How Obasanjo’s next move will fix Atiku, Buhari in the Feb 23 game

As congratulations bombard Buhari from most unlikely quarters, and Atiku swears to remain inconsolable as he kicks up a stink, the only Nigerian that is good on the brink will soon totter in. Then peace be still

Elijah Olusegun

Since Feb 23 when the odds began to build up in favour of the APC candidate Muhammadu Buhari, many politicians and fan groups started drafting their letters and press statements in high praise of the winner many of them had written off as a goner.

Even the fair-weather allies of the main challenger, PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, were no exemption in what now appears a game in which everybody is trying to out-do the other—in sending congratulatory messages.

But the senders are careful enough in doing that. They cloak the congratulations in a cover story: peace building, restructuring, and sportsmanship.

Dele Momodu, Ovation’s publisher and mouthy supporter of Atiku, was the first to flip over to the winning side while still maintaining some form of loyalty to his losing candidate. And he was subtle about it.

“My dear WAZIRIN, as a believer, you are aware that only God can give or take power. You’ve written your name in gold,” he tweeted Feb 26 while INEC was still announcing the results.

“Do not wait a minute longer. Please, pick that phone and call President Muhammadu Buhari. You have much more to gain Sir… Pass on the burden!”

The Twitter storm Momodu generated scarcely died down before a gale of congratulations began to rage from across party and tribal divides, especially from those who could savour the sweet smell of success in real time.

First up was the Ndigbo Unity Forum. The group congratulated Buhari, and urged Atiku and other contestants to fly to court if they had reasons. No war.

Next came the leading pan-Igbo group, Ohaneze, divided by politics of endorsement in the run-up to the Feb 23 election.

Atiku had sold the group on restructuring Nigeria, something the southeastern region is willing to die for. But a splinter fell to the APC side, and endorsed Buhari.

As results were totted up, and Nigerians eventually saw where the cat jumped, Ohaneze, too, made a u-turn. Not after it had rejected the result, though.

Its congratulations came with a staccato. “Buhari’s victory, as exposed by the majority of votes cast, has clearly shown that the president has been on the right course in the last four years,” said Ohaneze’s Sec.-Gen. Uche Okwukwu in Enugu Feb. 28.

“We urge all Nigerians and the international community to accept the verdict as the election was adjudged free, credible, transparent, and peaceful.”

Ohaneze didn’t ask their candidate Atiku to concede defeat; they didn’t ask him to go to court either.

But the Arewa Consultative Forum did.

The apex tribal group in the north wasn’t initially keen on either Buhari or Atiku contesting for the region in 2019. Its members, particularly Junaid Mohmamed, Ango Abdullahi, and others, had been very critical of Buhari and its government before the election. By Feb 27, the ACF, too, had fired off its congratulations to Buhari.

While it praised Atiku for putting up a gallant fight, the group, however, urged him to keep his babanriga on—that the loss is not worth all that sweat. “Especially as there is credible evidence that the elections have been generally peaceful, free, and fair,” said Muhammad Ibrahim Biu, ACF’s national publicity secretary.

“The forum calls on Atiku to accept the will of the people, concede defeat, and congratulate President Buhari on his well deserved victory.”

Groups from across the Niger Delta have also acted their parts. The Niger Delta Youth Leaders, for example, sent their congratulations to Buhari on Sunday as they urged “civilized” Atiku to not take law into his hand in seeking a redress. The Christian Association of Nigeria, the Jama’atul Nasril Islam, the Ohaneze Youth Forum, and others have been falling over themselves to be counted amongst the well-wishers at Aso Rock.

Even elder statesmen who had opposed Buhari’s second- term bid, and had given their support openly to the PDP presidential candidate, are beginning to turn round in the name of peace building.

Former military President Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida wrote his congratulatory letter March 2. In it he admitted his difference with Buhari—the difference that got really political when he wrote his first letter that rapped Buhari and his government in 2018—the difference that got the DSS chasing about Babangida’s media handler Kazeem Afegbua, who ended up as one of Atiku’s many spokesmen.

But IBB might have out-grown all that in the last few months. The head of the 1985-military-junta-turned-patron-of-Nigeria’s-democracy is now advising Buhari to heal old wounds, urging Atiku to close ranks and calm down the head-bangers pushing him to go to court.

“They must be prevailed upon to understand that politics is a game in which there must be only one winner,” he said in the letter.

If after all the bad blood that flowed in the run-up to the election, and Babangida believes he’s playing some statesmanship writing this letter now, then he is not alone.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is sure in on the game. For times like this present him an opportunity to take the shine, and erase his blunder—his third force (the Coalition of Nigeria Movement) and galled open letters he thought would defeat Buhari who spurned his advice to not contest in 2019.

Now he has contested and won. There’s an emergency. And the man IBB himself laureated the grand old father of modern Nigeria is not going to kick up his legs and watch his former sidekick and protégé breach Nigeria’s peace fighting the Feb 23 loss.

Obasanjo might be the last person to admit Buhari’s victory. However, a letter similar to IBB’s, coming from a hilltop mansion in Abeokuta to Aso Rock, is not an impossibility. And it could be the last straw that will break the camel’s back—disarms Atiku and ends the PDP sabre-rattling.

Why? Obasanjo likes to be seen as Prince of Peace in Africa. And he knows Atiku’s number, and has his ears. In fact, Atiku was his creature—for the 2019 presidential contest.

Obasanjo could have seen where the wind was blowing right from the time polling began. His divination of the outcome was somewhat free-standing. “In any competition, there will always be winners and losers,” he said while casting his vote at his ward 11 in Abeokuta North.

“If your purpose of going for any competition is that you must win at all costs, then that is no longer a competition.”

That take of his, while voting was going on, to many, made him non-partisan. That’s what he himself has always claimed he is, since he tore up his PDP membership card in 2014. Now that the game is over, he won’t have a scruple hugging and congratulating the winner he had so put down; and he will happily pat on the back the loser on whom he’d staked little, and tell him to grin and bear it.

Cheering up is something hard for most Nigerian politicians to do after a loss. So it won’t be easy for Atiku.

He believes he got Nigerians’ mandate with his over 11 million votes compared to Buhari’s 15 million plus. And the PDP candidate has lawyered up, swearing to fight to finish to reclaim the mandate.

But his mainstays are bending over backward—for peace’s sake. They are rallying around the announced winner Buhari.

This seems enough reason Atiku might have to think twice, and play the real sportsman his elderly backers expect—and demand of—him to play.