The APC, Eleven Years of Organised Ruin, and the Crime Called Governance
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Nigeria did not fall by accident. Nigeria was pushed.
Let us dispense with politeness. Politeness is a luxury that 133 million poor Nigerians cannot afford.
What the All Progressives Congress has done to Nigeria over eleven years is not wrong in the way that a miscalculation is wrong. It is wrong in the way that arson is wrong. It is wrong in the way that a deliberate, premeditated, systematically executed assault on a people’s future is wrong.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a president who has underperformed. He is the final, logical destination of a party built not to govern, but to harvest.
They broke it. Deliberately, methodically, and profitably. And they have the audacity to call the breaking a strategy.
ELEVEN YEARS: THE EVIDENCE DOES NOT LIE.
When the APC arrived in 2015, the promise was deafening: Buhari would fix it. The corruption would end. The naira would strengthen. The kidnappings would stop. The power would flow.
The naira that traded at 197 to the dollar when Buhari took office now staggers past 1,500. The poverty headcount that stood at 86 million in 2015 has swollen to 133 million, the largest concentration of extreme poverty on the planet, surpassing India, a country with six times Nigeria’s population.
Boko Haram has metastasised. Bandits control entire local governments. Farmers cannot reach their fields. The North that gave the APC its landslide has become the most dangerous zone for civilians in sub-Saharan Africa.
They promised to fix Nigeria. What they fixed was the outcome, in their own favour, and sent the bill to the people.
LAGOS: THE REHEARSAL.
Before Tinubu broke Nigeria, he had sixteen years to practice on Lagos. He ran it as a personal estate.
The toll gates were private extraction points on public infrastructure. The contracts moved in directions that enriched a network of associates whose connection to the governor was never hidden. It was simply never prosecuted.
When Tinubu left Government House in 2007, he did not leave Lagos. Every governor who followed governed with his permission and answered to his authority.
Lagos was not a success story. Lagos was a rehearsal. Nigeria is the main event. And the same people who celebrated what he did to Lagos are now surprised at what he is doing to Nigeria.
A BIOGRAPHY THAT CANNOT SURVIVE ITS OWN DOCUMENTS.
Tinubu agreed to forfeit $460,000 to the United States government, identified by federal investigators as proceeds of a narcotics trafficking operation. This is not allegation. This is a court-stamped forfeiture order filed in the Northern District of Illinois.
The money is gone. The record stands. What kind of republic installs a man with a narcotics forfeiture on his American record as the custodian of its federal treasury?
Then there is Chicago State University, whose records became so contested in Nigerian courts that the legal battle over their existence became more famous than their contents. A date of birth migrating across official documents like a fugitive. A gender marker that defies biological explanation.
A secondary school certificate referencing an institution whose existence at the claimed time remains a matter of active documentary dispute. He, she, or they of Chicago State University. This is the person Nigerians are asked to call President, Excellency, and Commander-in-Chief.
If you cannot trust the man’s birth certificate, his school certificate, or his financial history, what precisely are you trusting? You are worshipping power in the absence of principle, and calling the worship patriotism.
THE REPORT CARD: MARKED IN THE BLOOD OF THE POOR
The numbers do not campaign and the numbers do not lie.
GDP contracted from $494 billion to roughly $250 billion. The naira collapsed from 197 to over 1,500 to the dollar. External debt exploded from $10 billion to over $42 billion.
Total public debt now surpasses 121 trillion naira, so grotesque that debt servicing consumes more than the entire federal revenue in some months. A government spending more on paying interest to foreign creditors than it collects from an economy of 220 million people.
This is not mismanagement. This is the systematic liquidation of a nation’s future to fund the present consumption of a ruling class that flies private, builds mansions, and delivers speeches about sacrifice with a straight face.
They broke it. Deliberately, methodically, and profitably. Eleven years of evidence leaves no room for any other conclusion.
THE CHEERLEADERS: NAMED AND COMPLICIT.
Do not absolve the enablers.
The bought columnists who call the forfeiture strategy and the falsification genius. The social media mercenaries paid to swarm every critical post, manufacturing trending hashtags for a man whose credentials cannot survive a Freedom of Information request.
The traditional rulers who visit Aso Rock and emerge smiling for photographs deployed as endorsements, having confused the dignity of their thrones with the convenience of proximity to power.
The clergy who preach prosperity gospel to congregations that cannot afford two meals a day, while their private jets are refuelled on the same budget that cannot fund rural clinics.
The professors and lawyers who know exactly what the forfeiture order means, who understand precisely the legal weight of those Chicago State records, and who have chosen, in the most consequential moment of their professional lives, to pretend otherwise.
They are not confused. They are compromised.
History is never kind to those who chose comfort over truth while a nation bled at their feet.
2027: THE BILL IS DUE.
The ADC coalition is assembling around Atiku Abubakar. The combined opposition vote in 2023, before a single alliance was formalised, already exceeded Tinubu’s total by nearly six million.
That arithmetic has not changed. What has changed is the hunger, the rage, and the lived daily grinding experience of a people who were promised renewed hope and received renewed darkness.
The Narrative Force will not be silent. We will name the forfeiture. We will cite the court records. We will publish the numbers. We will name the cheerleaders.
We will repeat the truth on every platform, in every language, until 2027 delivers the verdict that 220 million Nigerians have already written in the currency of their suffering.
Nigeria, the bill is due. And in 2027, the APC will pay it at the ballot box, in full, with interest.
Nigeria did not fall by accident. Nigeria was pushed. And the people who pushed it are about to discover that a people pushed far enough push back.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
