By Sam Omatseye
Atiku Abubakar calls it a courtesy call. The history between him and his host, the Owu chief, his former boss and former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has had everything but courtesy. They smile at each other but wiles contour their faces. They gladhand because they are not glad. They hug but might wish to choke each other. As a former soldier, OBJ may wish that the most, but Atiku is taller and heftier. Obj may prefer to reach for his legs and plot a pinfall. But his octogenarian energies may end the encounter in a dark, hospital comedy. So, the wiles and smiles should do.
This invokes the phrase from Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembene in his short story, Her three days, about the malignant affability of wives in a polygamous home. They cloak an undertow of a warrior ethos with effusive joy. Sembene describes such affections as “the perfidy of words and the hypocrisy of rivals.”
So it might have been at Ota when Atiku returned, his second coming. Recall he did the same in October, 2018, ahead of the 2019 polls. He did not wish Buhari well. He gave him a witch eye. He who had called the Katsina titan the father of the nation after he became the president, typically played judas and abandoned the party. He had lost in the primary. He saw no way forward and went to his vomit. Vomit is a delicacy for the Adamawa chieftain. It is a familiar palate. So, he wanted to lock horns in 2019.
He was in Ota, with Obasanjo. There was an episcopal touch to that visit, as he had pulpit men, two bishops from different divides of Christendom. Oyedepo and Kukah wanted Buhari out. We know how that turned out. This time, Atiku did not want any holy of holies this time. No amens or hallelujahs. He poohpoohed the pulpit. He came with men of his own class and cassock. Tambuwal, Imoke, Ningi.
Maybe he thought Kukah and Oyedepo sullied his journey with the holy spirit. Or maybe he felt the holy spirit was angry with the men of God for accompanying the wrong candidate for an amen.
So, this time he wants no holy distractions. However, both men were haunted by their sins in the same week they were hugging and backslapping. The news came from 2005 from the work of Atiku when he was vice president, and stripped government agencies. One of them was Aladja Steel. The present director general of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, Ayo Gbeleyi, announced that the Aladja Steel worth $700 million at that time was sold off for a mere $30 million. Has any reporter investigated who bought it? What an advertisement for their time as stewards of our resources.
We also know that actions like that led OBJ to plot the prosecution of Atiku as vice president. He planned to rip him of his immunity, so he could give him the pinfall over corruption charges. The pinfall he cannot give today, he wanted to give in 2007 but failed. If they can fight with muscles today, they can look for another kind of collaboration: the muscle of elections.
Was that not why, as this essayist narrated last week, OBJ set up a panel with his favorite sons and daughter then to ban him for six years? Were the favorites not Bayo Ojo, Nasir El-Rufai and our own Oby Ezekwesili, two of whom are noisy today about the rule of law and decency? Did the media not call the panel a kangaroo? Did then Governor Tinubu not save Atiku with the legal fireworks of Wole Olanipekun (SAN)? How did Atiku show gratitude? With turncoat. Even today, the ICPC is asking OBJ’s favorite son, as he then was, to account for N1.3 billion allocated and disbursed for Kaduna Light rail, but no rail is whirring on the streets and arteries of the city.
Was this not the background to their public spat then when OBJ uttered a comedic jest, “I dey laugh o”. In his lack of vituperative imagination, did Atiku not reply with “I dey laugh too o?”
So, you can understand why their laughter cannot be a laughter but a mockery of it, or what playwright Samuel Beckett designated as Risus Purus, a laugh laughing at itself. A mirthless, soulless laughter.
Even while they were meeting, two party men of the PDP had just gone to blows at Asaba. Maybe Obj wished one of those blows landed on Atiku’s jaws. Or maybe Atiku wished the same of his host. But they are elders, although some may call them oldies instead.
Obj is not an official member of PDP, but he is still with them in spirit. He is not like Atiku who jumps from ship to ship. OBJ is more ethereal. He jumps in spirit. Thou canst see me jump and live. Atiku is better in this regard. He would not be a hypocrite. OBJ loves the pharisees in the Bible, except that the pharisees never jumped to the side of the Lord. So Obj is PDP in spirit.
Things boomerang for the Ota titan. Remember detention centre called Inter Centre? OBJ set it up for his enemies when he was head of state. Abacha, no humorist, sent him there as victim. In his engrossing new book, The Adventures of a Guerrilla Journalist, Femi Ojudu – sees it as a comeuppance. Ojudu was also Abacha’s guest there before he was moved to notorious Awolowo Road, Ikoyi.
Obj endorsed Obi and not Atiku. You could not accuse him of treachery. He did not bear the party card. We also saw him make a public theatre by tearing up the party card, the card he brandished when he was president, the card as emblem of party supremacy. The party he wrecked, the party that gave him the air of a democrat.
So, why did Atiku visit Obj when he knew what came out of it was to back his enemy? He probably thinks ObJ would not back Obi this time, even though the thin-voiced maestro is still crooning alone and has foresworn any alliance. His Obidients would skewer him.
But then, we know the same party is in crisis today. The loss of the 2023 polls is a tragedy in the PDP house, and they are like a family trying to come to terms with a death in the family. People grieve differently, so do families and so do political parties. In the novel, The Discomfort of Evening, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld shows how a Dutch family contends with the drowning of their loss that even involves constipation, incest, madcow disease and fantasies about a Nazi concentration camp in a basement. Grieving is like madness.
Today, they don’t have an idea in PDP who is the chairman or secretary, and how and when to hold a convention or speaks for the party, or how to approach a court verdict. They know one thing, though: how to visit a dinosaur general who also does not understand why no one has invited him to dinner at the Aso Rock in a generation.
Culled from The Nation
