RIGMAROLING IN ATIKU AND OBI’S VERY DIFFERENT TOWNHALL

By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

The consolidated cases presently being tried by the Presidential Election Petition Court are basically about who won or did not win the 2023 presidential election.

I will leave out that aspect except to say that if I decided to float a company with share capital of 8.7 million naira and two other people, desirous of competing with me, and having a combined wherewithal of 13 million naira, instead of joining forces and pooling together, decide to each float separate companies, one of which ends up with 6.9 million share capital and, the other with 6.1 million, then my company would still be more valuable than either.

That said, there are many dimensions to the trial of these election petitions that I find truly bizarre.

If Atiku Abubarkar really believes he won the election, you would suppose he would be quite eager to fulfill all requisites in order to prove exactly that.

Strangely, he wouldn’t even pay for the certified true copies of the very documents that are supposedly crucial to proving his case!

Rather, he prefers to lament that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has not given him documents he is clearly not interested in paying for.

This is actually quite perplexing, given that one would expect a presidential hopeful who had once served as a Vice President to appreciate why it is necessary, even if only as a revenue generating device, that certified true copies of official documents be paid for.

Instead, apparently proceeding from the standpoint of a sense of entertainment, Alhaji Atiku, imperiously expects INEC to hand him documents for free!

I guess you could say that when your philosophy of governance is framed by the deployment of Special Purpose Vehicles, SPVs, unto looting the commonwealth, you expect any and everything to be handed to you on a platter of gold.

Atiku boasted of calling 100 witnesses; so far, he has only been able to call 25 and apparently hopes for “a round figure of 30” when he closes his case!

This is quite apart from the fact that his witnesses seem to showcase one thing in common – they all emerge as rather quite far removed from the “facts” they are supposed to be establishing!

Mr Peter Obi’s approach to proving his case is arguably even more grotesque.

While, like his former boss, Atiku, Obi has been studiously quiet, watching his supporters cast aspersions on the judiciary, clearly in a bid to intimidate and overawe it into doing his bidding, his presentation has altogether been a comedy of errors not at all unworthy of a cheaply and quickly produced Nollywood flick from Upper Iweka Road, Onitsha, or, Old Pound Road, Aba.

While his TV lawyer, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, is insistent that a presidential election petition trial should require no more than 7 days to conclude, Mr Obi, on his part, has probably succeeded in asking for more adjournments than any other election petitioner in our legal history!

Like Atiku, Obi seems to be quite determined not to pay the state for certified true copies of the documents he wishes to tender in court.

This is besides being disgracefully clumsy in tendering them while having not paid for them, in the first place.

It is arguably understandable why Peter Obi would be adamant about not paying for services rendered.

He boasts of being a “trader”, and, apparently like his typical Onitsha Main Market counterpart, he is the type who would buy something at 1 naira and be fanatical about selling it at 100 naira.

Obi, the man with the sugarcoated tongue, of course, has absolutely no concept of civic responsibility – this is the pathologically lying compulsive importer and facilitator of consumption, who preferred to hide his money in Panama so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes in Nigeria and thereby contribute his quota to the development of the country he claimed, in his girlish voice, that he wanted to take from “consumption to production”!

Of course, he is famed as the one who doesn’t “give shishi”, so why not just seek to intimidate INEC into handing you documents like candy without having to pay for them at all?

As for trying to intimidate INEC, who is INEC when the entire judiciary is under assault from your minions?

As for his witnesses, similar to Atiku’s, they all seem pretty distant from the facts they are supposed to prove!

One would have expected Mr Obi to be even more meticulous with his case than Alhaji Atiku, given that, at least at face value, it should be more difficult to prove you are first from third, than proving you are first from second.

Now, according to Obi’s supporters, Obi actually came first, Atiku came second and President Bola Tinubu came third.

In which case, in order for President Tinubu to have manoeuvred his way to first position, he would first had displaced Alhaji Atiku into third position from second and planted himself as second.

At this stage, it would then have been Obi, first, President Tinubu, second and Atiku, third.

President Tinubu’s second manoeuvre would had been to elbow Mr Obi from first to second, while he replaced him at the top.

The very big problem here is that at this stage President Tinubu would then be first, Mr Obi, second, and, Alhaji Atiku, third.

So in order for Obi to have ended up as third, then President Tinubu, having displaced Mr Obi from first to second, should have been quite bemused to look back and see Alhaji Atiku displacing Mr Obi from second to third and replacing Obi, immediately behind him!

You don’t understand?

Well, let’s try and recreate the scenario: President Tinubu started out at third, with Atiku in second and Obi in first, then President Tinubu managed to rig Atiku from second to third and replaced him in second, whereupon now having Obi squarely in his sights, President Tinubu then rigged Obi from first to second and replaced him in first, only for Atiku, loosing his temper and “scattering his dada” and, so as not to be left out of the rigging galore, pounced on Obi at second and rigged him to third, thus positioning himself in second, but unfortunately, could not then rig President Tinubu from first to second, so he would replace him in first, in order for Obi, seething and gnashing his teeth in third, to then attack President Tinubu and seek to displace him from second to third, thus placing himself in second to be able to lunge at Atiku and get back to first so that this kindergarten rigmarole could continue until everyone got tired or… I’m actually beginning to have a headache, already – who brought me “Igbotimesmagazine” to read and where is my Panadol, for God’s sake?

Funny enough, as mutually contradictory as their petitions are, both Mr Obi and Alhaji Atiku do not seem to have any problem with each other and did not even bother to sue each other!

I have seen many bizarre cases in my time but this one seems to belong to an entirely different townhall.

By the way, I woke up a bit late this morning; can anyone fill me in on the latest changes Batman has wrought in Gotham?

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