Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a foundational truth about democratic governance that its practitioners too frequently forget, and its victims too painfully relearn.
Democracy is not a ceremony. It is a covenant. A binding, bilateral agreement between the governed and those entrusted to govern, an agreement that carries obligations in both directions, enforced not merely by law but by the collective moral weight of a people who know their worth.
When that covenant is shredded, when the institutions built to protect citizens from abuse become instruments of that abuse, the system does not simply malfunction. It forfeits its claim to the obedience of the sovereign.
The sovereign, in Nigeria’s case, is 220 million people. And they are no longer patient.
You have paid. Every single one of you has paid. And you know, with the precision that only suffering teaches, exactly what you paid for and who made you pay it.
The Covenant Has Been Broken.
Liberal democracy rests on two pillars that cannot be separated without the entire structure collapsing. The first is individual freedom, the right of every citizen to pursue a life of dignity without arbitrary interference from power. The second is popular sovereignty, the irreducible right of the people to determine, through free and credible process, who sits at the apex of the state.
Under the All Progressives Congress, both pillars have been systematically demolished. Not chipped. Not cracked. Demolished, with the methodical thoroughness of a government that has confused the mandate of the people with a licence to govern against them.
Individual freedom has been hollowed out by economic violence of a scale and speed that has no modern Nigerian precedent. The naira has lost over 70 per cent of its value against the dollar since May 2023. Inflation peaked above 33 per cent. The World Bank documented that more than 26 million additional Nigerians descended below the poverty line in the first eighteen months of the Tinubu presidency alone, a figure larger than the entire population of Ghana, added to Nigeria’s misery ledger in less than two years.
Petrol queues returned with vicious regularity. Electricity tariffs doubled, then doubled again, while load-shedding remained unchanged. Tuition costs at public universities rose beyond the earning capacity of the households those universities were built to serve.
This is not economic reform. This is the systematic destruction of the conditions under which ordinary human life is possible.
And no quantity of presidential media appearances, no choreography of Aso Rock briefings, no volume of APC spin can paper over numbers that the World Bank, the IMF and the National Bureau of Statistics have placed permanently in the public record.
Popular sovereignty, meanwhile, was put on trial in March 2023 and returned a contested verdict that divided the nation’s legal, civic and electoral community in ways that have not healed. The INEC result upload controversy was never satisfactorily resolved. It was absorbed, not answered, by institutional silence.
Distinguished voices in Nigerian jurisprudence and civil society, voices whose credibility is beyond partisan dispute, raised formal objections to the process. Those objections were noted. Archived. And filed, by millions of Nigerians, in the ledger of injuries that compound interest until settlement day.
Settlement day is 2027.
When the Guardians Fail, the People Become the Guardian.
Every democratic society establishes institutions to act as custodians of the covenant, namely courts, electoral bodies, regulatory agencies, a free press and a legislature with genuine independence. These custodians exist precisely because human beings in power are fallible, corruptible and self-interested.
The system works when the custodians hold. The system collapses when the custodians are captured.
Nigeria has watched its custodial institutions bend, one by one, in the direction of incumbency. It has watched regulatory agencies issue decisions that defy commercial logic but align neatly with political convenience. It has watched legislative chambers rubber-stamp executive positions with a speed that suggests pre-negotiation rather than deliberation.
It has watched electoral management bodies whose independence is asserted loudly in press releases but is contradicted quietly by patterns of conduct. It has watched, and it has remembered. Every instance. Every capitulation. Every moment a custodian chose comfort over conscience.
When this happens, when the institutional guardians of democracy abdicate their sacred charge, the people are not left defenceless. They are simply returned to first principles. And the first principle is this: in the absence of reliable institutions, the citizen exercises direct self-help. Not anarchy. Not violence. But the most powerful non-violent instrument available to a sovereign people.
The ballot.
And in 2027, that ballot will be cast by a Nigerian electorate that has paid, in full, the tuition fees of political consciousness. They paid in hunger. They paid in medical bills. They paid in children withdrawn from school. They paid in businesses closed, in savings erased, in futures deferred.
They paid in the quiet devastation of the middle-class professional who once had a plan and now has only a prayer. They paid in the market woman who extended credit she could not afford because her customers had nothing left. They paid in the young graduate who boarded a flight and did not look back, because the country that his parents built and his generation inherited had been rendered uninhabitable by policy choices that protected portfolios while destroying lives.
They are not confused. They are not divided. They are not afraid. They are educated, in the most expensive possible way, about the cost of misplaced trust. And they are coming.
The Record That Cannot Be Revised.
Against this backdrop of documented national suffering, Atiku Abubakar brings to 2027 a record that is not rhetorical. It is audited.
As Vice President between 1999 and 2007, Atiku Abubakar was the chief economic architect of a transformation that took Nigeria from fiscal ruin to continental credibility. External reserves grew from under one billion dollars to over sixty billion. GDP expanded for eight consecutive years. The Paris Club debt that had strangled Nigerian development for two generations was negotiated out of existence.
The privatisation programme, however imperfect in its execution, ended the stranglehold of state monopolies on sectors that needed private energy and capital. These are not campaign claims. They are the documented outputs of governance, verifiable in World Bank archives, IMF reports and Central Bank statistical bulletins. Numbers do not hold political office. They do not defect. They do not lie.
Compare that record against this one: manufacturing sector flight that has seen Procter and Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Nigeria, Sanofi and a procession of multinationals exit or drastically reduce Nigerian operations since 2023. Foreign direct investment inflows that dropped from 1.08 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2022 to figures that make fiscal planners reach for sedatives.
A non-oil export sector gasping for the oxygen of a stable exchange rate that this administration has consistently failed to provide. The numbers do not argue. They simply stand there, immovable, testifying.
Tinubu’s defenders will invoke his Lagos record. Let them. Lagos is one state. It has a port, a financial district, the highest concentration of corporate headquarters on the continent, and an internally generated revenue base that no other Nigerian state can replicate.
Managing Lagos’s fiscal advantage is not the same intellectual and administrative challenge as managing a federation of 36 states, 774 local governments and a population greater than the United Kingdom and France combined. The Lagos model, transplanted to Abuja, has not produced Lagos outcomes. It has produced national ones. And the national outcomes are catastrophic.
When you inherit the most naturally endowed federal system in Africa and return, after two years, a poverty figure that shames the continent, the Lagos argument does not merely weaken. It disintegrates.
The Coalition Mathematics.
Electoral victory in Nigeria’s presidential system requires a particular arithmetic. Fifty per cent plus one vote nationwide, with a minimum of 25 per cent in two-thirds of the states. This is not a formula that rewards regional champions. It is a formula that rewards national politicians, leaders with genuine roots, genuine relationships and genuine credibility across Nigeria’s full geographic and demographic complexity.
Atiku Abubakar is, structurally and historically, the only opposition figure who satisfies this requirement.
In the South-west, voter disillusionment with the Tinubu administration’s economic outcomes has cracked the monolithic bloc that delivered him his 2023 margin. The urban professional class, the artisan economy, the market women and the motorcycle taxi operators in Ibadan, Abeokuta and Akure do not distinguish between Yoruba solidarity and their inability to afford two meals a day.
Loyalty is not unconditional. It never has been. And when a patron delivers poverty instead of prosperity, the political clients begin to calculate rather than celebrate. That calculation is already underway in every local government in the South-west, and it does not favour the incumbent.
In the South-east, strategic calculation has replaced sentiment. Four consecutive years of APC exclusion and federal marginalisation, with a fifth term now threatened, has concentrated Igbo political minds on the calculus of leverage rather than the luxury of abstention.
The Igbo voter in 2027 is not voting with the heart. He is voting with the ledger. And the ledger shows clearly that sitting outside the winning coalition for a decade has cost the South-east federal appointments, infrastructure investment and political relevance. The ADC coalition offers re-entry. APC offers more of the same exclusion dressed in new rhetoric.
In the North, where Atiku’s base has always been deepest, the consolidation underway is not merely personal loyalty. It is the crystallisation of a regional consensus that the experiment with an APC administration untethered from northern economic interests has failed expensively.
Northern poverty indices under APC’s combined eleven years in power constitute an indictment so severe that even the most loyal party stalwart now speaks in whispers about what went wrong.
In the Middle Belt, which has bled most severely from the insecurity and displacement of two consecutive APC administrations, there is no patience left to offer any incumbent-aligned candidate. The farms that were burned, the communities that were displaced, the mass graves that were dug, these are not abstractions on a policy paper.
They are the lived reality of millions of voters whose ballot in 2027 will be cast in the full memory of what this government failed to prevent, failed to punish and failed to acknowledge with the seriousness it deserved.
The ADC is the vehicle assembled precisely for this alignment. A party without the encumbrances of decades-old internal feuds, without the regional ownership contests that fracture the PDP, and with the structural flexibility to accommodate the broad coalition that 2027 demands.
What This Election Is Actually About.
Strip away the personalities. Strip away the slogans. What remains at the centre of the 2027 contest is a question about the nature of the Nigerian state itself.
Is this a republic in which the citizen is the principal and the government is the agent? Or is it a managed territory in which power self-perpetuates, institutions serve incumbency, and the people are consulted every four years as a legitimising formality before being returned to their irrelevance?
Every contract has two parties. The social contract of Nigerian democratic citizenship promised, at minimum, security of person and property, functional public services, a currency worth holding, and a government accountable to the people who elected it.
That contract has been defaulted upon on every single term. Not one of its conditions has been honoured. The roads still kill. The hospitals still fail. The schools still crumble. The lights still go out. The naira still bleeds.
When one party defaults on every obligation, the other party is not merely entitled to terminate the agreement. They are morally obligated to do so.
In 2027, Nigeria terminates the agreement.
Atiku Abubakar and the ADC are the renegotiated terms.
A new covenant. On honest conditions. With a principal who has already proved, in office, that he knows the difference between a mandate and a licence. A principal who rebuilt reserves from nothing, cancelled debts that had lasted generations, and delivered growth that was felt not merely in the boardrooms of Ikoyi but in the markets of Onitsha, the farms of Kebbi and the workshops of Nnewi.
The people have made their calculation. The institutions may yet find their courage. And if they do not, the sovereign will proceed without them.
Because the people have always been the ultimate guardians of this democracy. Not the courts alone. Not the commissions alone. Not the agencies and the tribunals and the pronouncements of those who occupy office without honouring its obligations.
The people. Two hundred and twenty million of them. Educated by suffering. Sharpened by betrayal. Unbowed by a government that mistook their endurance for acceptance.
People Power Democracy.
Not a poster. A result.
And it is coming.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B is the Director General of The Narrative Force (thenarrativeforce.org)
