A Response to Dr. Umar Ardo, Ph.D.
Atiku knows that Obasanjo’s anger is rooted in the foiling of his third term ambition, and that was the point at which the relationship became irreparable.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Venom for venom. For years former President Olusegun Obasanjo has aimed his darts at the man who served eight years as his Vice President, and for years that man swallowed them in silence. That season is over. Days ago Obasanjo turned his fire on Atiku Abubakar once more, calling his choice of him his greatest political mistake and reviving old allegations about his first term, and this time the venom has drawn venom in return. Atiku replies that the bitterness traces to one thing, his refusal to support the tenure extension known as Third Term, a stand he wears as a badge of honour. That quarrel is the ground on which Dr. Umar Ardo now invites us to reconsider when, and why, the partnership died.
Dr. Ardo argues, with the authority of a historian and Villa insider, that the feud began not with Third Term but about September 2001, in the second-term politics, Third Term being merely the battlefield of an older war.
I owe him a frank reply. On his principle, that history must separate origins from triggers, we agree; on his conclusion, we do not. For the record he describes is only a fraction of what transpired, and it rests on an assumption that does not survive scrutiny: that Atiku ever offended Obasanjo at all.
IT BEGAN NOT IN SUSPICION, BUT IN PRAISE
Remember, in Obasanjo’s own words, how warmly it began. He did not inherit Atiku; he chose him. Nominating him on 17 February 1999, he called him a skilful politician and “a suitable bridge across the generation gap in Nigerian politics,” and offered the ticket to the country as a joining of two strong men, two generations, and our two widest gulfs, South and Christian, North and Muslim.
Nor was this the language of convenience. Chroniclers of the period record that the two men admired one another and looked to govern in harmony; that Obasanjo chose Atiku hoping to revive the smooth partnership he once had with the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, and vowed that no one, not even their wives, would come between them. He trusted Atiku with more than words: it was Atiku he sent abroad as Vice President elect to carry his goodwill to the leaders of Libya, Morocco, Angola, Zambia and Egypt. A President who hands his deputy the nation’s first diplomacy regards him not as a rival to watch but a partner to rely on. A man does not lavish such trust on someone he already distrusts.
THE STRENGTH OBASANJO LEANED UPON
The choice was no accident. Atiku came to office carrying the Peoples Democratic Movement, the structure built by Shehu Yar’Adua and led into the PDP by Atiku after his death, the machine at the forefront of Obasanjo’s own emergence as PDP candidate; his selection as running mate was itself a recognition of the network that had produced the victory.
The relationship was one of mutual strength long before it was one of distrust. As the foremost promoter of the candidacy outside the military, Atiku took his decisions with a principal’s authority, and Obasanjo leaned on him, consulting him before the crucial choices and, by the recollection of Atiku’s household, telephoning late into the night for counsel; his purse helped carry the campaign besides. When the chairman Solomon Lar preferred another man for the ticket, it was Atiku whom Obasanjo sent to Jos to win Lar over. That is not the conduct of a rival. It is the service of a partner.
ONE VANTAGE POINT IS NOT THE WHOLE LANDSCAPE
Dr. Ardo rests his case on the vantage point he held in the Villa from 1999 to 2007, and that deserves respect. But with respect, Dr. Ardo, what you saw from your desk was only a fraction of what transpired. The corridors of power are wide, and no single aide walks all of them. The late Professor Babalola Borishade and the late Chief Sunday Afolabi were ministers in that government, both close to the machinery that held the partnership together, Borishade coordinating the 2003 joint campaign and Afolabi its South West direction. Around them stood governors, legislators, party leaders and aides, each seeing a different face of the same relationship. Your account belongs among theirs, not above them, and a fraction, however honestly remembered, cannot carry the weight of the whole.
THE EARLY TENSIONS WERE REAL
To disagree with Dr. Ardo is not to deny facts. Tensions did exist before Third Term, in the second term, in succession, in influence. When the Fourth Republic Senate was inaugurated in June 1999, the PDP caucus favoured Chuba Okadigbo, a leader of Atiku’s own PDM, for Senate President; Obasanjo backed Evan Enwerem instead and asked Atiku to support him, and Atiku did, appealing to the PDM to fall in behind Enwerem, who prevailed by sixty six votes to forty three. The very first contest already showed a President ready to check his deputy’s own structure, and a deputy content to defer rather than resist. But friction is not rupture, and a quarrel that is managed is not a marriage that is ended.
STRAINED, BUT NOT YET BROKEN
Dr. Ardo’s own narrative undoes his conclusion: he concedes that Atiku backed the second-term bid, and that the two contested and won 2003 together. If the bond were broken beyond repair by 2001, how did they run and win as one ticket the year after? Mediation is not undertaken over a corpse; that senior men still laboured to contain the strain tells us the patient was thought to live.
THE CHAMPAGNE, AND THE HAND THAT POURED IT
I will not dispute Dr. Ardo’s account. After the primary that returned him as flagbearer for a second term, a victorious Obasanjo sat sombre, confided that he felt humiliated by quarters he least expected, and warned that after the elections the country would learn who its President was. Take every word as true.
Grant it whole, and it turns in the hand that wields it, for it asks us to pity a man at the moment he was being handed everything. Recall who had made this President. In 1999, when his campaign had run dry and his own people had failed him, it was Atiku who poured in the money and threw the PDM behind him, Atiku who brought in Chief Tony Anenih to revive a dying campaign, and the PDM’s men, from Lawal Kaita and Ango Abdullahi in the North to the ground armies of the West, who delivered the country ward by ward. And in 2003 he was made a second time: Atiku’s stature had grown so commanding that the re-election owed as much to his backing as to the President’s name, and he gave it without stint, throwing his northern structures behind a ticket that swept back with almost sixty two per cent.
So weigh the scene again. A President handed a second term by the very deputy he sat brooding over, muttering of humiliation and vowing the country would learn who was master, is not a President wronged but a spirit that could not be gracious even to the man who made him twice. So read, the anecdote does not indict Atiku but the temperament that would, in its own time, turn on him.
THE ENVY THAT DROVE THE WEDGE
Here Dr. Ardo is right, and I say so gladly. External forces did work to engineer the breach. As Atiku’s stature rose, so did the jealousy of those around the President, courtiers and interests who could not abide a deputy of such reach, working not with daggers but with whispers, feeding suspicion, trading in misinformation, driving wedge after wedge between the two men.
But this concession does not weaken my case; it completes it. If the rift was the handiwork of envious men and outside interests, then it was manufactured, not earned, poison brewed in the corridors and poured into the ear of a President whose temperament, as Awoniyi had warned, left him only too ready to drink it. The envy is a backhanded tribute to Atiku’s standing, and the misinformation is proof there was no true grievance, only one that had to be invented. None of it was an offence by Atiku. It was a wedge driven against him by hands not his own.
THEN CAME THIRD TERM
When the tenure extension arose, it did not add one more quarrel to a list; it changed the ground of the conflict. Until then the dispute had turned on succession. Third Term turned it onto the Constitution itself, onto term limits and the survival of the two-term rule. The amendment was rejected by the Senate on 16 May 2006, under Senate President Ken Nnamani, on a voice vote, after a campaign stained by allegations of inducement and against the opposition of roughly four in five Nigerians. A contest over a successor had become a reckoning over whether the Republic’s tenure limit would hold at all.
A quarrel over succession can be mediated. A quarrel over the Constitution cannot be split down the middle.
This is why Third Term cannot be waved away as the passive stage of an older drama. It was the point at which a containable strain became a permanent breach.
WHAT, EXACTLY, WAS ATIKU’S OFFENCE?
Both the popular account and Dr. Ardo’s revision share a hidden assumption: that somewhere Atiku offended Obasanjo, and we are merely arguing the date. The popular view fixes it at Third Term; Dr. Ardo moves it back to the second-term politics. Neither asks the prior question. What, exactly, did Atiku do?
Look at the record. He accepted the ticket. He won over Solomon Lar on Obasanjo’s behalf. He carried the President’s diplomacy across the continent. He deferred so scrupulously that he warned his own staff never to let him appear to overshadow his boss. And when the second-term question arose, with governors and much of the National Assembly pressing him to reach for the Presidency himself and the Mandela option of a single term urged upon Obasanjo, Atiku set his ambition aside and backed his principal’s return. Even then the hawks around the President schemed to drop him from the ticket, and moved to declare Obasanjo’s ambition while Atiku was abroad; it was Obasanjo himself who, weighing the cost, held the declaration back until his deputy came home. And they won together. Where, in that account, is the wound Atiku is supposed to have inflicted?
The one thing he declined was to lend his hand to an unconstitutional third term, and here the whole vocabulary collapses: to refuse to help a man break the law is no offence against that man, but a service to Nigeria and a defence of the Constitution both had sworn to uphold. Atiku offended no one. What changed was not his loyalty but Obasanjo’s tolerance of a deputy grown too strong to be owned and too principled to be bent. That is not Atiku’s offence; it is Obasanjo’s grievance, and the two are not the same.
And this is no discovery of hindsight. Chief Sunday Awoniyi, an elder who had known Obasanjo for three decades and doubted his temperament for democratic rule, told a newspaper in 1999, before Atiku had served a single day, that Obasanjo exacted trust and loyalty from everyone while keeping faith with no one but himself; he judged him unforgiving and vindictive, his reputation running well ahead of his substance. When Awoniyi carried these misgivings to the candidate, at a meeting arranged by Sunday Afolabi, Obasanjo brushed them aside, pleading that prison had made him a new man. The years would vindicate the elder, not the penitent. The turn against Atiku was no punishment of an offence, but a character running true to a portrait drawn before the government had even begun.
THE MAN LAR WANTED
Test the point against the alternative. The man Lar preferred was Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, the fiery radical of Kano, no man’s echo. He had contested the very ticket Obasanjo won, and served under him only as chairman of the mint, a slight for a former governor. Far from enduring Obasanjo, he spent those years in open revolt: he mounted his own presidential bid in 2003, argued in public that Obasanjo deserved to be probed, and decamped to the Action Congress against the drift toward one-party rule. His was a tongue no principal could have kept beside him for eight years.
Had Rimi been the deputy, the ticket would have shattered within months. It did not, because the man Obasanjo chose was Atiku, who bent where others would have broken and held his peace for eight long years. The marvel is not that the partnership cracked over the Constitution, but that it lasted at all, and that endurance was Atiku’s gift, not an offence.
ATIKU DID NOT STAND ALONE
Nor did Atiku stand alone. That same Awoniyi, the Yoruba Christian the North trusted enough to make chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, and a founding man of the PDP, would himself, when the tenure extension came, write an open letter pleading with Obasanjo to say plainly that he wanted no third term and would return to Ota in 2007. For his candour he received no reply, only the charge that he was no longer a party man; under his hand the Arewa Consultative Forum condemned the bid as a danger to democracy and the rotation of power.
If refusing an unconstitutional third term were an offence against Obasanjo, then Awoniyi offended him, the Northern elders offended him, the Senate that threw the amendment out offended him, and the four in five Nigerians who opposed it offended him too. The charge collapses under its own weight. What Atiku shared with the conscience of the North was never a grudge against a man. It was a defence of the Republic.
AND WHAT FOLLOWED SETTLES THE MATTER
The surest measure of an event is what it leaves behind. After Third Term there was no return to the old equilibrium. Atiku declared his own presidential bid in November 2006, moved to the Action Congress, and was declared ineligible by the electoral commission then under Maurice Iwu. It took the Supreme Court, in Action Congress and Atiku Abubakar against INEC, to hold that the commission had no power to disqualify a candidate, a judgment delivered so near the poll that tens of millions of ballots had to be reprinted within forty eight hours to carry his name. Only after Third Term did the machinery of the state itself turn against the Vice President; a quarrel that had lived in the Villa now played out in the courts and at the ballot box, an escalation unthinkable without Third Term.
Nor is Dr. Ardo’s counterfactual a refuge: that without the second-term struggle there would have been no Third Term cuts both ways, for without Third Term the earlier tensions might well have been managed and survived, as before 2003.
HISTORY IS BIGGER THAN ANY ONE WITNESS
Dr. Ardo has given us a valuable window, and he is right on much: that the feud did not spring from nowhere, that origins and triggers differ, that dramatic events expose tensions long in the making. But a window is not the landscape, and what you saw, Dr. Ardo, was a fraction of what passed in those years. The recollections of Borishade and Afolabi, of governors and legislators and party men, of Obasanjo and Atiku themselves, and the record of the newspapers and the courts, must all be laid side by side before anyone declares the case closed.
And the living evidence stands before us even now. The same Obasanjo who once called Atiku the bridge across our generations, and swore nothing would part them, today calls the choice his greatest mistake. Yet it was this same Atiku who bankrolled him when, by his own public word at the time, the candidate could not boast a hundred thousand naira of his own, and who then delivered him the very North he could not win for himself, rallying the northern governors elect at Kaduna and turning a hostile flank into a pledge, the man Obasanjo’s own campaign remembered as the bulldozer who cleared the road. A man does not travel from praising the bridge to condemning the mistake because his deputy served him too well, but because he cannot forgive how much he owes, or a service he mistook for a betrayal. Twenty years on, it is still Third Term that Obasanjo’s own critics say he has never forgiven, and still the Constitution, not any offence of Atiku’s, at the root of the quarrel.
The friendship began in praise. The tensions were real but survivable. The breach came over the Constitution. And through all of it Atiku offended no one. That is the fuller story, Dr. Ardo, larger than any single desk in the Villa could ever see.
The greatest danger in historical writing is not disagreement. It is premature certainty.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
10 August 2026
