As at the last count, no woman has expressed intention to be president of Nigeria come 2019. It is still a man’s world. So far, nine men are known to be eyeing the seat of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in 2019.The field is still open though for more to come seeking their parties’ nomination for the race proper.And largely too some of these ambitions are laced with bareface intrigues,implicitly running with the hare and hunting with hound.
Top of the list as at today is former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who has been in the wings, fuelling his ambition to be Nigeria’s president. Considered to be one of the most prepared to be president, Atiku Abubakar is perhaps the only one among the top eight contenders who has a ready blueprint, who has been in the saddle, who has a wide network of political allies, funding ability, and other prerequisites working for him. A little confession: I was a member of a think tank he set up more than 10 years ago to design a cross sectoral roadmap on how to jump start the Nigerian economy and polity. Each sector of Nigeria’s political economy had experts sit down and design strategic thrusts. At the end of the exercise, if he had become president in 2007, Atiku Abubakar, a man who specialises in tapping the best brains to man specific duties, would have hit the ground running from day one.
But his perceived impatience in the years leading to the 2003 re-election of former president Olusegun Obasanjo, to whom he was deputy, has been his major undoing. Recall that but for the deft strategic, and some say, cunning military strategies deployed by the former military leader, Obasanjo, Atiku Abubakar would have easily supplanted his boss. The former Vice President had successfully sold what he called the Mandela option, in which he wanted President Obasanjo to do just a term and hand over to him, to most Governors of the day. The war of attrition that followed has left seemingly indelible bruises from which the Adamawa political chieftain has yet to recover.
A mountain called Olusegun Obasanjo has been Atiku’s albatross. So has been the smear campaign which painted him as a very corrupt politician, a stigma that has stuck to him despite no indictment, or corruption charges never been brought against him in any Nigerian court. There are, however, indications that the United States government has a dossier on him, allegedly supplied by the EFCC under Ribadu, then working for Obasanjo. Infact, one of Atiku’s wives, Jennifer, had to relocate from the US to Dubai in the heat of the investigations on Atiku. I am unable to confirm if the US has ever since then granted the former vice president an entry visa.
He has been a political orphan more or less since then. For a man who inherited the awesome Shehu Musa Yar’Adua political machinery, a man deeply connected and seemingly liked nationwide, his baggage is daunting; and his seeming political prostitution, of changing political base ever so often, are major obstacles which stand against his ambition to be the candidate of the PDP in the coming elections.
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