NOTHING FOR ATIKU! By Jesutega Onokpasa

NOTHING FOR ATIKU!

By JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

I have noticed a degree of what is totally unwarranted anxiety over the implication of the Illinois court’s decision regarding President Bola Tinubu’s university records but the simple truth is that there is absolutely nothing for anyone to be at all bothered about.

Contrary to the cheap propaganda and stomach churning spin of the dependably unhinged, tiresomely ignorant and insufferably arrogant Obidients and their ilk, there is no basis, whatever, for any of our President’s supporters to be howsoever discomfited.

What is germane to this matter is whether or not President Tinubu graduated from Chicago State University and that university, itself, has already affirmed that.

In fact, with that, alone, the matter is already concluded or as a lawyer might put it, case closed!

Whatever that utterly shameful desperado and highly irritating clown, Atiku Abubarkar, who apparently comes from Cameroon, certainly lives in Dubai, and, goes to America to embarrass his supposed country and undermine the Nigerian judiciary, is going to “discover” from what the Illinois court has ordered, and to the extent it has permitted, will only confirm what CSU has already severally and serially affirmed.

Let me give you an idea of how lawyers reason and how we go about our work.

If you requested the records of your own child (whom you sent to school and paid their school fees) from their alma mater and they briefed me to represent them, I would instinctively, immediately, rigorously, and methodically oppose your application.

While it is your duty and obligation, under the law, to educate your child, it is, however, your child’s privilege to or not to allow you access to that which the same law might deem to be private to them.

There is, of course, that which the law might deem you automatically entitled to know about your child but only to that extent, for even your own offspring is a person and individual of his own with rights, duties and privileges that are entirely theirs, and that are not necessarily with reference to you as their parent.

If, however, the court happened to grant you access to those records, I would exhaust the entire appeals process because that is what I am trained to do, what the law allows me to do and what my profession expects from me, demands of me and imposes upon me.

Indeed, to be a lawyer is to shield your client from those, howsoever, in a position to undermine them or, in whatever way, meaning to do them harm.

If, it happens that you are eventually granted access to what you sought, I would then ensure that you can only access only what was permitted by the court and only to the extent that it was permitted.

It is not because President Tinubu has anything to hide that his lawyers have opposed Atiku’s obsession with prying into his privacy (only God knows what dastardly horrors we would discover if we pried into Atiku’s own secrets); it is because privacy is a fundamental human right and lawyers all over the world are fanatically inclined to most dutifully protect it or they wouldn’t be lawyers, at all.

That serial loser of elections, whose own ori clearly does not permit him to ever be President of Nigeria, can have all the documents the court has permitted and carry them on his bad luck head all the way from Illinois to Abuja, indeed, in as many wheelbarrows as he pleases, but I solemnly assure my fellow Nigerians, this blessed Sunday, our Independence Day, that he is going absolutely nowhere with them.

In short, if Atiku Abubarkar thinks he is going to win, vide a district court, all the way in Chicago, a case he miserably lost at the Court of Appeal in Nigeria, I can only say I truly pity him.

In any case, we have an apex court in this country called the Supreme Court of Nigeria and the last time I checked, it is not even subordinate to the International Court of Justice at the Hague, much less to some court somewhere in Illinois or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

Our beloved country, Nigeria, dodged two bullets in the February 25, 2023 election by roundly and soundly rejecting a petty trader of a religious warmonger, ethnic champion and pathological liar with a sugarcoated tongue called Peter Obi and his very fetish and obscurantism-addicted erstwhile master called Atiku Abubarkar.

God works in mysterious ways and it has pleased Him to solidly and unshakably establish this presidency of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to put Nigeria back on its feet and make it the Jewel of Africa and Pride of the Black Race.

I invest my country, Nigeria, with renewed hope on this first day of October in the year of Our Lord, 2023.

Happy Birthday, Nigeria!

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