The national leader of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has responded to the state of the nation address by the former vice president and presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic party, Atiku Abubakar. He described most of the issues raised by Atiku as anchored on tissues of lies.

Read the full text below:

The PDP’s presidential candidate, former Vice President Atiku, recently made comments regarding suspension of CJN Onnoghen. Atiku’s release is entitled “State of the nation address”. I encourage everyone to read it. In its disregard for the truth and patent misrepresentations, it will go down in political history as a classic of self-incrimination. Atiku thinks the piece exalts him. Instead it evinces his penchant for wilful misstatement that make him unfit for the office he now seeks and has always coveted.

In the statement, he claims to have dedicated all his life to the defence of democracy. Those of you who know him, and even those who don’t, know this is not true. If all of his life has been dedicated to support for democracy, then he is far too young to run for president; however, I must congratulate him for having somehow managed to find or begin a second life. This rebirth as a defender of democracy must have taken place only a few short hours ago.

His previous life of over seventy years was one of skirting democracy and of blatant impunity in attempting to enshrine reactionary government and installing an unjust political economy on the backs of the people.

In his address, he claims the nation has entered a difficult moment. To my dear and good friend Atiku, I say the difficulty is not so much with the moment but with your memory.

When you lorded over Nigeria in tandem with President Obasanjo, there were myriad court orders mandating that your government render to Lagos state the funds due it to improve the lives of its millions of inhabitants. Instead, you gladly and without dispute joined Obasanjo in utter disregard for these unambiguous legal verdicts. In so doing, you demeaned the rule of law. You also readily sacrificed the economic development and welfare of millions of innocent people in Lagos just to gain some illicit political advantage that proved to be fleeting and of no avail to you in the end.

You now speak of democracy and the need for executive restraint. But such verbal finery never crossed your lips or traversed your pen when you and Obasanjo improperly removed Senate Presidents more easily than a trendy cad exchanges a pair of shoes or changes the subject of his false affections. Your love for democracy is such that you were recently observed apologising to the PDP for not rigging the Lagos 2003 gubernatorial polls as you did the polls in the other Southwestern states…

It is curious that Atiku would take up the marker of a jurist who has enjoyed the sweet but hidden benefits of several million dollars of mystery money passing through his secret bank accounts, Even when discovered, these accounts held several hundred thousands of dollars in them.

Someone in Atiku’s position would normally be wary of a judge thus tainted. A politician in Atiku’s position should more objectively be concerned that the government would have been the source of the hidden funds or that government would use the fact of the clandestine money as leverage against the judge to make sure he did government’s bidding for surely this a jurist highly compromised by pecuniary indiscretion. It is almost unnatural that an opposition candidate would champion the soiled cause of such a judge who seems to have sold something in exchange for the money found in his vest’s secret pockets.

Yet, Atiku now cries the anguished cry of a man who thought he had won the lottery only to find he had misread the last number on his claim ticket. Or perhaps these are the tears of a man who thought he had invested in a sure deal only to see the reason for the investment evaporate before his very eyes. Now, Atiku and his cohort seek to turn their personal disappointment into a burning national issue. They seek to manufacture a constitutional crisis where none exists.

They said they suspended their campaign because of this matter. Here, they are as illogical as illogic can beget. By suspending their campaign, did that mean they were permanently ending it? Of course not! That would be a boycott or the permanent “removal” of the campaign. No, they have resumed their campaign after temporarily suspending it. If they know the meaning of suspend in this regard, only malign intent allows them to feign ignorance to the meaning of the word “suspend” when applied to CJN Onnoghen.

There is no need to quake at the solitary incident of the interim suspension of a justice pending the legal resolution of serious criminal claims against him. If this matter is shorn of the political trappings it has acquired, there is no fairer way to handle the matter.

Atiku, I gather, would rather leave the man in seat and allow the charges against him to go unattended. Or Atiku would rather that the CJN preside over his own trial. Such is the logical conclusion of Atiku’s position. It is an odd bravery that would lead Atiku to stake such a position. If Atiku is as oddly courageous as he now depicts, then let him venture a step further. Pray tell, let Atiku tell us what good and precious thing he and the PDP rendered that they cannot even countenance the temporary and conditional suspension of a single jurist until the charges of illegality against the man have been fully resolved in open proceedings conducted by his judicial peers.

Atiku claims to be a democrat and defender of democracy, but where was he, his voice and action during Abacha’s suffocating maximum rule? Was he not a member and cheer-leader of one of the five Abacha parties aptly described then as five leprous fingers of Abacha? Did he even have the courage to visit his mentor, late Major General Shehu Musa Yar Ádua, in jail for fear of Abacha stopping him from running for the governorship of Adamawa?

Dare Atiku say what is really upsetting him and what he really is hiding in his attempt to cloak his lifetime of undemocratic reckonings in the swaddling of this much too belated democratic second birth he now claims for himself. (NAN)

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