As the final results of last week’s presidential poll were released, three broad groups emerged: Those genuinely surprised that the Peoples Democratic Party candidate, Atiku Abubakar, lost; those in pretentious denial of his defeat; and those in a quandary because they hoped to profit from a stalemate.

The first group comprise those who expected that the electoral math would be significantly affected by the farmer-herdsmen clashes in the Middle Belt; the fragile economic recovery and job losses; the widespread feeling of a captive government; and, finally, the shambolic party primaries.

The opposition, actively supported by a few vocal religious leaders and a section of the business elite, hammered the ruling All Progressives Congress on these points throughout the campaign that it seemed February 23 would deliver the final nail in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political coffin.

If the leadership of the APC was sufficiently threatened by the potential pitfalls ahead, it didn’t show it. On the contrary, the public faces of the party’s three most dangerous politicians – Nasir El-Rufai, Rotimi Amaechi and Adams Oshiomhole – kept stoking the fires.

In what must have come as a rude shock to those genuinely surprised by Buhari’s reelection, however, he lost only marginally to Atiku in Benue with 7,587 votes and, for the first time, won in Nasarawa, a traditional stronghold of the opposition. He lost in the North Central by 104,239 votes (less than one per cent of the votes he scored in 2015), but it was his second-best performance in five races so far, defying the Armageddon predicted.

Why? In a contest in which the two leading candidates were Hausa-Fulani, the whispering campaign in many religious circles that the Hausa-Fulani is the worst evil that has befallen the region since Satan, didn’t seem to make much sense. Voters probably decided that Buhari was the lesser of two evils, ignoring clerics who had begged them, on their knees, to vote otherwise.

Also, the demographic changes in the region may have strengthened the Hausa-Fulani population and significantly improved its voting power. In Kwara, Abuja took the three-and-a-half-year-old war with Senate President Bukola Saraki to his doorstep in Ilorin, stoking a catastrophic “Otoge” rebellion against the Saraki dynasty; while in Makurdi, voters didn’t seem sufficiently impressed with Governor Samuel Ortom’s identity politics to give Buhari the resounding rejection the governor campaigned for.

Those in pretentious denial of Atiku’s defeat have a different problem. They built a castle of myths and could not bear to see their fancies crumble. One of such myths was that the perception of Atiku as a corrupt politician and the PDP as a crooked party would not stick.

It’s not their fault. In some respects, the poor choices of Buhari’s government in the last four years created a situation where some said they would rather have a corrupt government than an incompetent one.

But this moral equivalence is superficial. As I said in a piece entitled: “Buhari v. Atiku: The inconvenient truth,” published on February 15, trust was at stake and on that score, Atiku did not lose on Saturday: “He already lost in 2006 when he fell out spectacularly with Obasanjo and suffered a Humpty Dumpty’s fall. The sum of the ongoing feverish endorsements and lobbying, the extravagant claims of momentum and the fantasy electoral maps would be insufficient to stitch his candidacy together forever again. He’s done.”

And there, hopefully, goes the myth that Nigerians care less about corruption than they do about competence.

Yet the deniers will not stop there. Given how poorly Buhari is perceived in the South East, it was expected that he would probably perform worse than he did in 2015, when he got 198,248 votes in the five South Eastern states. Atiku was expected to bury Buhari in a tsunami of Igbo vote.

I had warned in an article on January 1, entitled, “2019: Facts, fiction, myths, and what matters”, that the myth of a Buhari electoral disaster in the South East was exaggerated. But deniers turned a deaf ear especially after Atiku picked former Governor Peter Obi as running mate. It was comfort medicine for the elite to ignore the facts, but ordinary Igbo people know that even their own kith and kin in Abuja have not served them better in the last 20 years.

Governors control the purse strings of the parties and have significant influence on where and how the votes go. It’s true that Buhari has not overcome the perception of Igbo prejudice. But in the last four years, he has managed to deepen his alliances with a number of governors and influencers in the South East. The result is an improvement in his performance from 198,248 in 2015 to 403,242 this year, when a spectacular defeat was widely predicted.

There, is also, of course, the myth of the influential retired army generals. Following former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s endorsement of Atiku, it was taken for granted that from then on, Atiku was president-in-waiting; which was, in fact, how Obasanjo addressed him, and he was not laughing.

The political graveyard is littered with the remains of former top political officers that Obasanjo has fallen out with, former President Goodluck Jonathan being the most recent casualty. So, when Obasanjo and Buhari fell out, with General T.Y. Danjuma, former military president Ibrahim Babangida and Aliyu Gusau all lining up behind the Otta chicken farmer, it seemed Buhari’s fate was sealed.

Deniers who indulged themselves in this expired tale refused to see the writing on the wall. Obasanjo has had his moment, but he obviously didn’t know when it ended. Nigeria is sick and tired of a self-appointed oracle who thinks it’s his business to tell us who should lead us and when.

Not only that, Obasanjo also thinks it’s his prerogative to decide how long every president must stay in office, and then goes on to judge the next man by a measure of success which he did not achieve in his 11 years of being in charge.

Deniers may continue to worship at Obasanjo’s shrine, but voters who have seen through his decades of hypocrisy and opportunism decided it was time to send the world’s most restless busybody former president on forced retirement.

Obasanjo also belongs to the third group – those who hoped to profit from a stalemate in Saturday’s election. Whatever he may have said about Atiku publicly or told him privately, it’s doubtful if Obasanjo loves Atiku more than he loves Buhari. How could he seriously believe that Atiku would win after damaging his former deputy consistently for 13 years only to seduce him with endorsement three months to a major election?

In any case, how will an Atiku presidency benefit an Obasanjo who puts himself first, centre and last? The profiteer from and mastermind of many stalemates was probably hoping for another stalemate over which he could have become the arbiter in deciding who takes over next on his own terms. But that was not to be.

Whatever Obasanjo could not get from Buhari who he once described as “smart, educated and experienced”, Atiku would have had to sell Nigeria to provide it, a transaction that voters right down to Obasanjo’s polling unit, rejected outright.

Atiku has fought a good fight. No challenger has come so close in the last five election cycles in Nigeria. He should have called it a day before the final results were announced, instead of indulging the judicial wing of the stalemate army, a wing that is currently in fortuitous disarray.

One lesson Jonathan taught Nigeria is that you don’t have to win to be victorious. And it was just like yesterday when one unexpected phone call from him to Buhari put the critics, the deniers and the stalemate army out of business.

Atiku missed that chance. And it could prove worse than his defeat.



– Azu Ishiekwene is the Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview and member of the board of the Global Editors Network.

Source: https://www.today.ng/opinion/atiku-abubakar-omen-worse-defeat-198964

Atiku is a shameless and desperate man.. He is no match to Buhari.

Good writeup! I find the part about Obasanjo the most accurate of it all. After publicly damaging Atiku for over 13 years you turn around and call him a president in waiting. That move seriously damaged the reputation of both Atiku and Obasanjo. It made their greed for power and political relevance to be very obvious. Now they have both been sent to political retirement and irrelevance

Well said writer

It's glaring that OBJ supported Atiku for his own selfish interest. Looking forward to seeing PMB's best performance. Nigeria shall be great again I believe

this is a quality write-up... my take on this is that, gradually, people are beginning to make their choice devoid of financial inducement.... GOD BLESS NIGERIA

All the mumus that have been deriding Buhari shame on you.
Your disappointment just began

Like for Atiku Share for Buhari

Atiku please keep wasting our money you looted. Please go to court. You can hire the services of 100 SAN. You haven't seen anything yet Atiku. This is the beginning of your misery.

Bullshit about the call. Atiku owes no one any call. If they like let them recharge his line.

If Jonathan did half of what Buhari did..

Believe me Buhari would not be where he is today...
He would have died in Daura long ago

Using Niger delta oil money to treat himself in London while masses suffer in penury

Beautiful, incisive and apt. Atiku's ambition was just a dream. His character flaws exhibited in his eight years in office was his greatest undoing. He is the bigger of two evils.

KidsNEXTdoor:
If Jonathan did half of what Buhari did..

Believe me Buhari would not be where he is today...
He would have died in Daura long ago

Using Niger delta oil money to treat himself in London while masses suffer in penury

Your moniker says it all.

When elections are won by rigging anyone can write anything and make a theory out of it but I ask. If it was free and fair would all these theories stand. The theory above is false. Nigerians voted Atiku but Buhari forced their will out of the window using INEC

Many of those who had supported and convinced people to vote out Buhari are crooks who benefited a lot from PDP dominated previous administrations.
Their aggressive campaign against buhari and tooth and nail arguments made me found out that interference of anti corruption bodies is really hurting their business

This overrated Atiku should just go and rue his defeat in shame.How can you explain the brutal beaten you suffered in the hands of your fellow Fulani man??.you were just reduced to a paperweight politician despite the overwhelming support you got in the south.
Shameless loser!!!.

You made it look as if you're the writer of this article. It's dishonest not acknowledging the source of an academic output. One of the names this your action is called is, plagiarism. Come on, apologise and acknowledge, bros. (The article was written by a popular editor-in-chief. If they catch you, uhn . . . )

Arikulators in denial, the article mentioned you. Next.

Dailymemoirs:
When elections are won by rigging anyone can write anything and make a theory out of it but I ask. If it was free and fair would all these theories stand. The theory above is false. Nigerians voted Atiku but Buhari forced their will out of the window using INEC

Only criminals would want Buhari out of power.

The myth of the "almighty" retired generals has just been exploded! Dele Momodu alluded to their forte as king makers and revelled in their support for Atiku.

In any case, OBJ is one of the biggest losers in PMB's re-election.

A man who waz ready to sell everything left of Nigeria to his friends and the old fools who have been scavenging Nigeria since d days of Noah.

Nonsense. Why not also try contest for Cameroonian elections. He's a citizen there afterall.

Atiku is a loser and thank God NNPC is now safe.

Corrosiveman:
Like for Atiku Share for Buhari

That was not an election, figures did not add up. Atiku will win in court if all the evident are looked into

And our God did not allow him to enter, despite all fake prophecies

Dailymemoirs:
When elections are won by rigging anyone can write anything and make a theory out of it but I ask. If it was free and fair would all these theories stand. The theory above is false. Nigerians voted Atiku but Buhari forced their will out of the window using INEC

Just cos r favored candidate didn't emerge doesn't mean the election was rigged. Not one int observer has discredited the process for God's sake. However, I dnt blame r lot, u holding on to whatever gives u a lil bit of cmfrt. Keep clutching at straws.

Freddyjimoh:
As the final results of last week’s presidential poll were released, three broad groups emerged: Those genuinely surprised that the Peoples Democratic Party candidate, Atiku Abubakar, lost; those in pretentious denial of his defeat; and those in a quandary because they hoped to profit from a stalemate.

The first group comprise those who expected that the electoral math would be significantly affected by the farmer-herdsmen clashes in the Middle Belt; the fragile economic recovery and job losses; the widespread feeling of a captive government; and, finally, the shambolic party primaries.

The opposition, actively supported by a few vocal religious leaders and a section of the business elite, hammered the ruling All Progressives Congress on these points throughout the campaign that it seemed February 23 would deliver the final nail in President Muhammadu Buhari’s political coffin.

If the leadership of the APC was sufficiently threatened by the potential pitfalls ahead, it didn’t show it. On the contrary, the public faces of the party’s three most dangerous politicians – Nasir El-Rufai, Rotimi Amaechi and Adams Oshiomhole – kept stoking the fires.

In what must have come as a rude shock to those genuinely surprised by Buhari’s reelection, however, he lost only marginally to Atiku in Benue with 7,587 votes and, for the first time, won in Nasarawa, a traditional stronghold of the opposition. He lost in the North Central by 104,239 votes (less than one per cent of the votes he scored in 2015), but it was his second-best performance in five races so far, defying the Armageddon predicted.

Why? In a contest in which the two leading candidates were Hausa-Fulani, the whispering campaign in many religious circles that the Hausa-Fulani is the worst evil that has befallen the region since Satan, didn’t seem to make much sense. Voters probably decided that Buhari was the lesser of two evils, ignoring clerics who had begged them, on their knees, to vote otherwise.

Also, the demographic changes in the region may have strengthened the Hausa-Fulani population and significantly improved its voting power. In Kwara, Abuja took the three-and-a-half-year-old war with Senate President Bukola Saraki to his doorstep in Ilorin, stoking a catastrophic “Otoge” rebellion against the Saraki dynasty; while in Makurdi, voters didn’t seem sufficiently impressed with Governor Samuel Ortom’s identity politics to give Buhari the resounding rejection the governor campaigned for.

Those in pretentious denial of Atiku’s defeat have a different problem. They built a castle of myths and could not bear to see their fancies crumble. One of such myths was that the perception of Atiku as a corrupt politician and the PDP as a crooked party would not stick.

It’s not their fault. In some respects, the poor choices of Buhari’s government in the last four years created a situation where some said they would rather have a corrupt government than an incompetent one.

But this moral equivalence is superficial. As I said in a piece entitled: “Buhari v. Atiku: The inconvenient truth,” published on February 15, trust was at stake and on that score, Atiku did not lose on Saturday: “He already lost in 2006 when he fell out spectacularly with Obasanjo and suffered a Humpty Dumpty’s fall. The sum of the ongoing feverish endorsements and lobbying, the extravagant claims of momentum and the fantasy electoral maps would be insufficient to stitch his candidacy together forever again. He’s done.”

And there, hopefully, goes the myth that Nigerians care less about corruption than they do about competence.

Yet the deniers will not stop there. Given how poorly Buhari is perceived in the South East, it was expected that he would probably perform worse than he did in 2015, when he got 198,248 votes in the five South Eastern states. Atiku was expected to bury Buhari in a tsunami of Igbo vote.

I had warned in an article on January 1, entitled, “2019: Facts, fiction, myths, and what matters”, that the myth of a Buhari electoral disaster in the South East was exaggerated. But deniers turned a deaf ear especially after Atiku picked former Governor Peter Obi as running mate. It was comfort medicine for the elite to ignore the facts, but ordinary Igbo people know that even their own kith and kin in Abuja have not served them better in the last 20 years.

Governors control the purse strings of the parties and have significant influence on where and how the votes go. It’s true that Buhari has not overcome the perception of Igbo prejudice. But in the last four years, he has managed to deepen his alliances with a number of governors and influencers in the South East. The result is an improvement in his performance from 198,248 in 2015 to 403,242 this year, when a spectacular defeat was widely predicted.

There, is also, of course, the myth of the influential retired army generals. Following former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s endorsement of Atiku, it was taken for granted that from then on, Atiku was president-in-waiting; which was, in fact, how Obasanjo addressed him, and he was not laughing.

The political graveyard is littered with the remains of former top political officers that Obasanjo has fallen out with, former President Goodluck Jonathan being the most recent casualty. So, when Obasanjo and Buhari fell out, with General T.Y. Danjuma, former military president Ibrahim Babangida and Aliyu Gusau all lining up behind the Otta chicken farmer, it seemed Buhari’s fate was sealed.

Deniers who indulged themselves in this expired tale refused to see the writing on the wall. Obasanjo has had his moment, but he obviously didn’t know when it ended. Nigeria is sick and tired of a self-appointed oracle who thinks it’s his business to tell us who should lead us and when.

Not only that, Obasanjo also thinks it’s his prerogative to decide how long every president must stay in office, and then goes on to judge the next man by a measure of success which he did not achieve in his 11 years of being in charge.

Deniers may continue to worship at Obasanjo’s shrine, but voters who have seen through his decades of hypocrisy and opportunism decided it was time to send the world’s most restless busybody former president on forced retirement.

Obasanjo also belongs to the third group – those who hoped to profit from a stalemate in Saturday’s election. Whatever he may have said about Atiku publicly or told him privately, it’s doubtful if Obasanjo loves Atiku more than he loves Buhari. How could he seriously believe that Atiku would win after damaging his former deputy consistently for 13 years only to seduce him with endorsement three months to a major election?

In any case, how will an Atiku presidency benefit an Obasanjo who puts himself first, centre and last? The profiteer from and mastermind of many stalemates was probably hoping for another stalemate over which he could have become the arbiter in deciding who takes over next on his own terms. But that was not to be.

Whatever Obasanjo could not get from Buhari who he once described as “smart, educated and experienced”, Atiku would have had to sell Nigeria to provide it, a transaction that voters right down to Obasanjo’s polling unit, rejected outright.

Atiku has fought a good fight. No challenger has come so close in the last five election cycles in Nigeria. He should have called it a day before the final results were announced, instead of indulging the judicial wing of the stalemate army, a wing that is currently in fortuitous disarray.

One lesson Jonathan taught Nigeria is that you don’t have to win to be victorious. And it was just like yesterday when one unexpected phone call from him to Buhari put the critics, the deniers and the stalemate army out of business.

Atiku missed that chance. And it could prove worse than his defeat.



– Azu Ishiekwene is the Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview and member of the board of the Global Editors Network.

Source: https://www.today.ng/opinion/atiku-abubakar-omen-worse-defeat-198964

Azu Ishiekwene, God bless you.

ekestic1976:
You made it look as if you're the writer of this article. It's dishonest not acknowledging the source of an academic output. One of the names this your action is called is, plagiarism. Come on, apologise and acknowledge, bros. (The article was written by a popular editor-in-chief. If they catch you, uhn . . . )

Read the bottom of the post.

Freddyjimoh:



– Azu Ishiekwene is the Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview and member of the board of the Global Editors Network.

Source: https://www.today.ng/opinion/atiku-abubakar-omen-worse-defeat-198964

U