Brilliant write-up. Kudos bro Davidoff2000:
OPEN LETTER TO HIS EXCELLENCY, ATIKU ABUBAKAR:AS YOU PREPARE TO LEAD US INTO BATTLE
It is no coincidence, that after four failed attempts and 26 long years of trying, you now stand on the cusp of history- you have finally managed to snag the Presidential ticket of a populist platform you helped build, fully poised to now run for the highest office in the land, on a party platform you actually consider your own.
The stars are finally aligning.
For a man with such a fitting sense of occasion, we are really happy that your tenacity has seen you, in 2018 under the PDP finally go one better than you did under the SDP in 1992. We congratulate you as you prepare to start the atrocious battle that may finally get you to start executing the vision you have had for this country since the early 90’s.
During the summer of 1992, at the runoff of the SDP Presidential primaries, Shehu Musa Yar’ Adua, your mentor, convinced you to shelve your presidential ambition and throw your weight behind MKO Abiola who was going head to head with a rampaging Baba Gana Kingibe.
You willingly did, trading a presidential party ticket on a platform you helped build, for national progress, making you an unsung hero of the June 12 watershed. Your thinking then was that another opportunity will present itself in 4 short years.
You could never have imagined then that it would take you almost a quarter century worth of time, effort and tribulations to get to run on a platform that was not just a child of circumstance, but on which you actually stood a chance.
Now you have finally gotten the chance, you must not squander it- it almost never came. You have the chance to heal the people- a grieving populace, and cleanse our land of the blood that flows in rivulets all about us.
You are a David, going into battle against a modern day Golliath, in the form of the incumbent PMB, our sartorial potentate who rules from the background because he has no idea what it takes to lead from the front.
He refused the Mandela option and has decided to seek another term in office, at the insistence of a powerful and corrupt cabal of Aso Rock mandarins, intent on keeping a puppet in power for their own self serving needs.
While his lieutenants speak so arrogantly, erroneously assuming his return is a done deal, he keeps a studied silence as they get louder and louder, offensively beginning to sound like God.
As you prepare to take on these men, I only urge you to approach this onerous task with all humility and with the fear of God in your heart, yet armed with all Machiavellian and dagger tactics at your disposal.
The men you seek to unseat are evil and vindictive men who will stop at nothing to hang on to power. While they may count incumbency, a bottomless war chest (from our collective commonwealth anyway), cooked up voting numbers, coercive force, geographical reach and unholy alliances with overbearing godfathers of the west, as part of their voter appeal, you have the unbreakable, indefatigable and insufferable spirit of the Nigerian people to lead you on.
They speak arrogantly, about the certainty of their victory, but forget that oft ignored element called providence that so often shows its hand in the affairs of men. That is one element that often comes to humble us all.
When Adolf Hitler, sat in the Fuhrerbunker in the summer of 1940 to plan Operation Barbarossa, he had grandiose plans of global domination and of proliferation and supremacy of the Aryan blood all over the world. He had enjoyed success usurping certain territories since 1939, and he had now set his eyes in the Soviet Union.
With his war Generals, the most brilliant military tacticians of the time, they planned to march over Soviet Union, a 1,800mi stretch they felt they could conquer in a little over two months. They factored in men- 3million made up of 150 divisions, they factored in jet fighters,- about 3,000, they factored in artillery more 7,000 artillery pieces. They factored in essential supplies too- more than 50,000 tons .
The history books call Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, it was not just an invasion, it was the most audacious war plan ever conceived in human history. The most brilliant military tacticians of the time had thought of everything- but had they?
Perhaps they did- everything in control of man, had been figured out, but they forgot providence- the God factor, which came by way of weather. The Russian winter came early in 1941 and halted the Nazi advance on the outskirts of Moscow. Just 200mi away from their target, the German troops could see the turrets, the spikes on the buildings of Moscow, but they would never set foot on the land.
Winter came so ferociously that the fuel in German tanks froze, their aircrafts immobilized, their guns jammed, frostbites ate up the soles of the feet of Nazi soldiers. The war effort crumbled in icy graves on the outskirts of Moscow.
Men had sat down to plan, but God had his own plans.
As it was in 1941, so it will be in another clime in present day Nigeria where men have arrogantly sat to play God, morphing themselves into the mould of conquerors when they ought o have seen themselves as the people’s liberators post 2015.
These men are vicious, the last President never knew this, and the man you seek to replace has no compunction, superintending over evil, comfortably ensconced under his cover of plausible deniability. He has divided us as much as he has afflicted us.
PMB in three short years has shown us the kind of man he is, the type of President he is and the sort of Presidency he leads. So from him, we have a mirror image of the kind of President you must not be- cannot be.
You must not be a lie.
Four years ago when they rebranded PMB and brought him to us, it was amidst the deafening cacophony of nauseating sloganeering. We couldn’t hear properly what they were telling us, so they succeeded in selling us a lie; they duped us and defrauded us in broad day light.
Their sophistry and political abracadabra bamboozled us all. Like money doublers, they preyed on our need for better fortunes- we all wanted a better life, a better country, a better future for our children and they hypnotized us, leading us into a trance to rob us of our votes and now dignity.
You must never be this devious.
They came with their deceptive rhetoric of change, promising us bread when all they wanted to do was steal our wheat, they promised us raiment when all they wished was to see us naked. They promised us shelter when all they wanted was to usurp the lands and see us battered by the elements.
These demagogues, with fanciful rhetoric and carefully scripted lies, excellently couched as manifestos, mounted rostrums all over the country to deliver powerful renditions of valor so they could deceive our most vulnerable populations, clarion calls that kindled the anger of our youth and infirm, pushing market women, farmers, artisans and even gate keepers of society to their side.
Even the workforce was not spared.
They told the civil servant that his boss was a comedian and the wages he paid were joke because he had a take home pay that couldnt take him home.The anger of the worker was kindled, and he vowed he must vote out this employer of his, just so he could get a better deal.
But has he?
This worker never knew he was getting a new task master with his vote. While his previous boss may truly have been a comedian, paying wages that couldn’t get him home, he at least had wages to look forward to, every month.
His new taskmasters that came in 2015 suddenly implied by their body language that the laborer was no longer deserving of his hire, as all over the country, backlog of unpaid wages have become the cornerstones of this administration.
You must not withhold from Caesar what is due to Caesar.
We were easily deceived then because when they brought this dictator turned democrat, they touted him as being a father to all, due to his age. Garbed in democratic robes, how were we to know he was a man who did not and still does not believe that we all equal in the eyes of our creator.
They decked him in an Italian pin stripe suit and brogue shoes and said he was now cosmopolitan in his outlook- that he was a consumate humanist, servant and savant leader.
Nigeria so needed change, we all accepted this talk without question, not knowing that at base and aspiration, PMB was still a cynical and clannish recidivist and jingoist, patron saint of thieves and cheerleader of marauders and land grabbers.
We do not need you to be any of these.
When they came with him, they said he was the Mai Gaskiya, the honest one, the one who never lies, but how many lies has he told us since? When he told us he is for everyone, but belongs to no one, we all broke out in applause for such uncommon courage only for him, to say soon after, that he was only for his own 97% damning the remaining ‘5%.’
You cannot be divisive, you must be a bridge builder.
They never told us he was a charlatan at worst, a fence at best- a receiver and beneficiary of stolen goods- in his case, stolen monies that powered his ascent to the Presidency, monies that will still be used in his attempt to reprise his role as our supreme ruler come 2019.
We do not need another devil in Aso Rock, and while our recent experience with the APC has shown us that the devil does not always come wearing a cape, brandishing a pitchfork, we do not want you to be our messiah either.
The man who is there now, has been led into thinking he is our messiah hence his determination to die in office for our economic salvation despite his glaring health challenges.
While our real messiah died with a thief on either side of him, this self anointed messiah who has hundreds of thieves all around him, will not be able to summon up one to follow him to the great beyond should the time come.
So, we are not looking for a messiah or a magician who will make the dollar and naira equal within a fiscal year, we just want you to come with a human heart, some common sense, plenty empathy and a shrewd business mind to take us from this point we are, to the point we all want to be.
In summary, we were all deceived. We all know we never had the quality of life we all deserved in the last government but at least we got by we were not committing suicide on a whim and seeking greener pastures in droves.
They only succeeded in supplanting the half bread we hitherto enjoyed with no bread at all, and while the last government chastised us with whips, they have only come now to chastise with snakes and scorpions.
This is not the change they sold to us, and indeed we all want to take another course. When Thomas Jefferson, in that famed American declaration of independence, graciously said:
‘We hold these truths to be self evident… that Governments are instituted amongst men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish such government and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.’
To effect our safety and happiness, we the people of Nigeria have so far decided that we longer want President Muhammadu Buhari lead us again, as we will shortly validate at the polls, and going forward, we intend to change government and bring a more humane, charismatic, inclusive and visionary leader who we feel will lead us down the path to self actualization.
It is against this backdrop that our representatives voted you, Atiku Abubakar in Port Harcourt yesterday, and on your shoulders, the destiny of Nigeria lies.
We know they will attack you, open several cases, institute probes and try to tell us you are a thief.
We will not even try to defend you as we focus on getting more people to vote for you. We will however remind them, they are thieves too, and if they had any iota of self respect, they must know that there ought to be honor amongst thieves.
Snitching on a thief does not mean you are no longer a thief yourself.
As you head into the elections proper, stay woke. Remember all the mistakes of the man who last had this ticket. He was too naïve and trusting.
He put his faith in men who betrayed him- Governors, Ministers and top party men, men stashed his campaign funds away and came out with empty hands to talk to their followers.
Perhaps they lost faith in him and did him dirty, but you need to watch it nonetheless. All these men who betrayed him have suffered immensely over the last three years and I believe they now see the essence of not shafting the man at the centre.
Fold your sleeves and dig in deep, no time for finesse now, these men are evil, so it must be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. While I am not necessarily advocating violence, you must have an unending capacity for mischief, because as GEJ learnt too late and Adeleke did the hard way in Osun, these men do not care for public opinion.
They do whatsoever it takes for them to win.
All they care about is grabbing power, after that every other thing follows- they can ride their luck in court. Do not be outrigged, do not be outmaneuvered, do not be out bought in the eyes of any voter.
The end justifies the means, seems to be their slogan, and you must be able to meet these men down at their own level of debauchery..
You can’t teach an old dog, new tricks, and what do I know? After I am just David Bigila and you? You are the Turakin Adamawa, the perennial presidential contender who knows it all, and all these things are actually supposed to be commonsensical, but so we thought last time, till we discovered common sense isn’t always that common afterall.
Remember, what matters is not the size of the dog in the fight, what matters is the size of the fight in the dog.
May God finally reward your hustle this time around. |
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