By Yekini Olugbenro

Professor Sola Adeyeye one of the American returnees rehabilitated by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and helped into political office – first as a Member of House of Representatives and later as a Senator – was on Politics Today, last Sunday, on Channels TV where he spoke from both sides of the mouth.

For the life of me, I can’t imagine a man of such standing could be so confused. In one breathe, Professor Adeyeye wants Presidency to be zoned to the South East while he is a leading campaigner for an Osinbajo’s Presidency. In another, the bearded Professor also thinks Rotimi Amaechi will be a good President of Nigeria but his sentimental attachment to Osinbajo trumps everything.

Professor Adeyeye didn’t hide the fact that Tinubu is their problem. Like his co-travellers, Professor Adeyeye is leading a new tribe of Nigerians that want a new country where Osinbajo is the symbol of everything good and perfect. The perfidy and huge contradiction that have been so shamelessly displayed by these new tribalists is the fact that they are archetypal chichidodo bird in Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Chichidodo hates human excrement with all its soul but only feeds on maggot.

It is very convenient for Professor Adeyeye not to want Tinubu, on whose shoulder he and others like him rose to political relevance, because Tinubu possibly belongs to the ‘old tribe.’ The hypocrisy of Adeyeye and Co is that they covet the support and the political infrastructure of the ‘old tribe’ to the point of orchestrating campaign of calumny against Tinubu to force him out of the Presidential contest.

Next time Professor Adeyeye finds himself in any TV studio to sell the symbol of his new tribe or is it colony, he should just do his salesman job without sounding confused and pathetic like he appeared last time on Channels TV.