Atiku’s Desperation And The North.
Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President and current presidential candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is desperate. He is desperate to become Nigeria’s president and this desperation is ageless. He would give his two hands to be our president and his desperation for Nigeria’s top office is oozing millions of watts of heat. He leaves no one in doubt that he longs to be Nigeria’s president. Among the others lined for the presidential contest he is the oldest, the longest contesting and indeed a veteran in the contest.
In 2003, while serving as deputy to former President Obasanjo, he contested for his boss’ job and was almost pulling the rug from below the elephantine feet of Obasanjo who had to beg his way out of Atiku’s sleight of hands to pick a second term ticket of their party, the PDP.
Having survived Atiku’s treacherous upper cut, Obasanjo was to unleash his fury on his treacherous deputy to make him a vegetable in the second term of their joint ticket.
In 2007, Atiku was to contest again. This time, he crossed carpet to the rival Action Congress (AC) to take a shot at the presidency and lost. For the 2011 election, Atiku returned to his PDP and squared up against an incumbent Goodluck Jonathan and lost the primary.
In 2015, Atiku set sail in the burgeoning opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), which was on the threshold of dispatching the then ruling PDP from power. He contested the 2015 Presidential primary of APC and came a distant third, behind the victorious Gen Muhammadu Buhari who won the ticket and Rabiu Musa Kwakwanso who came second. As the 2019 race gathered steam, Atiku again. returned to his PDP and easily picked its presidential ticket to set up a contest with incumbent President Buhari. He lost woefully in the ensuing election to Buhari but sulked and waited for the next contest.
That next contest is the 2023 presidential election, which holds in the next two months. Atiku, at 75 years, again, effortlessly picked the PDP presidential ticket and is squared to contest in the coming election as candidate of PDP.
So Atiku has somehow become a recurrent decimal in Nigeria:s presidential contest since the current democracy birthed. He has become a serial contestant as well as a serial loser and as this appears to be his last contest for the exalted Nigerian presidency. his desperation has reached its highest boiling point and as the contest nears and he is faced with so many gargantuan odds, he has waxed trenchantly desperate in the effort to nick it by every means; fair and foul.
In his frenzied efforts to get the presidency by every means, Atiku has resorted to brash, mean, desperate and asinine tactics to see his life long ambition come through.
To start with, Atiku or any other northerner is not supposed to contest the 2023 presidency, going by the power rotation agreement that has ruled the practice of our present democracy. The North-South power rotation arrangement has been an unwritten code that girds Nigeria’s democracy since 1999. Though fangled by the then ruling party, the PDP, It was the same PDP that tried to violate it in 2011 and 2015 when an incumbent Jonathan was put up for re-election. The resolve of the nation to stop PDP’s selfish efforts to violate this noble code partly contributed to the grand defeat PDP suffered in 2015.
So, it is unthinkable that Atiku, a northerner and Fulani should think that Nigerians would approve that yet another Northerner and Fulani should succeed President Buhari, who is a Northerner and Fulani, after eight years in power. Curiously, it is the same PDP that carved this power rotation arrangement and which emphatically violated it by putting up Jonathan for election in both 2011 and 2015 that is leading this audacious assault now purely for ultra selfish reasons. Atiku is contesting purely for selfish reasons and the weird belief that the vast northern voters will flock around him and support him to violate this nationalistic undertaking because he is a Northerner.
But then, the horse has already bolted before the stable door was secured. The power rotation arrangement has become a national ethos. It has acquired a life of its own and Atiku and his PDP can not arrest this with their selfish, desperate calculations.
Of course, Atiku’s effort to violate the power rotation agreement has terribly scattered what remains of PDP. The party has fragmented into irreconcilable factions since Atiku bludgeoned his way to its ticket and today, PDP has become a weakened, disorganized, inchoate entity, with Rivers governor, Nyesom Wike and several PDP governors leading a major faction that has rejected Atiku’s candidacy on the charge that it violates the power rotation agreement of the party and the nation. Today, PDP, under Atiku’s charge has become a terminally sick party that has defied all cure. Speaking of blind desperation and its consequences!
Recently, Atiku, faced with a no-win prospect, went to a Northern summit in Kaduna and made a very tendentious and dangerous demand that northeners should not vote for a Southern candidate. For a man that flatters himself as a ‘unifier’, that was an all-time-low that shows that Atiku has gone haywire in ethnic-baiting in the heat of desperation. The furore this statement generated showed that Atiku has gone beyond caring in the blinding quest to become president by hook or crook! In his calculation, Atiku felt the vast northern votes could be exploited by base appeal to tribal and ethnic sentiments. For a man who, in the heat of his PDP’s dangerous profiling of the North after Buhari became president, said that the North is bedevilled by poverty and illiteracy, Atiku felt that his kinsmen are not smart or educated enough to escape his selfish baiting. His calculation, and that of his PDP, is that after negatively profiling the North for nearly eight years, the same North will sheepishly queue behind them in 2023 because Atiku is a northerner. That was why he threw decorum to the dogs by coming out publicly to tell northerners not to vote Southerners and expect the entire North will sheepishly flock around him even with his complicity in the PDP-propelled anti-North profiling project that birthed when Buhari came to power in 2015.
Then, more recently, we were rudely shocked by the tendentious, specious and outlandish campaign Atiku mounts in the North that the APC presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu plans to relocate the Nation’s capital from Lagos to Abuja, if elected in February! As stupid, hollow and unfounded as this sounds, it only goes to advertise Atiku’s dangerous, desperate, divisive politics and goes to show a man ruled by fervent desperation for the nation’s top job to satiate base and selfish interests. More than anything, this latest Atiku campaign shows the disdain and contempt Atiku holds for an average northerner. For Atiku, a northerner is a dumb, undiscerning illiterate, a simple and manipulable mind that could be swindled by the kind of ethnic sentiments Atiku has made the cornerstone of his make-or-mar ambition. No depth is too low for Atiku to sink to corner the Nigerian presidency and with each day, he degenerates badly by his low-life campaigns.
Atiku is playing his trump card. His trump card is rabid ethnicism. Sadly for him, the North where he and his PDP remnants are hoping to cash out from is the same North that had been at the receiving end of PDP, Atiku and their cohorts’ venom since 2015. It is the same North PDP and its allies, with the approving nod of Atiku, had subjected to the worst ethnic profiling such that a Northerner is perceived as a dare-devil killer when he is not called a cow, goat or stark illiterate since Buhari defeated PDP in 2015. That is the North Atku and PDP want to pit against the rest of the country by their raging selfish political interests in 2015.
The onus is on the entire people of the North to reject PDP and Atiku’s poisoned chalice in 2023 because that is exactly what their desperate bid for the presidency in 2023 amounts to. It is a poisoned chalice from a party that did everything to fend the North off power for the period its glory lasted and an Atiku that supported a massive criminal profiling of the North by his party and its allies gave tacit approval to this hoping he would be the beneficiary of PDP’s anti-North policy.. They now want to take advantage of the North to advance their nebulous interests with no clear provision made for the interest of the North in their selfish, desperate charter.
Most importantly, Atiku and PDP’s present gamble, with the North as cannon fodder, aims to ensure the North is eternally pitched against other component parts of Nigeria in a war that would be to the detriment of the North. This is what happens when acute desperation melds with rabid selfish interests as Atiku and PDP’s present quest for the presidency portends. The North must reject these desperados.
Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos.
