Abubakar Disowns Atiku, By Sam Omatseye

Abubakar Atiku may not have heard of the name Thespis. Or he might have adopted it as his middle name. He was a Greek icon who invented acting. Hence the word thespian, which means acting. It is a tribute to his genius. Originally, the proper translation was pretender.

And the ADC presidential candidate must thank this essayist for this rhetorical excavation. For how do we examine the man on his recent economics. Examine what he had said in the past on subsidy. In 2020, he emoted, “I was demonised for suggesting it.” In July, 2022, he asserted as a PDP candidate, “It is inevitable that it will happen.” In December, 2022, he deadpanned, “I will remove the fuel subsidy.” In June, 2023, he reflects, “we achieved subsidy removal in two phases.” In November 2024, after President Bola Tinubu had removed subsidy, he bellowed, “I have always advocated the removal of subsidy on PMS.” Then, a few days ago, he blurted out, “If I win the presidential election, I will restore the subsidy.”

Tracking his quotes on this subject, we can observe Atiku’s metamorphosis. First, he is self-righteous. Second, he is a prophet. Third, he is Mister Promise. Fourth is his testimonial. Fifth, he is vindicated. Finally, he recants.

If the word pretender were adopted for the theatre, many world-renown actors would never have taken the job, from Ogunde to Zebrudaya. That is why we have the stage. We have refined the effort as an act, and the act as performance. Atiku takes comfort in the deceptive refinement. But we know him when he takes on roles, and shifts like sand dunes in a windswept desert. He was for subsidy before he was not.

For context, let us remember that he has a constant. That is, he wants to be president. Everything else makes him a jellyfish, a wayfarer, a wishy-washy man in a futile search. He has been in PDP twice, in AC, in ACN, in APC, in ADA, in ADC. He has a penchant for travels. With apologies to Cyprian Ekwensi and his novel Burning Grass, Atiku is the Sokugo of Nigerian  politics. That is in the physical sense. He has shown himself a wanderer in ideas, too. Like he has been on ship with subsidy removal until he jumped ship.

Few have really examined what he said about removing the subsidy. He did not say it was bad. He only said he was restoring it because the money was not accounted for. It is just like his deputy, Rotimi Amaechi, who said on television that they are stealing the money. When he was told a list of what was done with the money, he had little else to say than insist the money was being stolen. Without evidence.

In Atiku’s case, he is guilty of surrender. If he did not have a philosophical deviation from subsidy removal, why not fix it? If it is the implementation that is wrong, why not turn it around rather than stop it? It is a reflection of  Atiku’s lack of self-reflection. It is the sort of mindset that made it impossible for them to form a party. Rather, they take over and ruin those who owned it. That is why, rather than improve federal agencies, he sold them for cheap to his friends. When asked why, he said he could not sell to his enemies. That is what  political philosopher Claude Ake calls the “privatisation of the public sphere.” He sold Aladja Steel, sold Daily Times, etc. He does not build. He dismantles. Hence, he wanted to sell NNPC and the refineries etc. Of course, to his friends.

His new move is actually a tribute to Tinubu. He says he is not against the policy. He just wants to remove it. He needs to answer whether he would return state government’s allocation, for instance, Osun to N4 billion from 16 billion? Or he has been aching over the serenading words of Nasarawa State Governor Sule over how it helped him set up the biggest lithium factory on the continent? Or he will give Dangote money to keep his fuel price down so the billionaire will now compete with Elon Musk for the world’s number one rich? He will put on hold the Sokoto-Badagry and Lagos-Calabar coastal highways? What of NELFUND?

Atiku wants us to go back to when we were borrowing to run the government, or what is known as ways and means. We racked up as at 2023 over N27 trillion  in debt. For those who need to know, ways and means is different from borrowing from IMF. In the case of borrowing, we take other people’s money. You can or cannot pay. As Donald Trump once said, if you borrow a thousand dollars, it is your problem. If you owe a bank a million dollars, it is the bank’s problem. They will look for how to get the money. They need you alive and well to repay.

If you borrow from yourself, a la ways and means, it means you are printing money. It is economic cannibalism, a nation eating its own flesh. How do you pay yourself when you have no means to get resources. That situation brought Venezuela to its knees. It engendered the Great Depression in Europe after what was known as the Locarno Honeymoon when European banks borrowed themselves into misery.

That is what Atiku is promising. After restoring subsidy, he will have to borrow in order to borrow because he will have no resources to keep the country. Goodluck with any creditors after it becomes impossible to continue with ways and means. Even printing, as we have seen, has its deadline. In the context, John Maynard Keynes, the theorist that saved the world from depression, asserted that “in the long run, we are all dead.”

If Atiku borrows to borrow, it leads to burrowing. In the end, we all we bury our heads in the sand. He forgets that even if he restores subsidy today, the seller of rice will not tamp down the price. He should understand the history of inflation in the modern era. If he does not know, I can recommend books for him and his team.

Atiku’s denial of self is tragic. As an actor, he does not know who he is again. It is kind of akin to fears of the avatars of the Frankfurt School and Critical theory, like Herbert Mercuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote a well-known essay after they learned, as escapee Jews to the United States, of the Holocaust. In the essay, Dialectic of Enlightenment, they disavowed Hegel, Kant, Marx and even Descartes and argued that man does not learn from civilisation but has become alienated from himself and nature. As Dostoyevsky writes in his Notes from the Underground, one plus one is no longer life but the beginning of death. That is the root of tyranny because the self oppresses the self. Atiku, by denying his former self, is oppressing himself. Hannah Arendt calls it the negation of negation. Shakespeare describes it as “self from self – a deadly banishment.”

Atiku is playing a game Warri boys used to call “tubu tubu mess am.” It is a game of trial and error. He has embarked on another sort of travel. A man Louis Odion calls Ibn Dubai because of his picaresque restlessness, he is looking for court verdicts around the world against the president. He keeps running upon rocks. That also explains why he is working through Salihu Lukman to invent a G100. A nameless 100. They did not succeed the last time to rally the opposition behind him in Ibadan. They have become like the furies in Aeschylus’ play. The Furies are the children of castration in Greek myth. They just want revenge but they lose in court as Greek playwright and poet Aeschylus’ Oresteia Trilogy comes to an end. He should in the proposed meeting ask Obi, who they want to subdue, whether he, too, would restore subsidy. It should be the first topic of discussion. Issues before personality, in this instance.

The thing is, Atiku wants to dance in two weddings at the same time.