Atiku’s Grand Diversion and the Mambilla Mirage
By Dr. Sunday Dare
9/18/20262 min read
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s recent theatrical press conference, characterized by haughty condescension and an unbecoming disregard for the high office of the President of Nigeria, is nothing short of self-deprecation.
Stripped of its populist posturing, Atiku’s outburst is a transparent attempt to launder his public image and distract a discerning populace from the suffocating weight of his past.
While the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) arbitral tribunal in Paris continues to expose the dark underbelly of systemic procurement abuse—highlighting a suspicious $500,000 wire transfer from Sunrise Power’s Leno Adesanya to the US Citibank account of Atiku’s former wife, Jennifer Douglas, right around the unauthorized award of the multi-billion-dollar Mambilla Hydro Power contract—the self-styled "diverter-in-chief" prefers to preach unsolicited economic sermons.
Let us never forget what was truly at stake while Atiku and his collaborators played fast and loose with public trust. The Mambilla Hydro Power Project, which should have been a cornerstone of Nigeria’s industrial capacity and a lifeline for Taraba State, was weaponized as a vehicle for private accumulation.
Had the astronomical legal claims of his cronies at Sunrise Power succeeded in Paris, the Nigerian public treasury would have been pillaged to the tune of a staggering $3.38 billion—bleeding a nation dry through a combination of questionable settlement demands and compensation claims for a non-existent project start.
Yet, when confronted with these monumental red flags, a man who genuinely values integrity would descend from his ivory tower to clear his name. Instead, Atiku chooses evasion, hoping that loud rhetoric about petroleum subsidies and recycled populist slogans will erase the documented history of a legacy built on personal ambition rather than national service.
To lecture a sitting president with the unbridled insolence of dropping his first name, petulantly barking instructions, and dictating how governance should be run within a truncated timeline is the height of political hubris.
Nigerians do not need lectures on fiscal management from a political wanderer whose decades-long pursuit of the presidency has been defined by perpetual opportunism. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is doing the heavy, foundational lifting required to restructure an economy crippled by decades of structural inertia and subsidy hemorrhaging.
Atiku’s sudden conversion to the gospel of interventionism rings hollow. This is a desperate strategy by a perennial seeker of power who weaponizes transient national discomforts for electoral mileage.
If his past stewardship as Vice Chairman of the Federal Executive Council and overseer of the nation's economy is any metric, his blueprint is already an open book—one annotated with controversies, privatizations of public patrimony, and international inquiries.
Atiku Abubakar must understand a fundamental truth: political power in a modern democracy is anchored on moral authority. He cannot bypass accountability, wave away judicial and arbitral indictments in foreign capitals, and expect Nigerians to embrace him as an alternative.
Before he presumes to school the administration on how to run a nation, he must first answer the lingering, unpalatable questions of his past. Until then, his grandstanding remains what it truly is—empty noise from a desperate politician whose time has long since passed.
Let him save his unsolicited blueprints for a mirror; Nigeria has looked past the Mambilla mirage, and it will not return to the Egypt of calculated economic pillaging.
Dr. Sunday Dare is the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public communications