A prominent lawyer and essayist based in Warri, Rivers State, has deemed as unconstitutional and a grave threat to national security and cohesion the presidential ambition of PDP’s Atiku Abubakar over the unsettled controversy surrounding his nationality.
According to Onokpasa, the revelation by Senator Dino Melaye, Atiku’s longtime ally and spokesman, that the former Vice President considers the United Arab Emirates his country home, affirms existing doubts on Atiku’s loyalty – a matter that has been a subject of legal contests in the past – and rules his quest to be president a “violation of our national political ethos and an assault on national cohesion.”
He added that “Atiku, who claims to be from Jada in Adamawa, a town that is deemed in law as just as originally Nigerian as either Sapele, Ile-Ife, Nri, Nok, Bama or Daura, behaves in a manner that suggests he cannot even really be from Jada or anywhere else in Nigeria, for that matter, and, most probably just sneaked across the border from what is today still the Republic of Cameroon to masquerade himself as one of us.”
“Now, thanks to the stupendously garrulous and rather irritatingly loquacious Dino Melaye, we now know that Atiku is an indigene of the United Arab Emirates, UAE, whose actual village or hometown is Dubai, of all places!”
“I would suppose all of us who might have country homes have them in our ancestral communities. If his agent for his stolen primaries and now mouthpiece for his presidential ambition to absolutely nowhere says Atiku’s country home is in the UAE, we must now square up to the danger of our country falling into the hands of an alien enemy.”
“Most certainly as a proud black man I am not going to be ruled over by any Arab. Needless to say, the Nigerian in me cannot possibly succumb to Cameroonian rule. Of course, we cannot expect to have one united country if one northerner hands over to another northerner, more especially so when that northerner stole the turn of the South to produce a President for our country.”
“Simply put, Atiku’s presidential ambition is unconstitutional. It is a violation of our national political ethos and an assault on national cohesion. It is a direct challenge to national unity and therefore a threat to national security. Indeed, Atiku’s obscurantist and esoteric fixation on the presidency of our country is an existential threat to absolutely all of us who are authentic Nigerians for it is the very survival of our country that is presently at stake!”