By Emmanuel Aziken

If Lagosians living in the Badagry axis of Lagos State were the ones, who initiated the probe of Mr Akinwunmi Ambode’s purchase of 820 buses, it would have been seen for what it is.

Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode

That is an altruistic investigation of an administration which left their portion of the state worse than he met it. In fact, worse than it has ever been and turned Nigeria’s portion (Mile 2- Badagry Expressway) of the Trans West-African Coastal Highway into the most impassable portion among the countries the road transverses.

If it were so, the probe would have passed off as wholly apolitical.  But the first probe of a former governor of Lagos State since the advent of the Fourth Republic cannot pass off as apolitical.

Besides being the first former Fourth Republic governor of Lagos to be so subjected to a probe, Ambode had also taken to himself the record of being the first governor of the state to lose a re-election bid.

The probe initiated by the Lagos State House of Assembly is officially directed at unearthing why Mr. Ambode, despite the refusal of the house, went on to purchase 820 buses envisaged under his now abandoned transportation scheme.

The relegation of governance in the country was symbolized when Mr Ambode last April brought President Muhammadu Buhari to commission the imported buses and some unfinished projects that were supposedly his legacies in government.

While objective commentators sneered at how a Nigerian president was diminished to commissioning bus-stops and uncompleted projects, other politically fertile minds narrowed down on the absence of Mr Ambode’s former political godfather, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu during that visit.

Tinubu’s absence was at that time justified by his handlers to be due to a trip out of the country! It was a story only political simpletons would have believed.

How could the president have visited Asiwaju’s fiefdom and the ‘owner’ of Lagos stayed put wherever he was and not chartered the fastest jet to return?

Given the drama that shadowed the All Progressives Congress, APC governorship primaries last September/October, it would be overstating the obvious to say that the present problems of Mr Ambode’s are not accidental.

Besides losing out in the ministerial selection that saw an out of favour Olurinnimbe Mamora take the slot, he has also been enmeshed into a probe by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

But guesses as to the reason for Ambode’s agonies are many. Some infer that he is reaping what he sowed.

Some in their minds would point to the incident on May 2017, when the chaplain of the Government House Chapel, Alausa, was sacked and thrown out of his official accommodation after reportedly not giving honour to the First Lady during a communion service. God is fighting back on behalf of his servant, some may now say.

Others may point to the humiliations suffered by his predecessor, Mr Babatunde Fashola in the first days of the Ambode administration.

Also read: You need hard work, not prayer alone to excel ―Tinubu, Fashola counsel Sanwo-Olu, cabinet members

Mr Fashola’s project, Ikorodu Road, was commissioned without as much as recognising him. There was also the leakage of the N78 million spent in building a website by the Fashola administration. It was generally perceived that Ambode at that time was fighting Tinubu’s battle against Fashola who was believed to have been in the bad books of the national leader at that time.

It is, however, an irony that when it became a political necessity last year, that Tinubu and Fashola combined efforts to check Ambode at the APC primary last October.

Ambode’s dire position was brought home at the conclusion of the Babajide Sanwo-Olu Exco retreat when Governors Tinubu and Fashola came around to distil the wisdom and the immediate past governor was conspicuously absent.

It was later revealed that he was not invited, reflecting the continuing schism between him and the mainstream political movement that denied him a second term in office.

Having stopped him from a second term and stopped him from the Federal Executive Council, the gist is that the plan is to bring the former governor to his knees.

Besides the claims of arrogance and mixed performance in office, which in any case is not different from a lot of most governors in the country, Ambode must have touched a raw nerve to have generated the kind of backlash from the politicians that only four years earlier championed his cause.

The speculation in some quarters of a discreet plot by Ambode to exterminate Tinubu and his legacy had he gotten a second term cannot be readily ascertained. The musing about not answering phone calls is surely not enough reason for the plots against the former governor.

But what is known is that the establishment believes that Ambode must be decimated because of what it believes is his capacity to wreck the ‘owners’ of Lagos.

The gist in those quarters is that Ambode has so much money that if left on his own that he would do incalculable damage to the present structure on the ground in the state. It is also claimed that left unshaken, that he would also take his pound of flesh in a way that would irredeemably destroy his former political patrons.

Hence, the continuing plot to ambush Ambode!

Vanguard