Can Someone Tell Osinbajo To Sharap? -By Festus Adedayo

Vice President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo is learning the ropes of politics faster than anyone can imagine. The landscape of politics is full of treachery, deceit, lies, subterfuge, backstabbing and allied evils. Undoubtedly full of energy and depth, Osinbajo traversed the length and breadth of the country during the last election, selling the gospel of politics and the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) to the unconverted. His unique down-to-earth method struck some people as worthy reason to cast their votes for his political persuasion. To some, his Tradermoniwas a gambit to secure votes by stealth.

But politics has ended and so the professor of law should recline to his Aguda House official home and begin to lend his voice to all those advocacies he canvassed on the hustings, people thought Not so. Unbeknown to many people, another rat race has begun and our beloved Vice President is implicated in the trove. It is the rat race for the 2023 Nigerian presidency. Having set his hands on the plough, as Christian theologians say, (which Yoruba translate to tasting the sweetness of the pudding) there is no way Osinbajo would be expected to look back like Lot’s wife or go back to Egypt, which symbolizes the valley of national power. Right now, the deciders of where that plough will finally anchor need to be appeased, with everything imaginable: tomfoolery, niceties, badinages, groveling, sweet words and all that.

Osinbajo has so many principalities to contend with in this regard, the hugest of the behemoth being his mentor and ex-boss, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who himself is interested in the pudding. Very soon, you will begin to see approbation and reprobation, a Trojan fight with the newspaper press as battleground. Yoruba sons and daughters will seek to cancel one another out in that epic mutual political head-butting.

Osinbajo has ostensibly begun his own rat race and badinage is the cloth he chose to wrap round himself as he makes his maiden appearance. A couple of days ago, he had told the world that President Muhammadu Buhari is today poorer than he was in 2015. He told a very ribald tale of how he and Buhari were looking at their Code of Conduct forms and how he told the president that he was richer than him. Today, said Osinbajo, Buhari’s financial worth has dwindled considerably. First, the Vice President never obliged us with the cause of this dwindle. Second, even though Buhari, during the 2015 campaign, promised to make public his assets declaration, not only has he conveniently elected to reverse himself, rumour has it that the form is in his personal custody, rather than with the Code of Conduct Bureau. For a Buhari whose wife’s ADC was accused of cornering billions of naira not too long ago, whose son was caught in a bike accident, the bike said to be worth multi-millions and whose presidential election was financed with billions of naira and no one knows where the stupendous sum hailed from, Osinbajo, by telling the world that such a man is poorer, was apparently pouring libations on the grove of his 2023 presidential ambition, rather than telling a pastoral truth. As the clock ticks towards 2023, dusts hovering in the sky will herald political tackles; cries of head-butting will indicate rough hit.

This Osinbajo infelicity reminds me of that imperishable quote that once a man lays his eyes on an office, a rottenness begins in him.