Presidential Visit or Presidential Message?

POLITICAL NOTES

In news judgment, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Thursday visit to one of the national leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Senator Bola Tinubu, would definitely not pass for oddity. But, again, it was not a regular news angle. Evidently!

That a sitting president visited an ailing member of his party is curious especially, when several other members fall sick every time. Even when he recently lost his Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Ibrahim Attahiru, he neither visited the widow nor attended his burial, which was less than some 10 minutes-drive from the villa. Then, you should know the visit to Tinubu was a subliminal message.

Before the Thursday visit by the president, two loyalists of Tinubu: the Lagos State Governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu and a member of the House of Representatives, Hon. James Faleke, had visited him in London and told the world afterwards that the APC leader was fine, dismissing speculations about his health.

However, Buhari’s unscheduled visit has first damaged that lie. Nothing could have been hurriedly put together in pretence, as the picture taken showed Tinubu with a walk stick and obviously convalescing. That, of course, was a direct message to his rumoured presidential bid.

Second, the oft-pummelling of Buhari as indulging in medical tourism by what has come to be known as the “South-west media” has been extended to Tinubu, an aspiring presidential hopeful with an insight into what should be expected if he became president. That’s a northern game, you’d say – well-scripted and carefully executed with the viral circulation of the pictures.

Third and most importantly, there are indications that those controlling the levers of power in the government are determined to take over whatever is left of the party from Tinubu during the remaining local government and state congresses as well as the national convention. Thus, if and when that eventually happens, the photo-ops from that “message visit” was meant to dispel insinuations of a feud between them. It’s game over already… It was clearly a message visit!