Atiku Abubakar is in the tribunals! Why should this be a song? He and
\nhis supporters, after receiving heavy trouncing at the last presidential
\nelection, turned going to a tribunal to a song, a dance; indeed a major
\nachievement. Dazed by the outcome of the presidential election. Atiku
\nstarted the new song of going to the tribunal. He said, over and over
\nagain, that he would go to the tribunal. If he hoped to get a reaction
\nfrom Buhari that defeated him, he was terribly shocked that his song of
\ngoing to the tribunal was treated with such huge snub as has been known
\nof Buhari. In fact, it was only some of his party men who were
\nscandalized by the margin of his loss that advised Atiku not to go to
\nthe tribunal because he was defeated fair and square. But Atiku would
\nhave none of this. He ate and breathed the threat of going to court and
\nmeant the loud but boring repetition of going to the tribunal to be a
\nmorale booster in the face of the humiliation he and his henchmen
\nreceived in that election despite their noisy boasts.<\/p>\n
We heard when Atiku constituted his legal team as a subset of the
\nachievement of going to the tribunal. We heard when his legal team went
\nto institute a case at the tribunal as another subset of Atiku\u2019s weird
\nachievement. All these and numerous others were celebrated with uncommon
\naplomb and publicity by Atiku and his supporters. And then, Atiku went
\nto court. The tribunal proceedings have been carefully serenaded by
\nAtiku and his supporters that you might wonder what really is in the
\nwhole process. Atiku suddenly started talking of retrieving his \u2018stolen
\nmandate\u2019 and even as he and his rain-battered supporters knew that Atiku
\nhas no mandate to retrieve, they hung on to this boast as the tribunal
\ngathered steam and is now rolling in full motion.<\/p>\n
Atiku first anchored his claim of a mandate on the weird contents of an
\nINEC server which is known only to him and his PDP confederates alone.
\nHe claims that a server somewhere belonging to INEC gave him victory; a
\nqueer and horrible claim that has been denied by both INEC and those who
\nshould know. Against the position of INEC, Atiku claims that a certain
\nINEC server declared him winner of the election and chunked out a bogus
\nend figure that favoured him with no further back up. Atiku has no
\ncoherent state by state tabulation of results in his server. He has no
\nlocal government tabulation, no ward by ward tabulation and no polling
\nbooth by polling booth tabulation of the results he shamelessly hawks as
\nbeing from an unknown INEC server that only he and his PDP supporters,
\nespecially his Dubai Strategy members are aware of. Simply speaking,
\nAtiku invested heavily in bubbles in his strange claim of an INEC server
\nwhere results of the 2019 presidential election were transmitted by
\nGod-knows-whom. So embarrassing was that in his so-called INEC server
\nresults, Nigerians only voted him and Buhari and not even a single
\nNigerian voted for the many other candidates that contested the
\npresidential election under several platforms apart from APC and PDP!
\nCan you beat that?<\/p>\n
As his INEC server story refused to fly, Atiku now braced for the
\ndecisive tribunal hearing where he is expected to prove beyond
\nreasonable doubts, his strange claim of a mandate in an election he was
\nbeaten black and blue. That is the process we are in now and beyond the
\nwatery, leaky, cock-and-bull stories that have so far clothed Atiku\u2019s
\nqueer claims is the opportunity to prove, with indomitable facts, that
\nhe indeed won the election. That is the process we are in now. Atiku has
\nhad an 87-years old Ben Nwabueze, one of his most rabid backers, wheeled
\ninto the court room as his leading lawyer and that is where that drama
\nended. Atiku said he will call 400 witnesses to prove his case and the
\ntribunal has granted him 10 days to do so. By the time of writing this
\nreport, Atiku has just managed to call 36 witnesses and he has just
\nabout 4 days left to call the remaining 384! At the last sitting on
\nFriday, his lawyers claimed that his witnesses billed to testify that
\nday, coming from Zamfara were attacked by bandits on the way to Abuja.
\nThey nether provided the identity of those attacked nor where they were
\nattacked. They threw no further light to this sorry claim but then many
\nare wondering if Atiku indeed transports his witnesses from far-flung
\nstates to Abuja on the very day they were slated to appear. What are the
\nchances of a supposed witness slated to testify on a particular day
\nmeeting the tribunal after a journey that was supposed to last for
\nnearly the whole day? Lie, pure lies and pure evasion tactics! Anyway,
\nthe police has said that no incident of attack by any bandit occurred in
\nZamfara nor any person claiming to be Atiku\u2019s witness attacked on the
\nsaid day thereby bursting Atiku and his hopeless legal team\u2019s face
\nsaving white lie.<\/p>\n
Care to know how Atiku and his witnesses have fared at the tribunal so
\nfar? That one has the capacity of provoking a comedy book. So far, the
\nperformance of Atiku\u2019s witnesses at the tribunal has fed a huge industry
\nof comedy and parody. What comes from his so-called witnesses is a
\ncocktail of poorly fabricated stories, forgeries, outlandish lies and
\nsavagery claims that ridicule his case and his state further. One Atiku
\nwitness claimed that Atiku defeated Buhari in Buhari\u2019s Katsina State.
\nWhen cross-examined, he couldn\u2019t even produce one sheet of paper to back
\nup his silly claim. Even then, Atiku\u2019s \u2018INEC server\u2019 didn\u2019t make this
\nclaim as it said that Buhari beat Atiku in Katsina but with lesser
\nmargin than in INEC result. This particular claim led one social media
\ncommentator to make a post that the ban on tramadol is not working!
\nAnother claimed that real results were replaced with forged INEC results
\nand when challenged to produce the real results, he said he didn\u2019t have
\nany.<\/p>\n
One Atiku witness claimed that he transmitted results to an INEC server
\nand when challenged to give details of the results he allegedly
\ntransmitted, he said he didn\u2019t know the details but was concerned with
\ntransmitting results. One claimed that he transmitted results to INEC
\nserver and when asked the code of the so-called server he transmitted
\nresults to, he said he didn\u2019t know. One claimed that he was seeing a
\nstatement he allegedly made and signed to support Atiku\u2019s claim the very
\nday he was called to witness for Atiku. Another claimed that on the day
\nof election, a bomb was detonated at the collation center and he and all
\nPDP members, agents and supporters ran away and APC members changed the
\nresults. When asked how he knew since he claimed to have ran away, he
\nsaid that he hid somewhere and was watching what was happening, although
\nhe didn\u2019t tell us whether the APC members were immune from bomb blast.
\nOne claimed that the results he signed was not the real results, and
\nwhen asked why he signed, he said that he just felt like signing.<\/p>\n
One of Atiku\u2019s witnesses, in fact his chief witness, Buba Galadima went
\nthere to ridicule himself by claiming to be an APC member working for
\nPDP. And on and on and on, the parody keeps mounting. One surprising
\nthing about Atiku\u2019s witnesses is that none has so far passed the
\nintegrity test after being cross-examined. None has tendered half a
\nproof or fact to back up his specious claims. Like Atiku and those
\nmassing around him, it is obvious that his witnesses were drafted to
\ntell fairy tales and how Atiku hopes to employ this to become president
\nshould baffle and jar any decent mind. One would have expected Atiku to
\ncome to the tribunal with proof of how he was rigged out in his polling
\nunit in Adamawa where he was beaten but he did not do that. One would
\nhave expected him to draft his Campaign Director and National Leader of
\nPDP, Bukola Saraki to witness with resounding proof, how he was rigged
\nout in his Kwara State where Atiku hopelessly lost but he didn\u2019t do
\nthat. One would have expected Atiku to call his garrulous supporter,
\nBuba Galadima to witness how he was rigged out in his polling unit where
\nAtiku was beaten by a whopping 750 votes to his own 25 by Buhari but
\nthis old lickspittle rather came to the tribunal to revel and loaf. One
\nwould have expected Atiku to call Obasanjo, his main godfather in this
\nelection to come and prove to the tribunal how he was rigged out at his
\nOwu polling unit where Atiku miserably lost to Buhari but he didn\u2019t do
\nthat. Fact is that almost all Atiku\u2019s backbones in all the zones except
\nSouth East and South South were beaten down to their wards. Atiku didn\u2019t
\ncall these to witness how Buhari rigged him out starting from their
\nrespective polling units, wards, local governments and states but he
\nevaded this in his disgraceful claim of having a mandate. He rather went
\nshopping for cheap witnesses to come to the tribunal to regale the
\nnation with such silly, empty and baseless claims; none of which has
\nsurvived preliminary cross examination.<\/p>\n
With the days for him to call his witnesses drawing close, his lawyers,
\nobviously embarrassed by the jaded parody their case has turned to, have
\nto fork out that bandit attack story to buy time and bring their case to
\nan anti-climactic end. But what is obvious from what has happened so far
\nin Atiku\u2019s much-celebrated tribunal case is that it is a charade; a puff
\nand a silly tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying
\nnothing. In fact, Festus Keyamo (SAN) was even charitable in describing
\nAtiku\u2019s election petition as the most useless election petition in
\nNigeria\u2019s history. But then, many believe that Atiku knows the
\nhopelessness of his petition but mobilized all the drama he did around
\nthe case just to maintain a stranglehold on the 2023 presidential
\nticket. Time will tell on this too.<\/p>\n
Peter ClaverOparah<\/p>\n
Ikeja, Lagos.<\/p>\n