Atiku and Tinubu: Personal ambition or patriotism?

Supporters of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are on the same extreme trajectory they travelled in marketing their candidates and de-marketing the opposition in 2015. Every time these two groups argue, they are as vehement, virulent, and unforgiving of the opponent as they are protective and adoring of their own candidate. To most supporters of these Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar, it is nothing but a plain divide between evil and good.

Yet, it is curious that anyone would suggest to Nigerians that any difference exists between these two beyond their individual names and the parties they represent. Speaking about the parties, in fact, we must remember that a little less than eight years ago, they stood together on the same platform to advertise candidate Muhammadu Buhari as the best thing that could happen to Nigeria at that time. But I will return to this point in a bit.

Politically, Tinubu and Atiku literally started out in the same camp. The seeming extant ideological separation only happened at the return to democracy in 1999, when Tinubu chose to be with the Action Congress (AC) and Atiku went with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). After falling out of favour with the hierarchy of the PDP in 2006, Atiku moved to Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and became its presidential candidate in the 2007 elections. The lines of political ideology in Nigeria have thereafter become so indistinct that it would be burlesque for one of these two major parties to claim be better than the other.

Apart from the fact that Nigeria has seen the worst of them both, the fluidity of the movement of members between one and the other shows the parties are siamese. What’s more, the two most important people in the APC today, namely chairman Abdullahi Adamu and Secretary, Iyiola Omisore, once held executive positions in their individual states on the platform of the PDP. There could be no better way to illustrate the collapse of differentiation between the behemoth parties.

But Atiku and Tinubu’s history goes beyond parties. There are hints of business and personal relationships that are older than some of the idealist social media warriors who now taunt the two candidates daily. These two men have been friends, promoting and protecting each other’s interests for years. And they make no secret of it.

In his column on Sunday, for instance, Simon Kolawole wrote about an occasion where an edition of The Week, a weekly news magazine he edited, was stopped from circulating because his employers were uncomfortable with a story. According to him, this story highlighted some of the questions that Tinubu had failed to answer about allegations concerning his genealogy and early education. The magazine was owned by Atiku Abubakar, and he ensured that the story did not get read, in protection of his friend and political associate. That intervention was even though the two men were in different political parties at that time and that the federal government, in which Atiku was Vice-President, was in an all-time battle with Tinubu. It is a friendship that politics cannot interfere with. Yet those who support them now tear each other apart on social media, how foolhardy!

The two of them are also united in their ambition, if not desperation, to rule Nigeria. And it is in that desperate bid that they have done the greatest and unpardonable harm to the country. Every time I hear Atiku supporters speak about how far President Muhammadu Buhari and his APC have taken Nigeria back since 2015, I marvel at the irony.

Atiku resigned his membership of the PDP in February 2014 to join the newly formed APC. Although he attributed his decision to quit PDP to a variety of reasons, the former VP reached the decision because President Goodluck Jonathan insisted on contesting in the 2015 elections in defiance of an alleged agreement to zone the presidency to the north.
Since it was impossible to actualise his dream in the PDP, he moved on to the APC, where he eventually contested the presidential primaries, losing to Muhammadu Buhari.

After losing the APC primaries to Buhari in 2014, Atiku took a back seat in the party until 2017 when he, in preparation for the 2019 elections, returned to the PDP.
Of course, he got the ticket, but he lost to Buhari, whom he had joined others to foist on Nigeria four years earlier.

Atiku will represent the PDP in 2023 and tell us that the APC, which he described as “a party of change committed to the improvement of the lives of our people and to the continued existence and development of Nigeria as one indivisible country, in 2014, is the greatest evil thing that has happened to Nigeria.

In his own case, Tinubu has refrained from publicly speaking about the spectacular failure that the APC administration has been. Again, this is more for the preservation of his ambition than for any regret at the reversal of the hope that he bore for Nigeria when he campaigned for Buhari in 2015. It is difficult to believe that these men ever had any faith in Buhari’s ability to turn Nigeria around.

I say this because Buhari has been the same person for almost all his public life. A man of very few words, restricted vision, limited ambition, modest knowledge of Nigeria and an outdated, if not non-existent, idea of how to turn the country’s economy around and harness its diversity for benefit. People of Tinubu and Atiku’s political experience do not need more than a few interactions to see how far Buhari can take a 21st century country of Nigeria’s population, size, diversity, and clout. My guess is that they did but put priority on their ambitions over the country’s good.

While Atiku has jumped on every ship with the prospect of getting him close to grabbing a presidential ticket, Tinubu, realising Buhari’s cult following in northern Nigeria, closed his eyes to the man’s inadequacies, goaded Nigerians into seeing him as the messiah and vote for him for eight years in preparations for 2023 when he can justifiably ask for payback. This, to my mind, is the mindset behind his “emi lokan” episode in Abeokuta a couple of weeks back.

Here is an explanation of how plainly anyone should be able to read Nigeria’s current leader. Buhari knew that Gen Ibrahim Babangida(rtd) planned to overthrow his regime in 1984 but did nothing about it. He merely invited Babangida to his office and told him: “Whoever wants to sit on this chair let him come and sit here.” He then waited for the coupists to strike. This story, which is public knowledge, shows that Buhari is not a man who would put himself at risk for the benefit of any country.

I suspect that Tinubu saw this from the outset, but he knew Buhari was the easiest ladder to the attainment of his ambition to be president. In supporting Buhari over the last eight years, Tinubu didn’t care much about what Buhari did or didn’t do, and nor did he think much about the pains that Buhari’s style of governance imposed on his country. Like Atiku who undermined a party on the strength of his ambition, Tinubu supported anything that would make his dreams come to pass, no matter how much that hurt Nigeria.

Adedokun can be reached via Twitter @niranadedokun