The past few days have been awash with all manners of political melodrama occasioned by Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. The battle to unseat President Bola Ahmed Tinubu took an international dimension. In the litigation filed in a United States Magistrate Court, Atiku Abubakar prayed the court to compel CSU to release the academic records of PBAT.

After some serious back and forth legal tussles, the request was granted and the academic records released. The bottom line of it all was that PBAT was given a clean bill of health. In an unequivocal term, and to the bewilderment of the naysayers, the representatives of the CSU told the world that the same Bola Ahmed Tinubu who graduated in the University in 1979 is today the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Any contrary interpretations that Atiku Abubakar and his co-travellers may be articulating around are just meant to soothe their whims and caprices and to give false hope to their gullible followers.

This development prompted Alhaji Atiku Abubakar to call a world press conference last week Thursday. There, he formally narrated the outcome of his nomadic voyage to American Court. Now that he has secured the academic records of PBAT officially, the question is, what next? The next step to take, according to him, is to furnish the Supreme Court with his new discoveries which are apparently in favor of PBAT, all things being equal.

However, the consensus of opinion of the people that know the constitutional law inside-out is that there is no cause for alarm. They opine that there is no utilitarian value that the purported new evidence will add to Atiku Abubakar’s appeal pending in the Supreme Court. They say that it will even be easier for a horse to pass through the eye of a needle than for Atiku Abubakar’s legal team to raise new issues that were not pleaded in the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT). But unfortunately, Atiku’s desperation to unseat PBAT has broadened his naivity and beclouded his shallow sense of reasoning. And of course, those that are supposed to advise him, I mean his lawyers, are cashing out big time. They are seriously at the peak of their harvest time!

At that press conference, he also called on Mr Peter Obi, Senator Musa Kwankwanso and other disgruntled elements to join hands with him in the battle ahead. The unity that he failed to consummate and achieve before the contest among his former party topnotch in the PDP is what he is now clamoring for, though after the cloth cannot meet the proverbial Omoye, as she has already entered the market naked. What a funny character! What a way to demonstrate illusion, greed and lust for power!! What a way to exhibit political failure occasioned by shortsightedness!!!

People do have short memories. If not so, how come that the man has forgotten so quick how his former boss, President Olusegun Obasanjo humiliated and cut him down to size at the tail end of their administration in 2007. Then, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the governor of Lagos State came to the rescue. He gave him a soft landing in his party, the Action Congress (AC). He was already politically ostracized in the PDP when he was accommodated and offered the platform of the AC to realize his presidential ambition.

Unfortunately, these days, Atiku Abubakar is singing a different tune by trying to re-write history. He has forgotten that we are all living witnesses to the political tribulations he suffered in the hands of OBJ. He claims that he is not a betrayal having once enjoyed that rare privilege of benevolence from PBAT. Then, who is he?

What do you call a character who fell out with his boss that made him his running mate in the 1999 presidential election against all odds? How do you describe a man who was saved by Bola Ahmed Tinubu from being thrown into political oblivion in 2007? If he now takes an exception to being addressed as a betrayal, then he should be told to his face that he is in the family of the treacherous species.

He also came out to say that he was instrumental to the retention of Lagos State by the Alliance for Democracy in the 2003 governorship election. He boasted that he prevailed on President Olusegun Obasanjo not to take Lagos State using their do-or-die strategy in the manner that other States in the South West were captured in that 2003 inglorious elections. With that revelation, he has unwittingly indicted the government in which he was number two as being responsible for the shameless rigging in the elections of 2003 which brought PDP governors into the States of the South West except Lagos. He actually left no one in doubt that Chief Olusegun Obasanjo presided over an electorally corrupted government that rigged with ignominy for his party in 2003 and 2007 general elections.

Having contested four presidential elections and lost all, Atiku Abubakar at 76 is fighting tooth and nail to regain through crooked means what he failed to achieve through the ballot box. Today, the world has seen how desperate and daring he can go to take a pound of flesh from PBAT. But it crystal clear that this is being done out of desperation, frustration and jealousy. The feat he could not achieve on four different occasions spanning a period of thirty years is what God gave to PBAT just at one shot. He fails to realize that for him to rule Nigeria, it has to be established in the celestial and made to manifest in the terrestrial realms. Neither of these has happened, leading credence to the popular quote that, “Except the Lord builds the house, the builders only labor in vain”.

Finally, it is quite ironical that those who are taunting PBAT over his academic records have not been confident enough to come out publicly with theirs. Maybe they don’t know that he who goes into equity must come with clean hands. Therefore, where lies the moral justification behind Atiku Abubakar’s investigations of PBAT’s academic records if not for the purpose of making mischief? No doubt, the heaven and earth know that they are doing it in vain. But this whole episode must not be allowed to go without being put in its proper perspective at least, for the sake of knowledge and that of posterity.

If you have ever been betrayed by a friend, you will know the pain such a betrayal causes. This kind of betrayal is what Caesar experiences with his friend Brutus in the book, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.

Please, be careful in life! With a friend like Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu does not need an enemy.

B. Aderemi Ogundele
(Jagunmolu)