Atiku fancies himself as Trump, but why?

THE NATION

After more than one year of bellyaching, it is now certain that ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar cannot live down his defeat in the 2023 presidential election. After months of crisscrossing the globe to delegitimise the election result, including absurdly litigating the contest and contestants in United States courts, the former vice president, who was also candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has now begun to speak in the offhanded and irreverent fashion of the US president-elect Donald Trump. It is not clear what he hopes to achieve or what mileage that would give him, but in a series of tweets last Monday, he had declared: “Let me emphasise that the citizens who cast their votes in the 2023 presidential election are well aware that I did not lose; rather, we find ourselves in this predicament (economic hardship) because the election was criminally stolen from the Nigerian people…Like many fellow Nigerians, I firmly believe that we find ourselves in this current economic turmoil due to the Tinubu administration’s hasty ascent to power, devoid of a coherent plan. In stark contrast, my team not only devised a comprehensive recovery plan but also welcomed significant input from Nigerians, ensuring that our approach was inclusive and well-considered.” Is he still complaining or publishing another manifesto?

After the 2020 US presidential election, Mr Trump had similarly declared that that year’s election was stolen, a lie he has repeated so confidently that even he, not to say his majority rural supporters, started to believe the mendacity. He still reiterated it last week even after his victory at the November polls, indicating that Americans may be witnessing the return not only of a fascist but a megalomaniac. Former Vice President Atiku litigated the APC presidential victory in and out of Nigeria, ridiculed the country and lowered its esteem globally, but still failed to get the courts in Nigeria at all levels from the election tribunal to the Supreme Court to agree with his unproven assertions and arguments. Yet, he insists the election was stolen. The dismaying incompetence of his arguments notwithstanding, yet nevertheless fancying himself in the mould of Mr Trump, Alhaji Atiku has continued to reiterate the allegation of electoral theft which he has not proven in the courts or even in the media. He probably believes that the hardship accompanying the ongoing economic reforms would both justify his wild claims and make them resonate among a groaning public. But his false claims tell more about his character than the flimsy narrative he has tried to promote.

In every statement Alhaji Atiku has issued since he lost the court case against the APC victory, there is nowhere he has argued or corroborated his election success. All he does is allege the stealing of ballots, the falsity of results collation, and the malfeasance of the judiciary. Everyone who has had one thing or the other to do with the election had, in the eyes of the former vice president, been bought or corrupted. Though he has privately nursed animosity towards his opponents within the party, he has barely said a word on the internal and external factors that contributed to his loss, not to say the stale and abhorrent politics he played before the fateful poll. His party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was divided into nothing less than three factions before the poll, much of the division flowing from the party’s presidential primary. And he had ruffled feathers by the disagreeable manner he abandoned the party when he lost the election in 2019 only to return nearly four years later to reclaim its soul. He also said nothing, and perhaps couldn’t care less, about the resistance he met within the party.

Unable to undertake the reflection necessary to explicate how and why he lost the presidential poll, and unwilling to inspire the reforms his estranged party needs both to survive its fratricidal tendencies and project itself powerfully into the future, the former vice president has found it far easier to blame other people, groups, and political parties for his loss. In the election itself, he lost a part of the old political North despite his frenzied resort to ethnic politics and regional appeal, lost the entire Southeast to his grumbling and ambitious former running mate in the 2019 presidential poll, and could not entirely sweep the South-South because he had inspired a few enemies unwilling to overlook his contempt for them beyond eyeing their financial contributions to his campaign. Yet he thought the election stolen. Well, at least, to be fair to him, he has spoken more assertively about the result being stolen than speak about him winning. After all, Peter Obi, his 2019 running mate, also talks foggily about winning the poll without detailing the dynamics. From all indications, until he discovers that no serious party would give him their presidential ticket for the 2027 race, Alhaji Atiku will not stop whooping about electoral robbers who allegedly undid him, a chimera he had embraced since he began losing elections some six electoral cycles ago.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE NATION