By Timothy Ola Bamgboye

About a year and a half to the next general election, and months before the timetable is released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), politicians and their cronies have begun to warm their ways into the hearts of the electorate, as is their practice. There is no gainsaying the fact that Buhari’s recent two-day state visit to Kano where he was sensationally reported to have told a mammoth crowd that “by what I see today, if elections are contested I will no doubt win it” was geared towards whetting the electorate’s appetite for the impending campaigns.

Atiku Abubbakar’s dramatic defection to the People’s Democratic Party and the intense publicity of his person that came in its wake was undoubtedly aimed at achieving the same effect. Invariably, the two major political parties are telling Nigerians in clear terms that they would again be condemned to the proverbial devil and the deep blue sea as they were in 2015.

Preparatory to the 2015 elections, Muhammadu Buhari, the ruthless dictator with scores of human right abuses to his credit, low leadership profile and dismal creative intelligence on display, was repackaged as the disciplined, incorruptible, and regenerated democrat that would rescue Nigeria from the doldrums. With the 2019 elections at hand, it is Atiku’s turn to be rebranded from Nigeria’s politician with arguably the heaviest weight of financial scandals to the highly cerebral messiah the country has been waiting for.

The Nigerian youth who should be screaming Atikugate to high heavens are the ones championing the Atikulate cause. The recurring singsong is: what does morality matter? Aren’t all politicians the same? Those that are more daring wonder if any court of competent jurisdiction has convicted him of any crime? And one is left to wonder “would our mumu ever do?”

In 21st century Nigeria and in a country of over 170 million Nigerians, some persons still think either character or competence is dispensable for a contender for Nigeria’s grandest political office. We compromised competence the last time, why can’t we compromise character this time, gullible Nigerians wonder. This is the amazingly ridiculous mindset of tons of Nigerian youth. How depressing!

Yet, Atiku Abubbakar was not accused of corruption by a traffic-seeking, nameless blogger but by no less an institution than the United States’ Senate. It was not a careless comment by a five-minute-fame-craving senator but a detailed documented allegation of money laundering and bribery by the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Indeed, the amounts allegedly corruptly cornered by this leading presidential aspirant isn’t some paltry sum but a whopping sum of about $40,000,000, $14,000,000, and yet another $2,000,000.

Worse, during the inquisition into the Halliburton scandal that consumed American congressman, William Jefferson, who already bagged a jail term in the United States of America, the convicted congressman unequivocally named Atiku as an accomplice. If these shocking revelations do not constitute a prima facieevidence of Atiku’s super corrupt proclivities, what else could?

Is it that as intelligent as Atiku is, he does not know that politics is perception? Is it that he is not aware of the legal remedy of salvaging his reputation where he is falsely accused and could not have sued for defamation? Is it that since 2010 when this scandal broke out, all he could do is dismiss these grave allegations with the wave of a hand while steering clear of the United States? Or is it rather that his culpability and sorry state nevertheless, he is very much persuaded that Nigerians are blessed with an exceptionally short memory; and that since our mumurity lives on, he can always get away with anything?

If we are hopeful of making any meaningful progress, and entrenching sustainable development in our polity, we need to begin to think straight as a people. And the change of mindset ought to begin with the youth. If corruption is not taken as one of the fiercest enemies of our national life and tackled headlong, corruption will ultimately destroy us. To tackle corruption, we must build strong institutions; and to build strong institutions, we must elect strong men of repute and good report. And to think there are no such people in Nigeria’s most populous black nation is to be short-sighted.

If Atiku is elected into office as Nigeria’s president, no one needs a soothsayer to know he cannot muster the political will to institutionalize an effective anti-corruption system. As intelligent as he is, he evidently lacks the moral compass to fix the cesspool of institutionalized corruption that has been made to fester right from Nigeria’s birth.

What Nigeria needs now is a breath of fresh air. What we need now is a leader not tied to the self-serving, opportunistic and oppressive ideologies that All Peoples Congress  and Peoples Democratic Party have come to be known for. Never again should we allow political principalities to use the media in restricting the choice of president to either the devil or the deep blue sea. It is time we saw through the charade and the disaster any of Buhari or Atiku is bound to become. It is time Nigerian youths began to devote time, energy, intellect and passion towards pushing a third alternative into our national consciousness. Indeed, it is time we let go of our mumurity.

Timothy, a legal practitioner, writes in from Warri, Delta State