THE NATION
Lullabies are soft songs to lull into sleep a screeching baby. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar screeches with undignified pain after the Supreme Court quashed his appeal, 7:0.
But he invents a lullaby, of self-heroism and “democratic proposals”, to blunt a decidedly ugly swan song. He can tell all that to the marines!
Indeed, only the political Gen. Z, too brainwashed to know their country’s history, will regard as “democratic”, Sani Abacha’s National Constitutional Conference (NCC: 1996), “with full constituent powers”; and Atiku’s latter-day glamourization of the six-year rotatory presidency, among the six geo-political zones, which NCC proposed.
The one was devised to bury the golden June 12, 1993 mandate of Chief MKO Abiola. The other was invented to impose Gen. Abacha’s own tragic transmutation to horrid civilian president, with the sweet dummy that it would only last a “single” term.
Both blew up in Abacha’s face — and just as well!
Neither is anything but democratic. Indeed, any claim by Atiku to justify his grave obsession to be president is a tragic claw at the straws — straws that starkly expose his hollow claims as a democrat.
To refresh: the true leaders of the South West boycotted Abacha’s NCC. Heroes of that age included the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, who turned his back on the NCC — which was a clever ploy to bury MKO Abiola’s mandate and “move on”. So did other genuine democrats nationwide, who saw through Abacha’s trick.
But political careerists, among whom Atiku proudly counted, trooped to NCC to seek rank, if fresh opportunism, after conspiring against June 12, the true foundation of the 4th Republic, which dawned in 1999.
Major-Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua — whose faction of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP) traded off Abiola’s mandate for Ernest Shonekan’s Interim National Government (ING) — headed this phalanx, with Atiku, his mentee, in tow. But Abacha outsmarted them all.
So, both Abacha’s NCC and its proposed six-year, single-term rotational presidency, were failed coups against Abiola and his sacred mandate. So, it’s rich for Atiku to flash a collapsed coup, as democratic “solution”, after his crash at the Supreme Court.
Karma is so, so sweet: those who fought for June 12 are fairly and firmly in power today! It is what it is! Let Atiku and co live with it!
