Bakare said if he was called to be a minister in the Tinubu administration, there would be conditions to it, “but I am not desperate to be a minister.”
By Jeffrey Agbo
Clergyman, Tunde Bakare, has said that he would never refer to President-elect Bola Tinubu as “my president” which he often calls President Muhammadu Buhari.
Bakare, the serving overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church (CGCC), said during a webinar of about 200 participants on Saturday night that the Independent National Electoral Commission made a mess of the 2023 elections.
Bakare gave a speech at the Zoom webinar titled ‘Building the New Nigeria: The Role of the Diaspora’ organised by the PTB4Nigeria In Diaspora Group.
Asked after his speech if he would be happy to work for the new government as a Minister of Diaspora Engagements, Bakare laughed and said he would say what he told Buhari last week.
Bakare said, “Last Wednesday, I was at the Glass House where he (Buhari) has been restricted now because the main house is being renovated. I said I have done that for you. I want you to know that, because of the circumstances of your flying into power on the wings of integrity and incorruptibility, but you’re now passing on to someone who does not have that value.”
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Bakare said that at “any public lecture anywhere, before this mess is cleared off, I will address Asiwaju (Tinubu) as a President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria but I will never call him my president.”
He noted that he didn’t participate in the elections, and therefore, no one could say he lost.
Bakare, who participated in the All Progressives Congress presidential primary in June 2022, where nomination forms were sold for N100 million, polled no single vote.
Briefly touching this, he said, “I participated in the primary, and there were hundreds (of persons) who participated only by stepping down, so there is no shame in what we have done. We spoke truth to power.”
“I wasn’t there when they voted, I wasn’t there when they scored (me) zero, but we won that badge of zero and badge of honour,” the cleric noted, adding that this was because some defeats were more triumphant than victories.
Bakare said if he was called to be a minister in the Tinubu administration, there would be conditions to it, “but I am not desperate to be a minister, not at all. I was offered before but I turned it down. My life is not just to take photographs with the president and shake hands. But we will do if it will benefit even one citizen.”
