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Between Tinubu and Pedro
Comfort Obi
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By the time you are reading this,
Femi Pedro, the Deputy Governor of Lagos State, would have been thrown out of office, unless his boss, Governor Bola Tinubu, changes his mind and accepts his resignation letter. Seeing the folly in going to court to challenge the impeachment notice served him by members of the State House of Assembly, Pedro did what he should have done the day he decamped from the Action Congress (AC) to the Labour Party (LP). He resigned. But Tinubu, not wanting to give him a soft landing, has rejected the resignation.
Members of the Lagos House of Assembly insist on disgracing him out of office. Based on their letter to the Chief Judge of the State, Justice Adetula Alabi, asking him to set up a panel to probe Pedro, Alabi has instituted one, headed by a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, Alhaji Muhammed Badmus. The House is accusing Pedro of, among other things, constituting himself into an embarrassment to the state government.
If history is anything to go by, Pedro is as good as gone. But in Tinubu’s shoes, I would probably allow him to quit. And it will not be because Pedro deserves it. It will be because he is not worth the trouble. And it will be to show Pedro that politically, he is still a baby. How did a relationship which started in 2002, and which everybody thought was, excuse this cliché, made in heaven, come to this sorry pass? For an answer, let me briefly re-cap their story.
Until Tinubu, against all expectations, picked Pedro as his deputy governor, he was the Managing Director of First Atlantic Bank, a bank which on its own couldn’t have survived Professor Charles Soludo’s bank consolidation exercise. But no matter. Not a few people wondered at the rationale behind Tinubu’s action. He had just come out of a difficult situation with his former deputy, Senator Kofo Bucknor-Akerele, and the questions were: Can Tinubu trust Pedro? Does he know him well?
It turned out that he didn’t know him at all. He picked him on the recommendations of his friend and confidante, Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi. Afikuyomi recommended Pedro because he didn’t think Pedro had any political ambition. He didn’t think he could be a threat to anybody’s ambition, including his (Afikuyomi’s). He assured Tinubu of the apolitical nature of Pedro. Tinubu was comfortable with that. He didn’t need any more wahala after Bucknor-Akerele.
So, Pedro was sworn in. Tinubu ran with him in 2003, again, for his second term. But over three years down the line, cracks began to surface. Suddenly, Pedro felt he could step into Tinubu’s shoes. Tinubu and his associates were perplexed. More perplexed, perhaps, was Afikuyomi, the man who sold Pedro to Tinubu. He had a reason to be. He was equally interested in stepping into Tinubu’s shoes. The questions I kept asking when the drama was unfolding were: Did Pedro discuss his ambition with Tinubu? Did he discuss it with Afikuyomi? If so, what was their response? I am not so sure that any of the two encouraged him. Afikuyomi wanted the job for himself. Tinubu, rightly, wanted someone he had known for years. Pedro didn’t fit the bill. For Pedro, the writing was clearly on the wall, that he wouldn’t get the governor’s endorsement. He knew that the governor, like other governors, had somebody else in mind.
In Pedro’s shoes, I would have gone back into my shells. I would have let go of that ambition. Afterall, until he was picked by Tinubu, he had no such ambition. In his shoes, therefore, I would have remained loyal to the man who made me his deputy for five years, without knowing me quite well.
But what did he do? He decamped from the governor’s party, the Action Congress, and within a couple of days, became the governorship candidate of the Labour Party – a party without any strong following in Lagos, or anywhere in Nigeria. An emergency politician, Pedro didn’t even have any political structure. True, he was not the only one that decamped. The other aggrieved persons did the same and picked governorship tickets of one mushroom party or the other. Even then, they were better than Pedro. They are politicians. When a couple of them saw the handwriting on the wall, they quickly made a u-turn. They went back to the fold. One is now a Senator-elect. The other, I guess, will play a prominent role in the next administration. But not Pedro.
He stuck to an opposition party, working under an AC government. True, the Supreme Court ruled that Vice President Atiku had the right to decamp from the PDP to the AC, but it pointed out that it was immoral. I couldn’t agree more with that. It is immoral. A man with honour would have resigned.
For the several weeks Pedro was on the campaign train, he was not going to work. Yet, the governor did not worry him. He was going on campaign, using his official cars and security details. Yet, nobody worried him. While on the campaign train, he was bad-mouthing his boss and a government he had, for years, been a part and parcel of. Yet nobody bothered him. Then, he alleged that Tinubu was planning to kill him. Haba!
Not surprisingly, things have come to a halt for him. He lost woefully at the polls, and is now no longer comfortable at the Government House. I doubt whether he had even resumed since he protested the outcome of the polls.
The House of Assembly has, therefore, decided to help him leave office – not gracefully, but disgracefully. They want to make sure he leaves empty-handed, without his entitlements. He would, now, get no package from the state government, after five years of deputy-governorship. All things considered, he deserves a dishonourable send-off. He should have saved himself this disgrace by quitting before joining the LP. Why quit now?
Yet, I think Tinubu should accept his letter of resignaiton. Not that he deserves it. But as the Holy Book, the Bible says, it pays, most times, to repay evil with good. Yes.
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