Articulated Lies Don’t Win Elections – Leadershipng

Articulated Lies Don’t Win Elections – Leadershipng

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see through the phoney personality stunts with which the PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar is desperately struggling to get noticed by Nigerians.

Quite apart from the PDP’s legacy of political liabilities that have rendered it an abomination for a return to power, Candidate Atiku’s baggage of political and occupational contraband just cannot get clearance from Nigerians whose eyes have been shining with renewed focus on best attributes of the leader the nation needs since President Buhari’s 2015 emergence changed the agenda radically.

Suddenly, Atiku Abubakar has become a fanciful dancer, shifting and shunting his retired and tired body with visible stress that raises eyebrows and heart beats of surprised spectators. Amazingly, Atiku Abubakar has gate-crashed into the youthful constituency, donning face caps and T-shirts and cajoling his grandchildren to adopt him as an “uncle” instead and let him take them back 16 years.

He has even gone to the extent of mesmerizing his relentless tormentor, with a little help from marabouts, no doubt, and turned the predator of his political fortunes into an unapologetic promoter of his last-ditch presidential bid!

Atiku Abubakar has therefore grabbed the guts to manipulate our collective memory and hoodwink the gullible into actually seeing him and his polluted party as the sole solution to the still lingering myriad problems dumped on the Buhari Administration in 2015. But all right-thinking Nigerians reflecting on these articulated improbabilities, will realize that they are all outcomes of Atiku’s inordinate ambition to rule Nigeria by all means necessary as the icing on the personal cake he has been baking at the national bakery since he was unceremoniously catapulted from provincial to vice-presidential orbit in 1999.

Since then, we have been witnessing Atiku Abubakar’s comprehensive capacity for make-believe, including but not limited to the attempted political subordination of Nigeria’s presidency by gang-up of governors and when that was subsequently squelched by sheer resurgence of presidential political prowess, a tug-of-personal-wars ensued with deleterious impact on the national treasury, not to mention judicial jingoism. This time around, unfortunately, the mental capacity has been outstripped by the dizzying demands of manipulative make-believe which exceeded all our expectations of disarticulated political scheming and intrigue.

Atiku’s memory is the main casualty and the flurry of falsehoods flowing forth from his severely serialized political consciousness is telling, to put it mildly. Atiku, in a disoriented quest for relevance, lied about calling the wife of slain Lt.Col Ibrahim Sakaba until the wife, Seun, denied it asking, “Why the lies? I have not received any call from Atiku please.”

He claimed EFCC raided his children’s home until the EFCC debunked it; he claimed he was not invited to the Peace Accord signing ceremony, until Rev. Hassan Kukah produced an acknowledged copy of the invitation letter to expose the lie; the social media aide to President Muhammadu Buhari, Mrs. Lauretta Onochie, exposed yet another documented Atiku lie about being an orphan whereas in his book, MY LIFE, Atiku said his mother died in 1984 when he was 38 years old, prompting Lauretta to wonder “what’s the point of this lie”?

Alhaji Atiku did not tell Nigerians the truth in the policy document he said he intends to execute during his two terms of four years each, forgetting his promise to Ndigbo of serving only one term. Even on corporate matters, Atiku’s tax returns did not tally with his claim of having about 200 thousand staff on his payroll. At this rate, Nigerians who are alarmed by the extent and frequency of the falsehoods from Atiku Abubakar should take consolation and seek protection of their nation from the unthinkable consequences of an Atiku Presidency by using their PVC to reboot Atiku’s memory at the February polls in case he believes his party’s lies about Nigerians forgetting Atiku’s personal and occupational contraband. That should be sufficient protection from the avalanche of lies that will surely be an embarrassing feature of an Atiku Presidency.

Goodluck, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Port Harcourt, Rivers State.