Since independence, since the colonial era, have we ever heard the following from the lips of anyone seeking the votes of all Nigerians?
“I think what the average northerner needs is somebody from the north, and who also understands the other parts of Nigeria and who has been able to build bridges across the rest of the country. This is what the northerner needs. He (northerner) doesn’t need a Yoruba candidate, or an Igbo candidate. This is what the northerner needs.”
We have had bigots. We have had northern haters. We have had southern haters, Yoruba haters, Igbo haters, Itsekiri haters, Ijaw haters. We have not had a hater like Abubakar Atiku. He has made a canon of hate. A disgrace of candidacy. Vermin of love. The video and audio are out there. It was not a slip of tongue. The sentences unveiled with the method of a thinking man, and a thinking head inside a white cap that presided over his white overall. The only thing: it is thinking as contamination.
This is not the first time Atiku has invoked his tribal hubris. In his interview with Reuben Abati on Arise TV, he turned the screw on that same theme. He boasted that he would fatten on Hausa-Fulani votes.
He spoke without guile. He spoke the truth of his heart. He spoke the truth of infection. He called for cynical truce with his people, his tribe. No hypocrisy in his soul. He smelt the metal of prejudice in his blood. The mettle of a divider. If Atiku was this biased, why did he wait till today to refresh us with his sincerity. It is such sincerity we want in politics. A man that speaks truth to his own hurt. A man who is so reckless that he wants to profit from division. A man who loves to hate others in order to fire a love of his own kin. A man who would kindle kinship by skinning others. To your kin, kindness. To others, servitude. Kind only to his own kind.
We have been following his public fight with Wike and company. Wike has said that Atiku Abubakar wants to turn his PDP into a regional stronghold, a northern barricade like the great wall of Constantinople before the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. Atiku has stayed the course. He has made Wike a righteous man. Wike tells the truth about Atiku’s mind, which is the fact that Atiku has no qualms about northern tyranny. But it is Atiku’s truth. Let the south be damned, so let Atiku be. He wants to threw red meat for perceived northern dogs. He loathes the commonwealth of Nigeria. He wants his own wealth.
This essayist has called him peripatetic, and pathetic at that. A nomadic politician blending into every shrubbery. But Atiku has a constancy: a tribal lodestar. He is not only dyed in hegemony, he is its evangelist.
When he ran for president, he said he wanted a level playing field when even the political class agreed that it should rotate to the south. All southern governors held a meeting in Asaba and reached a pact: the next president shifts south. It was a bipartisan moment.
His running mate, Ifeanyi Okowa, the man without scruples and traitor to pacts and peers, hosted the charade as Delta State governor. Okowa is acting like the proverbial man in Achebe’s A Man of the People who would not spit out a sweet morsel that good fortune has thrust in his mouth. Hence Atiku and Okowa see nothing wrong for a party chairman and presidential candidate to come from the north. Atiku does not think an agreement means anything if the north has to keep faith. It diminishes the north.
But Atiku is no friend of the north. He paints the north as a grasping region. He makes the north an open enemy of the south. He turns his people into a cold war at a time we sorely need to unite. When he says he built bridges in the south, he needs to explain it. Granted he did. From the tone, it means he builds the bridges in the south to enhance his northern control. Is that fair? So why is he pitching himself as anti-Buhari, who has ruled like a hegemon?
Is building bridges in the south to enhance northern power his unstated philosophy of restructuring? He wants to restructure the south for the north? Or is it because he married wives across tribes? Wives who are northernised? Is his romance another way of going to bed for Nigerian power? From bedroom to boardroom. A bed as bed bug. He is conflating romantic liaisons with political power.
In the past, families married off daughters to enlist alliances in wars, like Henry VII’s daughter with a Spanish prince? That was cynical love. But Atiku is not that kind of lover. Is he not exploiting the north for his own personal interest? He claims to love the north. It is not that he loves the north a little, but that he loves Atiku more. He is trying to ride regional chauvinism to serve one man’s ambition.
So, we can recall he did not want Obj to be president. He said it was the north’s turn, and that turn was Atiku. A magnanimous Obj embraced him and made him vice president, and what a vice he became. After Yar’ Adua took ill, he challenged Jonathan, saying it was the north’s turn to complete the Katsina man’s term. And that north was Atiku. At that time, it seemed he angled for justice. Yar’Adua’s death almost ruined the northern run at Aso Rock. Jonathan invited him to parley, but he showed the president his back.
The north snatched its turn under APC. He, ever a roamer, had ditched PDP and AC, and come to APC. Again, it was north and it was Atiku’s turn. Buhari bested him at the primary. He sulked out of the party again, and joined the PDP. In 2019, the PDP gave it to all northern candidates at the Port Harcourt primary. He won before he lost the presidential poll. If it was the north’s turn when it was and the north’s turn when it was not, it was always Atiku’s turn.
That is the background to the 2022 primary when he was losing and had to make a deal to defeat Wike who was on the path to victory. To get justice, he wants to corrupt the north. Justice means Atiku’s ambition. He is a poison in the national well. He is the sort of person philosopher Francis Bacon condemned in his idea of the idol of the tribe. Here, it is the idol of tribalism. Bacon, Lord Chancellor and seal keeper, said victims of this idol allow their senses to be twisted. Atiku’s is. We pity him. In a better society, PDP would drop him as a candidate. A man cannot unite his party. Now, he has shown he cannot unite the country.
This is the same man who promised the Igbo that he would give them the presidency after his own run. He has become the dispenser of time and office in Nigeria. It is folks like him that think it is in the blood of Nigerians to hate one another. Lee Kuan Yew ran a country of three ethnic groups, and inspired them to see Singapore before they saw Chinese or Malay or Indian. Merit overturned tent. When the Chinese leader visited, he expected the local Chinese to adore him. Deng was disappointed. Hear Yew’s mission statement: “We are going to have a multi-racial nation in Singapore. We will set the example. This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have a place.”
That is not the sort of rhetoric Atiku can utter. That was not the quality of speech he uttered to stakeholders in Kaduna on Saturday. Yew’s example is above him.
Before Atiku woos the north to a hegemonic cooing, he should tell them what he has done for them all these years of public life. Not just in the north, but first in Adamawa, where his presence is only political. He has done little to lift their lives. Ditto the rest of the north. He is a cynical lover, just as he wants to turn his bedroom moan into a coda for power. If he has done nothing for the north, why does he want to use them? The north does not hate the south by nature. It is men like Atiku who Shakespeare describes as “sick of self-love” that makes some of them so. He is stoking the flame. The great philosopher, Jose Ortega Y Gasset, has opined, “Man has no nature…all we have is history.” So, it is Atiku’s history, not the north’s nature.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected colomunist with the Nation Newspaper.
