*A Response to the Atiku Abubakar Interview and the Illusions of His Cheerleaders
From Dan Osa-Ogbegie
There comes a point in public life when a man’s words stop persuading and begin to reveal him. That interview by former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar was one of those moments.
Not because it was shocking, but because it was not. There was nothing new in it. No evolution. No reflection. No evidence that time, experience, or repeated rejection has produced depth. What we heard was the same familiar script, delivered with the same quiet insistence that Nigeria must, somehow, still pass through him.
After decades in the arena, after presidential contests stretching back to 1993, a man ought to know when his moment has passed and when his role has changed. What we see instead is a refusal to recognise that line. A fixation on arrival long after the train has moved on.
At some point, a nation must ask itself, without sentiment, how long is too long.
There is something deeply troubling about a political figure who has occupied the highest levels of power, seen the system from the inside, and yet continues to approach national questions with such narrow, almost provincial reasoning.
Everything is reduced to sectional arithmetic, to calculations dressed up as fairness, to pathways that somehow always lead back to him.
Take this now fashionable claim that the North has been shortchanged in Nigeria’s power arrangement. It sounds persuasive until you look at it closely. It conveniently begins its reckoning from 1999, as though Nigeria came into existence at the return to civil rule. The decades before that, with their own realities and power configurations, are quietly ignored.
You cannot edit history to suit ambition and then present the result as justice. Nigeria is not a balance sheet to be adjusted for personal advantage.
Then there is the talk of coalition. It is the new language of convenience. It sounds noble, even sophisticated. But beneath it lies something far more familiar.
Everyone already understands how this play is designed to end. The ticket is to be secured first, then others will be invited to “come on board” in the name of unity. What is presented as coalition is, in truth, a coronation waiting for endorsement.
Call it what it is.
When the PDP struck what I can only describe as an iceberg, my instinct was to explore alternatives. The African Democratic Congress presented itself as one such option. I engaged. I listened. I watched.
It did not take long to see through it.
What was unfolding was not the birth of a credible national alternative. It was the quiet construction of a vehicle. A platform being subtly, but unmistakably, aligned to accommodate one man’s unyielding ambition.
You could sense it in conversations. You could read it in the alignments. It was not hidden. It was simply not being loudly advertised.
At that point, there was nothing left to consider. It was easy to make my choice.
And then you see figures like David Mark at the centre of this so-called alternative and the illusion collapses completely.
A man whose public life stretches back to the 1970s as the Chairman of the Abandoned Properties Implementation Committee in the old Eastern Region of Nigeria in 1976 presented as part of a new political awakening. One must resist the temptation to laugh.
What exactly is new?
When the same actors, with the same instincts and the same history, simply change platforms, what you have is not reform. It is recycling.
The faces change positions. The script remains the same.
And then there is the emotional theatre around Peter Obi and his supporters.
Strip away the noise, the hashtags, the moral posturing. What remains is a question that no one seems willing to answer honestly.
When the real negotiations begin, when the hard political bargains are placed on the table, what happens then?
Will he step aside? Will those who have built an identity around his candidacy quietly transfer their loyalty? Or will the movement fracture under the weight of its own contradictions?
Because that moment is coming.
Politics has a way of testing illusions. It is easy to speak of principle when nothing is at stake. It is much harder when compromise becomes the price of relevance.
Many are about to discover that Nigerian elections are not won on sentiment, outrage, or social media enthusiasm. They are built on structure, alliances, and cold, calculated negotiation.
No amount of online energy can replace that reality. Atiku will never step down his life long presidential ambition for Peter Obi, not even for Kwankwaso. Obi on the other hand may agree on paper to do one term and power goes back to the north, but in real time, he will not do one term if he wins. Everybody knows this…
And then there is the matter of character.
Olusegun Obasanjo knew Atiku at close range, not from a distance, not through speculation, but from the intimate vantage point of governance. In My Watch, he was unsparing and brutal.
In My Watch, in talking about Atiku, Obasanjo wrote:
“What I did not know… was his propensity to corruption, his tendency to disloyalty, his inability to say and stick to the truth… his lack of transparency… and his readiness to sacrifice morality, integrity, truth and national interest for self and selfish interest.”
He spoke of disloyalty. Of inconsistency. Of a disposition that placed personal interest above national considerations. He did not hedge his words.
Those are not statements that can be waved aside. They are on record.
The question is not whether they were harsh. The question is whether the years since have contradicted them in any meaningful way.
If anything, the pattern has only become clearer.
Across political cycles, Atiku has moved with remarkable ease from one platform to another. Each movement explained. Each transition justified. Yet the destination never changes.
It is always the same pursuit. The same ambition. The same insistence.
A man in constant motion, but always in the same direction.
This is no longer about Atiku alone. It is about a political culture that refuses to let go. A system that recycles the same ambitions and expects a different outcome. A followership that sees the cracks but chooses to explain them away.
Nigeria cannot continue like this.
There comes a time when a nation must draw a line. When it must decide that experience is not an eternal licence, and ambition is not a lifelong entitlement.
There is a time to step forward. There is also a time to step aside.
The tragedy of our politics is that too many of those who should know the difference have chosen to ignore it.
And so, every election cycle, we return to the same conversation, with the same actors, chasing the same script, and expecting a different ending.
In ending, I ask a pointed question:
How many of you, running an enterprise, will hire an applicant whose former boss gave such a damning reference as Obasanjo gave of Atiku in his book?
