AN OPEN LETTER TO MY BROTHER, PAT UTOMI.

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

I have just read through your article titled “Slavery is not an option”, which, unfortunately, I find to be nothing other than yet another frolic in self-aggrandizement on your part.

Assuming, without conceding, that President Bola Tinubu is this demon you would have Nigerians believe he is while Peter Obi is, of course, your messiah, you, on your part, are a saint – indeed the first Nigerian saint, former President Olusegun Obasanjo is, undoubtedly, an angel, and Mrs Ezekwesili is a virgin, let us then attempt a modelling of what you and your ilk are up to from a biblical standpoint.

Indeed, let our starting point be the most famous election in history which saw Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ challenged by a terrorist, bandit, insurgent, murderer and notorious robber by the name of Barabbas.

Suppose after that election was won by Barabbas, Pilate had decided that he couldn’t possibly recognize the electoral victory of a horrible sinner like Barabbas, especially against the Son of God, and proceeded to annul the election or, indeed, simply gave it to Jesus, thus effectively rigging the election for Our Lord.

Well, Barabbas is having none of that and proceeds to brief your good friend Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, who, funny enough, chooses to take his petition before an ecclesiastical court, that it be decided under Canon Law, the law of the Body of Christ, indeed, the codex of the Culture of Christ.

If I told you that the court would find for Barabbas and affirm his election, and that if it decided otherwise and found some convenient (or convoluted) excuse to give it to Jesus, Our Lord would be thoroughly ashamed of that court and would say to it “get behind me Satan”, would you agree?

Assuming you have not changed your religion and you’re still a fellow Catholic, I’d like you to drive down to the Bishop’s Court on Lagos Island and ask our archbishop, His Grace, Adewale Martins, what he thinks.

You could, of course, also ask their Eminences, Cardinals Arinze, Okogie, Onaiyekan and, or Okpaleke.

I guarantee you, you would be dumbfounded what you would hear, indeed even from His Eminence, our Archbishop Emeritus, John Cardinal Onaiyekan!

That said, I noticed you are still trying to sell us that old broken record that you are President Tinubu’s friend.

I can assure you that you are anything but.

Indeed, if nothing else, you are a hypocrite, a deceiver and Bola Tinubu’s very worst enemy.

Ultimately, friendship is a state of mind and that you might had “rolled” with a man for decades does not, in and of itself, make you his friend, even if he might be your friend.

Clearly, Bola Tinubu is your friend but equally clearly, you are certainly not his friend and in all probability, have never been.

Indeed, in your case, Tinubu is someone you only pretended you were friends with, most probably for what you could benefit from him, while all along you thoroughly hated, resented and envied him deep down in your heart.

Needless to say, that would make you a pretender.

Seeing him now in his finest moment, you find yourself unable to contain all that suppressed venom and bile, can no longer sustain the pretense of amity, and therefore strike out by pretending Peter Obi won an election you, of all people, must know he couldn’t possibly have won, much less actually won.

As far as I am concerned, you and your ilk all know that Bola Tinubu won the election but simply because you cannot stand him, you would have it stolen from him.

That, unfortunately, would make you a thief, Pat Utomi, indeed, a most infernal species of the rogue, my brother.

If I may ask, brother Pat, could you even swear before The Blessed Virgin Mary that you believe Peter Obi won the election and President Tinubu lost?

That in good conscience, and as brilliant as you are, you actually believe, in your heart of hearts, that Obi had any chance of winning with his former boss, Atiku Abubarkar, splitting his votes (and vice versa)?

That you have so pitiably forgotten your mathematics and miserably unlearned your statistics, and that it is not envy and hate that has made you such an infantile enemy of Tinubu, but that you have in fact crunched the numbers, and ascertained that Obi won, and determined that there is simply no way Tinubu could have won, even when the opposition had been stupid enough to remain divided, instead of coming together and attaining critical mass as President Tinubu had ensured back in 2015 to unseat an incumbent president?

Trust me, I know your problem, Uncle Pat; envy and hatred, as with prejudice and vainglory, indeed, ethnicism and entitlement, even tribalism and superiority complex, should be quite capable of making even a man as incomparably noble as a Mandela or another as inestimably brilliant as a Darwin, a total, pathetic bumbling buffoon.

If I may ask, have you even bothered to simply count the votes, even if suspicious, as you claim?

Is that how to rig an election, Mr Professor?

You give your opponents a quantum of 15 million votes and take a pittance of less than 9 million for yourself?

Why not just allot their 15 million votes to yourself and split your 9 million votes amongst them?

Are you people even reasoning at all?

What in the world have you guys been smoking out there?

Is that how your leader, the compulsive commiter of abominations, Olusegun Obasanjo, rigged elections in his time?

Are you really telling me that you are that dumb – you, Pat Utomi, of all people?

If, indeed, we are to believe your kindergarten pretense that you are not saying someone won or some other person lost, then, by that token alone, you are not really saying anything, at all, which must be because you have absolutely nothing of any real value to say.

If, indeed like Obi, you say your problem is with the process and not the results, well, who are you, anyway, and what would you have us do with that when you cannot even attempt however cursory a demonstration of how the process compromised the outcome and to what extent and import?

Is that the sort of illogical crap you would teach students at your university?

The only available inference to be drawn from your perplexing stance on the election is that you are a liar, wherefore the lawyer in me must put it to you that you cannot possibly be salivating for civil war, calling for a coup and canvassing treason unless you are also claiming Tinubu lost and Obi won.

Yet, in your stupefying day care drivel you made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to show how Obi might had won the election or how Tinubu actually lost it, indeed, rather similar to the command performance of woeful incompetence your lawyers staged before the Court of Appeal.

Indeed, your entire claim that Bola Tinubu did not win and that Obi won could be neatly wrapped into your excuse that the results were not uploaded by INEC to the IREV portal in real time, even when though not being a lawyer, you cannot pretend to be such a dullard as not to know that it did not thereby breach any law, not to talk of violating it to such an extent or with such gravity as to justify the annulment of the election.

In which case, you want to annul an election because the law was NOT broken!

Can you imagine that?

In other words, while having no proof that President Tinubu did not win and unable to prove that Obi won, nevertheless, at your age, and while being a professor, you would have us annul a presidential election, thus washing 300 billion naira down the drain (similar to the 13 million votes you and your rabble of jokers gave Sarah Omakwu to flush down her dirty toilet), and then, cough out another 300 billion for a fresh election, thus expending a total of 600 billion naira on balloting, simply because you do not like the face of the man who won the election and whom you are way too intelligent NOT to know ACTUALLY won the election!

And you call yourself a Christian?

I am sorry but I am ashamed of you, my brother.

Please get this through your hate-blocked ears: President Tinubu won the election and elections have consequences, and unfortunately for you, that you do not like the person who won is not, has never been, and can never be a ground for upturning an election anywhere in the world.

If there’s still any Christianity left in you, indeed as much as a scintilla of honour you still retain, please just shut up, already, stop making such an embarrassing fool of yourself, and may God bless you as you do.

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