Aare Amerijoye DOT.B

They buried him in 2023. They wrote the obituary, hired the mourners, rehearsed the dirge. Three years later the corpse is on the ballot, the pallbearers are in disarray, and the men who dug the grave are quietly measuring it for themselves.

Let the record be read aloud, and let it be read slowly.

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT BURY

In 2023 Atiku Abubakar was not merely opposed. He was betrayed from within his own house. Five governors of his own party turned their structures against their own candidate. The South withheld its hand. The federal machinery ground in the opposite direction. Every knife that could be drawn was drawn, and most of them came from behind.

He still polled 6,984,520 votes.

Understand what that figure is. It is not the ceiling of a strong campaign. It is the floor of a sabotaged one. It is what survives after the treachery has taken its cut.

A man who cannot be beaten fairly must be beaten crookedly, and a man beaten crookedly is not beaten at all.

Atiku himself has since put it in his own plain words, that his opponents stole the election and have since gone on to steal the economy. He argued that case before a tribunal. He has never withdrawn a syllable of it. Nigerians did not need the judgment to reach their own.

THE ARITHMETIC THEY CANNOT SHOUT DOWN

Propaganda is loud. Arithmetic is patient.

The certified figures from 2023 are these. Tinubu carried 8,794,726 votes nationally, roughly 36 per cent, on the lowest turnout in the history of this republic. Of that, the North gave him 5,587,757 including the FCT. Atiku, hunted from every direction, took 5,233,473 from the same North.

A gap of 354,284 votes. That is the whole northern advantage on which an entire presidency was built. In a region of tens of millions of voters, a margin thinner than the crowd at a single rally.

And look closer, because the closer you look the stranger it becomes. In the North West, Atiku won 4 of the 7 states outright: Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi and Sokoto. Kwankwaso took Kano. Tinubu won 2, Jigawa and Zamfara. Yet when the arithmetic was totted up, the man who won 2 states somehow led the zone. Win fewer states, harvest more votes. Let the statisticians explain that miracle to us. The rest of us have drawn our own conclusion, and we intend to draw it again at the polling unit, under light, with our eyes open.

THE SOUTH WILL NOT SPEAK WITH ONE VOICE

Here is where the fantasy of an APC second term dies.

In 2027 the South does not have one candidate. Open the list INEC has published for 16 January and count them.

Bola Tinubu of Lagos, APC. Peter Obi of Anambra, NDC, with Kwankwaso beside him. Seyi Makinde of Oyo, APM, with Bala Mohammed. Omoyele Sowore of Ondo, AAC. Prince Adewole Adebayo of Ondo, SDP. Donald Duke of Cross River, PRP. Sandy Onor of Cross River, PDP.

Seven southern men on one ballot. Ondo alone has produced two of them. Cross River has produced two. And the party of Awolowo’s successors, the party that once ruled this country for 16 years, now enters the field as a bystander in its own former empire.

Nobody pretends Sowore or Adebayo or Duke will be sworn in. That is not the point and it was never the point. The point is what their presence proves. Every one of them is a hole in the story that the South speaks with one voice and must be given its remaining years. You cannot demand a bloc while fielding a crowd.

And their votes are not nothing, because this race will not be decided by landslides. Sowore will take the young urban conscience vote, the same restless, online, unforgiving constituency Obi harvested in 2023. Adebayo will take the professional and intellectual vote that wants a clean pair of hands. Duke and Onor will cut into the South South from two directions at once, in the very zone Tinubu most needs and cannot win. In an election where the whole northern margin of 2023 was 354,284 votes, scattered hundreds of thousands are not noise. They are the difference.

The South East will not abandon Obi. Pride does not evaporate in one cycle. The South South is a genuine battlefield with no owner and now four claimants. And the South West, that famous fortress, that supposed vault of 7 to 10 million votes, is a myth that collapses the moment anyone opens the INEC record: the entire South West produced roughly 4 million votes in 2023 for every candidate combined. You cannot withdraw 10 million naira from an account holding 4 million. The zone does not contain the votes the boasters are promising, and this time it must share what little it has with Makinde, Sowore and Adebayo, all three of them sons of that same soil.

Now add the hunger. Add the queues. Add the fathers who cannot pay school fees in the very streets where the drums once beat loudest. The iron gates of solidarity have not been forced open. They have simply rusted through.

The South is playing the politics of ego. The North is preparing the politics of power.

Machiavelli left us the sentence for this moment in the Discourses: the wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

COUNT THE HEADS BEFORE YOU COUNT THE VOTES

Now leave rhetoric aside and look at the register itself, because the register is the only thing in this contest that cannot be spun.

For 2023 INEC published a national roll of 93,469,008. Broken down by zone: North West 22,255,562, South West 17,958,966, North Central 15,363,731, South South 14,440,714, North East 12,542,429, South East 10,907,606.

Add the three northern zones and you get 50,161,722. Add the three southern zones and you get 43,307,286.

The North enters this election with 6,854,436 more registered voters than the South. Before a single argument is made, before a single rally is held, the ground is already tilted, and it is not tilted towards Lagos.

Now look at what the Continuous Voter Registration did to that gap. INEC reported more than 10.18 million completed registrations across the three phases that closed on 26 July 2026, still subject to claims, objections and de-duplication before the final roll is struck. On the phase figures the commission released, the North West alone led all 6 zones with 1,560,531 new voters, more than double the South West’s 758,170, and the 3 northern zones together took roughly 3.1 million against the South’s roughly 2.36 million.

The gap did not close. It widened.

The South is arguing about who deserves the presidency. The North is quietly filling the register.

Now put the two halves together, and understand precisely what this means, because it is more modest than our opponents fear and more fatal than they realise.

Nobody here claims Atiku will defeat Tinubu in the South. That is not the assignment and it never was. The assignment is simply this: the South will not be delivered to him in one parcel. In 2023, with the South less divided than it is today, Tinubu drew only 3,206,969 southern votes out of a southern register of 43.3 million. That is his true southern strength. That is the whole of it. And this time he must share that shrinking ground with 6 other southern candidates while hunger does its own quiet campaigning in every market in Ibadan, Aba, Warri and Ikorodu.

So the votes he has already spent in his imagination, the ones he assumes will be conveniently stacked behind him because he is a son of the South, will simply not arrive. He does not need to be beaten in the South. He only needs not to be handed it. The ballot has already seen to that.

Then he must turn to the North for the balance, and the North is where his account is closing. His 5,587,757 northern votes in 2023 were borrowed on a promise. That promise has been answered with fuel queues, food prices, kidnapped and murdered generals, and a region that believes it was used to build a government and then shown the door. Men do not lend twice to a debtor who has not paid the first time.

That is the whole equation. A larger northern register consolidating behind one northern candidate, and a smaller southern register splitting 7 ways behind a man whose northern credit has run out.

THE NORTH HAS ONE NAME ON ITS TONGUE

Now turn north, and count the candidates.

Tinubu is southern. Obi is southern. Makinde is southern. Sowore, Adebayo, Duke and Onor are southern. Of every candidate in this race carrying a national structure, a national brand and the machinery to reach 36 states and the FCT, exactly one is a northerner, and his name is Atiku Abubakar.

That is not a talking point. That is the structure of the contest. A region that has watched fuel, food and security collapse together, that buried a retired major general taken in his own country and held until he died in captivity, that has been told for 3 years to be patient with a hunger that keeps deepening, now has exactly one of its own to vote for.

Above 5.2 million came out of the North for Atiku in 2023 while his own party was working against him. With that sabotage removed, with the APC’s northern bloc bleeding into his column, with no rival northern candidate to divide the ground, a northern harvest of 9 million is not a boast. It is a floor we intend to build on.

Add to it what the South will still give him, and the calculation is finished before the campaign buses roll.

THE COURTIERS SHOUT BECAUSE THE KING IS SHIFTING

Listen to the noise, then watch the man. The two do not match.

The propagandists are deafening. Statements pour out of the Statehouse on a weekly rhythm. The Information Minister takes to the newspapers to argue against feeding the poor. Aides queue up to explain that the hunger you felt this morning is a rumour and that anyone who names it is an enemy of the state. When the Catholic Bishops carried the country’s grief to Aso Rock in July they were told the nation is not bleeding, and when Cardinal Onaiyekan repeated in public what had been said in private, the Presidency turned on the messenger and accused a churchman of abusing his clerical privilege.

That is not the conduct of a government expecting to win. That is the conduct of a government that has already done the counting and does not like the answer.

Now watch the President himself. A man secure in the affection of the people does not need 31 of the 36 states gathered into his pocket before a single campaign bus has moved. He does not need to answer a rival’s welfare pledge with a sneer about serious ignorance. He does not need to speak of wrestling and boxing and meeting men in the field, as though an election were a brawl to be won by whoever swings hardest at the collation centre.

Confidence is quiet. Noise is what men make when the ground is moving under them.

Tinubu is not standing still. He is running helter skelter, from state to state, from platform to platform, from denial to denial, because he can feel the rug sliding out from beneath his feet. And the louder his courtiers shout, the more clearly the country hears the one thing they are shouting to cover: he knows.

THE PARTY IS NOT THE POWER

Then comes the last refuge of the doubters: he has left the PDP, so where is his structure?

Where was that structure when his own governors campaigned against him? Where was it when the party’s machinery was turned into an instrument of his defeat? His votes did not come from politicians. They came from people. Politicians can defect. The hungry cannot defect from their hunger.

And let nobody pretend a new platform cannot win in Nigeria. The APC was barely 2 years old when it removed a sitting President in 2015. In Osun this August, Accord, unfancied and outgunned, faced the full weight of the federal machinery and a documented freeze on state accounts, and still returned Adeleke with 511,067 votes to 444,815, taking 19 of 30 local governments. Parties do not win elections. People do.

Atiku did not change his course. He changed his vehicle. And this one has no saboteurs in the driver’s seat.

The ADC ticket itself was not handed down in a hotel ballroom. It was voted for in the open, in all 8,809 wards of this federation on 25 May 2026, and the party declared Atiku the winner with 1,846,370 votes. Whatever the objections raised afterwards, no candidate in this race carries a mandate collected in daylight across every ward in Nigeria. That is the machinery. It was built by hand.

AND WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?

Anger alone is not a manifesto, so let the record answer.

The last time Atiku Abubakar held executive office, this economy went from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars in 2007. Nigeria exited the Paris Club. Telecommunications were opened. Whatever any man thinks of that administration, nobody has produced a better set of numbers since.

Set that beside today. Inflation at 15.91 per cent in June 2026, food at 17.52 per cent and climbing. Growth of 3.89 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 in a country whose population outruns it. A minimum wage of 70,000 naira worth roughly 47 dollars a month. Roughly 6 in 10 Nigerians in poverty.

And what does he propose? Not slogans. He has committed to restore subsidy support to the citizen, and his own economic team has set out the method: targeted, capped, transparently budgeted, independently audited, moved off the importers and onto Nigerian production, off unverifiable claims and onto verifiable barrels. He has committed to recover the savings that have vanished and to make whoever took them return it. He has committed to welfare as a fundamental duty of government and to security as its twin. And he carries into it the one constitutional conviction he has never abandoned in 3 decades of public life: devolve real power to strong federating units, keep a lean centre for defence, foreign affairs and monetary policy, and let the states compete and grow.

That is a programme. Set it against a slogan and see which one feeds a household.

140 DAYS

There are 140 days to 16 January 2027.

Governors do not win elections. Moneybags do not win elections. Propaganda does not win elections. People win elections, and this time the people intend to guard what they cast: collect the card, verify it, vote early, stay at the unit until the result is pasted, photograph the EC8A, and go home peacefully with the evidence in your hand. No violence. No provocation. Just numbers too large to be edited and witnesses too many to be silenced.

Mandela said it always seems impossible until it is done.

The North is closing ranks. The South is splitting three ways. The arithmetic is finished and only the ceremony remains.

Ọ̀rọ̀ ò mọ àdìyẹ wọn, ọmọ àwòdì, ìyá ló mọ̀ àṣà. The chick cannot measure the eagle’s flight. Only the mother knows what those wings can do.

On 16 January, Nigeria will not be guessing. Nigeria will be counting.

AtikuAmaechi2027 #ADC2027 #GuardYourVote #January16

Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
30 August 2026