BOTH former vice president Atiku Abubakar and former EFCC chairman Nuhu Ribadu are politically footloose. They have oscillated like a yo-yo between Nigeria’s main political parties in the past few years it is a miracle they are not dizzied by their peregrinations. In this republic, Alhaji Atiku started out in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), where he rose to become a governor-elect and then vice president. He then joined the Action Congress (AC) in 2006, before shuffling back to the PDP after the 2007 elections, and finally and giddily transiting to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2014. There is nothing cast in granite to indicate that Alhaji Atiku would still not return to the PDP, for the party really remains his first love. He has denied he is moving anywhere. But he has managed to become so unpredictable that nothing can be ruled out.
Mallam Ribadu is also a veritable political nomad. As EFCC chairman, he was of course not a card-carrying member of the PDP, but he worked for a PDP government, and his soul and body seemed knit with the then ruling party. But frustrated out of the EFCC by the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency, he soon found himself in the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), which gave him the presidential ticket, for he always exuded progressive instincts and mannerisms. His bid was, however, doomed from the very beginning because he seemed to have been thrust too quickly into a role neither his mind nor his ideas had settled into. But just when many analysts began to see him as a future prospect for the country’s highest office, he jumped expediently into the strange and inimical habitat of the conservatives, the PDP. It turned out that he wanted to be governor of Adamawa State.
Using Adamawa as a turf war, both Alhaji Atiku and Mallam Ribadu have begun to joust and shuffle their feet. Mallam Ribadu is back in the APC, perhaps to bid for the governorship of Adamawa State or something even higher; and Alhaji Atiku is rumoured to be eager to offer leadership to the decapitated PDP. The truth of these suppositions will manifest in the coming months, perhaps next year, when the dithering and insular Buhari presidency will become embroiled in intricate politics on its way to becoming the earliest lame duck presidency ever.