Ten Shocking Reasons Atiku Will Make the Worst President, By Olusegun Adeniyi

My duty as an enlightend Nigerian is to accept the possibility that everyone who have presented themselves to be voted for as President has got the chance to become President however slim, and that includes Donald Duke, Seyi Makinde and even Sowore, though we know some won’t even win their respective polling units. An academic exercise like this however must give everyone a chance.

Having granted every man his chance, it becomes my duty – as a writer of impeccable talent – to place before the people, plainly, the bouquet of maladies that certain aspirants carry as excess baggage into Aso Rock. And for this series, we begin with the most travelled baggage-handler of them all: Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.

Therefore, Shall I Begin?

10 Shocking Reasons ATIKU Will Be a Tragic Blunder as President

1. HE IS DESPERATE TO TAKE US BACK TO EGYPT

At 80, the 2027 cycle represents Atiku’s political twilight – his final attempt, yet demonstrably his weakest.

For the first time in his long, wandering political life, Atiku enters the field without the safety net of a legacy party apparatus:

No governors, no lawmakers, no inner-sanctum Villa cabal, and no sympathetic central bank to engineer draconian economic policy in his favour. Stripped of structural muscle, desperation becomes his only ally.

He stands, for once, bare-fisted, without an army.

And a general without an army does not fight with strategy; he fights with promises. Any promise. Every promise. Even the rotten ones our forefathers already spat out.

A drowning man will clutch at the edge of a razor.”

“I will return the fuel subsidy.” – He Says.

He knows the calculus of desperation better than most: that the hungry man does not interrogate the meal, he only smells it. He knows the poor will clap before they calculate. He knows the economically strangled will embrace even a noose, so long as it is dressed as a rope of rescue.

But while crying, we also must lose our sight.

When the euphoria of that clap subsides, when delusion finally bows its head to logic, and the people turn to Atiku with the one question every conman dreads – HOW? – Alhaji will be found scavenging in the dark for an answer that was never there.

But let’s help the man or perhaps drag him to the theatre of logic, lest he thinks the entire population is as ignorant as he is.

In 2022, before the curtains of subsidy finally fell, the initial budgetary allocation for fuel subsidy stood at ₦443 billion. By year’s end, it had ballooned – astronomically, shamelessly – to ₦4.39 trillion.

Let us set this figure beside its siblings, that our audience may fully behold the dungeon from which we only just crawled.

The total national budget for 2022 was ₦17.3 trillion. Fuel subsidy alone devoured roughly 25% of it – one naira in every four, burned at the altar of a lie.

You still do not feel the weight of it? Then walk with me a little further.

Consider what the nation budgeted, that same year, for the sectors upon which any serious society builds its future:

Health – N711 Bn
Education – N1.3 Tr
Infrastructure (Works, Transportation, Power, etc) – N1.45 Tr
Housing – N500 Bn

Total – N3.97Tr

The nation spent more to subsidize fuel (₦4.39 Trillion) than it allocated to healthcare, education, housing, and infrastructure combined.

That, in full nakedness, is the dungeon Atiku is offering to walk us back into: a republic where the applause of the moment is bought with the mortgage of the future.

A desperate man is a confused man. And a confused man at the helm will trade a nation’s destiny for the satisfaction of his own unfinished appetite – derailing our vision, chaining us to stagnation, mortgaging tomorrow to settle the debts of his ego today.

We must say NO. Nigerians were not born to be collateral for one man’s lifelong hunger for a throne that has, on seven occasions now, refused him.

Shall I Begin?

Credit : Legendary Joe