Atiku and the future of Nigeria
The above title is not original to the columnist. It belongs to the heroic lore of Nigeria’s nationalist struggle and anti-colonial exertions. It belongs to Habib Raji Abdallah. One of the unsung heroes of Nigeria’s independence struggle, Raji Abdallah fought the colonialists with his pen and tongue suffering imprisonment and untold persecution in the process.
A sterling patriot and constant northern star, Raji Abdallah staked his life for the liberation of the nascent Nigerian nation from the shackles of colonization and the enslavement of the Black race from what Noam Chomsky, the contrarian MIT linguistic genius, has dismissed as a five hundred year old emasculation by the hegemonic western imperium. Together with Bello Ijumu, and his fellow northern middle belters among other northern progressives, Raji Abdallah fought the colonial authorities to a standstill.
These avatars belong in the realm of glorious possibilities for the Nigerian nation which must now be recuperated if Nigeria is to be redeemed from the cobweb of institutional amnesia and infamy. To the best of our knowledge, there are no living monuments to these heroes.
Having begun the process of national recuperation with the public recognition of MKO Abiola and Gani Fawehinmi, President Buhari should commence his second term with a closer look at the insidious manipulation of Nigeria’s national honours system in favour of unworthy charlatans and sundry nonentities. General Buhari should constitute a committee with the mandate to take a holistic look at our honours’ system which dampens and depresses the Nigerian spirit rather than uplift and ennoble it.
Now that the elections have come and gone, it is time to commence a healing process for the nation. The wounds are horrific. Nigeria is fractured all the way down the line. More than ever, the elections revealed a nation at war with itself. Never has the nation been this divided. The ethnic, regional, sub-regional, class and cultural fault lines have been further opened up. Add to this cocktail of national afflictions, the emergent demographic face-off between an increasingly young nation and an aging political class and you get the making of a perfect political storm.
This columnist is not among those urging Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, the runner-up in the presidential election, not to deepen the n ational wound by going to court. Deepening a wound is part of the paradoxical process of healing. You cannot properly heal a festering wound without cutting through it to prevent further septic rot. Having chosen the electoral route to national development, we must abide by its sacred ethos which includes protesting its very outcome.
Despite the electoral misfortunes he has suffered in the last decade, this column will not join in glibly writing off Atiku. Atiku is neither ku or late. Many have said of the former Customs and Excise boss that ambition should be made of sterner stuff. But a man who survived a brutal and grueling open round slugfest with a punitive prizefighter like General Obasanjo cannot be said to be a wimp or a weakling.
Having said all that, it is time to have a word with Alhaji Abubakar Atiku. After parting way with former president Obasanjo, the man from Jada has not always chosen his political battles wisely. Neither does he choose the terrain and the choice of weapon with circumspection. As a state ward from his youth and a state man from adulthood, Atiku should know what he is up against whenever he hurls himself in defiance against the overwhelming machinery of the Nigerian post-colonial state, whether politically, economically or electorally.
The modern Nigerian state is the West African equivalent of what is known in the old Belgian Congo as Bula Matari or the crusher of rocks. It crushes and grinds its victims to helpless submission. As Obasanjo’s all-powerful deputy, Atiku himself has been in the engine room of what is essentially an impersonal terror machine which only recognizes its current foreman. He ought to know that it cannot be lightly toyed with.
Atiku should ask General Buhari the man who defeated him in the last presidential election what he (Buhari) himself went through between 2003 and 2015 when he literally came back from the dead to defeat the incumbent in a historic electoral duel. His ordeal included a mysterious assassination attempt ascribed to the Boko Haram insurgents. On that occasion, this column noted that God must have spared Buhari’s life for a purpose.
Many of Atiku’s traducers have ascribed his problem to overweening and inordinate ambition. There is nothing wrong with ambition and without its driving force, nothing substantial can be achieved in life or politics for that matter. But ambition which does not have the common sense to recognize the limits and limitations imposed by certain circumstances can only end in compelling and humiliating tragedy.
But it may be too early to write off Abubakar Atiku. A man of his Croesus-like riches and connections cannot be lightly cast aside. Nigeria still needs Atiku’s wealth of experience. One would have thought that the post-election period would have afforded Atiku a chance for deep reflections about how to transit from partisan politics to pan-Nigerian statesmanship. Atiku’s economic wizardry and political gamesmanship can be deployed to boost the chances of a nation permanently adrift.
Atiku should ignore the few stragglers nudging him on the path of needless confrontation with the state. This is not a role for which he has been historically prepared or politically grilled. It takes a different type of psychological stamina and political cujones. If Atiku bothers to look behind him to see if his base support is still standing, he would have noticed a calamitous desertion from the ranks. It is all in a day’s work. Having fleeced the poor man of his dollar, the scoundrels have moved on to the next kill. Like gluttonous rodents that happened upon a sugar cane plantation, they have fled before the fermented sugar fully kicked in.
If Atiku should look further, the situation ought to be more disheartening. Espirit de corps has finally materialized among the old soldiers, and it is not sugarcane spirit. The old generals who promised to bring down the roof if Atiku is not elected president have quietly vanished with their tail stuck in their boots. A few have reemerged from the rubble of Atiku’s shellacking to congratulate their Commander in Chief. A Generals’ quarrel is not for the general public to settle or for paramilitary subalterns to dabble into.
A few weeks earlier in this column, we cautioned Atiku that he should not confuse the generals’ declared support for him as an emphatic endorsement of his presidential bid. We told Atiku that they were merely using him as the cat’s paw to pull the chestnut out of fire, knowing fully well he was probably the only man with the means and material to drive the presidential duel to the frontiers of inconclusiveness. That was when the “Venezuelan plot” would have taken over. Once that possibility quickly collapsed in a major electoral rout, the game was up.
If Atiku had noticed the heavily nuanced birthday banters and exchange between President Buhari and General Obasanjo, he would have detected a strategic shift of hostile engagement. As tested warriors, both retired generals know where the locus of power lies.
While General Buhari could afford to be magnanimous and conciliatory to his old commander, Obasanjo also knew that he could no longer afford to be grumpily confrontational without inviting major reprisals from a man of Buhari’s granite resolve. There was not a single mention of the last presidential election.
In military parlance, this is called re-engagement after disengagement. Atiku has been abandoned in the political jungle to forage for himself. The classic Catch-22 military logic stipulates that one’s concern for one’s own safety in the face of danger real and immediate is the process of a rational mind.
How time changes indeed! And how its wild gyrations could reconfigure a man’s political fortunes even before the proverbial cock crows! Shortly after he was elected Vice President, a triumphant and regnant Atiku Abubakar had journeyed up north to Kaduna for a regional conference.
The then Turaki of Adamawa was the man of the moment, a crown prince and king in waiting; unarguably the most important northern political figure thrown up by the Obasanjo Settlement, having been dramatically catapulted from governor in waiting in the seething provincialism of Yola to the national theatre through the vice presidency of the Federal Republic.
The conference was a virtuoso performance for the new kid on the block. Atiku delivered a blistering put-down of the northern power establishment upbraiding them for the North’s perpetual underdevelopment, its worsening economic plight and lamentable social inequities. It was as if a northern Daniel had finally come to judgment. It was Atiku’s finest hour.
Alas it turned to be a political mirage. It was too good to be true. The PDP government soon reverted to its default setting of extractive predation. Rather than laying the foundation for the rapid economic transformation of the nation, the PDP government concentrated its focus and attention to destabilizing and eventually destroying rival parties as if this was its sole raison d’etre.
By the time the Obasanjo-Atiku political feud became a national emergency both gladiators had become so politically sapped that neither of them could any longer give a thought to the economic and political transformation of the nation. This situation was to largely subsist under their successors until the Nigerian populace put the party out of its misery after sixteen wasted years.
It can now be seen why it is argued in many quarters that even if it survives for a thousand years, the PDP as a party will never be at the vanguard of reforming consciousness in Nigeria. The future of Nigeria is too important to be left in the hand of a party like PDP. Age is no longer on the side of Atiku Abubakar. The last one and half decades are a testimony to his resolve and determination to rule Nigeria. It has been a heroic struggle within his limits and limitations.
But this, we believe ——to echo the great Raji Abdallah once again: No single individual can be allowed to hold down the clock of a nation or stall its progress towards economic and political transformation. For his efforts, we salute the great man from Jada. It is time to return to the lush and verdant provenance of his magical homestead on the Adamawa plains and the embrace of adoring grandchildren.
Okon nabbed for electoral treason
To the iconic Clifford Police Station where the loony boy Okon is held on sundry charges ranging from vote-switching, vote-snatching, vote-selling while mounting illegal road block, defacement of opponents’ billboard and conduct prejudicial to state survival. In the glorious age of Single Treasury Account, the police decided to streamline and simplify the charges slammed on Okon by bringing them under the ominous and omnibus hammer of electoral treason, a single bullet to the plexus if you have ever seen any.
On the day he was going to get into terminal trouble, Okon had barged as usual into the sitting room very early in the morning wearing an amiable scowl. Before snooper could ask for an explanation, the mad boy exploded.
“Oga, I wan quickly reach dem Akala checkpoint off dem Fourth Avenue for Ikoyi make I collect my own from dem dough him collect from dem politicians. You know say policeman no get commonsense, na yanfunyafun him go dey spend money and small time dem money go finish again”.
“Okon, man must whack. And what is your own about the poor man?” snooper demanded.
“Ha na my good friend. I don sabi am since he be DPO for dem Costain and Iponri. Na better man but Yoruba yanga and feferity dey too much. He get time like dat when he come dey wear ring for him leg and I tell am say armed robbers go cut him leg”.
“Okon, these things happened about forty years ago and you claim to be thirty eight”, a bemused snooper enquired.
“Oga, leave dat o jare. I don tell una say official age no be facial age. Monkey dey sweat, na hair dey hide am. He get one Yoruba professor like dat who say him be sixty years when him former students don reach seventy. Dem they call him baba and him dey tell dem say nobody fit remove am becos official age na officious age. Na dat one dem Fela dey call ogbologbo”, the mad boy sniggered.
Actually, it is hard to blame the mad boy for his cynical irreverence. It has been an explosive fortnight in Nigerian politics. Strange things have been happening in the political firmament. There are strange alliances everywhere and even stranger cross alliances. The parties are melting and dissolving in a huge fireball of chaos and confusion. A major structural reconfiguration of party formations is under way in Nigeria. From Ilorin to the Lagos Lagoon all that had appeared ideologically solid is melting into thin air.
It will end in further ideological disorientation and contempt of the people. Yet the brutal hard fact remains that in post-colonial Africa, you cannot remain glued to the moral high ground if it will lead to your being evicted from power. Loss of power can be more devastating than lack of power. Better not to taste the perquisites of power than to have the power of perquisites suddenly snatched from you. You can only make a difference when you are in a position to do so.
But the contempt of the people is mounting as the ethical and moral toll become prohibitive. Never in the history of the country have the people demonstrated such brutal indifference to the plight of their former rulers. In Ilorin, the people of Kwara have seen off the Saraki dynasty with a song and a sigh of relief. In Akwa Ibom, the good people of that state put the swashbuckling Godswill Akpabio in his place.
In Delta James Ibori, the former fugitive offender, is still electorally dominant, having poleaxed and put his own cousin to the electoral sword. Snooper has known Emmanuel Uduaghan since his days as a lowly medico at the Aladjah Steel Complex in Warri and the clubbable chap has never appeared more devastated and forlorn.
When a tiger leaps backward, it is always a dangerous signal. We may be witnessing the beginning of some revolutionary stirrings in Nigeria in all its contradictory and countervailing momentum. May you live in interesting times.
- Next week: Okon turns the table in custody.
