ATIKU/OBI: How Nigeria Dodged a Bullet

Either of them would have been a disaster of monumental proportion. One of them will have sold the country to his friends and the other will have planted the seed of politics of religious bigotry – a pathway to very quick dissolution of the country.

Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had, between 1999 and 2007 when he served as Vice President, started a very self serving, economically dangerous and unpatriotic sell out of the nation’s best assets. He was unapologetic till today, that he turned those assets to his business partners and associates. Electing him President was sure going to give him a golden opportunity to finish what he started in 1999.

Peter Obi, the meek candidate of religious groups and a cacophony of tribal irredentists who used their influential platforms to seek to divide the country along faultlines in pursuit of forlorn crass objectives that are known to only them was as dangerous too.

The election of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as president in the just concluded presidential election was, to me, akin to dodging a bullet by the county because by their antecedents, body language and the friends they keep around them, it was an open secret that if any of them had become president, the country will just fall into a trap set up to ruin it and leave it at the mercy of speculators, shylocks and undertakers who have minced no words in their desire to see to the disintegration of the country.

Conversely speaking, if Atiku and Obi had earlier on united and merged, they would have won the election on the first day. But because God has forsaken them, it is after both had lost that they are now united to break the country to bring war, hunger and suffering to the Nigerian people. The people who failed to come together by eschewing selfish personal desires in order to easily win, are the very ones that are now coming together to pursue objectives that are at variance with national goals of peace and development.

If, by mere happenstance, the two men are to succeed in upturning the election, who, between them will be number one and thus become President? Will Atiku concede to Obi or will Obi just retire and allow Atiku to take over? The glaring possibility is that as soon as they succeed in sabotaging the choice of the people which the election of Tinubu signifies, the two will ignite another bloody rivalry between them, setting the stage for war and ruin.

Both Atiku and Obi are individually and collectively bad news to Nigeria. As president, each of them has a peculiar anti-people danger he poses to the country and now that they have united, they still do so not out of any patriotic desire to develop the country, but to put it on the path of retrogression.

The same way God the almighty has knocked their heads together and sent them apart in order to save the country from their inordinate and very dangerous ambition, is the same way He will scatter their brains, pitch them against each other and render them incompatible in order to continue to save Nigeria from the machinations of its enemies both within and without.

– Yakubu Ahmed-BK