Atiku agonistes

By Olakunle Abimbola

Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President of the Federal Republic and squelched PDP candidate in the 2019 presidential election, is in agony.

But that agony, pathetic and bathetic, issues from phantom hope, soaring on wilful delusion, driven by the most stubborn strain of self-deceit and galloping conceit.

Indeed, how do you describe a loser, hands-down in an election, who nevertheless declared himself a soar-away winner; quoting some comic server, as real in common sense and in law, as a mirage in a sweltering desert?

Whoever readies a parched throat, to drink from such vanishing waters?

It’s the peril of Atiku-lated mirage in full technicolor! Yet, Atiku and his Atiku-lated crowd appear too dazed to readjust themselves to the arid reality.

For starters, eminent jurist, Prof. Ben Nwabueze, SAN, leads the nay ensemble, over the 7-0 Supreme Court verdict, that gave the Atiku challenge the judicial short shrift.

Now, you can’t doubt the forensic skills of Pa Nwabueze. He is among the best, if not the very best, in his area of legal expertise. In the Atiku legal misadventure, however, the political partisan would appear to have trumped the forensic genius in our good professor.

Maybe it’s just honest mistake, or even partisan chutzpah gone awry? If either or both were the case, then Atiku would appear only the latest of Prof. Nwabueze’s chequered historical faux pas.

In 1966 Nwabueze, as a young Turk, was among the principal advisers of Major-Gen. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, Nigeria’s first military head of state, over the promulgation of the Unification Decree of that year.

In 2019 Nwabueze, now old and frail, appears condemned to righting the wrong of that “original sin”, in his umpteenth restructuring campaign; to which the old man has given his all, since the dawn of The Patriots, under the leadership of the late Frederick Rotimi Alade (FRA) Williams, Nigeria’s first SAN. Tough luck in a karma war!

Between that knowledge of history and the secrets of the future, poor Atiku is, at present, left to lick his wound!

The PDP is not helping matters, by its comical reactions.

Uche Secondus, its national chairman, does a comic appeal to the supernatural, resigning he, and his political household, to the court of God; a sentiment our loquacious FFK echoes, in his ubiquitous tweets, yammering about Egyptians you see today you’d see no more!

Pray, is FFK now among the prophets, even if he claims to be a pastor?

Read Also: What next for Atiku?

A “shocked” Kola Ologbondiyan, feisty soul and PDP spokesperson? He drones on and on, about how “the distinction of our case remains for Nigerians, including generations yet unborn.” Seriously? Indeed, nothing is more lethal than wilful self-delusion!

Old man Buba Galadinma, zesty neophyte if there was one, in blaring support of his new partisan friends, darkly weighed in, with the dire security implications of the Atiku failure!

But it’s the candidate himself, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, that seems stuck by a most devastating strain of bluff and bluster!

First, he declared himself unbroken by the judicial shellacking. Then, he consecrated himself as Nigeria’s democrat-in-chief, a thankless chore he claimed to have imposed on himself, these 20 years past, and is not willing to surrender, no matter what!

Curiously, in that patriotic bragging, he sounds eerily close to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s too well known rich lather of patriotic narcissism.
Strangely, however, mum has been the word, from the Ebora Owu, to Atiku’s present travails.

Before the election, the Ebora had assumed the pious role of the grand democratic Pardoner. Like the old Catholic hustler in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prelude to the Canterbury Tales, he had attempted to cleanse Atiku of his “sins”, all frozen for history, in My Watch, Obasanjo’s presidential memoirs.

As it turned out, Atiku, ashen, crushed and desperate, had through a crony, donated N50 million to the political cathedral of grace, the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) — first in Africa! What is unclear, however, is whether there was established quid-pro-quo, for the most sacred of political transactions, on the eve of a most crucial presidential election!

Still, the slightest of doubts negates Julius Caesar’s rigorous integrity test: Caesar’s wife must not only be above board, she must be seen to be so! Are those high standards, of probity qua probity, gone with the classical epoch?

That brings the discourse to Atiku’s comic epiphany, of declaring 1999 to 2015, the first 16 years of returned democracy in which the PDP rammed itself out of power, as the apogee of Nigeria’s democratic ideals!

How so? By its overweening conceit and overarching sleaze, which plumbed the very nadir under President Goodluck Jonathan, but which strong foundation was laid under the Obasanjo-Atiku presidency?

By its brazen writing of electoral figures, which started as a moderate pour with Obasanjo’s re-election of 2003; but hit the monsoon in the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s “election” of 2007, an exercise in which the colluding INEC never even bothered to serialize the ballot paper, which the president-elect was utterly ashamed of, but which the Supreme Court nevertheless certified as okay?

Indeed by 2015, after Fall Guy Jonathan had added his own effete stumbles, a PDP re-presenting its candidates for re-election had become the Achebean rogue who had stolen too much for the owner not to notice!

Yet, it’s the same PDP and its misdeeds that Atiku was trying to re-canonize, just as Obasanjo had tried to re-beatify Atiku, before the 2019 presidential election, after all the complete demolition job contained in My Watch!

Any surprise both not only fell flat but were sweet butt of jokes?

Aside from this Atiku-lated epiphany, Atiku’s severe post-defeat syndrome also entailed a Samson complex, of pulling everything down and libelling the courts, because he lost a bad case!

Well, was this a former Vice President of the Federal Republic, or some callow political hustler, new on the block, blindly lashing out, in insane rage?

With Atiku’s rather funny lionization, PDP appears set to gamble away its time in opposition, as it did in power. Unless it changes tack, it risks a stiff drop: from power, to opposition, to irrelevance.

If that happened, the peripatetic Atiku, everything to everybody so long as he sniffs a power deal, would move elsewhere to pursue his fixation: power. If you doubt, check his partisan wandering: PDP to Action Congress (AC), back to PDP, then to APC, and now back to PDP!

Even now for the former Vice President, it could well be morning yet on migration day! But then, it’s his democratic right.

Still, Atiku could put up such a show because the general society itself is tragically distracted. The masses proudly lack institutional memory. The elite — merrily selfish, parasitic and unconscionable — are a classic example of how not to be an elite!

A section of the media has even traded healthy skepticism for sickening cynicism! At a critical juncture of Nigeria’s history, what appears to matter is the institutional ego of those media — and the sacred arrogance of their reporters and columnists — and not honest duty to a country, trying to find its feet again.

Let’s just hope those involved won’t gamble away their market relevance, as some parties and politicians have blown away their political essence — and become the future media equivalent of Atiku agonistes!

Quote: “Atiku’s patriotic bragging sounds eerily close to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s too well known rich lather of patriotic narcissism”