Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Cast your mind back over the past year, to the stampede. One after another, opposition governors folded their flags and filed into the All Progressives Congress, until the ruling party, pleased with its haul, took to posting scorelines on its own timeline and boasting that it now holds thirty-one of the country’s thirty-six states.
Read that number slowly, because it is meant to frighten you. It is meant to say that the contest is finished before a single ballot is cast, that power has already been carved up in air-conditioned rooms, and that your thumbprint on 16 January 2027 will be a mere formality.
It is a lie. And the governors who bought into it should think again.
A MAN WHO COULD NOT WIN HIS OWN HOUSE
Begin with the simplest question in Nigerian politics today. If the President is the grandmaster who can arrange any result he wants, why could he not arrange one in the streets he has commanded for more than two decades?
In the 2023 presidential election, Bola Tinubu lost Lagos. He lost the city that is called his fortress, his backyard, the seat of his political empire, to a party that had barely existed a year.
He was not the only landlord evicted from his own compound. In Delta, the home state of the Peoples Democratic Party’s own vice-presidential candidate, the presidential votes went elsewhere.
Now set that record beside the promise being whispered to the defecting governors. They are being told that the man who could not deliver his own ward will somehow deliver theirs. That the man who could not hold his own house at the ballot will hold the entire federation on their behalf.
If he could not do it in Lagos, where his name is written on everything, on what altar are these governors laying down their political futures?
ELECTIONS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE
Here is the truth the powerful keep forgetting, and the people keep reminding them. No party is bigger than the people. No individual, however highly seated, is bigger than the will of a nation.
A governor can carry his own person into a new party. He cannot carry the hunger in his people’s kitchens. He cannot carry the anger at the filling station and the market stall. He cannot deliver, in a sealed envelope, the conscience of millions who have quietly decided that enough is now enough.
In 2023 the people had not yet been pushed fully to the wall, and still they defied the machinery. Turnout was the lowest this republic has ever recorded, and even then the ruling party could gather only about thirty-six of every hundred votes cast. That was a warning shot fired in relative calm.
2027 will be fired in the storm.
A governor may cross the carpet. The people do not cross with him.
THE ARITHMETIC OF SEVEN MILLION PHANTOM VOTES
Watch, too, the desperation that is being dressed up as strategy. The talk from the President’s camp is of harvesting some seven million votes from the South West to blunt the northern tide.
So bring out the calculator. In 2023 the entire South West, all six states together, across every party on the ballot, produced roughly four million votes. You cannot pour seven million from a cup that has never held four. That figure is not a target. It is a fantasy, and everyone doing the sums knows it.
Look no further than Osun. The state his own ancestry is widely traced to, the home of Iragbiji, is no gift resting quietly in his pocket. It is a hard contest, fought out polling unit by polling unit, its verdict lying exactly where every verdict lies, with ordinary voters. A man who cannot simply command his own ancestral soil has no seven million waiting for him anywhere in the South West.
The ground has shifted further since. In 2027 the southern vote splits three ways, between Tinubu, between Peter Obi, between Seyi Makinde, each of them a son of the South. Atiku Abubakar stands as the only presidential candidate the North has put forward. So while the President’s own base fractures beneath him, the North gathers itself behind one man.
No arrangement of governors repairs that arithmetic. No scoreline on a party timeline changes it.
THE PEOPLE ARE WATCHING, THE PEOPLE ARE WAITING
There have been allegations, firmly denied by the Presidency, that this migration of governors was watered by more than admiration, that inducement and not conviction moved some feet. We will let that argument run its course.
Instead, let the government prove its confidence the honest way. Let it guarantee a free, fair and credible election, and then let us all discover whether defecting governors and borrowed structures are worth anything at all against a determined people.
That is a challenge Atiku welcomes. He is not chasing phantom projections or padded scorelines. He is doing the harder and older work, earning the trust of Nigerians in every zone, in the plain language of their suffering and their hope, one honest conversation at a time.
So let the party crow. Let its timelines boast. The people are watching. The people are waiting. And on 16 January 2027, with a guarded ballot and a steady thumb, the people will speak in a voice no carpet crosser can silence.
The result is not theirs to write in advance. It belongs to the people, and it cannot be rigged.
Elections belong to the people. And the people have not yet had their say.
155 days to 16 January 2027.
TheWillOfThePeople #AtikuForNigeria #ADC
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
15 August 2026
