Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
In the grand arena of Nigerian politics, where deception masquerades as strategy and manipulation parades as democracy, we are once again being sold the fallacy of inevitability, the lie that Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the APC are untouchable in 2027. This is not analysis. It is anaesthesia, administered daily to numb a suffering people while a government feeds fat on their hunger.
But history is merciless to thrones built on propaganda. The field for the sixteenth of January 2027 is set. Atiku Abubakar carries the standard of the African Democratic Congress at the head of the broadest opposition coalition since 2013. Tinubu limps to the ballot dragging the heaviest economic record of any incumbent in our democratic history. The reckoning is real, and the verdict belongs to Nigerians.
“The only real failure in life,” said Joseph Fort Newton, “is the failure to try.”
To accept Tinubu’s inevitability is to kneel before the battle begins. Nigerians are done kneeling. A fortress whose foundation is hunger is already condemned.
ONE, THE NORTH WILL FINISH WHAT IT STARTED
The claim that the North lacks the numbers to unseat Tinubu is delusion. Northern votes have decided virtually every presidency of this republic, carrying Yar’Adua and Buhari to power, consolidating Obasanjo’s second term, sustaining Jonathan in 2011, and handing Tinubu his 2023 victory. The three zones with the highest turnout in the federation, the North-West, the North-East, and the North-Central, are all Northern.
Here is the brutal irony. The region that lifted Tinubu into office is the region his policies have punished most savagely, and it is the region that will bring him down. No civilian has ever reached the presidency from the North-East at the ballot box. Atiku Abubakar, a son of Adamawa, answers both the raw arithmetic of Northern numbers and the unfinished business of justice in our federation. The North has the power, the motive, the grievance, and the candidate.
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world,” said Archimedes.
The North, united behind Atiku, is the lever that brings the fortress crashing down.
TWO, THE COALITION, THE APC’S WORST NIGHTMARE MADE FLESH
They say the opposition is too divided to win. Political amnesia. The APC herself was born of the 2013 merger, opposition fragments fused for one purpose. She knows coalitions kill incumbents. It is exactly how she killed one.
The figures of 2023 cannot be argued away. Atiku polled 6,984,520 votes and Obi 6,101,533, a combined 13,086,053. The full anti-APC vote reached 14,582,740 against Tinubu’s 8,794,726. Read that again. Nearly fifteen million Nigerians voted against this man. Fewer than nine million voted for him. He never won the heart of this nation. He won a technicality of division, sneaked through the gap between two opposition columns.
That gap has been welded shut. The ADC is now the consolidating vehicle of the opposition, and the primary proved it with numbers no spin can survive. Out of a registered membership of 3,113,599 across all thirty-six states and the Federal Capital Territory, a staggering 2,527,977 members voted, a turnout above eighty per cent that no party in this republic has ever approached. Atiku polled 1,846,370. Rotimi Amaechi polled 504,117. Mohammed Hayatu-Deen polled 177,120. Seventy-three per cent of every ballot cast, a winning margin of over 1.3 million votes. Set that against the ruling party’s choreographed coronation. One was a stage performance. The other was the largest internal democratic exercise by any opposition party in Nigerian history.
And let us deal squarely with the charade Dumebi Kachikwu is parading. On the eve of the authentic primary, a splinter gathering met for one day at an Abuja event centre, elected itself a brand new chairman that same morning, and by voice affirmation and the raising of one man’s hand pronounced Kachikwu its candidate. No register. No accreditation. No ballots. Not one figure published, because none exists. A man whose entire 2023 national outing was a statistical rounding error now drapes himself in the name of a party whose authentic leadership the courts have settled, decisively, in favour of the structure under which Atiku won. On one side, 2,527,977 verified ballots under a leadership recognised by INEC. On the other, a hall, a hand, and a hallelujah. Nigerians can tell a national movement from a stage play.
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.
The APC copied the coalition formula. In 2027 the original owners have reclaimed it and pointed it at Aso Rock.
THREE, THE LONG BALLOT AND THE GOVERNORS’ BOAST, PROPAGANDA’S LAST TRENCH
I can already hear the rooftop rebuttals. Two boasts, recited like incantations.
First, the long ballot. Obi has fled to the NDC with Kwankwaso beside him. Makinde flies the APM flag. Jonathan is named by one faction of a broken PDP while Sandy Onor carries another. Sowore, Adebayo, Duke, Olawepo-Hashim complete the list. Where, they sneer, is your united opposition?
Dead on arrival. The danger of 2023 was never many names on a ballot. Eighteen stood that year and sixteen were footnotes. The danger was two candidates of near equal national weight splitting one protest constituency down the middle. That condition no longer exists. In 2027 there is one coalition heavyweight with a two-million-vote mandate and structures in every state, ringed by candidacies that are regional by construction. Obi’s rerun is stripped of novelty and momentum, his pairing with Kwankwaso welding two bases that do not transfer. Makinde’s reach ends at Oyo’s borders. Jonathan is hostage to a factional ticket and eligibility litigation. The perennials have never moved a percentage point. None of them subtracts meaningfully from Atiku’s column. Most subtract from each other, and several carve their slices out of the incumbent’s own claimed territories. The fringe has never decided a Nigerian presidential election. It will not start now.
Second, the governors. Let them count their state houses. Then let them remember 2015, when the PDP held more governors, more senators, more local governments, and the presidency itself, and was swept away by a hungry and angry electorate. Governors did not save Jonathan. Governors did not deliver Lagos to Tinubu in 2023, when he lost his own state with every lever of incumbency at his back, and could not hold Kano against a movement. The reason is eternal. On election day a governor casts exactly one vote. The other millions belong to the very people this government has starved, taxed, and devalued for four unbroken years. A governor can hire a crowd. He cannot hire conviction, and he cannot order a hungry man to vote for the author of his hunger.
Against their column of governors stands a column they cannot buy, borrow, or decamp. For the coalition Atiku leads is not an alliance of politicians. It is the coalition of the Nigerian suffering people. Its members are the market woman watching her capital evaporate, the teacher whose salary buys half of what it bought, the farmer afraid of his own field, the graduate hawking in traffic, the pensioner devalued by decree. Its field officers are the commanders of the suffering vote in every ward of this federation, mobilisers and ward chairmen and women and youth leaders who carry the same hunger home at night as their neighbours, and who have resolved that this time the suffering will speak with one voice. You cannot fragment hunger with a long ballot paper. You cannot out-rally it with a procession of governors.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln.
It is the ruling house that is divided against the people it governs. The people are gathering under one roof.
FOUR, THE ECONOMY, THE CRIME SCENE
Their spokesmen will point to a falling inflation rate and declare the storm over. They mistake slower bleeding for healing. The patient is still on the floor.
Yes, inflation has eased from the catastrophic peak of nearly thirty-five per cent this government inflicted in 2024 to 15.69 per cent as at April 2026. But a slowing rate is not relief when prices have already doubled and tripled. The cost of living does not reset. It compounds. The market woman does not eat percentages. She faces the bill, the heaviest any generation of Nigerians has carried, and that rate has now risen for two consecutive months on fresh fuel shocks, exposing the celebrated stability as a thing of paper.
The naira is the crime scene. Tinubu met it near four hundred and sixty to the dollar. It now languishes around one thousand three hundred and seventy officially, worse on the street. Two-thirds of its value gone in three years. That is not policy. That is the silent confiscation of every Nigerian’s savings, salary, pension, and dignity. He removed the subsidy overnight with no shield for the poor and tripled the cost of moving, eating, and surviving in one announcement. And when the suffering became undeniable, the answer was statistics, labour figures redesigned to declare near full employment in a country where our brightest queue at embassies to flee.
Now set the wreckage beside the record Nigerians remember. When Atiku served as Vice President and headed the economic team, the economy grew from about fifty-eight billion dollars in 1999 to roughly two hundred and seventy billion by 2007, debts cleared, reforms delivered, the naira holding its head. Nigerians are not gambling on an unknown. They are recalling a proven steward to retire a proven failure.
No ruling party in our history has survived re-election in the teeth of economic suffering. Jonathan fell in 2015 over an economy far kinder than this one. Tinubu carries a record Jonathan would have called a nightmare.
“A hungry man is not a free man,” said Adlai Stevenson.
In 2027 the masses will vote survival, and survival has a name on the ballot.
FIVE, THE THEOLOGICAL ALIBI
The most cynical argument of all is that God gave Tinubu victory and will repeat it. It is the last refuge of men who cannot defend a record, the outsourcing of failure to heaven. Scripture warns against it. Israel demanded a king against counsel and got Saul and regret. Shechem crowned Abimelech and reaped violence. Rehoboam should terrify this government most. A ruler inherits a weary people, they beg him to lighten their burden, and he piles it higher. Nigerians begged for relief and received subsidy removal without a cushion, devaluation without a plan, taxes without mercy. Scripture tells us how that story ends.
If every victory is ordained, the questions write themselves. Was God against the PDP in 2023? Did God reject Obi? Is heaven now the author of the hunger? Those who hide behind providence have, by their own logic, made God responsible for their failure.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” said Voltaire.
Nigeria’s destiny rests in Nigerian hands, not in the convenient invocation of providence by men fleeing their own record.
SIX, THE SAME-FAITH GAMBLE WILL BE REPAID WITH INTEREST
The Muslim-Muslim ticket of 2023 was never governance. It was cold arithmetic, a calculated insult to the balance on which this fragile federation rests, and the wound has not closed. A nation split evenly between two great faiths was told one half did not matter.
The warning came inside the APC’s own fortress. In Lagos, Tinubu was beaten on his own ground, 582,454 votes to 572,606, in Amuwo-Odofin, Ojo, Ajeromi-Ifelodun, Alimosho. A man who could not hold his backyard asks the nation to believe he cannot be removed from the house. If religion played no part, why the parade of questionable clerics manufacturing acceptance? A clear conscience needs no costume. Repeat the formula in 2027 and the APC meets a Christian community that is alert, alienated, and finished with goodwill, while the ADC fields a candidate of national reach and a balanced ticket built to close the wound.
“Men are governed only by serving them; the rule is without exception,” said Vauvenargues.
A NEW ORDER IS COMING
The APC’s greatest weapon was always a divided opposition. That weapon has been taken from its hands and broken. What remains is mobilisation, ruthless and total. Every ward organised. Every voter registered. Every ballot protected from casting to counting, because vigilance, not trust, is the price of victory.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” said Martin Luther King Junior.
On the sixteenth of January 2027, the arc completes its bend. The myth of invincibility dies at the polling unit, the reign of suffering ends, and Atiku Abubakar takes the oath this nation has owed the North-East, and owed itself, for far too long.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
9 June 2026
