Pity Atiku. The court afforded him time. But he chose to fight like a beast scratching the air. He pushed his lawyers, SANs all, out of the fray. It was a tag team match in the ring, featuring Atiku Abubakar and Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
But what an anti-climax. Rather than pounce like a Doberman, Atiku took the battle head-on with the stumbles of a charging ram. His grief was to look for what was not missing in a certificate. The Chicago State University had said President Bola Tinubu is a graduate. He wanted to look for other things.
Credit him. He has good eyes for spellings, dates, signings and pictures. He noted that the school might have made mistakes. But his eyes lacked focus. But the issue was not whether he was a student. He did not address the fundamental matter. Did Tinubu attend CSU? If he spotted mistakes, who to blame? I think Atiku Abubakar should have sued CSU. It is they he has trouble with and not the fellow who went to school.
And if he sues, he would be, not Tinubu’s foe, but advocate. He would save Tinubu the trouble of a court itinerary, of the discriminating itch of picking SANs or American lawyers, or expending dollars to restore the purity of his nomenclature and the sanctity of his paper certificate.
He could not raise hairs over whether he was an honour student, attended classes or wrote exams. Without knowing it, Atiku has become a fighter for the Tinubu cause. He is a quintessence of the parable of the enemy being at peace with one.
So, Atiku could become a certificate revolutionary. He could teach the university how not to make mistake with a certificate. Rather than being men who fought in election trenches, he and Tinubu could become pals who taught Americans how to write certificates. But it is nothing new in the Universities as a recent report says one out of 10 certificates show one form of error or another, including grades.
Especially with a name like Tinubu and not Tom or Jerry. He could add another charge: Racism in spelling names or certificate racism. Has he heard how their broadcasters call African athletes in their country? Roll back tapes and hear how they pronounced Olajuwon, Okoye, Okafor or Adebayo, and he will have abundance of material for his bloodhound of SANs.
In the case of Atiku versus Tinubu, the issue is not whether he was there or whether he graduated. If it was a clerical error, maybe Atiku should sue for clerical error. It is not Tinubu’s headache.
Suing CSU is the only way he could have made something out of his adventure. For one, the case has closed in court and everyone is waiting for the verdict. He has no more prayers. If he goes to court, is he going to say the man did not go to the school? Or is he going to be the first person who had certificate errors?
What Atiku is doing is what American historians describe as the lost cause. It refers to the southern partisans of the American civil war, who would not accept that they lost the war. They keep hiding under the so-called folksy charm of the south. They romanticise black servitude and deny the tyranny of the slavery era. They propagate antebellum beauty and the superiority of their soldiers. They even say they did not fight the war to keep slaves. They merely wanted to assert a federalist principle. They twist it as state’s rights. They exploit such delusion to fight to upturn racial equality today. At a Mississippi rally, Ronald Reagan proclaimed, “I believe in state’s rights.” A code for white supremacy. The KKK and Donald Trump are a product of that depraved conscience.
Not for them the modern credo of human equality. That It is not Atiku’s problem alone. He is often backed by the war cry of Obi’s supporters. They are twinedtwinned and twined in self-delusion. Atiku is a lone ranger vouchsafed to a populist rabble. Evidence is not material. They believe. It is faith without work, or faith without facts.
While the rabble kept saying they won the election, they also called for the army. They parroted lies about Tinubu’s health, parodied to their own shame the fashion sense of then candidate Kashim Shettima until they exposed how old-fashioned they were. They latched on to certificate anxiety and drug apocrypha and called the university so many times that the school developed a standard response to their hysteria. They thought if they called many more times, someone would say he did not know the school.
Atiku did not want to miss the train. He then issued a statement without evidence that President Tinubu was mounting pressure on the judges. Had he even taken time to examine whether his lawyers made enough case for his own victory? Maybe he did and discovered his SANs had a feeble offering at the Presidential Elections Petition Court (PEPC). Hence, he hollered at CSU for one last card.
In the same breath, Obi’s men continue their melee. They were looking for blackmail. They threw ads saying ‘all eyes on the judiciary.’
But they don’t want to win. They love a loser’s ecstasy. They love their misery as wannabe. It gives them vim and dynamism. It puffs their egos as phony intellectuals. They mistake rap for rhapsody. It is a masochist paradise. It is like pain without a pain killer. But pain is its own killer pill. In the paradise, they grieve, rant, squirm and rage. They illumine the darkness of their intents with deceptive glow, to skew narratives.
It is the physiognomy of failure. It is not like Okonkwo or Oedipus, who saw death and craved it. Or the protagonist of Gabriel Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, who spends his whole life waiting for the husband of his obsession to die. They, at least, have wish fulfilments. End gives apotheosis. It will embalm their heroes and sheroes. But Atiku and his Obidients crave an epic in search of great men and women, a tale without end.
They want a Sisyphean bliss, and they will keep getting almost there. Just like profitless adventures of Willy Loman in playwright Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman.
It is the way of lost causes. We are seeing it with Nnamdi Kanu and his followers. The agitation is the success. Some of our clerics need such euphoric intoxication. They keep preaching for followers to keep hoping. It is such attitude that inspired a distorted reading of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, in a new book, Why the Bible Began by Jacob L. Wright. He writes about how the Jews wove failure into nobility and justify salvation with defeats. Their misery, especially with the Babylonian captivity, they sang the Lord’s songs in a strange land. According to Wright, they poeticise bondage. Even after Christ, Christians see the crucified and suffering Jesus instead of the risen Lord. In the epic The Iliad, Homer’s account of the fall of the Trojans beats that of the Greek triumph. He paints fallen Hector’s exploits as though a hero. In the same way, Obi’s folks and Atiku have turned pity into piety, despair into desire, the prospect of salvation into a salvo and savoir faire. Two baseball clubs in the U.S., the Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, found love among themselves for a century until they won. Victory deprived them of a fine illusion. Frank Sinatra sang, “Here’s to the losers, bless “em all.” In Paradise Lost, John Milton pens Satan into greater grandeur than Christ.
The Obidients and Atiku will continue to guard and cherish their sweet melancholy, and even if they see victory, they would pray it never comes. And it won’t. They are like the main character in one of America’s classics, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence about the Gilded Age. The character spent all his life falling in love with his wife’s sister and another man’s wife. Decades later, when it is time to finally climb up the stairs to meet her, alone, he walks away.
