Why It Has To Be Bola Tinubu This New Year, By Jesutega Onokpasa

Today is New Year’s Day in the year of Our Lord, 2023.

It is a particularly important New Year for us because we have a President to recruit for our country less than two months from now.

While thanking God for our lives, those of our loved ones, and indeed, for our nation on this day, we must now also square up to the momentous decision to be made for our good, the good of this country and the glory of God, come February 25.

We have three frontrunners for the presidency of Nigeria and must soon choose which of them to hire for the job.

WHY IT CANNOT BE ATIKU ABUBARKAR

The reasons why former Vice President and People’s Democratic Party, PDP, presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubarkar, cannot be the next president of this country are actually legion.

Indeed, but for the fact that as a people, we often seem to be collectively incapable of predicting danger ahead of time, while always failing to foresee disaster, even when it is headed straight in our direction, it should be clear to absolutely each and every Nigerian by now that there is just no way Atiku Abubarkar can become a president of this country without the most unpalatable consequences for our dear nation.

Indeed, this is precisely (and most unfortunately, at that) how we keep playing the ostrich with very serious and highly sensitive issues of utmost importance to the unity, progress and security of our country until they completely get out of hand.

Rather than adopt forethought as our paradigm for public engagement, we instead seem to prefer to keep toying with matters of existential significance to the wellbeing of our country while being steadily dragged into the precincts of tribulation for the generality of our people.

From whatever angle of honesty one may choose to look at it, the idea of one President of Northern extraction to be succeeded by another of the same extraction is so unconscionably inequitable that it just cannot and will not work in this country – certainly not at this time at all!

It is not even a question of Southerners insisting that one Northerner cannot replace another; it is actually Northerners, themselves, led by their own governors, who most heroically and patriotically came to the realization that perpetual retention of power in one half of the country poses a threat to the peace and progress of the entire country.

In reality, any such retention of power and therefore entrenchment of rulership in one region actually poses an existential threat to the very continuance and survival of our country, itself.

That the PDP has only produced one President from the North who ended up serving only three years is not the fault of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians who don’t even belong to any political party in the first place.

They had an opportunity to produce a President of Northern extraction in 2019 but were soundly rejected by that same overwhelming majority of Nigerians for another President of Northern extraction in another party, the All Progressives Congress, APC.

That is elections for you and they do have consequences we all just have to learn to live with.

The PDP cannot visit the consequences of its electoral failures on the Nigerian people and should have realized that its political misfortune is absolutely none of our business as citizens of this country.

If we are indeed to retain hope for national progress as a united nation with one destiny, power must rotate to the South this New Year, 2023.

You cannot claim to be championing Nigerian unity by attempting to steal the turn of an entire half of your supposed country, thus effectively intending to render them second class citizens of a nation they are equal stakeholders of.

What is supposed to then be their reaction to being relegated to subservient status in a country they share with their Northern compatriots if one Northerner ends up succeeding another as President this election cycle?

For God’s sake, we already have more than enough problems in this country, as it is.

All we can really afford to tolerate going forward is what will ameliorate our national condition and add value to the lives of the Nigerian people.

Anything capable of further endangering the unity, jeopardizing the cohesion, assaulting the oneness, or, threatening the survival of this country must be doggedly opposed by all of us as one united nation from North to South.

Atiku Abubarkar or any other Northerner succeeding President Muhammadu Buhari will simply plunge our country into the abyss.

This is the logic behind the national consensus championed by the Northern governors which ensured the emergence of a Southerner as the flagbearer of the All Progressives Congress, APC.

That is the meaning of national consensus, something the PDP was simply too desperate to respect, even to the extent of brazenly violating its own constitution on power rotation only to end up producing a candidate without any legitimacy whatsoever.

Power, indeed, simply has to shift to the South or we might not even have much of a country left over post May 29, this year, if not immediately after the presidential poll!

This is the real danger Atiku Abubarkar’s presidential bid poses to our country and yet, as a nation we seem to be ignoring the raging bull elephant in the room, just as we seem to keep doing in this country till it becomes too late.

The good and ever patriotic people of the North have agreed for power to shift to the South.

Atiku must not be allowed to rely on base appeal to ethnocentrism, regionalism and religion to scuttle what has already crystalized at the level of national consensus and nationwide consciousness.

One man’s inordinate ambition to be President at all and any cost cannot be allowed to endanger national survival itself.

All of these are quite apart from the fact that Atiku actually has no real governmental experience to speak for him having been kept at arms length and away from real governance by his former principal, Olusegun Obasanjo, whom he consistently betrayed and undermined throughout their eight years in office.

In fact, the entirety of Atiku’s supposed preparedness to rule is predicated on a most disastrously untoward career in public service as a customs official, a position he denigrated to wanton abuse wherein he spared absolutely no opportunity to break the law while lining his pockets with ill-gotten wealth at the expense of our national economy.

He is, in short, a man particularly inimical to the public good and most profusely unsuited for public office.

Simply put, Atiku Abubarkar cannot be President of Nigeria.

WHY IT CANNOT ALSO BE PETER OBI, AT LEAST THIS TIME AROUND

As for Peter Obi, can he be President of our country?

Well, why not, except that he simply will not end up being President because he cannot garner the votes requisite thereto.

That Obi cannot win is not by any means any sort of prescriptive submission.

Obi cannot win as a simple matter of real politick!

The fellow will simply not be able to get enough votes to become the president of this country.

There is simply no way for him to gather the required number of votes requisite thereto!

This is also quite apart from the truly problematic dimensions pertaining to his ambition which has seen the emergence of what to all intents and purposes is a most rabid and quite virulent personality cult actively cultivated by a consumate demagogue and pathological liar of a presidential candidate.

In any case, whatever might be said in favour of Obi can be verifiably and ascertainably established in favour of Bola Tinubu who bested him in all indices and particulars of good governance as a state governor.

What’s more, Bola Tinubu leaves him in the dust in all ramifications of the delivery of the dividends of democracy to the people, and the grooming of others to contribute their quota to the development of our country.

Peter Obi has absolutely no one he can point to as a leader he trained, groomed or empowered to make his or her own mark in leadership.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no politician in today’s Nigeria that can claim to have more political products that have delivered for their constituents than Bola Tinubu.

While Tinubu is a compulsive team builder and team player, Obi is a dreadfully conceited individual who thinks he knows it all and does not require the input of others in governance.

Where Tinubu thrives on consensus and carrying others along, Obi’s state of mind is a black hole of pathological arrogance in which he is a demigod of a lone ranger who alone has something to offer.

Indeed, strictly psychologically speaking, the truly pathetic dimensions of Peter Obi’s megalomanic self-assessment and utterly twisted worldview are just the right material for the makings of a dictator, despot and altogether tyrannical ruler.

In any case, and as to factual political credentials, while Obi was at best an average though highly controversial governor, the very best performing governors we have seen since 1999, from North to South, all have one relationship or the other with Tinubu.

Indeed, the most competent Vice President in the history of Nigeria was Tinubu’s nominee and political product.

That is the mettle of Bola Tinubu where all Obi can point to are the sales girls and loaders at his numerous supermarkets and dumping grounds for imported consumer goods from China and elsewhere!

WHY IT MUST BE BOLA TINUBU COME FEBRUARY 25

A lot has been said about and against Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, this election cycle and, in fact, pretty long before now.

I cannot think of anyone running for President who has been more vilified, disparaged and relentlessly pounced upon than the Asiwaju.

The vitriol has been so consistent, as well as, most brazen and insidious, alike, that it does not even really bother me that much anymore.

I am already old enough to have come to the understanding that unwarranted attacks only elicit more of the grace of God and the Divine Assistance of the Holy Spirit upon the victims of such injustice.

There is even a man of my acquaintance who tried very hard to make a name for himself by propagating the utter fiction that Bola Tinubu is not healthy and cannot rule effectively.

This fellow, may his soul rest in peace, suddenly died early last month while still in his thirties, even as Bola Tinubu, the supposedly unhealthy one, is still very much alive and running for President of the country the fellow has now left behind!

While there is no end to the infernal fictions that have been concocted regarding Bola Tinubu, what is pretty clear is that if he was ever a drug dealer, the Americans would had given him their well-known treatment for drug runners long before now.

Instead, they have consistently given him a clean bill of health.

Again, if he had stolen money belonging to government, the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo and Nuhu Ribadu would had succeeded in finding something that would have stuck and promptly railroaded him into jail while they held sway and terrorized their political opponents from North to South!

Indeed, by Ribadu’s own admission, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is the most investigated, hounded, harassed and persecuted politician in Nigeria yet nothing blameful was ever found against him.

In any case, if anyone truly showcases just the right philosophy of governance and track record in actually delivering development and services to the people, it is most certainly Bola Tinubu, a man with an astonishing ability to forge together the right team to get the job done.

Indeed, unless there is something profoundly spiritually out of place with us as a nation, he is the exact man we should be recruiting as our President this New Year.

Let this year therefore bring only good tidings upon our nation as we go to the polls.

Let us cooperate with the grace of God by voting wisely for the good of this country.

Let us hire the man who has done it before, time and again.

Let us recruit as First Citizen a man guaranteed to leave our country far better than he will meet it as President.

Let us vote for the Tinubu/Shettima All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Ticket.

Let’s make Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu the next President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria!

Happy New Year, Nigeria!

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