The Presidency has taken on former Vice President, Alhaji
Atiku Abubakar, on what has been termed his ‘appeal to emotion”. Presidential
spokesman, Femi Adesina, on Friday took a swipe at the former Vice President
and presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party for allegedly making
efforts to influence the decision in the ongoing legal tussle bordering on the
last presidential election.
In a statement, Adesina described it as “laughable and
progressively pitiable, to see and hear efforts by presidential candidate of
the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the last general elections, Alhaji Atiku
Abubakar, appeal to the emotions of Nigerians, particularly members of the
judiciary, perchance it would influence decision in the ongoing legal tussle
over the result of the presidential poll”.
The statement also reads inter alia:
When the Supreme Court recently pronounced the All
Progressives Congress (APC) candidate as due winner of Osun State gubernatorial
contest, Alhaji Abubakar, a former Vice President, had chided the court, saying
it should have considered “the pulse of the nation,” and reflected it in the
judgment.
That was when the jigsaw puzzle began to fall in place. Were
most of the challenges in the country being orchestrated by hidden hostile
hands, who think such would influence the judiciary, which would consider the
so-called “pulse of the nation” in arriving at judgment on the presidential
poll?
Before and after the Osun State judgment, the PDP candidate
had always been quick to play up negative developments in the country, the
latest of which is the tendentious story by Wall Street Journal, alleging that
about one thousand Nigerian soldiers had been recently killed by Boko Haram and
Islamic State of West Africa terrorists, and secretly buried by Nigerian
military authorities.
The military has duly countered the story, educating the
Wall Street Journal on the hollowness of its publication. But Alhaji Abubakar
has quickly weighed in on the matter, as part of his gambit to whip up
emotions, and perhaps get the judiciary to reflect the “pulse of the nation” in
its judgment.
According to the PDP candidate, who lost the last February
poll by nearly four million votes, as released by the electoral umpire, he
could “not fathom that in the space of a year, scores of great patriots were
killed and buried secretly without their families being told.”
In an apparent afterthought and doublespeak, he added that
he was hesitant to believe that “such grand scale of deceit is even possible
under a democracy, such as Nigeria is expected to be.”
The above, rather than mitigate Alhaji Abubakar’s position,
gives him out as someone who denigrates the country’s democracy, which he was
part of building, in his heyday, before unbridled ambition blinded.
Yes, soldiers fighting insurgency and terrorism are great
patriots. But the same can’t be said of anyone quick to believe any negative
story about his country, however fictive and lacking in verity as the story
could be. Well, except such person had the motive of whipping up negative
sentiments and emotions, so that the judiciary could respond to the “pulse of
the nation and reflect it.”
We have told Alhaji Abubakar and his co-travelers that the
judiciary would always come to conclusions, drawing from matters of the law
placed before it, and not sentiments or so-called “pulse of the nation.”
Therefore, in vain does anybody labour to devalue the
government and its military, thinking it would fall into a grand plan to get
into office through artifice. The campaigns and elections for 2019 are long
over. The country has moved on. And those who know it actually know it.
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