By KASSIM AFEGBUA

When the noise rented the air like a thunderbolt, one was tempted to conclude that there was substance in their agitations. Quite a few Atiku Abubakar’s media lapdogs appeared with leaked saliva all over their mouths, seemingly aroused by a false hope of catching President Tinubu pants down. Indeed they have been running from one media house to another, trying to sustain a public discourse that would suggest that they have a case. This their latest drama is one of the most insanely and idiotic things I ever saw; their incoherent attempts at jackpot, moved further away from anything that could be considered rational with every stride; and, they have left everyone dunber for having listened to them in the first place. They turned themselves into courts of jurisdiction, and played the role of both the accuser and the Judge. They told us they had germane grounds of appeal; which grounds are pre-election matters. How can they be questioning President Tinubu’s eligibility to run now? Where were they when he declared his interest in becoming Nigeria’s president? This is the desperation I wrote about earlier. These guys are desperately trying to armtwist the process through the backdoor.

Power and the desire for it are indeed intoxicating; they tease from the known to the unknown, and cause their victims to spend and spend and even go for broke!!! I hope that Atiku will be able to feed his family by the time this wild goose chase is done with him. In my reckoning, by now, any discerning mind ought to have come to the unassailable conclusion that President Tinubu is a child of Divine Victory: nobody gave him a chance to succeed when plots were scripted and acted to undercut him; plots from within the APC, his party, from the CBN, when the currency was changed deviously to stop him, to deliberate propaganda to declare that he wasn’t healthy, and therefore unfit for the office, and so many other plots. He survived all of them; he survived all the bottlenecks and came out even stronger, to defeat Atiku Abubakar, and Peter Obi, his strongest contenders. It was like magic; give it to his mindset. The mindset of a strategist always has matches for invidious plots and machinations. He rode on landmines, struggled through the forest of political satans and demons, to rise to this enviable position of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, without latching unto anybody’s political shoulder. From scratch, he built his political structure across the country and has now struck the number one position before all of our visual senses. It is this earned victory and success that Atiku and his sinuous fawns want to set aside. It can’t happen!

This Atiku man, who is so desirous to address a perceived wrong is actually crying out for justice from a place where he is shackled by some crimes he committed in the same US, concerning some Jefferson’s issue; one doesn’t even know the current status of that matter. I do remember copiously though, that when that matter was hot, he was barred from visiting America; until one “arrangee” process saw that lifted, during the campaign for the 2019 presidential election. Even now, America has shut its door against him again. Those who scammed him smiled to the bank, and kept on assuring him that he would become President. The scamming game has continued to resonate much media buzz, but the results are withering away like a flash in the pan. Today, moving from one World Press Conference to another, Atiku Abubakar is still searching for political power and with so much desperation; like an addict. On this his latest expedition, we can all now say that there has been much ado about nothing. All noise, and no substance. How do court proceedings in America affect our own jurisdiction? It is a statement of FACT that President Tinubu attended Chicago State University. Those who are profiting from Atiku’s desperation won’t let him be. They must milk him to the last vortex. After this, he will yet again take a deserved rest in Dubai, for his final rest from politics. Tongue in cheek, or maybe as someone said go into preparations to contest at 81 in 2027, just in a bid to create a record for the Guiness Books.

If he has a good case, he doesn’t need his media rottweilers to bark at the Judges or Justices. All that is needed is a good presentation of the case, with verifiable evidence beyond reasonable doubt. This style of leaving substance and chasing shadows, and building a media buzz around it, won’t help him; not in this case, not at all. In his last World Press Conference, he lopped Nigerians and members of his party into a room where he presented his flimsy allegations and entertained questions from journalists, who were sweating profusely under the harsh circumstances he exposed them to.  I feel sorry for all these individuals who are joining him in his sufferings. They not only constituted themselves into a court of jurisdiction, they also passed verdicts from their dreamland as if they were justices of the Supreme Court. If they have any amount of seriousness in them, they are better off approaching the real court to present whatever evidence they have, rather than taking their matter to the public court in this depraved manner. Anyway, when desperation drives the adrenaline of the power seeker, it makes them blind to everything else including common sense, and deepens the orbit of their conscienceless power. In a matter of months though, all this will become history. I’m left wondering if Atiku Abubakar ever heard the say, “those who live in glass houses, don’t throw stones.” When he has rested his fight, President Tinubu will now start his own fight against the Waziri Adamawa. He and his men have scored no points on this, and they will forever live to lament and regret that this needless fight never started, in the first place.

The Star