By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
One Christian he raised for a decade. One truth that ends the bigotry charge against Atiku Abubakar forever
Bring the evidence.
That is the one thing his accusers have never been asked to do. For years they have screamed that Atiku Abubakar is a Fulani supremacist, a religious partisan, a man who would seize Nigeria for one tribe and one faith. They shout it on television. They flood it across social media. They have built an industry on it.
And not one of them has ever produced a single fact.
The facts destroy them. They are written and published in his own biography, Atiku, The Story of Atiku Abubakar. Read them once and the lie never recovers.
THE FULANI WHO REFUSED THE THRONE
Start with the men who know him.
Boni Haruna, a Christian who would later govern Adamawa State, said it plainly. Atiku is a non-Yola Fulani from a Chamba heartland, born outside the old power elite that treated domination as a birthright. While that elite measured every man by his nearness to their power base, Atiku stood apart. Haruna called him “more liberal and tolerant”, a Fulani with no taste for the hegemony game.
They call him a supremacist. The Christians who worked beside him call him the man who refused to dominate them.
You cannot indict a man on a charge his own life answers.
THE CHRISTIAN HE RAISED
Now look past the words to the deeds, because deeds are where bigots are exposed.
Atiku did not stumble upon Boni Haruna. He took him under his wing in 1990, a young Christian he chose to invest in. When Atiku ran for the SDP governorship ticket in 1991, Haruna sat on his intellectual team, wrote his speeches and prepared his position papers. Atiku wanted a generational change in Adamawa, and he wanted young men and women like Haruna to inherit the future. Their faith never entered the calculation. Their promise did.
Then Atiku was disqualified in 1991, and watch what a so-called bigot does next. He did not drop the young Christian who could no longer be useful. He went to work for him, persuading Governor Jolly Nyame of the newly created Taraba State to take Haruna on as a Personal Assistant.
It went further. When Abacha crushed the democratic structures, Haruna was stranded. He had lost his mother. He had no money to chase the doctorate he dreamed of. And it was Atiku who lifted him again, handing him the post of Deputy Managing Director of the Lagos-based Sub-Saharan Press, publishers of The Week, a position he held until 1998.
Twice more Atiku recommended him for appointment as a state commissioner. Across nearly a decade, through every fall and every fresh start, one man kept reaching back for Boni Haruna. And not once in all those years did Atiku pause to ask which God his protege prayed to.
A bigot hunts for the line of faith. Atiku spent ten years and never once went looking for it.
THE DEPUTY HE CHOSE
So when Atiku finally won the governorship in 1999, his choice of deputy was no gamble and no token. He was a Fulani Muslim from the south of the state. He reached deliberately across the divide for a non-Fulani Christian from the north, and the man he reached for was the same Christian he had raised since 1990.
A religious bigot does not spend a decade lifting a Christian and then hand him the second highest office in the state.
A VICTORY HE COULD HAVE POISONED
That 1999 contest was a knife fight. Ethnicity and religion, the ancient curse of Adamawa politics, had been sharpened and aimed at him. Yet he polled 329,595 votes against Takaya’s 283,957, a razor margin of just 45,638.
He held the platform. He could have answered poison with poison. Instead he stood in Jimeta and called his win a clear victory for the forces of unity over the forces of division and disunity, then asked the very men who had fought him to take his hand and build one united state.
He had every reason to divide and he chose to unite.
WHAT THE MAN IS AFTER
Strip away the lie and the real question stands clear. What does Atiku actually want for Nigeria?
He wants the betterment of a battered people, and not of one tribe among them. He wants a security architecture that finally guards the life of the Fulani and the Hausa, the Yoruba and the Igbo, the Ijaw and the Kanuri, the Tiv and the Idoma, the Edo and the Urhobo, the Efik and the Ibibio, the Nupe and the Igala, the Berom and the Ebira, and the child of every other people who call this country home, and that protects the property men spend their whole lives building. He wants prosperity that reaches the ordinary home and not the prosperity of a closed circle. Above all, he wants the total rescue of Nigerians from the excruciating hardship into which they have been driven, the hunger, the fear and the despair that now stalk this land.
That is the mission of a unifier, not a bigot. You cannot rescue a nation you intend to divide.
SO BRING THE EVIDENCE
Let them try. Let them name one office he hoarded for his tribe, one Christian he shut out for his faith, one hour when domination was his for the taking and he seized it.
They cannot. It does not exist. What exists is the opposite, written in his own story and testified to by the very Christian he raised to power with his own hands.
Nigeria has suffered enough leaders who carve it into tribes and faiths and share the spoils. It needs a leader whose entire life is the refusal to do exactly that.
On the evidence, in black and white, that leader is Atiku Abubakar.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force
