Former aide to the immediate past president, Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Doyin Okupe has given reasons a national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been reduced to a sectional leader in the party.
Okupe who said this in a post he shared on Facebook added that ethnicity is one of the worst issues killing the progress of the country.
According to him, Tinubu’s reduction to “more or less a Southwest leader” in the party has religious and ethnic colouration.
Recall that a former Osun State governor and ex-interim national chairman of the APC who is also a staunch Tinubu loyalist, Chief Bisi Akande, recently stirred the polity with his statement that the 2019 presidential race is open.
Akande added that President Muhammadu Buhari’s second term aspiration is not automatic.
But Okupe said Tinubu, even though a Muslim has been reduced to nothing in the APC because of “ethnicity” which he (Okupe) identified as the greatest challenge facing Nigeria.
He said, “I have read many articles and posts including that of my brother Segun Adeniyi, wondering out of frustration whether any opposition party exists in Nigeria today.
“As a matter of fact I can say it openly and without any equivocation whatsoever or fear of reasonable contradiction that there is no opposition party in the country.
“The reason is very obvious and it is the very foundation of our national malaise.
“It’s simply ethnicity. This monster has done more harm to Nigeria as a nation more than anything else.
“Sometimes we confuse it with religion. This is a sad fallacy. Ethnicity supercedes religion in terms of the evils holding the nation down.
“MKO Abiola was a Muslim but when the chips were down ethnicity shot him down both as a party man in NPN and as a President elect in SDP.
“Even more recently Asiwaju Tinubu, national leader of the APC, though a staunch Muslim, is more or less reduced to a southwest leader of APC. He will disagree with me for obvious reasons but I know what I am saying is the Truth.
“I recently read a piece ascribed to CAN where the latter was quoted as haven said “Baru a northern Muslim insults his boss Kachukwu a southern Christian.” This is pure ignorance. I may not know exactly what is going on in NNPC but certainly it has nothing to do with religion.
