ATIKU ABUBAKAR AND THE LIMITS OF INORDINATE AMBITION- JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

It is with utter bemusement that I read an article under the hand of one Tunde Olusunle, apparently a PhD holder, and, Special Adviser, Media and Publicity, to Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples’s Democratic Party, PDP, in which he attempted an excoriation of All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, without bothering to market his boss, Atiku. Indeed, altogether, Dr. Olusunle’s article was as bewildering as it was otherwise brazenly hypocritical and entirely self-serving.

Though Olusunle’s piece was clearly intended at merely impugning Tinubu in the most dishonest and underhanded manner imaginable, for some reason, he saw fit to begin his shamefully bellicose, rather materially empty, and, quite virulently ill-natured article with a rather quite perplexing attempt at name dropping, coupled with a futile struggle at whitewashing the horrific Obasanjo years of which he was apparently a shameless participant. Later in his vainglorious scribble, Olusunle thanked God for the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s, recently introduced Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, though he conveniently forgot to mention the fact that it is a long awaited correction of the truly shameful elections conducted under his former boss, each and every one of which remain the most heinously rigged in the entire history of Nigeria!

In a pitiable attempt at self-advertisement, Olusunle sought to hoodwink his readership he was back then a member of some superteam of experts helping Obasanjo to rule our country as one should be governed. He forgot to mention how their government frittered away opportunity after opportunity to reset and move our nation forward, while mindlessly burning up 16 billion dollars (most of which actually disappeared into the pockets of persons I would reckon might even be well known to Olusunle) purportedly building power plants across the country, with no member of Olusunle’s superteam having the good sense to remind their boss to also make provision for the figuratively far lower cost of a roasted corn in order to supply gas to these stations while having them linked to the national grid for the purpose of evacuating the power they were expected to produce in the first place!

While Olusunle would have us take him as some saint now working for a messiah in his new paymaster, Atiku, truth is, he actively participated in the kitchen cabinet of a man who contributed more to destroying Nigeria than any other and is now trying to sell us the equally, if not more, woefully failed deputy of that same man.

According to President Goodluck Jonathan, President Olusegun Obasanjo ended up slaughtering only women and children in Odi, Bayelsa, when the militants he was supposedly after had already fled the town. Indeed, his ill-advised incarceration of Asari Dokubo and tyrannically orchestrated impeachment of Diepriye Alamieyeseigha, was what provoked the Movement for the Emancipation of The Niger Delta, MEND, into taking expatriate oil workers hostage in protest, something that was then copied by pure criminals starting in the South-south and South-east, till it spread like wildfire nationwide, and has become the infernal signature of Boko Haram, ISWAP and scores of bandits across our country today!

However low Atiku Abubakar rates Nigerians, they are most certainly not returning to the PDP they vomited however much the likes of Olusunle and others on Atiku’s payroll attempt to entice them into embarking on what would only amount to a most macabre return to the Egypt of their erstwhile bondage. Olusunle, of course, had absolutely nothing to say about his serial failure of an eternal presidential candidate, Atiku, who claims to want to unite Nigeria by apparently first further disuniting it by brazenly stealing the turn of one half of his supposed country to produce the next President of Nigeria! That is clearly because there is absolutely nothing worthy or howsoever remotely worthwhile to say about Atiku, a pathetically psychologically homeless man, whose one and only real abode, as pointed out by Sam Omatseye, is his obsessive and patently inordinate ambition to be President at any cost.

Early next year Olusunle would be most bitterly rueing having squandered the PhD he is seemingly quite proud to advertise on an indigene of Dubai who wants to rule over Nigerians. Indeed, in his desperation to return to national limelight and the corridors of power in Aso Rock, Olusunle has only ended up backing the wrong horse. Unfortunately, there is no military government to railroad his foreigner of a presidential candidate down our throats, quite apart from BVAS and other innovations that have now consigned the era of diabolical rigging of elections by the PDP to the dustbin of history.

Atiku Abubakar will not be President of this country because such a presidency would then immediately render the thus unconscionably cheated Southern half of this nation just as dislocated as the North, if not much worse! Simply put, if Atiku were to become president, he would barely have a country to govern! In any case, there is an abiding national consensus, led by Northerners, for that matter, for power shift down South as the lowest denominator for the preservation of our national unity, harmony, balance and cohesion.

That nationwide consensus will ensure Bola Tinubu emerging victorious in the coming election, an outcome that would see Nigerians electing the most evidentially prepared candidate to lead, make things better and make better things for them, their families and their country. In short, and quite unfortunately so for Olusunle and his ilk, wherever they are presently hooded, stumbling along with Atiku, helping him down the stairs on his voyage to absolutely nowhere, they are, once again, firmly on the wrong side of history in the making.

Olusunle projects that come February 25, 2023, those of us who support Tinubu would be with him in some town hall. I can assure him and his boss, Atiku, that come February 25, 2023, they would find themselves contending with the embarrassing difficulty of having to reference Tinubu as “Mr. President-elect”! Olusunle assures that come May 29, next year, Nigerians “will be readying for the resetting and reclamation of” our country. He is in fact quite correct in that regard, except that the man at the head of that monumental project of national rebirth will be a newly sworn-in President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu!

Onokpasa, a lawyer and member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Abuja.