That about everyone thinks Atiku Abubakar’s ethnic baiting, of October 15, was entirely a Freudian slip, is a spectacular failure of media tracking and dutiful reportage.

Yes, the former vice president’s buried, ultra-rotten thoughts did ooze to the surface. That was clear from the brazen recklessness of that dark northern pitch.

But since Atiku started his run for the PDP presidential ticket, the core of his run had never been clearer.

First, he declared only a northerner could help PDP win back federal power.  If that did not jolt anyone in that party, it was only fair testimony to the PDP’s uncritical — even desperate — hankering after power, by whatever means necessary.

After, he positioned himself as that northerner — the sole Arewa redeemer with whom PDP must swim or sink.

Then, he engineered the Aminu Tambuwal nomination collaboration (no crime, to be sure) to clinch the PDP ticket, leaving the likes of Nyesom Wike and Anyim Pius Anyim in the lurch. 

It was the same sickening crow he carried to the Arewa stakeholders forum — wrong platform! — and Atiku, self-garnished pan-Nigeria unifier, self-degraded (and manically so!), as no more than a crass and hollow northern baiter and divider.  What verbal suicide!

Still, don’t get it mixed up.  In a country of multiple nations, striving to out-fox one another for central power, a solid home base is key.  On that, you can’t fault Atiku.

Indeed, in all Nigeria history, only former President Olusegun Obasanjo has won a federal election without a home base.  

But the 1999 “Army Arrangement” (apologies to Fela) that made that possible only led to wicked taunts and spicy jokes that drove Obasanjo berserk to “capture” (in Chief Bode George’s words) his native South West.

So, from an egregiously rigged 2003 election, to a failed “3rd term” bid, to the unconscionable militarization of PDP ranks, and finally to a travesty that was the “do-or-die” 2007 elections, Obasanjo laid the solid foundation for PDP’s power blues today.  

Yes, it all collapsed on former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ).  Still, he was a mere fall guy — though, to be fair, GEJ also contributed his fair share to the PDP rot.

So, you’d pardon Atiku for trying not to go the Obasanjo route — and none of Atiku’s opponents for 2023: Bola Tinubu, Rabiu Kwankaso, Peter Obi and others can afford to joke with their home bases.

On that score, Peter Obi would appear in a serious quandary.  True, his social media army, wild, tetchy and rude, continue to screech from their e-bastion.  

But with the South East flux, not even Peter Obi could boast his tally.  No wonder, not a few are already baiting him to go hold a rally, in his native Anambra, to “test his mic”!

So, locking up the home front is no crime.  But making it sound as if home is all that matters is virtual political suicide.  The simple configuration of the Nigerian Constitution and the rigour of electoral spread make that very clear.

But that could well bring us to the more worrying question on Atiku, the presidential candidate and his party: what exactly would both campaign on?  

If their solid flank of credible campaign appears melting by the hour, wouldn’t Atiku launch into a sterile and barren ethnic pitch, as he did on October 15?

Indeed, what would Atiku and PDP campaign on?

Public morality?  At this time in 2007 when PDP, Obasanjo and Atiku were exiting power, there was also a jumbo strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).  Back then, both Nos. 1 and 2 hustled for private university licences, while the public ones in their care decayed.

Sure, the current ASUU strike is still unresolved but no one is reporting either PMB or Vice President Yemi Osinbajo hankering after private university licences!

Legacy?  Obasanjo and Atiku loved the Igbo so much!  But all they did with the mainstream Igbo political elite was buy into their “All of you” syndrome, as told by Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart — remember tortoise that soared to the skies with the feathers of others but scammed them all claiming he was “All of you”?

Well, PMB shunned that “All of you” syndrome — translated, in real terms, to South East party barons allegedly securing critical infrastructure contracts but pocketing the money.  He gave contracts to those who could execute them.  That change of temper has secured the 2nd Niger Bridge!

But the loss of All of you ”appointments”, contracts and allied pork has led that lobby to orchestrating scalding PMB hate.  Yet, the most rabid Igbo “hater” in Nigerian history just completed 2nd Niger Bridge, in the harshest economic season imaginable!

Yes Atiku, so, so graceless when cornered, told an Igbo lobby that bridge was no special deal for the Igbo, since all Nigerians would use it — true.  Still, for avid Igbo lovers as Atiku, Obasanjo and PDP, that bridge never got beyond a rich campaign tool!

But the special spice is that “2nd Niger Bridge” is replicated everywhere — East, West, North and South!  That’s not bad for PMB, notorious Fulani hegemonist and arch-hater of other tribes!  Pray, what did ardent lovers, of the PDP era, do with project spread?

Besides, public-spirited legacies, spread everywhere, trump a million of self-serving presidential libraries!

Critical infrastructure and agriculture?  True, President Jonathan completed the Abuja-Kaduna rail, though PMB opened it; and PMB ought to have given GEJ much more credit at the project’s inauguration, very early in the APC era.

Still, contrast a rail project at the tail end of 16 years of relative boom to the APC rail record in less than eight years of painful leanness.  

Besides, while Obasanjo played presidential dog in the manger on rail corridors, PMB played the rail liberal, which explains why the Lagos urban rail is about roaring into life.

On agriculture, did anyone hear of Nigerian rice all through those 16 PDP years?  Now, less than eight years since 2015, it is clawing hard for market share!

Social safety nets?  True, the Obasanjo Presidency did a zonal pilot of the school feeding scheme.  But that pales into absolute insignificance compared to the nearly 10 million kids being daily fed in public primary schools nationwide.  

Besides, whoever heard of conditional cash transfers to Nigerian poorest of the poor, in those years of relative plenty, but hardly any coherent attack on poverty?

True, Atiku and PDP would still, with gusto, push the ogre of “insecurity”; and act the avid hell-raiser on “Muslim-Muslim” ticket, to tap into explosive passion for raw electoral gain. How scare-mongering resonates with the electorate, however, remains to be seen.

The PMB-era policy, big on agriculture, massive on infrastructure, and re-jigging the deformed power sector reforms (and Tinubu’s newly released manifesto, which pushes the same set of goals) is to rebuild the real sector and spring Nigeria from the import trap of SAP, where it had languished, since 1986.

The pain of re-building the real sector, to be sure, is massive.  But it’s pain of rebirth, not the pang of death.

It’s on that future that the presidential contestants should engage the electorate: not on Atiku’s base northern pitch; not on Obi’s gaseous promises and phantom stats.”

All luck is not transferable, is it? — a friend often jokes, a glint of mischief in his eyes.

But what if ill luck is a constant plague in your public life — tough?

That seems the fate of Iyorchia Ayu, embattled PDP national chair, caught in a North-South cross-salvo, onward the presidential sweepstakes of 2023.

Dr. Ayu dawned on Nigerian politics as a dashing and rather intellectual young man: the first president of the Senate, in the diarchy that preceded the still-birth 3rd Republic (1 January 1992 – 27 November 1993), under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.

But soon enough, ill luck rammed on his public door — with his impeachment and replacement by Ameh Ebute, though for standing up for Abiola’s June 12 mandate.

That portrait of the Senate president as a young man, pummelled by ill luck, has followed Ayu the old man (he locks 70 on November 15) and controversial PDP boss — a chair he fights the political battle of his life to keep.

Between 1993 and now, Ayu’s has been some depressing study in presidential hire-and-fire.

First, under Gen. Sani Abacha: Ayu was replaced with the loud and controversial, though grimly loyal, Wada Nas aka ”Wada Noise”: on account of his implacable defence of Abacha in life and in death.

Then, under President Olusegun Obasanjo: after a battery of shuffles and re-shuffles, Obasanjo finally dismissed Ayu in December 2005, giving no reasons.

But it needed no genius to figure the presidential guillotine slashed through Ayu’s ministerial neck for being an Atiku Abubakar partisan — then a Vice President declared persona-non-grata in the presidency he re-won with Obasanjo, in the controversial 2003 elections.

So, if Atiku sticks with Ayu now, you must understand both have come a long way.

Both left PDP for Action Congress (AC), Atiku’s platform for his 2007 presidential run, though then a political refugee.

Both, still refugees, were founding members of APC.  Both later gobbled their vomit to return to PDP.

Now, both have grossed the PDP chair and PDP presidential ticket in a North-North lock-up — a one-track blast that Nyesom Wike and co insist fuels the current PDP conflagration, on the virtual eve of a crucial election.

Will Ayu come up short as he did under Abacha and Obasanjo?  Or would he this time ride the tide and deliver some triumph with Atiku?  Time will tell.

Still, for such an endangered species, Dr. Ayu has a rather ruinous proclivity.

In the heat of the moment, Ayu pronounced Aminu Tambuwal the “hero” of the PDP presidential convention, for withdrawing for Atiku to clinch the ticket.

But this particular “heroism” has led to a northern PDP triumvirate: PDP chair (Ayu), PDP presidential candidate (Atiku), director-general of the Atiku campaign (Tambuwal)! That not-so-heroic mis-jive may well haunt Ayu till the end of his political life

Besides, this northern “hat trick” (to borrow that football lingo) has given the Nyesom Wike anti-Atiku blitz much of its vim, for it robes PDP in a distinctly northern tribal hue.

Even then, as the battle drew, Ayu dismissed his Wike-led nemesis as a band of kids not there when the grandees — like Ayu, who these callow kids now had the temerity to challenge — were forming and nurturing PDP!

Then, at the Uyo, Akwa Ibom, launch of the Atiku Abubakar presidential campaign, Ayu claimed the PDP train had rolled off — a rather amusing euphemism to call the bluff of Wike and co — but that it could still be halted to accommodate everyone (another even more comical bluff, with the stark balance of extant PDP powers).

Read Also: Wike, Ayu exchange fire over N1b bribery claims, others

So, might a footloose tongue be Dr. Ayu’s real challenge, which powers the ill luck that clearly has blighted his public persona: impeached president of Senate, dismissed  former minister of the Federal Republic, and now, endangered party chair?

Is he perhaps fated to be yanked off the neck of his troubled party in high storm — just as the albatross in ST Coleridge’s long, long poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”?

These are complex questions that, frankly, hardly anyone can provide accurate answers.  What is certain, though, is that the omens are grim.

Suffice it to say too that a party which simple yet grand electoral joker was to point fingers at present challenges to cynically milk voter pains and sympathy, is ironically getting doubtful — and maybe scornful — fingers pointed at its war-without-end.

Sure, it’s no crime for the opposition to nail the sitting order with its flaws, just to unhorse it.  APC did the same en route to defeating PDP in 2015.

The cynicism here, however, is that much of the challenges in this season of leanness could have been averted in the epoch of plenty, which approximated the PDP 16 years in power (1999-2015).

More like a sick ode to self-glory than salute to clinical thinking, President Obasanjo handed good cash, in hard currency, to Nigeria’s creditors, for debt “cancellation”.

No matter the short-term euphoria over that deal, that cash if invested in massive and renewed infrastructure, could have galvanized the economy to routinely pay back those debts.

If that had been done, much of the post-PDP borrowing, on which scarecrow the party was poised to hang its campaign pitches, would have been averted.

Then, the abiding morass in the power sector has its root in the crony privatization of the PDP era, during which the old Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was balkanized and sold to DisCo “investors” — a travesty for sweetheart cronies that neither had the capital nor technical nous to run those critical shops.

Mix collapsed infrastructure: decayed roads plus comatose rail, with a power sector dead as dodo, even after gulping humongous cash during the Obasanjo-era power sector reforms, and you have a perfect reason for today’s gritty poverty.

Add the gangling, preening, equal-opportunity sleaze under President Goodluck Jonathan and you’ll clearly see the incalculable harm the former ruling party had done this country.  Yet, it was priming itself to cynically point fingers!

The Wike “rebellion” seems to have put paid to all that though it’s early days yet.  But the chaos appears set for a higher gear, with another G-4 set to call Wike and co’s bluff and stick with Ayu — no matter what.

That G-4? Edo’s Godwin Obaseki, Bayelsa’s  Duoye Diri, Adamawa’s Ahmadu Fintiri and Taraba’s Darius Ishaku — a gubernatorial quad sworn to calling Wike’s bluff.  But where does that leave their splintered party?

Jesus the Christ said his crucifixion was divinely settled.  But woe betide the vessel that aided its fulfilment — and that was Judas.

Is nature paying PDP back, for its past ills, with this chaos in rich technicolor?  Still, might history still blame Albatross Ayu — like Judas — for aiding the chaos foretold?

Time will tell!

Sir ‘Eyo — one year after

14 October 2021, it was all gloom — the passage, at 73,  of Dr. Adewale Adesoji Adeeyo, OON — the triple Alpha in everything: good breeding, compassion, generosity, sartorial excellence, emotional intelligence and overall a sweet and good man.

14 October 2022, exactly one year after, it was time to relive and savour AAA’s abiding sweetness, at a simple but classy first year remembrance in his Ikeja GRA home, as Sir ‘Eyo himself would have wished.

Keep on resting in bliss.  As the Lord lives, your widow and the two boys in her care would never walk alone.  Indeed, sweet is the memory of the just!  Sleep on!