Oh, Sarah Palin and Atiku are running!
By Owei Lakemfa
NOBOBY in the United States (US) can ask, Sarah who? Sarah Palin of course! With the former sports caster and half term governor of Alaska, the American presidential elections in 2012 promises to be a ball.
Sarah is chatty and beautiful but with little brains. It is to the credit of the American public that she gets lots of paid speaking engagements; it is not about what she says or has to say, it is how she says it. She is generally incoherent with broken thoughts while her twitter is the butt of jokes for spelling errors and ill thought statements.
But Sarah is running, no not running away, but running for the White House currently occupied by Barack Obama, one of the most intelligent, lucid and compelling speakers in the world. But in American politics, those qualities may not necessarily set both of them apart.
If quality counts in those politics, Sarah who became an albatross around the John MaCain presidential campaign would have drowned, but if anything, she is on the rise! During the campaigns, the MaCain team was quite concerned how to handle a running mate that preferred shopping to rehearsing for her debate with the experienced John Biden.
Once, the team asked her what other countries apart from US make up the North American Free Trade, but Sarah could name none! A trading zone that is made up of US and two neighbours; Mexico and Canada, was of no interest to a Vice Presidential candidate! She also could not name a single news service she relies on.
In any case, all those are in the recent past; what matters now is that she is an undeclared front runner for the American presidency. When asked whether she will run in 2012, she replied in her usual incoherent manner “I’m looking at the lay of the land now, and … trying to figure that out, if it’s a good thing for the country, for the discourse, for my family, if it’s a good thing”.
She had earlier told Fox News that she “would offer [herself] up in the name of service to the public” if “nobody else wanted to step up”. Any day, I will vote for Sarah running because in a world that seems so gloomy, we need comic relief.
In contrast, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar who on Monday emerged tops ahead of other ethno-regionalist and religious champions from the North in the race for the 2011 presidential elections in Nigeria, takes himself serious. He had started out in his political career as a Pan Nigerian nationalist who ran a good race in the presidential primaries of the defunct Social Democratic Party.
It was therefore not surprising that in the post-military rule politics in 1999, he emerged as one of the most powerful politicians in the country, winning the gubernatorial race in Adamawa, and then the Vice Presidential slot.
Atiku between 1999 and 2003 was known to control the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and most of the governors. He grew so big, powerful and confident that he decided to challenge his boss, President Olusegun Obasanjo in the 2003 presidential primaries.
The Obasanjo team had to beg him to allow “Baba” a second term. He backed down, agreed to retain his old position while waiting to be crowned in 2007. That was a big mistake; the big man had not learnt the basic lesson that no man puts his hand on the plough and looks back; he should have thought things through before challenging his boss.
Once Obasanjo got re-elected, Atiku became a redundant and tamed Vice President who was insulted and ridiculed by the Obasanjo boys in cabinet.
Atiku fled the party where he was once boss, and coupled together a new party with unsuspecting nationalists like Bola Tinubu. He later ran back to the PDP, but a new power, Goodluck Jonathan had emerged. When Atiku held sway in PDP, Jonathan was at best, a paper weight who did not count in the PDP calculations.
But when Atiku returned, he found Jonathan a political heavy weight that cannot be defeated in a straight contest, so he combined his weight with those of former military dictator, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, veteran spy, Mohammed Aliyu Gusau and two-term Kwara State governor, Bukola Saraki. But even this was not enough to counter balance the Jonathan weight, so the Gang of Four with Malam Adamu Ciroma, ( a man who has made a successful career, living off government) as their political leader, decided to play the regional card.
Nine unelected, and perhaps unelectable men met and purported to pick for the entire North, the man who will be their political leader, and in their curious way of reasoning, the leader of the entire country in 2011.
The group claims to want to complete the second tenure of the late President Yar’Adua who died during his first tenure!
One point arising from this play of regional politics is that it further fragments into ethnic, sub regional and even religious politics.
While the monkey can claim oneness with the gorilla, when the chips are down, the former remains a monkey and the latter, a gorilla. Babangida and Saraki (who like his father added Abubakar to his name to emphasise his claimed religion and region) can claim to be ‘Northerners’ but in the politics of the North, the former will come to realise that he remains a Kemberi, and the latter a Yorubaman.
Atiku who began his political career as a patriot, has sunk into ethno-regionalism, purporting to represent the pre- Lugard half of the country which he hopes to amalgamate in 2011 with the second half, and then rule as president.
In all these, the country’s unity, welfare and development does not count; what does is power and the addiction that comes to its regular users. Admittedly, one positive thing in the emergence of Atiku from the Gang of Four is the further demystification of Babangida, and the possibility that the country will not be visited in the nearest future by the Babagida holocaust. Nigeria, We Hail Thee!
