Raging cold war between the National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Bola Tinubu, and his one-time acolyte and current Minister of Interior, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, has grown worse, First News’ investigations have revealed.
Top and reliable sources in the Lagos chapter of the APC, disclosed that the two politicians came to disagreement following Aregbesola’s sudden decision to jump out of the bandwagon of Tinubu’s presidential campaigners.
Tinubu, sources also claimed, in turn took his pound of flesh by knocking off the names of most of Aregbesola’s chairmanship and councillorship candidates in the recently conducted Lagos local government elections.
Besides, sources revealed that the clash of the two political titans has streamed to Osun, their home-state, and where Aregbesola was governor for eight years.
Osun State governor, Chief Adegboyega Oyetola, who is Tinubu’s nephew, has reportedly begun deconstructing Aregbesola, by weeding out most of the latter’s supposed administrative legacies.
One of them, a source remarked, was the governor’s recent cancellation of Aregbesola’s edict mandating pupils in all public schools to wear the same uniform.
Besides, Aregbesola’s policy of mingling sexes in otherwise single-sex schools was also thrown overboard by his successor.
In November last year, Aregbesola had nearly come to clashing with Oyetola when both of them planned separate programmes for the 10 years unbroken record of APC reign in Osun State.
But Aregbesola was eventually persuaded, by the police and some traditional rulers to shelve the programme.
Back in Lagos where Tinubu holds sway, Aregbesola’s advancing influence has particularly begun to dwindle, as Tinubu’s overbearing structure has effectively checkmated the minister, investigations further revealed.
Sources hinted further that Aregbesola’s Alimosho G-18, which had in recent years been anointed by Tinubu to take charge of nominations of the chairmen, councillors, and Assembly members both at the state and federal levels, was effectively sidelined in the last local government election.
” A simple way Jagaban (Tinubu) used to disarm Aregbesola was to direct that all sitting local government chairmen should do a second term.
“Alarmed, Aregbesola began to plead with Tinubu, as he had many candidates that he intended to bring in as council chairmen,” a source close to the two politicians, and who craved anonymity, disclosed to First News.
Tinubu, the source said, eventually conceded barely 10 percent of slots to Aregbesola, to choose his preferred candidates.
However, it was gathered that what became a sore point in Tinubu’s meagerly allocation to Aregbesola was the dropping of Dr. Oladipo Okeyomi -Aregbesola’s chairmanship candidate for Ojokoro Local Council Development Area.
Okeyomi, who is a security consultant to Aregbesola’s Interior Ministry, had contested the chairmanship seat for a record four times to no avail.
Already, Aregbesola has reportedly reached out to Governors Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State and Oluwarotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State, in what is widely believed to be an agenda for paradigm shift in Southwest politics.
In the same vein, he is said to have reached out to the Oyo State governor, Mr. Seyi Makinde, with a view to making the latter defect to the APC, and thus strenghten his (Aregebsola’s) camp.