For Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President and embattled PDP presidential candidate, it doesn’t rain. It rather pours.
From Benue, you perhaps can forget the latest sabre-rattling against the Fulani, real or imagined, who Samuel Ortom, Benue governor, is convinced are sworn to wiping out his Tiv people.
Every month end when salary looms, and the treasury is not so wet, that bellicose ethnic stuff is ortom-atic (beg your pardon, automatic) — perhaps to rally the people and distract them from biting belly pangs?
Whatever the motive, President Muhammadu Buhari had borne Ortom’s rabid attacks with rare equanimity. That seemed to work for Atiku, so long as there were cheap partisan gains; and the dart was turned against the president and his APC.
Not any more! Atiku now reels under Ortom’s explosive and savage anti-Fulani charge. Atiku won’t have any of that profiling crap and he said so. The denouement, in the dark and bathetic drama: “To hell with Atiku” Ortom raged — and to blazes with his presidential run! Oomph!
But from Bauchi has come a quiet yet deadly rattling of gun fire: Bala Mohammed, Bauchi governor, is angry and it’s doubtful if he can be appeased.
“Atiku should apologize to me,” he growled, according to a news headline, “or I will dump him!” Holy Moses! What thunderous ire!
That ire sent both the no less embattled Iyorchia Ayu (never a second’s relief from Nyesom Wike and co’s ever booming batteries of artillery fire) and Aminu Tambuwal (the third leg of the triumvirate — Atiku and Ayu being the other two — accused of crass “northernization” of PDP) scuttling to Bauchi to appease the governor.
Now, a double irony here: One, Ayu, equally an endangered species in the intra-PDP crossfire, plays the peace-maker and intercessor with Atiku!
And Two: Atiku, the “northern candidate” whose charity must start at home with his brag that his fellow ethnic Fulani would easily belt and best APC’s Kashim Shettima and his Kanuri folks, who Atiku summarily dismissed as “minorities” in the North East, where both Atiku and the APC presidential running mate are homers!
Yet, a prime commander, in the Atiku North East “Fulani Army”, is threatening to dump Atiku, unless “he come beg me” — to borrow the colourful pidgin lingo of Fela. Remember his “e don beg me” brush with Justice Okoro Idogu?
Is Atiku then getting gradually dis-Atikulated, like some unhinged disarticulated truck — or even de-railed train? Indeed, for the Wazirin Adamawa, it doesn’t rain. It pours!