Abductions Revive Atiku’s Opportunistic Politics

By Palladium

Despite a pending case instituted by the Nafiu Bala-led faction of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in the Federal High Court, Abuja, former vice president Atiku Abubakar has finally registered with the party in his ward in Adamawa State after pussyfooting for a little over four months. The registration caught reporters napping. In July when the former vice president and his men orchestrated the official takeover of the ADC, and former senate president David Mark and ex-Osun State governor Rauf Aregbesola were appointed interim party chairman and interim national secretary respectively, it was expected that Alhaji Atiku would follow hard on their heels by consummating his registration. For inexplicable reasons, it took more than four months before he finally crossed the Rubicon. His months of dithering reflected the tentativeness of his politics and the opportunism of his ambition. Characteristically uncommitted to anything save his ambition, or to ideology or to political party, or to persons or principles, he has always had an eye on the main chance.

Months before the July ADC takeover, he had assembled a flotilla for the unique purpose of finding a platform with which to make his final bid for the Nigerian presidency in 2027. The flotilla comprised sundry politicians grieving over their displacement in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), men and women anxious to see Alhaji Atiku announce his membership of the party in consonance with his huge financial commitments. Instead, he balked. Some suggested it was because the party was rent in two by discord over who was the legitimate chairman of the party, especially seeing how controversially the previous chairman Ralph Nwosu hastily relinquished office. Others suggested that though he resigned his membership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on July 14, 2025, the former vice president was at sixes and sevens over whether to finally commit himself to the ADC into which he had led most of his lieutenants. Gen. Mark coaxed him; Mr Argbesola entreated him; the talkative and vengeful Nasir el-Rufai tugged at his flowing robes; and the vast assemblage of journeymen looking for political relevance raised a din – all of them to have him lead the charge, not remotely or virtually, but from the front, physically, even if sluggishly.

The 2027 party primaries are just months away. When by early November Alhaji Atiku was still vacillating, many members of the ADC, particularly those bewitched by his uncompromising talk, were beginning to panic. They wanted a political war in 2027, and were eager to draw their swords; but they were sobered by the enormity of the task ahead and chastened by what needs to be done to secure victory. Vacillations, they reasoned, would not deliver the main prize. But the more the former vice president was entreated, the more detached he became, until of course early last week when he dropped the other shoe. The party leadership may be flummoxed by their leader’s reluctance to take risks and are vexed by his seeming indifference to the dangers his tentativeness exposed them to, but the party rank and file are now openly animated. Alhaji Atiku had kept a tight grip on the funds needed to vivify a party long used to being hijacked and ravaged by ambitious politicians; now, they seem assured that at last, the spending would begin in earnest.

As unflattering as Alhaji Atiku’s political style is, and regardless of the many contradictions in which his presidential ambition over the decades had weltered, he is at bottom a cautious man and spender. He waited long enough to see that the PDP had become irredeemable; waited still to see that the ADC was unlikely to unravel over its disputed chairmanship and leadership fights; and also waited until the last two weeks when a spate of terrorist killings and abductions began ruffling the feathers of the ruling party. He was indeed still prepared to wait even further to gauge the right moment when he would feel and see the Achilles heel of the administration. But suddenly, buoyed by the terrorist abductions in Kebbi and Niger States as well as the startled incomprehensibilities of the APC administration in responding to the siege being woven around the country, Alhaji Atiku has found his voice and seemed to gain political weight. Finally, he senses that the APC can be beaten. Though he sometimes rails against the administration’s economic policies, he knows at bottom that the APC is not doing badly at all in reviving and, even more encouragingly, resetting the Nigerian economy. Using economic issues as a campaign tool, he suspects, will not resonate. It has to be insecurity. And in the last two weeks, a carefully choreographed wave of abductions and merciless butchering has triggered a jaunty response from the ADC and Alhaji Atiku. Forgetting that he is of the Fulani stock accused of being the main inspirators of insecurity in Nigeria, a charge also levelled at former president Muhammadu Buhari for being the chief originator of insecurity, Alhaji Atiku appears emboldened to claim he has the magic wand to cure the insecurity cancer. Few are likely to believe him.

But it hardly matters. The former vice president is probably the most accomplished exponent of political opportunism. He has seen enormous possibilities in the choreographed terrorist attacks and abductions across some northern states, not to talk of the intensification of other attacks in states torn between suing for peace or fighting it out. He will deploy the ensuing public anger and helplessness to drive his campaign and position himself, despite his old age, as the deus ex machina Nigeria desperately needs. That mentality – of seizing the opportunity of lawlessness to make political profit – is rife among a section of the political class. It is illogical, but it is rife. Former Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai also once enthused, as governor, that being Fulani, he was in a position to stop the killings pervading the southern part of the state. However, all he did throughout his governorship was to pay the killers and, by his reckless statements and prejudiced disposition, stoked the fire of more killings in the state. Should Alhaji Atiku become president as he hopes, he cannot do better than President Buhari or Mallam el-Rufai. He will make stupendous promises, but he would be chary of drawing too much blood from his kinsmen. If his kinsmen saw the Buhari presidency as licence to deliver carnage, and found plausible excuses to justify and bask in the bloodletting, it would not be different under Alhaji Atiku. He has not shown himself a principled and ideological politician, and had in his past campaigns urged Muslims and the political North to be discriminating in their voting.

No one believes that the killings and abductions are happenstances. Some, however, say they are enacted to thumb the nose at the United States which had threatened to bomb the perpetrators of Christian genocide to smithereens. This view is sheer nonsense. While baiting the US may seem foolhardy, perpetrators of killings and abductions, though they are in many instances Fulani, know that executing a military campaign by air or on foot in Nigeria is indeed hard to carry out with precision. Most Nigerians think the intensity of the terrorist attacks, particularly in the Northwest, was designed to produce both a political message and a political advantage. Alhaji Atiku is unbothered by whatever anyone thinks or whatever justifications are adduced for the rampage. All he sees is an administration discomfited by the events of the day, and an advantage for him and his beleaguered party to soldier on. Whether he can sustain the advantage beyond a few months remains to be seen. Though chafing under the table, the administration should count itself fortunate to have to contend with the recrudescing terrorist attacks about six months before the primaries and more than a year before the elections. If they cannot find a way to neutralise the political effect of insecurity as a factor in the campaigns, then they have themselves to blame.

The attacks and abductions have clearly made the ADC and its leaders both hopeful and exuberant, a sort of profiting from an opponent’s misery. This is politically legitimate. But there is also increasing realisation that cells of terrorist attackers lurking in the forests in many southern states, their agenda speculated to be either land grabbing or the establishment of a religious caliphate inspired by ISIS ideology, is a disincentive to vote Atiku. Those speculations stand more chance of dooming the Atiku campaign than energising it as he anticipates. Mallam el-Rufai is characteristically more upbeat than even Alhaji Atiku. He swears that with the ADC’s newfound zeal and the muddle in which the APC has found itself, Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna would be swept away in 2027. His fixation is predictably with Kaduna where his reputation had been bludgeoned by former supporters who encountered and embraced the inspiringly urbane style of the governor and marveled that governance could be so easy and entrancing. The ADC national secretary, Rauf Aregbesola, has not met with such good fortune. His reputation is in tatters and his politics generally uncouth and unappealing. He zeroes in on Osun; but as regicidal as that state is, they do not have the reputation of being calculating and nostalgic. To them, Mr Aregbesola is history, and in Osun, they forget history, especially when it traumatises them.

If the ruling party manages to turn the corner in respect of insecurity, the lull the ADC experienced for months when their dithery leader, the former vice president, agonised over whether to commit himself lock, stock, and barrel to the fringe party, will return to haunt them. But having been inattentive to and mystified and mortified by the country’s economic recovery, Alhaji Atiku will do everything in his power to prevent the APC from getting a reprieve. The abductions chaos has now gifted the great opportunist a chance to indulge his pastime of profiting from other people’s misery; he will nurture that anomaly for as long as he can manage. Given the brittleness of his politics, his unsteady gait in withstanding headwinds, and the way he plays ducks and drakes with the love and support of his followers, it is hard seeing him weather the storm when the political hurricane against his ambition reaches Category 5.