Sour grapes Having lost the PDP primaries ignominiously to Jonathan, Atiku became a prophet of doom. He said: “those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.” Of course, the only change that is peaceful is the one whereby Jonathan either foregoes re-election or is defeated at the polls. A Jonathan victory was, in the logic of Atiku, an invitation to violent change. But one needs to ask the former vice-president this question: “Would the proposed violent change spare prophet Atiku, who was vice-president for eight years and who is alleged to have cornered juicy public companies from his vantage point as head of the privatization program under Obasanjo?” Perceptions are sometimes more important than reality. Therefore, violent change would also have Atiku as one of its primary targets. For his part, the threats of Muhammadu Buhari during the 2011 election campaign led to widespread violence by his supporters in the North after he lost. They went on a rampage; looting and killing; in spite of the fact that, by all accounts, the elections were adjudged the most free and fair in the history of Nigeria’s current democratic experiment. By the time the mayhem had subsided, over 1000 people had been slaughtered in cold blood, including innocent National Youth Service Corp members, and some 65,000 Nigerians became displaced. Undaunted, Buhari went on to declare in a statement made pointedly in Hausa in a BBC interview that: “If what happened in 2011 should again happen in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood.” Dr Femi Aribisala
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 07:09:53 +0000