Fani-Kayode, Pastor Bakare Make Peace After ‘Fighting’ Over Tinubu

Former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, and the senior pastor of Citadel Global Community Church, Tunde Bakare, have made peace after recently exchanging words in the media.

Fani-Kayode, a chieftain of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), disclosed in a tweet that he and Bakare settled their rift following the intervention of Ovation Magazine publisher, Dele Momodu and Yinka Odumakin, the spokesperson for Afenifere socio-political group, amongst others.

“Just concluded a 3-way conversation with Pastor Tunde Bakare and Mogaji Gboyega Adejumo, spokesman of the Yoruba Summit Group. We clarified all issues put the matter behind us. My respect for Pastor Bakare remains high. I thank Mogaji and Chief Dele Momodu for their intervention,” the former minister tweeted on Wednesday.

Fani-Kayode had attacked Pastor Bakare after delivering a sermon where he likened former Lagos State governor, Bola Tinubu, to Jephthah in the Bible for rescuing Lagos and other Southwest states from the “onslaught of PDP.”

THE WHISTLER recalls that the sermon titled “An Idle Man’s Brain Is The Devil’s Workshop” had gone viral on social media and was perceived by some as Bakare’s endorsement of Tinubu for president in 2023.

The pastor had said, “…God does not need anybody’s permission to put such (Tinubu) in his hall of fame despite their past deeds and ancestry.”

Bakare had also described Yoruba leaders who were in the habit of criticising the former Lagos governor as “rancorous elements”.

But Fani-Kayode, in an opinion piece titled “Who is Squeezing Bakare’s Ballls?”, had said the pastor was incoherent in his words and actions.

The former minister asked that “could this volte face have been motivated by the fact that an unsavoury event which allegedly took place in 1990 in the life of the pastor was about to be exposed by the Tinubu camp? I’m not making any allegations here: I’m only asking a question.

“Again, could it have anything to do with an allegedly ugly situation with a bank whose ownership recently changed hands?”.

Odumakin had also rebuked Bakare, saying, “It is the very height of the abuse of the rostrum for a Pastor to say to us no matter how God-forsaken the country has become that if somebody is accused of being a thief, the rest of us should go and become thieves as well.”

The pastor subsequently hit back at Fani-Kayode, describing him as someone who was once “in the grip of Satan”.

He also challenged the former minister to provide evidence that he was ever involved in any shady deal.

“As he (Fani-Kayode) described you (Odumakin) affectionately as his brother in the piece, I believe you are either companions or must be in the same league or camp. I have only one appeal to make through you to him: Tell him to expose my supposed “ugly past of 1990″ he must know about and the shady deals involving some bank that just changed hands that involved me in any shape or manner,” Bakare was quoted to have said in a letter he wrote to Odumakin.

“If Femi does not do so as soon as possible then he has published deliberate falsehood about me. I will await this publication soonest. For the sake of Femi’s mother who I ministered Christ to in their Papa home while Femi himself was still in the grip of Satan, I will hold my peace for now.”