B A B A J I D E

ATTENTION: I hope we now understand the reason behind ADC's deafening silence. Forgive me for thinking too deeply. I have always preferred logic and critical thinking to emotional reasoning. Look at the electoral arithmetic. It is no secret that Atiku Abubakar remains a dominant political favourite in the Muslim North. A substantial proportion of his electoral strength is concentrated there. In contrast, religious sentiment is less likely to be a decisive voting factor for him in the South. Now, if APC must reclaim some northern states and secure the constitutionally required 25% in others, Atiku becomes a major obstacle. And that brings us to an important question: Why Atiku and not Peter Obi? Because Obi is a known national favourite with considerable cross-regional appeal. Disqualifying him would be a much harder political assignment, attract greater public outrage and potentially trigger a nationwide backlash. Atiku, on the other hand, presents a different political calculation. Neutralising his candidacy could create an opportunity to fragment or harvest a significant portion of his northern electorate. And tell me, was it really a coincidence that barely 90 days before the election, Bola Tinubu travelled to Mecca and made a public spectacle of his encounter with the Black Stone? The political symbolism was hardly subtle. It was a message to a religiously sensitive electorate, particularly in the Muslim North. APC understands that the game is not necessarily to win hearts and minds everywhere. It is to manipulate the electoral arithmetic sufficiently to secure victory. Consider the possibility: weaken the opposition in the South, eliminate its strongest competing northern structure, and position the incumbent to harvest the resulting political vacuum through persuasion, political alliances or electoral manipulation. If the numbers must add up, Atiku's electorate must be accounted for. But here is where the plot could become even more interesting. The only way to completely deny the incumbent the electoral advantage of Atiku's northern voting bloc would be for Atiku to publicly collapse his political structure in support of the NDC. Yet, in the unlikely event that this happens, would Atiku be dismantling the very political structure that could have stood between Tinubu and a northern electoral advantage? He might inadvertently become an accomplice to the very electoral outcome he would be seeking to prevent. And considering the painfully sluggish nature of our judicial system, I struggle to see how any further legal hurdles could be resolved in time to reverse the political consequences. At the moment, the biggest political victories are not achieved by defeating your opponent at the polls, but by engineering the circumstances in which your opponent defeats himself. 👩🏽‍🦯👩🏽‍🦯👩🏽‍🦯