BY DAPO OKUBANJO
On seeing a recent video of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar leading a delegation including former Sokoto governor Aminu Tambuwal and another former governor, Gabriel Suswam to the Kaduna home of former President Muhammadu Buhari, one encounter with a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) quickly came to mind.
Sometime in 2018 while working as a Station Manager in an Abuja-based TV station, I took up the politician who left the All Progressives Congress (APC) with the Atiku Group after his appearance on a programme on contemporary political issues ahead of the 2019 election. I was surprised when this vocal PDP chieftain who was a regular staple on TV shows told me that the then President Buhari meant well for Nigeria and was doing a lot to stabilize the country. But when asked why he and the others were hard on the man at the time, he uttered a single word response -Politics.
Indeed, former Vice President had since his defection from APC to return to PDP in 2017, never had a single good word to say about the man, Muhammadu Buhari and his administration -until the first of his two visits to Buhari after leaving office in 2023.
As a matter of fact, Atiku’s attacks on the Buhari administration after his return to PDP were a weekly affair, a few examples of his tirades will suffice to back my position on Atiku’s pre-2024 stance on the former President.
In July 2018, when he was fighting to pick the PDP Presidential ticket, the former Vice President described the government of President Buhari as the “most corrupt since the return of democracy to Nigeria in 1999.”
Few months later in September of same year, former Vice President Atiku said, through his campaign spokesman Segun Sowunmi, that former President Buhari was Nigeria’s incompetent leader.
Sowunmi was quoted as saying that Atiku was coming “to clean the mess that Buhari would leave which has resulted in job loss, poor economy and ranking of the country as one of the poorest.”
Incidentally, same Sowunmi was one of the first PDP members to visit Daura in January 2024, where he was effusive in his praise of Buhari whom he described as truly Mai Gaskiya (a reference to one of the former President’s nicknames for his forthrightness.
Even former Governor Tambuwal who owe his ascendancy to the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives to APC leaders, publicly declared Buhari as a failure in office barely a year ago.
Also, earlier in 2018, Tambuwal in an interview with Punch newspapers, termed former President Buhari as “an analogue leader who lacks the required capacity to rule modern Nigeria.”
Back to Atiku. As former President Buhari was winding down his first term in office, the former Vice President, in January 2019 described Buhari as “one of the biggest disasters to have ever befallen Nigeria.”
The former Vice President was even quoted, during the 2019 campaign in Jigawa, by Premium Times as saying that
former President Muhammadu Buhari was not ”a full-fledged Fulani man because he cannot speak Fulfulde.”
He added that ”a real Fulani man would not drag his followers into extreme poverty like what is happening under the APC administration”.
So it beggars belief that a crop of people who have had cause to use several abusive words on Buhari and his administration now see him as someone they could use as a rallying point for opposition to the President Bola Tinubu administration in Northern Nigeria.
Is it that the man is no longer incompetent, divisive and corrupt now that he is out of office? How do these people want Nigerians to take them serious? This takes me back to the story I narrated earlier. Yes, it all boils down to politics. But will they be bold enough to tell Nigerians, especially Buhari’s fabled political base, that that they were simply playing politics? Your guess is as good as mine.
What is however clear to discerning Nigerians is that the recent visit by the Atiku-led delegation to the Kaduna home of the former President was meant to curry his favour ahead of the 2027 election.
But it looks like the delegation did not fully grasp the message the former President sent out via a statement issued by his spokesman, Mallam Garba Shehu, after former Governor Nasir El rufai visited him in Daura in March 2025.
His body language was clear. The former President is a party man who is loyal and grateful to APC for providing the platform he used to fulfill his political dream. If that was not clear to the Kaduna pilgrims, they need to pay close attention to the wordings of Buhari’s tribute to his successor President Tinubu on his 73rd birthday.
Dapo Okubanjo, a journalist and public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja via dokubanjo@yahoo.co.uk
