Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Fear wears many disguises. Sometimes it hides behind silence. Sometimes it hides behind noise. In Abuja today, it is hiding behind noise of the loudest possible kind.
Listen carefully to the ruling party this July and you will hear it. The chest beating. The manufactured triumphalism. The chairman of the All Progressives Congress announcing to journalists that his party is going into the 2027 race with a bloc of over twelve million votes, and declaring, in his own words, that there is no shaking at all. Ministers proclaiming that no opposition candidate can match the President’s achievements. Governors gathering in Kebbi to issue communiqués of total support.
A confident government does not spend its days announcing how confident it is.
A government that has genuinely won the hearts of its people does not need to shout. The people do the shouting for it. What Nigeria is witnessing instead is the political equivalent of a man whistling loudly as he walks past a graveyard at midnight. The whistling is not courage. The whistling is the fear.
A MANDATE BUILT ON A MINORITY
Let us return to the arithmetic, because arithmetic does not flatter and arithmetic does not lie.
In 2023, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was declared President with roughly eight point eight million votes, about thirty seven per cent of votes cast, on one of the lowest voter turnouts in our democratic history. Nearly two out of every three Nigerians who voted that day voted against him. He did not win a national embrace. He won a fractured opposition.
That fracture was his entire victory. Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, between them, polled millions more than the man who was sworn in. Tinubu’s strategists know this better than anyone. Their nightmare has never been the Nigerian people falling out of love with them, because the people were never in love. Their nightmare is opposition consolidation.
And now consolidation has a name, a platform and a candidate.
THE ECONOMY IS ON THE BALLOT
If the 2027 election were a referendum on the dinner table, the government would not campaign at all. It would simply apologise.
Ask the market woman in Ado Ekiti what a bag of rice costs today against what it cost in May 2023. Ask the civil servant whose salary was devoured by the naira’s collapse after the currency was thrown to the wolves of a botched float. Ask the young graduate watching fuel prices multiply after subsidy removal was announced with a shrug, with no cushion, no plan and no mercy.
The Renewed Hope Agenda promised renewal. What Nigerians received was the most punishing cost of living crisis in a generation. The government’s own allies admit it. Even the communiqué of the APC first term governors, while endorsing their principal, conceded the current hardship faced by many Nigerians and pleaded for interventions to ease the burden of the reforms. When your own endorsement letter contains an apology, the verdict has already been written.
You cannot campaign on hope in 2023 and campaign on hunger in 2027.
Nigerians have seen the alternative, and they remember it. Under the Obasanjo administration in which Atiku Abubakar drove the economic team, Nigeria’s economy grew from fifty eight billion dollars in 1999 to two hundred and seventy billion dollars by 2007. Debt was exited. Telecoms were liberalised. Pensions were reformed. That is not nostalgia. That is a record, and records are what elections are for.
THE LAWFARE HAS FAILED
Now ask yourself a simple question. If the President truly believes he cannot be beaten, why has so much energy been expended on the African Democratic Congress?
Nigerians have watched a curious spectacle unfold in the courtrooms. Suits contesting the ADC’s leadership. Rulings and counter rulings over congresses. A commission that suddenly found controversies where a growing opposition party stood. The party has stated plainly that these judgments do not affect its candidates or its primaries, and its leadership has taken the matter forward on appeal with full confidence in the law.
But step back and observe the pattern. Nobody wrestles a ghost. Nobody spends this much effort trying to trip a party they expect to stumble on its own. The sheer intensity of the obstruction is itself the confession. You do not fight this hard against an opponent you believe you can beat at the ballot box.
They are not afraid of the ADC’s problems. They are afraid of the ADC’s promise.
THE ADC IS ON THE BALLOT
And here is the news that keeps the Villa awake. Every scheme failed.
At the very end of June 2026, days ahead of INEC’s nomination window closing, the African Democratic Congress uploaded its presidential ticket to the commission’s own portal, a fact announced publicly by the party’s National Publicity Secretary. Atiku Abubakar, chosen by nearly two million party members in a transparent primary in May 2026, stands as the candidate, with Rotimi Amaechi beside him. The coalition that the ruling party swore would collapse has instead crystallised. David Mark chairs it. Rauf Aregbesola drives its machinery. The heavyweights the APC once relied upon now stand across the field.
The ADC is on the ballot. Say it slowly, because in the corridors of power it lands like thunder. Every plot to keep the opposition off the field has ended where such plots always end, in failure.
SIXTEEN JANUARY 2027
So yes, the President knows. His pollsters know. His governors know, which is why they endorse him with one breath and beg him to ease the people’s suffering with the next. His chairman knows, which is why he shouts about twelve million phantom votes instead of pointing to a single kitchen in Nigeria where life is better than it was three years ago.
Power built on a divided opposition dies the day the opposition unites. That day has come.
On the sixteenth of January 2027, Nigerians will not be voting against a man. They will be voting for their own survival, their own dinner tables, their own children’s future. And they will find on that ballot a party, a coalition and a candidate ready to receive them.
The whistling in Abuja will grow louder between now and then. Let it. Graveyards do not answer whistles. Ballots do.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
14 July 2026
