2027: THE NIGERIAN PEOPLE WILL SAY NO TO AN ESCOBAR.
HAVING TINUBU IN ASO ROCK IS A MISTAKE THAT WILL BE CORRECTED BY THE NIGERIAN PEOPLE.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
On the afternoon of Thursday, 16 April 2026, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu stood before an audience of Renewed Hope Ambassadors at the Presidential Villa and delivered what his handlers intended as a devastating indictment of Atiku Abubakar. He questioned whether Ajaokuta Steel was working. He theatrically asked whether the Delta steel plant had delivered results.
The entire performance collapsed the moment a single question was posed in return.
What manner of man lectures Nigeria about privatisation outcomes when he himself entered the Presidential Villa carrying a documented record of civil asset forfeiture to the United States government on funds that United States federal investigators identified as narcotics trafficking proceeds?
The privatisation of public assets is a policy instrument with a long and respectable global pedigree. The forfeiture of narcotics proceeds to a foreign government is a matter of judicial record. One is governance. The other is evidence.
I. THE FORFEITURE THAT CANNOT BE ERASED
In 1993, Bola Tinubu surrendered 460,000 dollars to the United States government under a civil asset forfeiture agreement. United States federal investigators had identified those funds as narcotics trafficking proceeds channelled through accounts linked to Tinubu. This is not allegation. This is not ADC propaganda. This is court record, filed in the Northern District of Illinois, Case Number 93C4483, accessible to any journalist or government on earth that chooses to look. No criminal conviction was entered. A civil forfeiture was. The distinction matters in law. It does not, however, alter the nature of the funds that were surrendered.
This is not ancient history rendered safe by time. In February 2026, a United States District Court ordered the FBI and the DEA to release their full investigative dossiers on Tinubu, ruling that the agencies’ refusal to disclose was, in the court’s own words, neither logical nor plausible. The files are being released. Nigeria will read them before 2027. The man who wants to rule this country for another four years has live, ongoing, court-compelled disclosure proceedings in Washington DC.
The man carrying that record is now questioning the industrial policy of a former Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of that posture defies description.
Pablo Escobar built roads and football pitches in Medellin. He also flooded the streets with cocaine. The Nigerian people are not required to be impressed by infrastructure built on a foundation that cannot survive forensic scrutiny.
Before leaving the Presidential Villa on Thursday, Tinubu described the ADC convention as a street convention. He intended contempt. He delivered a compliment.
The streets of Nigeria are where a bag of rice now costs what a family once spent in a month. The streets are where graduates queue at petrol stations for work. The streets are where 220 million Nigerians conduct their daily referendum on presidential competence. If the ADC drew its energy from those streets, then Tinubu has correctly identified its source of power and should be afraid of it.
A president who forfeited narcotics proceeds to a foreign government does not possess the moral standing to decide which democratic gatherings are dignified and which are not.
II. THE PRIVATISATION ATTACK: A FORENSIC VERDICT
Ajaokuta Steel Company was not conceived, built, or destroyed by the Obasanjo-Atiku administration. Nigeria announced plans for an indigenous steel complex in 1958. Construction commenced under Shagari in 1979. The mill reached 98 per cent completion in 1994, under the Abacha military dictatorship. Not one day of those forty years fell under Atiku Abubakar’s executive authority.
When the NCP assumed the asset in 1999, it inherited a rusted monument to thirty years of military mismanagement that had passed through Shagari, Buhari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abacha, and Abdulsalami. The NCP did precisely what the Punch editorial board in 2024 and 2025 would later demand as the only rational solution: it sought private capital to do what six administrations had comprehensively failed to do. The concession to GIHL collapsed because GIHL allegedly cannibalized the asset. That concession was terminated in 2008 by the Yar’Adua administration, not by Obasanjo or Atiku. The record of that programme, including its rationale, its methodology, and its outcomes, is documented in detail by Nasir El-Rufai in The Accidental Public Servant. El-Rufai was there. He recorded what he saw. He is now in the ADC coalition.
Here is the fact Tinubu’s speechwriters hoped Nigeria would not notice. In 2022, the Buhari administration paid 496 million dollars to settle the international arbitration that arose from that failed concession. The claim against Nigeria at the point of settlement stood at 5.258 billion dollars. Four hundred and ninety-six million dollars was the discounted price of a privatisation decision that Tinubu now mocks.
Tinubu’s speechwriters were selective in their targets. They chose Ajaokuta and Delta Steel, assets burdened by forty years of military mismanagement before the NCP touched them. They said nothing about Oando Plc, Conoil Plc, Ardova Plc, Indorama Eleme Petrochemicals, Benue Cement Company, or Transcorp Hilton Abuja. Every one of those enterprises emerged from the NCP privatisation programme. Every one of them is operational today. Selective prosecution is not analysis. It is propaganda.
The man who stood on Thursday and mocked Atiku Abubakar for the state of Ajaokuta Steel is the same man whose government is now pursuing its own concession partner for the very same asset, having signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Russian firm Tyazhpromexport in September 2024, while simultaneously exploring Chinese partners because the Russia-Ukraine war rendered the Russian arrangement complicated. This is not a new vision. It is the NCP model, performed again, on the same stage, by the man who mocked the original cast.
The man mocking the NCP for seeking a concession partner in 2002 instructed his own minister to seek a concession partner in 2024. This is not policy analysis. It is plagiarism dressed as contempt.
The hypocrisy extends beyond steel. Atiku Abubakar consistently championed the privatisation of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company and the sale of refineries to credible investors, positions that were resisted in their time. The Tinubu administration has since commercialised the national oil firm, but without the transparency or accountability that genuine reform demands. The man who mocked the NCP’s reform agenda has implemented a version of it on every front, and on every front he has done so with less openness than the original.
Furthermore, the choice of Ajaokuta over the more optimal Onitsha site was a post-civil war political decision taken in 1974, a quarter of a century before the NCP existed. The NCP inherited not only a physically incomplete asset but a structurally mislocated one. Atiku Abubakar did not build Ajaokuta. He did not ruin it. He attempted the only rational solution available. That solution is now the official policy of the man who mocked him for it.
III. THE CONSTITUTIONAL HERESY OF ONANUGA’S DECREE
Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga declared on Thursday that Tinubu must complete two terms and that North-South rotation demands it. This is not a political point. It is an anti-democratic declaration. Sections 131 and 137 of the 1999 Constitution as amended set out the qualifications and disqualifications for election to the presidency with precision and completeness. Power rotation appears in neither section. It possesses precisely zero constitutional force. When a presidential spokesman tells the Nigerian people that their 2027 votes are subordinate to a cartel arrangement negotiated in back rooms, he has not defended a president. He has insulted a republic.
A president is not crowned for eight years. A president is elected, and can be removed by the sovereign will of the Nigerian people. That is not opposition rhetoric. That is constitutional fact.
IV. 2027: THE CORRECTION
Presidential spokesman Daniel Bwala posted on Thursday that Atiku was already a coalition candidate in 2023 and still lost. The argument sounds sharp. It does not survive arithmetic.
In 2023, the presidential vote was split across four competitive candidates. Tinubu did not defeat a unified opposition. He won a plurality in a fractured field, collecting 8.79 million votes while the combined total of his three principal opponents was approximately 14.6 million, nearly double his own tally. The ADC coalition of 2027 is not a repetition of 2023. It is the consolidation of precisely the fragmentation that delivered Tinubu his plurality. Bwala is comparing a divided 2023 to a unified 2027 and hoping nobody checks the subtraction.
The Nigerian people are checking.
The ADC coalition is not a conspiracy. It is a democratic response to democratic failure, encompassing Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi, Nasir El-Rufai, Rauf Aregbesola, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and David Mark. Femi Falana SAN has argued with meticulous legal precision that no provision of Nigerian law prohibits any qualified citizen from contesting any election at any time. The presidency cannot make law by press release. Onanuga cannot amend the Constitution on X.
Tinubu has been through courtrooms in Illinois. He has been through certificate controversies so pronounced that Chicago State University became a recurring reference point in Nigerian political discourse. He has presided over a naira that fell from approximately N460 to the dollar when he took office in May 2023 to over N1,700 to the dollar at its nadir, a destruction of more than 70 per cent of the currency’s value in under two years. He governs a country in which the cost of a bag of rice is a daily referendum on presidential competence. These are not opposition accusations. They are the lived reality of 220 million Nigerians.
A man with live, court-compelled disclosure proceedings in Washington DC does not get to lecture Nigeria about transparency. A man who forfeited narcotics proceeds to a foreign government does not get to lecture Nigeria about governance. A president whose spokesman declares elections subordinate to rotation cartels does not get to invoke democracy.
Aso Rock is not a throne. The Nigerian people hold the corrective authority. And in 2027, they will exercise it.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org | 17 April 2026
