The attention of the Diaspora Directorate, Tinubu/Shettima Presidential Campaign Council has been drawn to a statement credited to the Director of Diaspora for the Atiku-Okowa Presidential Campaign Organisation, Prof. Isa Odidi, claiming that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the former Vice President and PDP presidential flag bearer who is currently in the United States ostensibly to meet with some US lawmakers is “the preferred presidential candidate in next year’s elections for the majority of Nigerians abroad.”
Prof. Odidi also said in the statement that because “Atiku is the best prepared and capable leader to turn around Nigeria,” Nigerians in Diaspora would “be encouraged to contribute their quota in skills, resources and governance as it happened during the Obasanjo-Atiku administration.”
We wish Prof. Odidi had given the US trip of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and his musketeers its true colouration, which was yet another negotiated entry visa to the United States (as he did on the eve of the 2019 presidential election) to create the impression that all is well with him and the US authorities.
Whereas the PDP presidential candidate is still a person of interest to that nation’s law courts as he still has a slew of cases to answer. Nigerians in Diaspora should be reminded that it was principally because of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar that Mr William Jefferson, a prominent New Orleans Congressman, spent five years in jail because he told an investor, Lori Mody, who was wearing a wire, that he would “need to give (then) Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar $500,000 as a motivating factor to make sure they obtained contracts for Mody’s company in Nigeria.”
It also would have been more honourable if the Director of his campaign had not said Nigerians in the Diaspora would be encouraged to “contribute their quota in skills, resources and governance experience as it happened during the Obasanjo-Atiku administration” when Atiku’s boss said the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about his vice president that he is pathologically corrupt and a shameless liar in his book “My Watch” that needs not restating here.
Pray, how can an Atiku character be more endearing to Nigerians in Diaspora when his kind is the main reason most of them are still in foreign lands against their wish?
Prof. Odidi is a man of letters who knows that words have meaning. For him to have characterised Atiku’s jesters who followed him to the United States as a “carefully selected strong delegation of His Excellency” beggars belief. We wonder what can be “strong” in the credentials and characters of persons such as Dino Melaye, Reno Wendel Smith Omokri and others.
It must be mentioned that none of the Presidential candidates can be more endearing to Nigerians in Diaspora than Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu not only because of his superlative accomplishments as the Lagos State governor, some of which are quite unprecedented, but also Diaspora Voting that has been captured in his Action Plan, among other Diaspora-related policies and programmes of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
It can now be said without any fear of contradiction that Atiku Abubakar’s arrangee trip to America is yet another desperate move of a drowning man looking for anything, including a straw, to stay afloat. His US visit cannot save him from the imminent shellacking that awaits him in 2023.
Prince Ade Omole is the Director of the Diaspora Directorate, Tinubu/Shettima Presidential Campaign Council.
