One-time Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has lambasted the popular Lagos-based cleric, Pastor Tunde Bakare, over his recent comments eulogising the leader of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu.
Bakare made the comments during a sermon in his church, saying that “people should see Tinubu as a Yoruba hero, he shouldn’t be vilified. Like Jephthah the Gileadite, he has fought many battles on behalf of the Yoruba people and won despite his rough beginning and God does not need anybody’s permission to put such in his hall of fame despite their past deeds and ancestry.
“… I have a word for some Yoruba people whose stock in trade is nothing but a rancorous noise characterised by bitterness and resentment about the ancestry of the former two-term governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Carry your stone.
“I have a word for those Yoruba rancorous elements, noisemakers who have not achieved as much as Asiwaju Tinubu has achieved, but are always querying and worrying themselves about his ancestry.”
Reacting via an article he wrote, the former Minister warned that Bakare “does not have the right or the mandate to tell us who to follow and neither does he speak for anyone but himself. His authority begins and ends in his Church.”
In his reaction, Femi-Kayode said, “I listened to Bakare’s words, spoken from the sanctity of his pulpit, three times and I was astounded. I asked myself what could have possibly made him flip in such an unceremonious, undignified and inglorious manner?
“I regarded his new-found and newly-cultivated grovelling and sycophantic assertions about Tinubu as being not only self-serving, arrogant, pitiful and condescending but also, to borrow Mr. Phil Smart’s words, a “celebration of criminality and a desecration of the pulpit”.
“….I asked myself, what on earth could have happened to my old friend and brother and someone who, in my view, is undoubtedly one of the most reverred clerics of our time?
“However on this Tinubu matter he has not done justice to himself and he has indulged in an inexcusable faux pas!
“I am constrained to ask, why this sudden u-turn on Jagaban? Is there something he knows today that he did not know one year ago? If so can he possibly share it with us so that we can possibly consider doing a volte face too? Or is that they have something on him?
“Is he being blackmailed? Are his balls being squeezed by a hidden hand? Why has he suddenly lost what my friend and brother, Comrade Yinka Odumakin, often describes as ‘testicular fortitude?’.
“Is his chain being pulled by someone? Do they have something on him? Is there a deep dark secret somewhere that we know nothing about and that they are dangling over his head like the sword of Damocles?
“Could this volte face have been motivated by the fact that an unsavoury event which allegedly took place in 1990 in the life of the Pastor was about to be exposed by the Tinubu camp? I am not making any allegations here: I am only asking a question.
“Again could it have anything to do with an allegedly ugly situation with a Bank whose ownership recently changed hands?
“Once again let me be clear: I have not made any allegations here but I am simply asking whether this is true or false.”
Fani-Kayode further insisted that: “He (Bakare) can stand with Tinubu and praise him as much as he likes but he would do well to desist from lecturing and talking down to those of us that do not share his views about him.”