How the APC Peddles Shamelessness as a Political Strategy
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a particular species of audacity that flourishes only in the most fertile soil of impunity. It is not the audacity of the visionary or the reformer. It is the audacity of the man who sets fire to your house and then arrives at your door selling smoke alarms.
Nigeria has seen many political performances. But what the All Progressives Congress has erected around the name of Atiku Abubakar is not performance. It is a monument to shamelessness so towering, so structurally committed to its own contradiction, that future generations will study it as a case history in the corruption of public reasoning.
Let us be precise about what is happening here. A political party whose supreme leader entered the record books of a United States federal court via a confirmed asset forfeiture linked to a narcotics investigation has appointed itself the moral tribunal of Nigerian public life.
The party whose flag-bearer is festooned with unanswered questions about phantom academic certificates, Chicago court depositions, and documented financial irregularities of the most serious kind has stood upon the highest rooftops of the republic and screamed “corruption!” at Atiku Abubakar. The sheer, magnificent gall of it is almost worth admiring.
Almost.
The APC’s assault on Atiku is not argument. It is theatre. And it is theatre performed by actors so encumbered by their own lines that they dare not read the script aloud in its entirety. For if they did, the audience would ask the obvious question: what exactly are you?
What manner of political formation dares prosecute a corruption narrative whilst its own principal is haunted by a $460,000 forfeiture to United States federal authorities, a forfeiture rooted not in tax disputes or administrative errors but in proceeds connected to a narcotics investigation? That is not allegation. That is court-certified, legally binding fact. The documents exist. They do not shift. They do not negotiate. And no volume of manufactured outrage has ever made them disappear.
Atiku Abubakar, for his part, did not cower before these attacks. He counterpunched with surgical devastation. He exposed the ghost secondary school that somehow issued Tinubu a certificate after the man had, by his own account, already completed the studies it was supposed to certify.
He lifted the Chicago veil, laying bare the compounding inconsistencies of a public biography that collapses under even the most elementary scrutiny. He challenged the forfeiture record. He did not whisper these things into diplomatic corridors. He stated them plainly, for the public record, daring his attackers to rebut them with facts rather than fury.
None came. None has ever come.
On 19 January 2019, Atiku Abubakar issued a direct, unambiguous challenge to the Federal Government: produce concrete evidence of corruption against him, or be forever silent. That challenge has never been answered. Not in 2019. Not in 2023. Not today in 2026.
The machinery of mischief keeps churning, but it churns on empty. What it produces is not evidence. It produces noise. And noise, however amplified, remains noise.
Consider the record with cold, prosecutorial clarity. The United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in its February 2010 report on foreign corruption, mentioned Atiku’s wife in relation to certain transactions. It mentioned Atiku’s wife. Not Atiku.
There was no trial. There was no conviction. There was no indictment. The propagandists who cite this report invariably omit those distinctions because the distinctions demolish their entire case.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, an institution that has never lacked for political motivation when the moment demanded it, has investigated Atiku Abubakar repeatedly. It has found nothing. Not because it lacked access. Not because it lacked resources. Because there is nothing to find.
The commission that has prosecuted senators, governors, and ministers on evidence far thinner than what its handlers would love to pin on Atiku Abubakar has returned, each time, empty-handed.
In January 2019, the BBC confirmed that Atiku Abubakar entered the United States. This single fact is worth dwelling upon. For years, the APC and its auxiliaries had propagated the story that Atiku was banned from American soil, that the United States government had shut its doors against him on account of financial crimes. It was a lie so aggressively repeated that many believed it.
Then Atiku walked through American customs and immigration, and the lie dissolved. The APC did not retract it. It simply moved on to the next lie.
INTERPOL maintains no record implicating Atiku Abubakar in money laundering or any transnational financial crime. The United States Department of Justice has never filed a case against him. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an institution renowned for its forensic rigour, has no file on him.
A comprehensive search of Nigerian judicial archives from 1999 to 2025 reveals not a single court that has ever docked Atiku Abubakar on corruption charges. Not one. In a country where political prosecution is practically a contact sport, in a republic where the instruments of state are routinely weaponised against opponents, not a single court has managed to construct a case against this man that survives first principles.
No conviction. No indictment. No charge. No court. The ledger is empty. Draw your own conclusions.
And then there is the matter of Olusegun Obasanjo’s memoirs, which the APC chorus has elevated to the status of holy scripture whenever it suits their purpose. Let us take that document seriously, since they insist upon it. My Watch does contain sharp criticism of Atiku Abubakar. It also contains a characterisation of Bola Tinubu as “insatiably greedy and dangerously corrupt.”
You cannot cherry-pick testimony. Either Obasanjo is a credible witness or he is not. If his words about Atiku are gospel, then his words about Tinubu are gospel with equal force. If his words about Tinubu are “politically motivated,” then his words about Atiku carry exactly the same caveat. The APC cannot have it both ways. That is not argument. That is intellectual vandalism.
Moreover, the same Obasanjo who authored those criticisms of Atiku publicly endorsed him in 2019, stating plainly that Atiku was the best among the candidates with the capacity to make Nigeria prosperous. Was that endorsement “politically motivated”? Or was it a sober, considered reassessment by a man who understood what Nigeria needed more than the APC’s campaign managers ever will?
The APC operatives who cite the 2013 memoir in prosecutorial tones are curiously silent about the 2019 endorsement. Selective quotation of a source you claim to believe is not evidence. It is manipulation dressed as analysis.
Writing a book and calling someone a name is not evidence. It is opinion. Opinion shaped by ambient grudges, bruised egos, and the political calculations of the moment. Obasanjo is not a court. He is not a tribunal. He is not the EFCC, INTERPOL, the DOJ, or the Serious Fraud Office.
He is a former president with his own very considerable history of controversy. Treating his memoir as a legal document whilst ignoring the voluminous institutional record that exonerates Atiku is the kind of reasoning that deserves to be named for what it is: desperation wearing the costume of analysis.
The double standard at the heart of this campaign is so naked it requires no special equipment to expose. When Obasanjo criticises Tinubu, APC loyalists dismiss it as bitterness and political score-settling. When he criticises Atiku, the same loyalists hoist the same passages aloft as though they were tablets from Sinai.
This is not politics. This is the logic of the carnival: everything means what the ringmaster decides it means, and nothing else.
Now hold that mirror steady and look at what stands behind the noise. This is a government that inherited a struggling but functioning economy and delivered, in under three years, a naira so debased that Nigerians queue at bureau de change the way their grandparents queued for water. This is a government that promised to end insecurity and presided over the most spectacular collapse of purchasing power in a generation, with food inflation so punishing that hunger has become a political constituency of its own.
The man whose vice-presidential tenure delivered a 15.3 per cent economic growth rate, the highest in Nigeria’s recorded history, and saw GDP surge from $58 billion to $270 billion, is being prosecuted for corruption by a government that has achieved the precise opposite: a naira in ruins, a middle class in retreat, and a nation that goes to bed hungry. That is not a contrast. That is a confession.
I have reviewed the institutional record across two continents. So have the courts. So have the investigators. The conclusion is the same everywhere: the corruption case against Atiku Abubakar is smoke without fire, sound without fury, allegation without evidence.
Winston Churchill observed that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its trousers on. In the age of WhatsApp broadcasts and social media carpet-bombing, that lead has extended to several continents. But the truth carries more weight than velocity. It always catches up.
Nigerians approaching 2027 are not voting in a vacuum. They are voting after three years of lived experience: of petrol queues and empty tables, of a currency in freefall and a government in denial, of promises that evaporated and a ruling class that grew wealthier as the governed grew desperate.
They deserve a choice grounded in facts, not fabrications. They deserve to weigh a man whose record stands fully in the open against a party whose own leader’s biography cannot survive elementary scrutiny.
The carnival must end. The contradictions must be named. And the Nigerian people must choose: do they continue to reward the architects of their ruin for performing outrage? Or do they elect, with clear eyes and full information, a leader whose record across the vice-presidency, the private sector, and the democratic arena has never once been successfully impeached?
The APC’s record speaks. Atiku’s record speaks. Nigeria must now decide which voice it trusts with its future.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
