Tunde Bank-Anthony, a chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos, has cautioned the supporters of the presidential candidate of the party in the 2023 general elections, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to stop deceiving Nigerians about Tinubu’s achievements in the state.
While speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday, Bank-Anthony said Tinubu’s supporters were telling lies to Nigerians in a bid to get acceptability for their candidate.
He said before Tinubu, those who had been in charge of the state had done an exceptional job while also noting that Tinubu’s successors as Lagos State governor had done a better job than he did in eight years.
Bank-Anthony, who is the spokesman for the Concerned Lagosians, an APC group, said Mr Babatunde Fashola’s achievements as governor of the state were more visible than that of Tinubu, enjoining the supporters of the presidential candidate to anchor their campaign on something else.
He also warned Tinubu’s supporters not to claim glory for the achievements of Fashola and his successors, former Governor Akinwumi Ambode and incumbent Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu.
Bank-Anthony said, “Our candidate now, everything he [Tinubu] is campaigning with is Lagos as if in the last 100 years, Lagos has seen nothing like him. But we as Lagosians need to set the record straight.
“I’m almost 60 years old, grew up on the Island. I don’t remember a road on the Island that was not tarred but the problem is that the politics they are playing now gives us a lot of concerns.
“The politics that Lagos was developed by Tinubu who happens to be the candidate of my party is unacceptable. Lagos has always been. You call New York, you call Paris, you call London, you call Lagos. The school he [Tinubu] went to in Lagos, did he build it? Where he was born, did he build the hospital?”
He said all APC members in Lagos were on the same page in support of Tinubu’s candidacy but insisted that his group would not be a party to the lies being peddled by the APC presidential candidate’s supporters.
However, Wole Badmus, the Executive Director of South West Grand Alliance for Tinubu-Shettima 2023, while speaking on the programme, argued that Tinubu became the governor of the state when infrastructure was decaying, adding that the infrastructural decay in Lagos forced the federal government to move Nigeria’s capital to Abuja.
While insisting that Tinubu transformed Lagos, he stressed that Fashola, Ambode and Sanwo-Olu were all products of Tinubu’s school of thought.
He said Tinubu’s 25-year blueprint for Lagos is being implemented to date, pointing out that it was not out of place to give him the credit for the successes being recorded in the state to date.
Badmus, who acknowledged the inputs of former governors, especially Alhaji Lateef Jakande, insisted that Tinubu is the father of modern Lagos.
Credit: The Nigeria Lawyers