Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
They have run out of facts, so they have reached for the oldest poison in our politics. When a man cannot be faulted on competence, on generousity, on record, the bigot reaches for his tribe and the zealot reaches for his faith. Atiku Abubakar is today the target of both, and for one plain reason. He frightens them. A man who unites cannot be fought on the field of ideas, so they have fled to the gutter of ethnicity and religion instead.
Let the record answer them.
THE LIE OF HEGEMONY
They brand him a Fulani hegemonist. It is a manufactured charge, an empty label pressed into service because the truth about the man gives them nothing real to attack.
Hear it clearly. Atiku is Fulani, and he has never hidden it or been ashamed of it. He is also one of the most thoroughly detribalised Nigerians in our public life, a man who has spent his years building across every line of tongue and faith rather than hiding behind them. There is no contradiction in this. A man can honour his own roots and still belong wholly to the nation, and Atiku has proved it again and again.
The charge of hegemony cannot survive contact with his record. Hegemony hoards power. Atiku gives it away. Hegemony serves only its own kind. Atiku has lifted up Nigerians of every kind. The accusation describes the exact opposite of the man, which is why his accusers trade only in the word and never in the evidence.
And what did this supposed hegemonist do the moment power came to him? As a Fulani Muslim from the south of his state, he reached across every line his accusers now weaponise and chose a Christian from the north, Boni Haruna, as his deputy. He did not balance the ticket with a kinsman. He balanced it with the very Nigeria the bigots claim he despises.
THE MAN WHO RAISED OTHERS
The cruellest irony of this campaign of slander is that Atiku is being torn at by ingratitude, when his whole life has been a labour of lifting other men up.
Consider Boni Haruna. Atiku took him under his wing in 1990, a bright young man who wrote his speeches and drafted his policy papers. When Atiku was disqualified in 1991 he did not discard him; he personally arranged for Governor Jolly Nyame of the newly created Taraba State to take the young man as a Personal Assistant. When the democratic structures were dissolved, Atiku gave him a livelihood, installing him as Deputy Managing Director of the Lagos based Sub Saharan Press, publishers of The Week, a seat he held until 1998. He recommended him, not once but twice, for appointment as a state commissioner. And then, at the summit of his own power, he did the unthinkable in our politics. He made the young man his deputy governor, and when he himself ascended to the office of Vice President, he handed Boni Haruna an entire state.
Those who have sat in the room with him know the rest. He once narrated at the inauguration of the Presidential Campaign Council at the International Conference Centre, in the presence of His Excellency Boni Haruna, how he had given Boni Haruna his first vehicle and his first house, placed a whole state in his hands, and asked for one thing only in return. Keep your fingers off the people’s money. That is not the instruction of a thief. That is the creed of a man building a clean successor generation.
And Haruna was not the only one. When Atiku learned that the former deputy governor Sunday Afolabi had been stranded at Ojota and forced onto a commercial bus to Ibadan after a party meeting, he bought the man a car. This is who he is. The ledger of his life is crowded with such entries, a lifetime of them.
His hand has reached far beyond his own region and his own faith. The Tiv people of Benue, a people he shares neither tongue nor creed with, crowned him with the traditional title of Zege Mule U Tiv, the biggest shade of the Tiv people, and when the great flood swept through Benue and ruined the homes of more than 100,000 families, he reached into his pocket and sent relief to the victims through their state government. Ask yourself what manner of hegemonist is honoured by the Tiv and gives to the Tiv in their hour of grief. The question answers the slander.
THE HAND THAT FED THE PARTY, AND THE MEMORY THAT FAILED
Now let us speak of the loudest of his accusers, and let us speak softly, for the facts are heavy enough.
Before the People’s Democratic Party was a force, it was a frail gathering in want of money it did not have. At a single fundraiser in Abuja, Atiku gave 100 million naira from his own pocket and offered to pay the rent of the national secretariat for two full years. He funded committees. He paid the way of members too poor to reach the meetings. He spent more then 500 millions building PDP. In November 1998 he poured a further 130 million naira into the party to secure its victory.
When the controversy came, Atiku did not hide. He stated the bare truth, that the man who would soon be President could not at the time point to even 100,000 naira of his own, and that the funds which floated both the party and its candidate had come from contributors, with Atiku himself foremost among them.
Understand plainly what this means. Beside the soldiers who wanted him, Atiku was the chief civilian promoter of the Obasanjo candidacy. He marshalled the structure that carried the man, lent him the clout of a young and rising politician, and reached into his own pocket to meet the very costs of the campaign that made Obasanjo President. The presidency Obasanjo wore in 1999 was stitched, in no small measure, from Atiku’s loyalty and Atiku’s money.
I will add what those who walked the road with him remember. There was a further burden, 120 million naira at the First Bank, lifted quietly off the shoulders of Obasanjo, who would later set his hand to a damaging report against his own benefactor.
Ingratitude has a short memory. History does not, and neither do we.
JOS, 1993: THE NORTHERNER WHO STOOD DOWN FOR A SOUTHERNER
If you want the one act that buries the charge of tribal hegemony for ever, travel back to Jos in March 1993.
Twenty seven aspirants converged on the Social Democratic Party convention to fight for the presidential ticket. On the first ballot Moshood Abiola led with 3,617 votes, Babagana Kingibe followed with 3,225, and Atiku came third with 2,066. The gap between the two front runners was wafer thin, under 400 votes, and a second ballot was called to settle it.
Here the true measure of the man stood up for all of Nigeria to see. Atiku, a Muslim from the north, was warned that Kingibe, another northerner, might seize the ticket. He could have clung to his bloc and bargained it for himself. Instead, when the leading aspirants rose to address the delegates, Atiku withdrew and threw his delegates behind Abiola, a Yoruba from the south. Abiola took the second ballot with 2,683 votes against Kingibe’s 2,456, and the ticket was his.
Read that again, slowly. A northern Muslim stood down so that a southern candidate could rise, and in the same stroke he helped halt a fellow northerner. That is not hegemony. That is its exact opposite. That is a man who placed the unity of Nigeria above the arithmetic of his own region, and he did it more than three decades ago, long before today’s bigots learned to spell his name.
THE UNIFIER THEY PAINT AS A DIVIDER
When Atiku won the Adamawa governorship on 9 January 1999, taking 329,595 votes against his rival’s 283,957, a margin of 45,638, he did not crow about one group triumphing over others. He named it for what it was, a clear victory for the forces of unity over the forces of division.
Months later the ticket that bore him to national office was sold to Nigerians as the marriage of South and North, of Christian and Muslim, the bridging of the two widest gulfs in our common life. The very man who chose him for that role called him a skilful politician with the advantage of youth, a suitable bridge across the generation gap. A bridge. Even his accusers, in their honest hours, knew precisely what he was.
THE NATIONALIST WHO GUARDED OUR SOVEREIGNTY
Recall too what he stood for while our economy lay in ruins. On the platforms of London, at seminars on development and on Nigeria’s prospects, he did not go cap in hand. He told the world that Nigeria would not surrender her key institutions to a permanent monitoring mission of any multilateral agency with a questionable record. He invited the world to invest on Nigeria’s own terms. And the stewardship he was part of answers for itself, an economy lifted from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars by 2007. Those are not the figures of a plunderer. They are the figures of a builder.
THE VERDICT
So let them rage. One serpent tongue, however busy, cannot pull down what four decades of raising men up has built. Venom from a single mouth does not undo a lifetime of good faith, and the people see clean through it.
They offer Nigeria the politics of blood and prayer mat. Atiku offers the politics of the bridge. They count a man’s tribe and a man’s mosque. We count his works, and his works are a multitude.
This is his time. The narrative of governance in Nigeria is about to turn, and no bigotry dressed up as analysis will hold back the dawn.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
4 June 2026
