Next year’s presidential election will be fought, won and lost in Nigeria. But Atiku Abubakar is fighting it in America. Determined as a locked jaw, Atiku, who is seeking the presidency for the seventh time, desperately wants to unseat President Bola Tinubu and replace him as Nigeria’s leader next year. Yet, instead of strategically deploying his efforts and resources at home to checkmate Tinubu’s formidable and ruthless election ploys, Atiku is “de-marketing” Tinubu in faraway America, using a lobbying firm to gather and send unsavoury information about his past to the US president and US Congress.
According to the bizarre story, Atiku hired a US lobby firm, Von Battan-Montague-York, L.C, for a staggering sum of $1.2mn to advance his political interests in the US. Last week, the firm said it would soon send to President Trump and Congress “60 pages” of the US Department of Justice’s documents relating to Tinubu’s “alleged involvement in a heroin trafficking investigation spanning the late 1980s and early 1990s”, following which Tinubu forfeited $460,000 in the ensuing civil proceedings. The presidency was apoplectic, describing Atiku’s antic as “an affront to Nigeria’s sovereignty”. In a statement, Bayo Onanuga, President Tinubu’s senior media aide, said: “Nigeria is a sovereign nation, not a satellite of any foreign power,” adding that Atiku’s action was “an attempt to externalise domestic politics and undermine Nigeria’s sovereignty.”
