Alleged Corruption: Atiku mocks Presidency’s China comparison, warns it cuts both ways

By Omeiza Ajayi

Presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Atiku Abubakar, has turned the Presidency’s attempt to draw a comparison with China back on itself, arguing that the strategy has instead placed President Bola Tinubu under sharper scrutiny.

Reacting through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku argued that a presidential spokesman who reaches for China as a benchmark for judging him ends up setting a standard his own principal cannot survive.

“It takes a peculiar kind of unintelligence for a spokesman to set out to drag an opponent before a hypothetical Chinese court, only to end up dragging his own principal into the dock,” he said.

He pointed out that capital punishment remains the maximum penalty under Chinese law for the most serious drug trafficking offences, and maintained that no court anywhere, including in Nigeria, has ever indicted or convicted him for corruption, narcotics offences, or any crime. He described this record as a matter of settled public fact.

Rather than treat the comparison as a threat, Atiku invited the Presidency to apply it to the case of the $460,000 forfeited to the United States Government in a civil forfeiture matter tied to allegations of narcotics trafficking and money laundering.

He argued that Chinese authorities, given their reputation for strict enforcement on drug-related matters, would treat such a forfeiture not as closure but as the opening of an investigation.

Extending the logic further, Atiku suggested that Chinese standards of accountability would equally implicate the administration on unrelated fronts — from a national budget he described as riddled with padding and questionable appropriations, to unresolved allegations against a senior presidential aide over the alleged creation of a fake government agency, to what he called the gap between the government’s “Renewed Hope” promise and the hardship many Nigerians report facing.

He said the episode reflected poorly on the Presidency’s handling of its own messaging, adding that a media adviser’s role is to shield his principal from political missteps rather than create them. He was similarly dismissive of the Presidency’s earlier reliance on a US government reply to diplomatic correspondence, insisting it amounted to routine exchange between sovereign states rather than any judicial finding or vindication.

Atiku argued that accountability, once invoked by reference to another country’s laws, cannot be applied selectively.

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