Atiku Abubakar looks at himself in the mirror and sees a chess player.
He may not be a certain politician who did so when he was governor and belted out a song of self-praise, to wit: “I am ugly but I am governor and the most powerful man in this state.” I spare the world his name and state.
He, at least, exercised a sense of self-scrutiny and physical realism to chasten himself.
Atiku lacks such self-deprecating humility.
But he, of all days, chose a season of holy ferment to play a politics of visitation.
As philosopher David Hume noted: “The corruption of the best produces the worst.”
One can muse on visits and their imports.
We know of arrivals of pesky in-laws and cold handshakes and placid smiles.
The famous movie, Look who’s coming for Dinner with Sidney Poitier reverses that sentiment.
The visit of coup plotters, like Buhari had when he was head of state.
A handshake of grudges like the one between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak that betokened blood and death. Between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, after which Hitler mocked: “Our enemies are tiny little worms. I saw them the other day at Munich.” Or the bearhug of Russian diplomat Andrei Gromyko in the embers of the Cold War. Richard Nixon rebuffed Brezhnev’s hugs. He preferred handshakes. Or the handshake between Tinubu and Atiku during the 2023 election campaign at a chance meeting where both had few words to exchange.
Tinubu turned it into a fashion moment adjusting something on his rivals. Sometimes visits are sneaky, like Odysseus, who returned from the Trojan War to see a flock of men trying to take his wife, Penelope. Atiku was not the only visitor. Nasir El-Rufai also came calling, a few days before he decided to go to court to challenge an avalanche of corruption charges. But beware of visits under the cover of God. We had the visits of the three wise men at the birth of Christ, and it is still a liturgical controversy today whether they are of God or of the enemy.
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In his famous poem, T.S. Eliot calls it a “hard journey” in his Journey of the Magi. So, what are we to make of that visit. Shehu Sani put it in context. He described it as a “façade” and “surreptitiously a new attempt to build a strong northern alliance using ex-President Buhari as a rallying point to challenge and evict President Tinubu’s government in 2027.”
He did not end his note without a prophecy. He said the “project will eventually kiss the dust.”
He says they want to exploit Buhari’s folksy charm in the north and rally his mass following. Hence, I say the man has no sense of a real chess player.
He wanted to play on the optics of a handshake to cast himself as a provocateur of the talakawa. He has invoked, without knowing it, a story of tribal prejudice during the 2023 election campaign.
He stirred up the “our own is our own” mantra after he told the Arewa Council that the north should vote for their son. He forgets two things. One, that he cannot re-evoke the PDP primary strategy where he turned the north into a political horse trading. He took over Tambuwal’s vote and entrenched himself as the northern candidate. Two, his visit to Buhari reignites the allegation that the former president’s cabal were working for Atiku. That fueled the Nasir El Rufai’s rhetoric to confirm Tinubu’s camp’s charge that some elements in Buhari government wanted to sabotage his party’s candidacy. Does this visit not whip up that charge? Buhari will have, of course, to prove again that he is a party man, not an ethnic man. In the last polls, he had to brandish his voter’s card just to advertise his loyalty. Of course, Buhari will be forced to do same this time if the Atiku men want to play up the ethnic card. Atiku only remembers the north when he wants their vote. The point has ben made over and over as to what he has done to help the north as a big man of influence and wealth. His Adamawa State is one of the worst in development indices. The north has never done well. Atiku cohabits with southern elite where he makes wealth all the time except when he wants power. He is the most cynical politician of this generation. The second, of course, is El Rufai, who exposed Atiku’s ethno-regional chicaneries last year but he is in bed with him today. In the north, according to all researches including that of Redline and Oxford, most of the states have over 50 percent of citizens living below poverty line. In the northwest, in the last eight years, between 35 and 40 percent and in some states between 50 and 75 percent of its citizens were living below poverty line. These surveys covered between 2014 and 2023. Where was Atiku if not ensconced in his Dubai luxury rampart? For El Rufai, his Kaduna was 55 percent below poverty level when he could have done better with over N400 billion no one can account for. Yet, the Tinubu administration has appointed ministers in the north in the most critical part of their needs. Vice President Kashim Shettima made this assertion in the presence of Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila. Vice President Shettima asserted that for insecurity, President Tinubu appointed two defence ministers from the north, Abubabakar Badaru and Bello Matawalle, Chief of defence staff Gen. Christopher Musa. But there is more. Few have heard of the Paluka initiative, a non-kinetic programme, amounting to hundreds of billions of naira, that focuses on pursuing development in a suite of states like Kano, Kebbi, Jigawa, Bauchi, Sokoto, etc. It is to be pursued by ministers of health, defence, economic planning, housing, agriculture. The ministers of health and agriculture are also from the north. These ministers have done little to serve as the story tellers of their mandates, and should have been the ones to tackle Atiku in his megalomaniac visitations. For instance, why has the agricultural minister not shown how the federal government has devoted about N300 billion so far in that sector in the area of largescale farming, fertilisers, etc.? With his appeal to northern sentiments, Atiku forgets that a narrative of such nature projects the north in what French thinker Michel Foucault sees as prefabricated identities, a people without dynamic or conscience to be corralled at will towards unthinking loyalty. Writers and thinkers like Zadie Smith and Charles Taylor have mused over how such identities can endanger and problematize civilization. The last election exposed the futility of such automatic fanaticism as the north had hefty votes for the APC candidate. As Shehu Sani asserts, Atiku wants to privilege prejudice over national cohesion.
He is the most dangerous politician in the country, followed by Peter Obi.
The Atiku visit reminds one of Friedrich Durrenmatt, one of Europe’s best playwrights’ masterpiece, The Visit, in which a native and now wealthy lady returns to her town and turns the whole community upside down. Atiku may want to read that play, if he reads.
