High-profile Pastor of The Citadel Global Community Church, Tunde Bakare, has defended himself against the torrent of criticism that trailed his recent viral endorsement of the perceived 2023 presidential aspiration of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, National Leader of Nigeria’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party.
Bakare, during a sermon last week in his Lagos Church, came down hard on Tinubu’s critics, elders and certain other notable members of Tinubu’s own Yoruba tribe in Nigeria’s southwest, accusing them of being “jealous” of the APC chieftain, Tinubu, who is also a former governor of Lagos State, Nigeria’s richest and most populous state.
Tinubu is believed to be eyeing Nigeria’s presidential seat come 2023, a position occupied by the incumbent President Mohammadu Buhari. Pastor Bakare himself was a vice-presidential running mate on Buhari’s earlier failed ticket for Nigeria’s presidency in 2011, before his successful bid four years later, in 2015.
In another Sermon at his Church yesterday, Bakare assailed critics who had accused him of being “bribed” by Tinubu to promote the latter’s rumoured bid for Nigeria’s Presidency come, saying such people should come up with “facts” to “expose” him.
Bakare doubled down on his endorsement of Tinubu’s still-undeclared presidential aspirations, saying the metaphorical “bath water and the baby” should not be thrown away by certain self-appointed undertakers who thought the way forward for Nigeria’s present social, political and economic dilemma was to “uproot the tares and separate them from the wheat long before the harvest time ordained by God”.
Furthermore, said Bakare, the same “undertakers”, presumably of Tinubu’s speculated presidential run, forgot that the current mixture of “the bad, the good, and the ugly in the polity” was a result of the negligence of past and present leaders, who slept on duty and allowed the enemy to sow the tares while the good man had planted good seeds on the ground.
Further responding to the comments of some of his critics who had called him “delusional” in the aftermath of his endorsement of Tinubu and alleged he had been bribed by the top-flight politician, Bakare declared that he is “never for sale” and that he had been bought by the Blood of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary and “no other price could match that”.
Bakare then issued a challenge to his critics, saying that they should come out and expose him expeditiously if they could prove anyone bribed him to issue his quite unexpected and flowery endorsement of Tinubu’s rumoured presidential aspirations come 2023.