Bakare: ‘Emi lo kan’ politics gratifies personal ambitions

The Presiding Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has condemned ‘emi lo kan’ politics, saying it only aims to gratify long personal ambitions.

Bakare said this during a state of the nation broadcast delivered at his church auditorium in Ikeja, Lagos State on Sunday.

The term ’emi lo kan’ which means ‘it is my turn’ in Yoruba language was popularised by the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu, who used it to canvass for votes in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital in the build-up to the APC’s presidential primaries in June 2022.

Speaking on the broadcast titled, ‘Bridging The Gap Between Politics & Governance’, Bakare, who was also a 2023 presidential aspirant of the APC, said politicians who practise the “emi lo kan” kind of politics do not intend to serve the people.

READ ALSO: Tinubu parleys APC candidates, says ‘we must work for victory’

The cleric said: “This ’emi lo kan’ politics that insists on one’s turn, even if circumstances do not align, is bad. Politics of entitlement also manifests as perennial candidacy, not with the intent to serve, but to gratify long-time personal ambitions.

“It could also manifest as insistence on a given political office as a reward for what one considers a lifetime of sacrifice to the nation. Politicians with a sense of entitlement evade political debates; they do not consider it imperative to communicate with the electorate.

“Entitlement politics will breed an imperial presidency that is distant from the people and has no sense of responsibility or accountability to the people. Such imperial governance will slide towards dictatorship and will be intolerant of dissent.

“Entitlement politicians set low-performance benchmarks for themselves when they secure power and are content with projecting molehills as mountains of achievement. That is bad politics and bad fruit and all that it is,” Pastor Bakare stated.

The Star