Former Interim Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Chief Bisi Akande has said Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is dangerously humorous, difficult and complicated to classify.
Akande revealed this in his autobiography titled: “My Participations,” unveiled in Lagos recently.
In his words: “Tinubu is a difficult personality; very complicated for me to classify. He revels in controversies but constantly suppresses attendant difficult pains of disappointments and betrayals by consuming cups of strong espresso (coffee) and chains of cigarettes.
“Ahmed Bola Tinubu is adept in building political bridges. He is an all-round leader, but in my view, he is not a native politician in the Nigerian sense. In struggles, Bola is always resolute against all difficult circumstances.
“In fighting, Bola demonstrates consistent courage and resilience. He is powerful and strong political mobiliser, a fierce and ferocious fighter such that he generally and quickly generates tension around himself when poised for a fight to the embarrassing confusion of those who might have enjoyed his pleasantness and generosity.”
Akande said what he had learnt was that in any war, apart from battles of deadly weapons, it would be safer to persuade Tinubu to fight on one’s side.
“If you allow him to fight on the other side, even if you are winning the initial battles, you cannot be rest assured of winning the peace thereafter. Bola Tinubu is an adept believer in the American ‘two-party democracy’ and a shrewd business entrepreneur of the capitalist hue.
“He carries his business sense too often into his political decisions. He always feel too strongly about his own (sometimes, peculiar) own political views and ways, but his presentations and utterances appear constantly underplaying by smarting too often under heavy burdens of human demands and public pressure,” he said.
Akande added that Tinubu is a man of exceptional quick reflexes who had interpretations for different and alternating moods of others around him with instinctive striving and sensitive hormones.
He said for whoever he sensed negatively, he detested, condemned and that if possible fought ferociously.
“For others in his positive antenna, he admires, protects and defends with passion. Bola Tinubu is blindly generous and dangerously humorous. In his generosity, he relishes most political associates, and others with absolute optimism and invariably, in most cases, he indiscriminately accommodated many of them to his utter detriment.
“In his humour, he is commonly characterizing and vocalizing the mannersims of his victims in ridiculous epithets. All along, we argued too constantly and quarrelled a lot too often on issues of political discretions.
“Tinubu often incurred my displeasure each time he trivially assumed that political culture of the totally cosmopolitan Lagos was a perfect replica of those other cultures of the rest undiluted communities of Yorubaland and of Nigeria at large. He always absorbed my angry political tantrums as old-fashioned and with jocular snubs,” he stated.
According to Akande, while others hate his guts and feared his grievances, he cherished the enormity of the quickness of his wits and marveled at the largeness of his heart for smart arguments.
“However, despite my constant talking down impudently on him with pontification about my old-time political experiences, he has refused to give up on me. He always makes me feel resolutely pampered. And we came, at last, to trust each other absolutely,” he added.
