Atiku’s search for fleeting illusion

By Wole Olujobi

If good governance has indeed become the Nigerians’ holy grail, who are then the knights in  gem-crusted armours that can be employed to fetch the chalice?

That is the question on the lips of discerning Nigerians who crave for good governance anchored on the rule of law and managed by sober politicians, as Nigerians brace for the January 16, 2027 presidential election to choose a leader who sees the law as the grundnorm in democratic governance to make progress in accordance to the will of all Nigerians in contrast to the motorpark politics of sinews and hijack for a narrow group interest.

The last time I witnessed a motorpark politics in the scale of the infamous D.B Cooper hijack was in Oshodi; a boisterous Lagos mainland and hell-on-earth enclave where nothing is certain; law is a victim of its creators; and life can be very cheap.

Oshodi is not a full slum, though it contains massive informal settlement characteristics, such as high crime and chaotic slum-like pockets, such as the infamous ‘Oshodi underbridge’.
Though it is today better described as a major, high-density commercial and transport hub undergoing urban renewal and commercial transformation, despite modern developments, parts of Oshodi still experience  pressures arising from  pockets of deep poverty or vulnerable street children where the outlaws, such as Chess in the Slums, freely operate.

The complexity of Oshodi persona represents the fluid characteristics and dubiety of its volatile governance system where the rules that apply in the morning may not necessarily apply in the afternoon.

For instance in the 1990s and 2000s, Oshodi was widely notorious as a chaotic, hyper-congested transit point plagued by street gangs called the ‘area boys’ that thrived in hell-raiser and gangster paradise, pickpocketing, crime, and heavy informal market crowding that competes with the life in the jungle. Here, no law strictly exists, and when it exists, to breach it and create the scene of Armageddon is a matter of minutes, particularly among the factional and leadership crises in Lagos transport unions—primarily involving the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN).

Their beef is almost always centred around power tussles, park control, ticket/toll collection rights, and national versus state leadership battles, all motivated by man’s unlimited thirst for the control of capital to maintain a world created by man to live and wallow in his excesses. And when struggle for power, money and influence emerges, the law is put in abeyance for chaos to thrive in reckless ecstasy.

Unfortunately, that jungle contraption is being invented  to govern Nigeria’s political space where desperate politicians can at will hijack the political platform they made no investment or do not legally hold in trust, to exercise political control and authority.

In the law governing electoral contests in Nigeria, Section 40 of the 1990 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended, which guarantees freedom of association, does not give associations or political parties the freedom to disregard the legal authority regulating their activities. 

Section 82(1) of the Electoral Act 2022, which prescribes statutory notice requirements for party conventions, congresses and meetings convened to elect executive officers, ought to be a safeguard against arbitrary political succession and  hijack of party structures by powerful individuals, which often results in chaos. But unfortunately, desperate politicians often resort to this  contraption to exercise political authority and control in a clear breach of the law as can be seen in the politics of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), which seeks to force itself into the nation’s political space without first asserting the legitimacy of its existence.

In the current quagmire involving ADC that apes the Oshodi politics of attrition, the disputed ADC Chairman, David Mark, is in a pitched battle with the Nigerian law, pitting himself against the legal heir to the throne of ADC’s authority, Nafiu Bala Gombe, a former deputy national chairman of the ADC.

As an accomplished military tactician that had weilded both the guns and the gavel, General Mark, a marksman in a wired treasonable felony plot with other desperate leaders that see political banditry as a model of modern democratic governance, went for the broke, usurping the  legitimate authority that ought to be exercised by Bala Gombe.

Although both common sense and Nigerian law expressly affirmed Gombe’s legitimacy, Mark and his men, in a manner of armed banditry, maintained strong control over ADC against the law.

As it is in Oshodi, so it is in ADC; the Atiku Abubakar’s special purpose vehicle manufactured for emergency control by political engineers in military fatigue that helped him recreate Nigeria in the image of Oshodi combustible enclave managed by street rascals, who hold the law by the jugular to illegally exercise political control over the lawful founders of ADC. Here, the law of the jungle prevails over the written codes that regulate public affairs of the party that is now being controlled by the people that are adept in the hijack of government authority through military coup.

But the Nigerian law is a patient lion that guides its territory in measured alertness, ready to devour the wandering predators that seek to threaten the authority of its sphere where it is the king.

In response to the abuse of the nation’s law in faraway Abuja, the Nigerian law spoke loudly at the Federal High Court and the verdict rang deep across the world that Nigeria is not a jungle where predators threaten the existence of other stakeholders in the wild world where all animals are equal but some animals seek to recreate themselves to be more equal than other animals. But the knell sounded for that impunity in the court, and, significantly, the ADC’s rebuke by the Nigerian law came the very day that the icon of democratic governance,  legacy leadership and respecter of the law and human dignity, Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji, gathered a massive crowd of Ekiti people at the Ekitiparapo Pavilion where he praised Ekiti people for their show of love and support, declaring that the icon of democratic struggle and soldier of civil rights, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had been highly beneficial to Ekiti State in terms of lending supports in development projects, notably in the construction of new roads and rehabilitation of the existing ones that were in terribly bad shapes, and so Ekiti people would choose  their Knight in Tinubu to lead the charge in the nation’s development process, including demonstrating appreciation for his support for Ekiti State.

Also at the rally, party chieftains set a goal to significantly boost vote tallies in the state in aid of Tinubu’s victory, targeting over 800,000 votes; all these in support of the nation’s law for succession politics to thrive in democratic governance in clear departure from ADC’s contempt for the nation’s legal codes in its careless raid on democracy.

The court’s intervention sacking Mark and his illegal executive council that produced Atiku as its presidential candidate  proves the legal basis of the Nigerian jurisprudence that the law is the foundational backbone of a democratic society, which ensures that power is held in trust; politicians are accountable; rights are protected; and citizens live in an orderly and predictable political and social environments.

The judgement also established the supremacy of the constitution and clearly spelled out the rules that prevent arbitrariness in political conducts.

It is also a demonstration that Nigeria’s legal system ensures that every individual—regardless of wealth, status, gender, or background—is subject to the same rules and receives fair treatment while also protecting core civil liberties, including freedom of association, the right to a fair trial, and protection for vulnerable groups.

The ruling also highlighted the place of the law in providing legal basis for the rules governing elections, political parties, and the peaceful transfer of power, while
also providing peaceful and institutionalised mechanisms to settle disputes through independent courts rather than violence,  to create a conducive atmosphere for economic stability and growth in contrast to arbitrary power without fixed laws and regard for the public good, which poses a fundamental threat to democratic societies.

The judgment corrected the erosion of the rule of law through arbitrary power that replaces predictable, equal laws with the unpredictable will of individuals.

The political power vested in government officials and leaders is essential for the functioning of democratic societies. But when politicians misuse their power, citizens can no longer trust that their rights will be protected, for in this instance, accountability is destroyed and civil liberties suppressed.

In my earlier essay, I had written that desperate politicians that place their hopes in the sweetened augury of the marabouts had better beware, warning that the fair prophecy and fiery foreboding of the diviners that trade in tricky forecasts is often a game of fate that palters in a double sense. That admonition explains the fury of the Nigerian law in the ADC’s current gambit, which has broken the hopes of the patrons who traffick in the corrupting currents of power and ambition among the ADC leadership cadre.

In the mix of Atiku’s conundrum was Wednesday court ruling declaring as fake the purported resignation of Gombe, thus relinquishing his vice championship of ADC to create alibi for the takeover of the party by Atiku’s men. This latest trouble has completed the grotesque transformation of Atiku from a man that once ruled the roost of Nigerian politics to become a floating shipwreck in the Nigeria’s political waters.  For Mark, he is marking his time as a poor marksman in the game of audacious usurpation of constitutional authority!

Atiku, once renowned as an erstwhile backer of civil liberties for democracy but now an arch promoter of fascist conduct, is facing the metamorphosis of an extinction scale in his endlessly manipulative hunt for power. As the ADC presidential candidate now dons a mob-cap on a head that once wore the crown, his current travail is sauce for wisdom for politicians to accept the rule of law over inordinate ambition propelled by the imperial theme contained in the augury of the marabout, to seek power at all costs and by all means, only to end up cementing a permanent metamorphosis into oblivion.

King Saul’s metamorphosis in Biblical account reminds of his abandonment by the spirit of God due to his disobedience and rebellion against established rules. He became tormented by an evil spirit in a desperate bid to maintain his fracturing grip on power against the rising David and broke his own laws to consult the Witch of Endor, to summon a spirit to divine his future, which ended up cementing his tragic doom.

Such is a tragic metamorphosis for a man in desperate pursuit of power. Vaulting ambition spurred by the alleged prediction by marabouts has thrown Atiku into a web of political barbwires, threatening to rob him the knightly grace to lead Nigeria. Valiant but over-ambitious Macbeth, spurred by the  magical illusions of the three witches at the Pit of Acheron, met his own doomed metamorphosis at Dunsinane hills. Madcuff is my witness.

*Olujobi, a journalist, writes from Ado-Ekiti