Former vice president Atiku Abubakar’s 2023 presidential race is a story of what might have been. Does he regret how he ran the race? Does he know a different outcome was actually within his reach, had he been less presumptuous? Or was he just plain incompetent in political strategy? There is nothing in the former vice president’s public statements, now or in the past 20 months or so, that gives any indication he was remorseful about the tactics he used in the race. If he suffered pangs of remorse privately, he has been clever and successful in masking it. If he didn’t feel any remorse, then he must be more stoical than many people give him credit. But any normal and clever politician in Alhaji Atiku’s worn shoes would have pined away in regret for frittering away what was undoubtedly his best chance to clinch the race.
Last week’s verbal jousting with Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister Nyesom Wike indicates that the former vice president actually remains sanguine about his monumental electoral loss. He may never get the chance again, whether to run for the top office or win. In 2023, all he needed to do was indulge in the realpolitik that had hallmarked his decades-long political career. He was not the most perceptive and principled of leaders, but nature at least afforded him chances upon chances in two or three dizzying months in mid-2022 to win the diadem he had coveted all his life. Uncharacteristically, for someone so placid about political morality and so unfeeling about other people’s opinions, he flung it out of the window and failed to seize the moment. Last week, in their verbal jousting, both men showed who was to blame and what that critical factor that would have produced a different outcome was.
Alhaji Atiku drew the first blood in a television interview where he insisted that Mr Wike’s character disqualified him from being picked as running mate. He was not only the second pick by a committee the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) set up to do the sieving, the former vice president said dismissively, his role in the Rivers State crisis and his giddy display at the FCT made the former Rivers State governor a misfit for the onerous responsibility of deputizing for the president. Now, of all the criticisms anyone might level at Mr Wike, assaulting his character is the most intolerable. He believes he is a political purist, and more, he believes his judgement is generally infallible, moored, he thinks, on the most indubitable ethos any system could forge. For instance, in his diatribe against Rivers governor Siminalayi Fubara, the issue of character failure of his successor remains the recurring theme. To, therefore, be accused of character failure was a gauntlet he would never fail to take up.
The former vice president had obviously forgotten his facts or mixed up his story, thundered Mr Wike through his spokesman. The PDP committee in question, roared Mr Wike, actually had the FCT minister as the number one pick, with 13 votes, and former Delta State governor Ifeanyi Okowa, the number two pick with only two votes. The former vice president, he said, mixed up his facts or lied sacrilegiously in the time of Ramaddan. Incidentally, PDP spokesmen later shamefacedly admitted that Mr Wike was first pick. And as for impugning his character as governor, former governor, and now FCT minister, the former vice president, he said, simply evaded the truth, avoided blame for his 2023 humiliation, and pursued red herrings. Mr Wike said he had since moved on beyond the 2022 mishap, advising Alhaji Atiku to do the same.
Unfortunately for the former vice president, Mr Wike, despite his own private failings, many of which are obvious, was right in his summation of why the PDP lost the presidential election. It was tactical folly for the PDP presidential candidate to have imagined that picking Dr Okowa would enable him to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. He had thought that the Ifeanyi in Dr Okowa’s name would help him appeal to both the Igbo and South-South votes. At another time and perhaps era, theoretically, he would be right. But not when a certain Peter Obi was also in the race on the platform of the Labour Party (LP), and certainly not when the Southeast’s herd mentality could not be immediately discounted or mitigated by any known factor. What is even more flummoxing is that everyone, save the former vice president, knew that the ideologically superficial Mr Obi was nevertheless sensible enough to know that all he needed to do in the race was lock the Southeast down and make a dangerous, if fatal, pitch for the Christian vote. The LP candidate was in fact coherent and largely successful in both efforts. It clearly sounded the death knell to a presidential ambition to ignore the damage Mr Obi was capable of doing, and to pick an intelligent but largely uncharismatic running mate with no strategic appeal.
Read Also: Nollywood graces Series Mania, puts Nigerian content on global stage
If Alhaji Atiku had picked Mr Wike, as the more politically savvy PDP committee suggested, he would have saved the party from fracturing, thus defanging the nuisance value of the Group of Five (G-5), kept the usually conservative South-South in the bag, set the cat among the Southeast pigeons who would doubt their insular champion, and convinced enough Middle Belt and core North voters to put all their eggs in one basket as he parochially preached. He had the clearest and most enticing pathway to the presidency in the 2023 poll. But instead, he was sure, without any basis, that his main opponent, the then candidate Tinubu, would falter. He then reinforced the farce by reposing confidence in the promises of many presidential insiders of the day, leading him to defy the threats of the G-5 and Mr Wike. No one so more willingly committed political suicide.
Alhaji Atiku may be unprincipled, but he is not stupid. He probably knows that he made a big mistake in 2023. He also probably suspects that the last presidential election was his best and last chance to run for the coveted office. But he needs a sacrificial lamb to convince the world that too many ‘traitors’ doomed his electoral chances, and also needs any ointment wherever he can find it to salve his wounded conscience. He has never wished to be a statesman, and would, therefore, be loth to admit his error nobly and bravely. He will, therefore, continue to joust with Mr Wike, abuse him at every turn, and nitpick his faults. Redirecting the attention to the FCT minister will, however, not mitigate his failure to make hay while the sun shone in 2023. Whereas hope may be rising for Mr Obi at the LP as the Supreme Court has weighed in against the intransigent party chairman, Julius Abure, in the PDP, and in the foreseeable future, the pall is unlikely to lift anytime soon, regardless of how mendacious the former vice president can be.
