Atiku, bienvenue Chicago

Even as those who flew thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic, drove several kilometres and walked a million steps in search of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s status at the Chicago State University are back –empty-handed– and the chief mourners and their bitter sympathisers have refused to go home, it is fit and proper to intervene in what many discerning minds have described as our longest-running comedy. Yes.

Around the blackmail has grown a huge industry of tricksters, pranksters, fraudsters, mobsters and marabouts. They are joined by all manner of charlatans masquerading as public affairs analysts, public commentators and public rights activists.

Feeding the mill of deceit is the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the February 25 election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who has been huffing and puffing, threatening to bring down the roof on everyone. He has been inviting — inciting actually — his fellow politicians to join him on his vacuous voyage.

Is the president’s certificate fake? Can there be a fake without an original? Whoever claims to have seen a fake must know where the original is; not so? If Chicago State University is defending the certificate it issued to one of its dearest former students, should anybody claim to know the paper more than the issuer?

Why the flood of tears? To arm-twist the supreme court? To keep the opposition and its supporters in high spirits? To bring the judiciary into disrepute and cause anarchy? Unbridled emotionalism? I really don’t know.

In search of the truth, I have consulted a renowned psychologist whose theory is even more befuddling than those that have been advanced for this strange behaviour. The professor, who pleads not to be named for what he describes as security concerns, says: “It is deep desperation, fuelled by a strange animosity, extreme bitterness. Consider a man who yells at a Lagos bus stop, “help! help! help o! They have taken my manhood o! My manhood is missing o! There is nothing you tell such a man, he will keep yelling. Even when he touches the thing, he will not agree it is there. Right?”

Omotoso is Lagos state commissioner of information and strategy