You Have Ran Enough”: Former Cross River governor, Donald Duke advising Alhaji Atiku Abubarkar to end his long-standing presidential ambition.
Last week I ended the column by concluding that former Anambra State governor, Peter Obi, would not be an ideal ADC Presidential candidate at the 2027 Presidential election.
But neither did I endorse
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar as a politically fit and proper person for the party’s presidential candidacy even though one of the two would emerge.
Today we examine Alhaji Atiku’s suitability and his chances of victory if he eventually emerges the candidate.
Ordinarily, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s experience and network, his decades of experience in Nigerian politics and government should provide him a strong foundation for the leadership of the Nigerian nation except for his unchecked arrogance of being a born to rule Northerner which has led him to many avoidable mistakes.
His national appeal – he has built a broad coalition of supporters all over the country – should ordinarily enhance his electability just as his background in business and other sectors of the Nigerian economy should help him drive economic growth.
Unfortunately, now in the age of AI, his being perceived as an old guard, having been too long in the political space, and contesting at each election cycle since the 90’s, have rendered him otiose, and out of touch with younger Nigerians as well as current realities in governance, no matter the effort to mask all these. It’s comeuppance and all these are now bound to combine to rob him of any such opportunity.
Past allegations of corruption, not limited to Nigeria, would also negatively, impact his chances – and here I am not relying only on President Obasanjo’s deliberate, mostly hyperbolic de – marketing of his one – time Vice.
Nor can we forget that Atiku has also made the mistake of unreasonably discounting most Nigerians’ crave for rotational presidency.
More than the above, however, are his personal failings which have already rendered him unfit to be elected President of a huge multi- ethnic, multi- religious country like Nigeria.
These are so obvious, and negative, that only a very committed, but limited number of his own political party members can feel obliged to vote for him at the election.
Come with me as we navigate these personal failings in my article of 27 November, ’22.
Titled:’Atiku’s Long Running Superiority Complex That May End Up Aborting His Presidential Ambition’, it reads as follows, though now significantly edited for space:
My first received impression of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar was that of an arrogant, condescending Hausa-Fulani senior customs officer, who considered himself superior to all – thanks to two friends of mine – also customs officers -both now long retired, one of who actually worked directly with him at the Lagos International Airport, Ikeja.
This view got further confirmation when I saw the entitlement mentality he exhibited while pursuing his ambition to be Chief MKO Abiola’s Vice Presidential candidate, for no other reason than that he was a protégé of the powerful General Shehu Musa Yar’ Adua. The unimaginable intra-party crisis that followed the choice of Babagana Kingibe did not help. Of course, I was all the while rooting for Kingibe in my column in a Lagos evening newspaper edited by my friend, Banji Ogundele.
Vice President Atiku has demonstrated a striking lack of patience in waiting to take his turn, the reason I recently captioned one of my articles on this column as “Atiku Abubakar: Desperation is Your Name”.
Underpinning his desperation is his superiority complex. He so much believed he was better than his boss, former president Olusegun Obasanjo, that he actually wanted to supplant him as PDP candidate in the 2003 presidential election.
Let us hear how the Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka put it while answering a question at the special presentation of his book, “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?: Gani’s Unfinished Business”, at the Freedom Park, Lagos:
” Before the PDP primaries in January 2003, Obasanjo got everyone he knew could reach me on the surface of the earth including Yemi Ogunbiyi and my son, to get me to help him intercede when it was clear that (Abubakar) Atiku was in a position to take his job. He knew Atiku had a lot of regard for me and calls me ‘Uncle’.
“The pressure was intense. Of course, I could not have knelt before Atiku not to embark on a course of action that would lead to his boss’ disgrace. But I can confirm to you that Obasanjo as President knelt down before Atiku so that he would not lose his job”. “But I warned Atiku that for making Obasanjo to kneel down for you, be sure you would have to pay heavily for that. I guess my warning came to pass if you remember Atiku’s dramatic change of fortune once Obasanjo was sworn in for a second term of office.”
That is vintage Atiku.
Another instance when Atiku demonstrated his belief in being superior to everybody was when he took peremptory action, though coyly, in his choice of Ben Obi as his running mate in the 2007 presidential election. Chief Bisi Akande captured it as follows in his Autobiography, ‘My Participations’, Pages 485 – 486: “In 2007, we formed a party, the AC, with Atiku Abubakar. We agreed that Atiku should be our presidential candidate but with the understanding he would run with Bola Tinubu.
One day after we had nominated Atiku as our presidential candidate, one young man came and gave me a form from INEC. I told him I could not sign a blank form, and that I, as Chairman, must know the name that would be filled in the form. The young man, Bashir Yusuf Ibrahim, must have been the organising right- hand man of Atiku. The following morning, he came again with Lawal Kaita. Kaita begged me and said it was Ben Obi whom Atiku had chosen as his running mate behind our back. So I signed the form because I believed that as the candidate, Atiku had the right to choose his running mate. We, however, believed that Atiku should have chosen his running mate from the AC even if he was no longer favorably disposed to Tinubu. With Atiku, the party will be strong in the North, but because of the preponderance of PDP in the South East and the South – South, it would face more resistance in that area. Obasanjo was stepping down from the Presidency. Therefore, the Yoruba, even the few that benefited from his arrogant rule, would no longer be obliged to vote for PDP”.
You can see in how Atiku tried to trick Chief Akande into signing a blank ‘cheque’ that he was, indeed, being unduly pompous; all in the attempt to show that he was wiser than all. That was apart from the way in which he unilaterally chose Obi as his running mate, in a political party which he did not own, and where you had the likes of Tinubu and Akande.
What could be more audacious?”
That exactly is Atiku, and it is what Governor Wike has been saying about his unreliability. Any rational person would expect that he would, at the very least, let the Chairman of the party know who he intended to choose as running mate. But Atiku so believes in his superiority, “being of the Nigerian Aryan race”, he thinks he could get away with just about anything, which is what he does in whatever political party be belongs.
Two other events are worth recalling. One Sunday in The Nation, absolutely unknown to both of us, it so happened that Tatalo Alamu and I wrote two very scathing articles about Alhaji Atiku, the candidate of the AC. Indeed, I actually went ahead to endorse General Muhammadu Buhari only to hear later, that the Monday after, emissaries of the Atiku campaign organisation visited with Ashiwaju to remonstrate against the two articles.
The other event was much more momentous. Again to ‘My Participations’ we go, pages 429 – 430 where Chief Akande brought into bold relief, the incredible support General Muhammadu Buhari enjoyed in the North in 2007.
He wrote: ”During the 2006 electioneering campaigns, as the National Chairman of AC, I was leading the party’s meetings and campaigns to most of the emirate capitals and cities of Northern Nigeria, crisscrossing Buhari’s ANPP in the political spaces of the North. We were trying to market Atiku Abubakar. One day, according to our schedule based on police permit, we were to hold a public rally at a particular open concourse in Jalingo. Buhari’s ANPP too was granted a police permit to address his rally a few days after our own rally at the same venue. As our aircraft was descending into Jalingo, I saw a large crowd of party enthusiasts in the bowl of the venue. I was secretly jubilant that we were being welcomed by such size of crowd. As we touched down, our party leaders told us that the venue had to change. I was wondering as to how we would evacuate such a large crowd. It was alarming to hear that the crowd I saw at our supposed venue were reported to have come to wait and catch a glimpse of Buhari at the ANPP campaign being anticipated a few days after our rally. The people had come to avoid harmful jostling among Buhari’s die-hard supporters at the expected date”. “When it became impossible to block their coming or prevent their intended waiting, the police had to advise AC to look for another venue. In our own case, the practice was to provide fund for transportation and logistics in advance, to mobilise our party loyalists. I was made to understand that Buhari would advance nothing for mobilisation, yet his enthusiasts would travel by foot, or ride on donkey, days ahead to beat the time. Such was Buhari’s charisma in the political space of the entire Northern Nigeria”.
Yet Atiku insisted, as usual, on being his party’s presidential candidate. He would even follow that up by singularly selecting his running mate.
The same thing is playing out in his PDP. But in Wike, Atiku has met more than his match.
Believing Wike was a person he could easily wrong foot, having coyly beaten him to the presidential candidacy of their party, the first thing he told him when he visited Wike’s house after their party’s convention was: “Ayu must go”. He had expected Wike to jump at that but instead, he was asked why? And although he it was who said that since the presidential candidate is from the North, the party Chairman should come from the South for the sake of fairness, and equity, he would later begin to say other things, claiming he hasn’t the power to effect what he jubilantly promised.
Such perfidy.
That exactly is how Atiku’s superiority complex and cunning, not forgetting his entitlement mentality, and several allegations of corruption, have all caught up with him that these human frailties will now end up being the final nail on the coffin of his presidential ambition.
It is precisely this ego-maniacal superiority complex that would not let him see the greed, and the unfairness, that out rightly perfume the North, holding tightly to all the consequential positions in the PDP, namely, the Presidential candidacy, the party Chairmanship as well as the Director- Generalship of his campaign. It is only fair that the Wike-led Group of 5 is stubbornly, but righteously, standing up to this one-upmanship.
Without a doubt, Alhaji Atiku’s arrogance, coyness, not to say lies, perfidy and unreliability should, in a serious political party, render him unsuitable to be chosen as the ADC’s candidate for the 2027 Presidential election or as the president of any country, even Myanmar.
What then should the party do?
In the first place, not many Nigerians think that both Atiku and Obi would still be in the ADC by the time of the election. It is even not unreasonable to suggest that one of them is behind one of the two newly registered political parties. Whatever happens on the long run, ADC will be stuck with one of the two politically unfit candidates and Nigerians can only wish them the defeat ADC – a mere party for hire – so richly deserves.
