HOW ATIKU ABUBARKAR PREVENTED PETER OBI FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT

HOW ATIKU ABUBARKAR PREVENTED PETER OBI FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

Nigerians are a most interesting breed.

Take this from me and imprint it in your head: “If you are not prepared to lose an election, you do not deserve to win one.”

MAHMOUD YAKUBU, HOW DARE YOU NOT RIG FOR PETER OBI?
Those after Mahmoud Yakubu are not after him for rigging election FOR Asiwaju Bola Tinubu; they are after him for not rigging election FOR Peter Obi or Atiku Abubarkar, depending on whom they support!

The Obidients, whom I have projected will soon become Disobedients and turn on Obi when disappointment metamorphoses into regret, regret matures into realisation, the scales fall from their eyes, and, they come to see Obi for the true monster he is, are misbehaving in the most despicably dishonest and hypocritical fashion.

The Obidients are not against INEC and Yakubu for working AGAINST Peter Obi; they are after them for not working FOR him!

Indeed, the Obidients are that totally without honour.

AN ELECTION LIKE NO OTHER
Professor Atahiru Jega recently penned yet another splendid article in which he exhaustively and, indeed, most excellently placed the election in its proper realistic perspective.

Nevertheless, he made one error by comparing the 2023 election with the one held in 1979.

Both elections are actually very different because back in ’79, there was no ruling party, therefore, no one to take power from that was also in the race, wherefore all the parties were fundamentally on the same footing.

The only election comparable to ’79 in this republic is the 1999 election which represents a similar scenario of different parties and tendencies competing with one another and trying to grab power from an outgoing military dictatorship.

The 2023 election is thus more comparable to the 1983 election and every other election after 1999 but not merely because of the outcome – ruling parties win the majority of elections all over the world, including in Europe and America; it is more comparable because the fundamental character of such elections is that you have a ruling party that is thus, effectively in the position of an incumbent, whether it is fielding a new candidate or just trying to return a sitting President for a second term.

Therefore, you basically have a ruling party on one side determined to retain itself in power, and, the opposition, on the other, intent on taking power from it.

Where the ruling party wins, it has defeated the entire opposition even if when it loses it might only have been upstaged by a part or parts of the opposition.

Yes, President-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC, scored 8,794,726 votes, Atiku Abubarkar of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, polled 6,984,520, Peter Obi of Labour Party, LP, got 6,101,533, and, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party, NNPP, took 1,496,671, but, regardless, Tinubu’s votes belong to one category, that of the party in power, while those of the opposition, irrespective of how many political parties constitute it, are collectively votes belonging to those who wanted to replace it in power.

From this perspective, the 2023 election was most astonishing, to say the least, and quite unlike any other election in the entire history of our country, for you have a ruling party with less than 9 million votes, nevertheless, defeating an opposition with a tally of some 15 million votes!

IT IS SIMPLY BECAUSE BOLA TINUBU IS A YORUBA MAN
Is Oby Ezekwesili pretending she does not know how Peter Obi, her tribesman, lost the election to Bola Tinubu, whom she clearly cannot stand, having apparently otherised him as “that Yoruba man”?

What was that very cheap self-righteous nonsense about her being prepared to accept Tinubu’s victory if indeed, he actually won, though it would deeply sadden her?

Of course, Bola Tinubu won, madam, so stop being such a hypocrite!

Does Mrs Ezekwesili not know that Obi’s almost 7 million votes are in Atiku’s notoriously very deep pockets!

Must everything disappear into Atiku’s pocket?

Aunty Oby, it is your former boss, Atiku Abubarkar, and not a Yoruba man called Bola Tinubu, that is the reason why an Ibo man will not be President this time around, and, I’m ashamed of you for pretending not to know that.

How could Obi possibly had won with Atiku in the race?

Who is pretending not to know how Bola Tinubu won this election?

Is it not clear that we just held our side together and waited for the other side to council each other out?

In a sense, it was not even Bola Tinubu that defeated anyone, as such – Atiku Abubarkar defeated Peter Obi, Peter Obi, in turn, defeated Atiku Abubarkar and, of course there was Rabiu Kwankwaso, harassing them both.

In such a scenario, what was anyone expecting?

Where Obi has defeated Atiku and Atiku has defeated Obi, and, Kwankwaso has defeated them both, will the last man standing not be Bola Tinubu?

You think Tony Elumelu did not know what he was saying?

That is how the election was won and lost – they defeated one another and that’s how Bola Tinubu defeated them all.

Tinubu has done absolutely no wrong to anyone; please leave him alone.

IT IS ATIKU THAT PREVENTED AN IGBO MAN FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT
Indeed, my dear sister, Chimamanda Adichie should know better than to indulge so shamefully in transferred aggression.

Chimamanda should feel free to go and grab Atiku by the collar and ask him why he took 7 million votes from her tribesman, Peter Obi and prevented an Ibo man from becoming president of Nigeria because that’s the simple, bitter truth.

What is Bola Tinubu’s business with that or is it because he is Yoruba and Adichie, of all people, is such an ethnic bigot, she just can’t stand Yoruba people?

What were we supposed to do – be a ruling party but refuse to field a candidate just so Obi would be President?

Is that how to become President – on a platter of gold?

It is hard work, for God’s sake!

We are, on one side, a ruling party intent on retaining power while Obi, Atiku, Kwankwaso and the remaining 14 together constitute the Nigerian opposition, on the other side, intent on taking it from us.

It was for the opposition to sort itself out, attain critical mass within one platform, muster its votes behind one candidate and defeat us.

Frankly, while I totally despise Peter Obi and hold his Obidients, the infernal personality cult he has cultivated around himself, in nothing higher than the deepest contempt, it was not for Obi to step down for Atiku but for Atiku to step down for Obi.

Why should it have been for Obi to step down for him?

Who the hell is Atiku, anyway?

Yes, Obi is a boy, as the saying goes, but a boy soon becomes a man, and, having, hitherto, been faithful and loyal to Atiku, he deserved the latter’s support this time around.

Must it be Atiku all the time?

He will take the turn of the North, run and fail, and, then pounce on the turn of the South, as well?

It is the turn of the South to produce the President of Nigeria and Atiku had absolutely no business being in the race this election cycle.

Indeed, just as it was Asiwaju’s turn in the ruling party, this time around, it should have been Obi’s turn in the opposition, as well.

This election should have had only two legitimate major contenders: Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Peter Gregory Obi – case closed.

15 MILLION VOTES DOWN THE DRAIN!
Crucially, while we closed ranks around our pathfinder, who led the way to victory, the opposition, on its part, lost its way completely and most woefully failed to attain critical mass when Atiku wouldn’t step down for Obi and they both, thereafter, apparently decided to just give vote waster per excellence, Sarah Omakwu, 13 million votes to flush down her dirty toilet.

That’s what those two clowns did with the votes of 13 million Nigerians this election cycle – when you add Kwankwaso’s one and a half million votes and the votes garnered by the jokers in the race, the Nigerian opposition wasted the votes of nearly 15 million Nigerians!

That is how we defeated them with our lower tally of 8.8 million votes which Asiwaju Tinubu, nevertheless, managed to gather together and keep in one piece, and against all odds, like the well brought up market woman’s son he is!

Indeed, his legendary mother trained him well and it shows.

WHY PRETEND NOT TO KNOW YOUR REAL ENEMY?
How can anyone with sense and conscience therefore pretend not to know that but for Atiku Abubarkar, Obi would, in all likelihood, be President-elect?

Where were the extra votes that could have made Obi the winner supposed to come from with Atiku insistent on running and stealing the turn of the South to produce the next President of Nigeria?

THE WHOLE WORLD NOW KNOWS HOW THE ELECTION WAS WON AND LOST
You think foreign governments are congratulating Bola Tinubu just for the fun of it?

They are congratulating him because they know he won the election; because they know exactly how he won it; and, because they are not ethnic bigots like Chimamanda Adichie whom tribal hatred has blinded to a 14 million pound elephant of wasted votes running riot right in her bedroom!

The world has recognized Bola Tinubu as President-elect and incoming President because it knows, for a fact, precisely how he won and how Obi and Atiku correspondingly lost!

WHO RIGGED WHOM?
Oh, IREV did not work yet that same supposedly flawed process tallied up a total of 15 million votes for the opposition that it then chose to most idiotically scatter amongst its members?

You flush 15 million votes down the toilet and you still have mouth to talk?

Is Oby Ezekwesili no longer in contact with her former boss and the very worst election rigger in Nigerian history, Olusegun Obasanjo?

Can’t she place a phone call to him and ask how he and Maurice Iwu used to rig elections?

You rig elections by allotting 15 million votes to your opponents and only 9 million to yourself?

Is that what Obasanjo told Aunty Oby?

Is that how to rig elections or you simply take the 15 million for yourself and share the less than 9 million amongst your hapless contestants?

Tinubu bribed Yakubu to rig election for him or against him, or, indeed for the opposition?

Tinubu gave Yakubu money to give 15 million votes to his opponents and only 9 million to him?

Rig what, for whom, and against whom, and, by whom?

Rigging gave you over 15 million votes and gave us less than 9 million and you are still complaining?

Or Mahmoud Yakubu should have stolen our 8 million plus votes and given them to you in addition to the 15 million he had already counted for you?

Well, shame on all of you; we won and you lost – please someone play me some Timaya.

GOD IS WATCHING US ALL!
Your pathological lying disgrace of a cheap trader loses election so clearly and obviously and his next move is to commit treason, poor scorn on our judiciary, insult judges, call for military takeover, plot coups, promote tribal mahem and plan religious war?

May God punish anyone pretending not to know that it is because Peter Obi, Atiku Abubarkar and Rabiu Kwankwaso would not come together that Bola Tinubu won this election!

May the wrath of God fall mercilessly on all those pretending not to know that it is because Atiku defeated Obi and because Obi defeated Atiku and Kwankwaso defeated both of them that Tinubu ended up defeating all of them and emerging as the last man standing!

May Heaven abandon all those pretending not to know that if only all three of them, or even just Obi and Atiku, had come together and Atiku had decided to step down for Obi, he would have most likely defeated us, maybe even by a very wide margin.

May the Almighty be truly harsh with that despicable rascal out there who pretends he or she does not know how Obi or Atiku or Kwankwaso lost and Tinubu won.

HOW TO HAVE DEFEATED BOLA TINUBU
How do you defeat a party in power?

Is it not Bola Tinubu that showed us exactly how it’s done?

It is a two part equation – you the opposition must first come together as one solid force, but that is not even yet enough.

The second part of the equation is to hope and pray that the ruling party is hopelessly fractured and critically divided.

Is that not how Bola Tinubu cobbled together the All Progressives Congress, APC, and succeeded in unseating an incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan, back in 2015?

In addition to that, had the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, not become a house pitiably divided against itself at the time?

Isn’t that how we won in 2015?

Can’t you people think?

Bola Tinubu even gave you the marking scheme and exact formula for defeating a ruling party and when it came to your turn to give us a taste of our own medicine, you went to the pharmacist to buy it but halfway to our house you felt thirsty and decided to drink the medicine yourselves, even though it was not your doctor’s prescription?

Thanks for the favour!

THE NIGHTMARE TEAM
That is what you get when your team is an aggregation of dullards.

Obi assembles this ragtag team of utterly obnoxious, highly arrogant, pitiably ignorant, very loudmouthed noisemakers and thinks that’s how he was going to defeat the Asiwaju?

The Chairman of your party is a forger of documents; your running mate was declared a rigger of elections by a court of law; the former DG of your campaign is an exconvict; his replacement cannot even win an election in his community; your spokesman is better known for kissing girls in home videos than for having anything sensible to say; the other one was busy making comical videos on Instagram with urchins like P Square and a newborn baby like Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour instead of helping you figure out how to get Atiku to step down for you; yet another one likes to pose, say words like “it is profound”, and is fond of lacing his highly irritating statements with the quotes of other people because he never has anything original to say for himself, and, you were actually hoping to defeat Bola Tinubu with this Brady Bunch for a dream team?

Atiku Abubarkar assembles a team headed by Dino Melaye who prefers eating gigantic plates of unappetizing looking beans when he’s not making a clown of himself at political rallies, instead of figuring out how to get Obi to step down for you and you expected to defeat Bola Tinubu?

These are the people that were supposed to defeat us?

Defeat who – Asiwaju Tinubu?

Have you guys not seen his team?

THE THREE FACES OF PDP
Despite a few defections here and there, Asiwaju succeeded in keeping our team together.

On your part, you guys divided what should have stood strong as one party into three parties, PDP, Labour and NNPP, and even at that, the shadow that was left in PDP further divided itself into G5 governors and what not, and any of you was still expecting to win?

What the hell have you guys been smoking out there?

Who is Peter Obi: is he not a former vice presidential candidate of the PDP?

Who is Rabiu Kwankwaso: is he not a former two-term governor and one time minister under the same PDP?

Who is Atiku Abubarkar – is he not a former Vice President and a two-time presidential candidate of that very same PDP?

PDP scored over 14 million votes in this election – it just dashed LP 6 million and gifted NNPP 1.5 million!

You had nearly 14 million votes for the taking and you were all so immature and incompetent that you decided to divide it up three ways?

Obi, a man already dreadfully in the grip of Satan, gets to the new bridge President Buhari built to Onitsha – a bridge everyone uses but pretends doesn’t exist because it is Buhari that built it – and for some reason, additional evil spirits take possession of him and he throws his 6 million votes into the River Niger!

Atiku is told what Obi has done, refuses to be outclassed, takes his cue from his marabout, flings 3 million plus votes across the border to his father’s people in Cameroon and gives the remaining 3 million ballots to Dino Melaye to use as toilet paper!

Kwankwaso remembers he is a PDP man after all and must not be left out of the Waste Olympics so sets his 1.5 million votes ablaze!

You divided yourselves in three parts, left us intact, and yet you were still daydreaming of defeating us?

MEDICINE AFTER DEATH
I saw Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed sitting down for a joint press conference with Governor Ifeanyi Okowa and I could hardly believe my eyes.

I am staring at these two people and I’m like “why the hell didn’t you guys do this before the election when there was still hope you could combine your votes together and defeat us; why now, when it’s all lost; isn’t this precisely what you should have done long before the election when you still had all the time in the world to straighten things out and come together behind one candidate; what were you waiting for – to be defeated?”

If Datti Baba-Ahmed has no sense, as is clear for all to see, has Okowa, one of the most adept politicians in this country, suddenly also become similarly clueless?

What are you both doing seating together?

But for Okowa’s Atiku, your Obi would have won and vice versa – you are each other’s very worst enemies!

Obi cancelled out Atiku and Atiku cancelled out Obi and it is now you are coming together to do what – crucify Bola Tinubu?

Well, unfortunately for you all, it’s the Season of Easter, Our Lord Jesus is risen from the Dead and no one will succeed in crucifying his Bola on whose solid mandate we now unshakably stand.

YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME – SUCH IS LIFE
Elections have consequences and we all have to live with them.

Bola Tinubu won and you will all just have to live with that reality.

Four years is not far from now and then, you can try your luck again and hopefully not be as idiotic as you were this election cycle.

You lost election because someone else won it – the day you win it will also be because someone else has lost.

Such is life, so go home to your wife, think about your life and wait to try again to make her First Lady in four years time.

That is what losers of elections do – they don’t then threaten religious war, threaten to burn down their entire country and start calling for military coup.

YOUR PRESIDENT, LIKE HIM OR NOT!
Funny enough, though we won, even if anyone should be complaining about rigging in this election, it should be Asiwaju Tinubu.

It is for 15 million votes to rig out 9 million and most certainly not the other way round, unless there is something very wrong with your neural wiring.

Moreover, how does a ruling party get only slightly more than one-third of the votes?

Well, it is obvious how that could have happened for there is nothing you didn’t do to steal this election from Asiwaju Tinubu: you threw naira redesign at him and tortured, tormented and killed innocent Nigerians in the process; you machinated fuel scarcity and nearly upended our national economy; you planted moles in our party, colluded with our own people and used our own government against us, yet Asiwaju still defeated you.

In Christianity, we have a hymn that goes “Let God arise and let my enemies be scattered!”

It is actually paraphrased from Psalm 68.

The only way I can account for your loss and Tinubu’s win is that God prevented you from coming together so Tinubu could win.

We call that grace where men dwell in the secret place of the Most High and abide in the Shadow of the Almighty.

This election has been won and lost; we have 200 million people to take care of; and, there is no time to be lost.

Enough of the shenanigans – we have a country to run and must close ranks to optimally do so.

I think I know what God wants to use Bola Tinubu for but who can really know the Mind of God?

Nevertheless, since it is clearly His will that this man be our President, I am all for it.

Indeed, just as it takes talent to spot talent, it takes grace to recognize grace.

If you still do not know that Bola Tinubu’s victory must be the will of God, you do not know anything.

That said, there really is only one question still hanging over this election: how could Peter Obi and Atiku Abubarkar so selfishly, egotistically and most wickedly waste the votes of 13 million Nigerians?

That is the question they must both answer.

If there is any other question, it is “why was Atiku so heartless as to prevent an Ibo man from becoming President?”

That is the question that Cameroonian indigene of Dubai, who insists he must become president of a third country called Nigeria, will have to answer.

As for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, he has absolutely no case to answer and will be President on May 29.

That is God’s will for Nigeria.

Onokpasa, a lawyer and member, All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, writes from Abuja.