If Atiku ever makes good his plan to contest for the post of President in next year’s elections, he would have come second, after Buhari, in terms of frequency of shots at the presidency and under different political platforms. As Vice-President during the democratic era of President Olusegun Obasanjo, Atiku was a faithful and loyal subordinate until their romance fell like a pack of cards from 2005, when Obasanjo made it clear Atiku was not in the cards as his successor in 2007.
Atiku rued this miss and became politically embittered, as he quietly sulked but plotted to deal his boss a payback blow when it mattered. By 2006, Obasanjo had reduced Atiku to a political orphan, making him redundant both within the public domain and inside Aso Rock. Atiku’s isolation echoed in the PDP as his principal had-like Prussia (Germany) did to France between 1871 and 1914 after the brutal humiliation of the latter in 1871-completely warmed up to potential friends and real foes of the VP in the party. When Atiku saw how badly deflated he had become, enjoying only the titular accompaniments and not any form of de facto or de jure power as VP, he began to seek a way out of the miserable political state.
Ex-VP Atiku has attempted but failed to clinch the ticket in several parties, the prominent being APC and PDP. He’s back in PDP, having left the APC. Like most Nigerian politicians, Atiku’s presidential ambition often resurrects only on the eve of every general elections, every four years
Not long after the travails of the second-in-command, news filtered out from Aso Rock that OBJ was nursing a Third Term presidential ambition and that he had compromised the National Assembly to amend the relevant clause in the Constitution and perfect this democratic coup. This was followed by a widespread speculation that OBJ was indeed trying to kill the ambition of Atiku and his likes, by putting himself up for another term in office after the mandatory two-term limit.
This political contraption was to do a lot of damage to the personality, popularity and reputation of Obasanjo as a democratic leader and icon in Africa. If truly Atiku was the architect or not, the rumours and speculations helped his cause and looked like karma, throwing spittle right in the face of his chief political detractor.
But OBJ, undeterred and probably hurt by the bandwagon effect of his leaked and failed Third Term bid, had more blows for Atiku: the then VP was publicly mocked and openly challenged to defend himself on allegations of corruption in the Customs Service when he was still a very senior superintendent in that public organisation. OBJ also allegedly used the anti-corruption bodies to link his VP to a series of high-profile scandals, indicting Atiku in cases of international fraud.
The death knell on Atiku’s political ambition was probably sounded by these infamous fraud and money laundering allegations. By 2007 when OBJ also had to quit, Atiku had been already burnt politically.
The controversy surrounding Atiku’s public persona opened the floodgate of an interminable wilderness and “political tourism”. Atiku moved out of PDP, moved in and moved out again. The tour was informed by a desperate quest to earn a political party’s ticket. The search for this and the aspiration to take over Aso Rock pulled the former Adamawa State Governor-elect and ex-VP into a chapter of joining any political party that had its presidential ticket up for sale.
However, Atiku’s foray into politics has also had its bright sides. He’s quite popular among his Fulani kinsmen and has the ears and hearts of the Talakawas. He was a “timber and calibre” in 1999, which informed his choice as VP to OBJ. But in the light of Buhari, his fellow Fulani being interested in the race for another term, amid a wave of popularity among the core Northerners, can he be a force in 2019?
Atiku is sometimes described by those close to him as a simple, humble and pleasant man, whose wealth rubs off on friends, allies and workers. He’s sometimes likened to General Ibrahim Babangida in terms of friendliness and milk of human kindness. For his close aides, Atiku’s political philosophy is etched in existentialism and well defined in the context of “chop-I-chop” or the ‘live and let live’ Nigerian political ideology.
Ex-VP Atiku has attempted but failed to clinch the ticket in several parties, the prominent being APC and PDP. He’s back in PDP, having left the APC. Like most Nigerian politicians, Atiku’s presidential ambition often resurrects only on the eve of every general elections, every four years.
Aside this emergency political interest, which doesn’t really show genuine commitment to the cause of nation-building, it also gives the man away as lacking a moral spine and having no political ideology or creed, in view of frequent movement from one end of the same pole to another.
*Prof. Folarin is of the Political Science Department of Covenant University, Otta, Ogun State.
