Opinion: Pastor Bakare’s beer parlour gossip and other irrelevancies – By OWEI LAKEMFA

Tunde Bakare, a 67-year-old pastor would have been Nigeria’s Vice President had President Muhammadu Buhari won the 2011 election in which the former was his running mate. Even now, Bakare claims God had revealed to him that he would succeed Buhari as president. Perhaps because the assurance is so certain, he is not even bothered about campaigning for the 2023 election.

For a man who aspires to such high public office, it is assumed that he would think things through before going public. The least expected of such a man is not to retell in public with a note of authority, childish, beer parlour gossips that over the past five decades have mutated like variants of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As with tales in taverns fuelled by idleness, alcohol and small chops; in the case of Nigeria, by pepper soup and ‘404’ endlessly washed down with palm wine, burukutu, ogogoro and beer, such tales mutate depending on who is telling them and for what purpose. The theme of Bakare’s watering hole gossip is the old discredited one that seeks to clothe former Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa in the garb of a deity who placed an effective curse on the Igbo nation.

Let us examine one of the versions of the Balewa tale. It is planted in the 888-page book, A Right Honourable Gentleman: The life and times of Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and published in 1991 by Hudahuda Publishing Company, Zaria. It is authored by Trevor Clark, a former British soldier and colonial officer in Nigeria. For his childish claims, Clark relied on “most sources” to write his version. On Page 802, he wrote: “Another(version) colourfully claims that Okafor (Major Donatus) offered to spare him if he would drink some alcohol, and that Abubakar refused utterly as a true Muslim, but had something to say before they killed him: ‘Ibo! Ibo! Ibo! Sai kuna rasa wajen zama a Nijeriya (Igbo! You will lack any place to belong to in Nigeria).

In this version, Okafor, an Igbo, is presented as a godless person who tried to make a pious Muslim commit a sin; for this Balewa is said to have cursed the Igbo as a people who forever will be vagabonds roaming Nigeria.

It is instructive that the only persons present when this ‘curse’ was uttered were the coup plotters and none of them made such a report. So who witnessed this? Just a childish fabrication. On the same page, the British biographer claimed, again without any fact or attribution, that Major Okafor was “the man who shot Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa over the heart with a sub-machine gun…”

The ‘curse’ version Bakare is spreading is the one planted on Page 689 of the 799-page book, Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto: Values and Leadership in Nigeria, published by Hudahuda Publishing Company, Zaria in 1986. The book was written by another paid foreign biographer, John N. Paden. Vanguard