The man in the nightmare of Atiku, Mark, Aregbesola and company must be one Nafiu Gombe. He was a sore thumb on creation day. That is, when the rains started to beat the coalition. He did not resign. No one has asked what the fellows in the Ralph Nwosu-led executive took from the army of occupation that Gombe did not get. They did not drop out for nothing. ADC was not formed for charity. It was no virgin asking for a rapist. The coalition of the wounded gave something. We want to know why and what.
We should also know why Gombe has not flinched. Did he get the offer and look the other way? Was he not ready to succumb for the cheap. What was the scale and character of the settlement?
Many media folks and reporters love the ADC folks too much to expose them? Maybe the few reporters and editors who want the truth ought to dig and soil their shovels. In Warri, in my boyhood years, we delighted in the phrase, “cheap article dey run belle.” It simply means, if you prefer to buy infested piece of food because it is cheap, a running stomach awaits you. ADC is in the belly of storm.
The ADC folks did not want to do the work of forming a political party. They settled for the aje butter formula. They want what is easy instead of what is true. They did not want to sweat, wait, get bruised, stumble and follow the narrow path. When they tried, they formed ADA. It sounded like a sister’s name. Then they learned it was a copycat. They did not know how to even name a party. So, they wanted a soup already cooked. Now they are having running stomach and they are blaming someone else who spent all day in the kitchen deploying heat and ingredients. What ADC has done is what Eleyinmi in Village Headmaster will call “nonsense and ingredients.”
Let us have some language lesson with the word ante bellum. It is latin, and we know lawyers have afflicted themselves with that ancient language. So, we can start with ante, and it means ‘before,’ ‘in front of’ or ‘prior to.’ Bellum means war or warfare. INEC chair Prof. Joash Amupitan has cleared the fog in his interview with Arise TV anchor Reuben Abati.
The folks in the ADC and their television lawyers are alien to this fact. When the Court of Appeal says the factions should revert to the status quo ante bellum, it means before the war in the ADC. So, when did the war in the ADC begin? Was it not when David Mark and his disciples browbeat the party executive to stand down? They did not resign a bloc. There is no constitutional recognition of group abdication. They did as individuals. Their trouble is with Gomb, who says it is his emilokan moment to be the party chairman.
ADC says he resigned. He said he did not. ADC is circulating what looks like a letter. It reads like a form. Did the ADC produce a stock letter for resignation whereby a person fills his name like a form? Everyone resigns for different reasons. But the letter in circulation looks like one written as though everyone must sign with the same reason and the same language. Even the handwriting in the same so-called letter is not consistent with a conflict of cursive and straight penmanship. Again, the letter was sent to INEC about four months after his purported resignation. Mariama Ba wrote a work titled: So Long a Letter. For ADC, so long a letter travels. We want to know if the ADC has the audacity to tender a forged letter in court; if, that is, Gombe’s denial is right. It will be defending a crime with a crime. It is also called double jeopardy. Fela would call it deady body get accident… Deady body break bone..Na double wahala for deady body and the owner of deady body.
The subplot of this drama is a battle of memory. Are they trying to play with the remembrance of things past, apologies to Marcel Proust. It is not like Proust which happened a long time ago. This is just months. Or is it like when Shakespeare says that they are making “a sinner of memory to credit a lie.”?
So, ante bellum means before that moment when the hostilities fomented, and it means before Mark was installed. Gombe never accepted Mark, and he believes he (Gombe)is the authentic chairman. That makes, in his lights, Mark a usurper.
Because the ADC folks are no respecters of the law, they have vowed to conduct their conventions and congresses, even though the court warned against any act on both sides. It means the folks are not serious. One Chidi Odinkalu said the professor – and Chidi is nowhere near a professor – who is INEC chair should not interpret the court verdict. A hollow man indeed he is. He wants Amupitan to go seek legal clarification in court. I know Chidi and his folks cannot write a manifesto yet, but who stops him and his ADC from going to court to seek same?
They cannot form a party. They cannot take over a party. They cannot settle everyone. They cannot interpret a court decision. They cannot write a manifesto as yet. They cannot obey court order. They are busy playing a club of political retirees without knowing it. They even have representatives abroad. Maybe they should ask for that task one of their stars, Rabiu Kwakwanso, who has been barred for terror reasons from the United States. He, too, should go to the Hague. Chidi should be his attorney for top dollar. ADC can pay.
They see themselves in ADC as a kaleidoscope of our politics. ADC glitters but no gold. Real gold takes a lot of digging. They should ask the president how he did his work. Some of the ADC men like Rauf know it.
Tinubu started his work years ago, and his political career in this republic began with the Alliance for Democracy. He did not found it but he ran from its grassroots to be governor. Just like his tour as president, he started with crisis. He did not cry. Rather he tackled the foes. One group was the elders of the Afenifere who wanted to lord it over him. They wanted to make him a marionette. They tried to impose Ganiyu Dawodu, who almost purloined his victory for Funsho Williams. He did not cry but worked within the party to get it back. They wanted to control Tinubu, his policies, his appointees. He defeated them. The trojan Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), who was Tinubu’s chief of staff tells for my upcoming book an incident when he banged the table in his office about not ceding an inch to them. The other battle was with Obasanjo, who planted spies and worms in the AD, wanted to weaken the party for the 2007 polls, a story told with Pathos by Olawale Oshun in his book The Kiss of Death. Tinubu did not cry like ADC about OBJ trying to kill his party. Neither did he compromise. He manoeuvred and blindsided and ambushed the general by forming the Action Congress. The stealth and imagination that led to the formation of AC reads like the story of witchcraft. But the details must not be unveiled here until my book tells it blow by blow. It was a political thriller. Even OBJ cannot tell it in public to save his ego. And some of those who took part in the scheme did not know who was pulling the strings and why. In an interview with one of them, he confessed, “But I was not aware.”
Yet, in the 2003 elections, when other states fell in the Southwest to the OBJ shenanigans, Lagos State was left unscathed. How did Tinubu ride the Tiger to his destination and the tiger was thankful and only growled away. Both beast and rider waved goodbye. He was going to beat the tiger later and reinforce the image of the last man standing.
Even if OBJ did sweep the Southwest states for his men, the same Tinubu did not weep. He went to work and the states, Edo, Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, Ondo, all became progressives. In a famous Fashola line, they came back “one by one by God.”
After that, Tinubu pitched for the centre. No one can doubt that he was the architect and spirit behind the fall of PDP with Jonathan’s ouster. In one sweep, he redeemed Buhari and ended what was dreamed as a dynasty for 60 years.
Emilokan and Olule came as a war cry from Abeokuta. He beat his party leaders. Not strange to him. He did that in Lagos with Afenifere. He had said in Yoruba that they who wanted to scuttle his ambition with fuel and currency scarcity did not know the way home. The rest is history.
The ADC folks are crying because Amupitan obeyed the law. They were Amupiutated and they are crying. No legs to kick and hands to blow. The Supreme Court has not ruled, yet they are taking the laws into their hands. They plan to scare us by catastrophising the situation. They are imagining hell because they have no power to fight. They boasted over FCT polls that it would be bellwether of their popularity. How hard they fell.
As the cliché goes, you cannot make an omelette without breaking an egg. They want it served hot. It invokes Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick where an ambitious amputee captain goes to sea to avenge of a white whale.
