Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
On this single day this week, two noisemakers of the same government came for Atiku Abubakar over one subject: fuel subsidy. Nyesom Wike brought his mouth to a road inspection in Abuja. Bayo Onanuga brought Statehouse letterhead. One shouted, one typed. Between them they produced not a rebuttal but a confession, in two voices, and the confession is theirs.
It was a remarkable spectacle: two men, two platforms, two styles of attack and not one serious answer to the central questions before Nigerians. One supplied the heavy noise; the other supplied the stationery. Neither supplied the evidence capable of killing Atiku’s argument.
Let us take the noisemaker first, then the scribe.
THE MAN WIKE CANNOT STOP TALKING ABOUT
There is a certain kind of politician who cannot argue, so he abuses. Who cannot account, so he shouts. Who is handed a microphone to inspect gullies and uses it to chase a man he swears is already finished. That politician is Nyesom Wike.
He called Atiku a “voodoo economist”. He called him “confused”. Then he spent his entire briefing proving he cannot get through a single public appearance without the former Vice President’s name in his mouth. A man does not obsess over a ghost. Wike’s venom is a confession. Atiku lives rent free in his head, and the rent is his peace of mind.
There is something almost comic about the spectacle. The man Wike insists is politically finished somehow remains important enough to occupy his microphone, his briefing and his temper. If Atiku is truly irrelevant, why the obsession? If Atiku is truly finished, why the fury? If 2027 is already decided, why does Wike sound as though someone has just informed him that the race has started?
The harder Wike tries to bury Atiku with insults, the more he advertises Atiku’s relevance. He is not extinguishing the fire. He is standing beside it with a jerrycan of petrol.
HE ATTACKED A POSITION ATIKU NEVER TOOK
Strip away the theatre and the charge collapses on contact. Wike says Atiku wants to “bring back the fraud”. Atiku said no such thing, and Wike knows it.
Atiku has never called for the crude, overnight restoration of the old racket. He has said, for years and on the record, that the removal was necessary but recklessly executed, detonated on inauguration day with no preparation and no safety nets, and left to crush the poor.
This very week he put a model on the table: a targeted, capped, transparently budgeted and independently audited production subsidy, every barrel tracked, built to lower energy costs and drive domestic refining. That is not a return to the old fraud. It is the burial of it. The old regime was opaque, uncapped and unaudited. What Atiku proposes is transparent, capped and audited. It is the exact antidote to the thing Wike pretends to fear.
So the voodoo economist is the one who could not read the policy before attacking it.
Indeed, this is what makes Wike’s intervention so revealing. He did not defeat Atiku’s proposal; he replaced it with a caricature and then attacked his own invention. That is not political argument. That is intellectual evasion dressed up as confidence.
When the substance is too difficult to defeat, attack a version of it that does not exist. When the figures are uncomfortable, change the subject. When the questions are inconvenient, reach for an insult.
PHASED REFORM IS NOT NEW TO ATIKU. IT IS NEW TO WIKE.
Wike wants Nigerians to believe there are only two roads: shock therapy, or chaos. There is a third, and Atiku has actually walked it.
By Atiku’s own account, Obasanjo set up a committee to phase out the subsidy and Atiku chaired it. The design was deliberate and sequenced, phase one, then phase two, then phase three, meant to retire the subsidy in stages so the economy and the ordinary Nigerian could adjust. That reform was to be carried forward by the government that followed. It was abandoned by others, not by Atiku.
And the record of that era of managed reform is not in dispute: Nigeria’s GDP grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars in 2007.
That is the difference between men who build economies and men who inspect gullies. Atiku helped run a government that grew the nation almost fivefold and chaired the very committee charged with reforming subsidy in an orderly way. Wike’s signature achievement is the volume of his own voice.
The contrast could hardly be more brutal. One man is pointing to a history of institutional reform and economic management. The other is pointing a finger at an opponent and hoping the volume of the accusation will substitute for the weakness of the argument.
Wike wants Nigerians to believe that economic reform began with the microphone he currently holds. It did not.
NOW TO THE SCRIBE
While Wike was busy at his roadside, the Presidency decided to put its own comedy in writing. Special Adviser Bayo Onanuga issued a release meant to demolish Atiku. It demolished Tinubu instead. We could not have written a sharper indictment of this government if they had paid us to.
Let us walk through it, scene by scene.
Because once the Presidency itself puts its defence on paper, the contradictions become harder to hide. A microphone can wander. A written statement remains. And this one leaves fingerprints everywhere.
SCHRODINGER’S SAVINGS
In one paragraph, Onanuga assures us there are no savings, that the trillions Atiku asked about live “in his imagination”.
A few paragraphs later, the same man boasts that 15 trillion naira in savings has “gone into the coffers of the three tiers of government”, that states are now fat and happy, and that July delivered a record federation share.
So which is it, Special Adviser? Are the savings a figment of Atiku’s imagination, or the miracle feeding your governors? You cannot cash a cheque you swear was never written. This is Schrodinger’s savings: imaginary when Atiku asks where the money went, and gloriously real when the Presidency wants applause.
If the money does not exist, stop taking credit for spending it. If it exists, publish where it went.
This is not a minor semantic disagreement. It goes to the heart of accountability. If the money is real enough to celebrate, it is real enough to account for. If it is real enough to distribute, it is real enough to trace. If it is real enough to become political propaganda, it is certainly real enough to appear in a ledger.
The Nigerian people are not asking for poetry. They are asking for arithmetic.
THE CONFESSION WEARING A DEFENCE
Then our favourite line. Defending the President, Onanuga writes that Tinubu “only accelerated it by weeks”.
We thank him for the honesty. He has confirmed the entire case against his boss. If the law itself scheduled an orderly removal, with a framework, for the end of June 2023, and the President could not wait those few weeks, could not resist announcing “subsidy is gone” on his very first afternoon, with no cushion for the poor, then the recklessness is admitted in writing. Necessary step. Reckless execution. A responsible pilot follows the checklist. This one kicked open the cabin door at cruising altitude and told the passengers to enjoy the breeze.
There is no hiding behind semantics here. “Accelerated by weeks” is not a defence if the argument is that preparation mattered. It is an admission that the timetable was compressed and the consequences were imposed immediately on people who had not been adequately protected.
The Presidency cannot demand credit for boldness while outsourcing responsibility for the consequences of the manner in which that boldness was exercised.
EXPORTING PRIDE, IMPORTING HUNGER
Onanuga swells with pride that Nigeria now exports refined fuel to Europe, Asia and America. National pride, restored.
Meanwhile the United Nations reports that roughly 80 per cent of Nigerians cannot afford a decent meal a day, and manufacturers count 767 companies dead and hundreds more on life support.
So this is the new pride. We ship fuel to Rotterdam while a mother cannot fry akara for her children. We power the tanks of foreigners and starve the pots of citizens. National pride does not feed anybody’s family.
There is nothing wrong with exporting refined petroleum products. There is everything wrong with demanding applause for exports while ordinary Nigerians are being crushed by the cost of living.
A country does not become prosperous simply because its products cross an international border. Prosperity is measured in the lives of its people.
If the government wants to parade exports as evidence of success, then let it also answer the harder question: what has happened to the purchasing power, security and dignity of the Nigerian family?
You cannot feed the foreign market with national pride and ask the Nigerian household to survive on patriotic slogans.
THE RELIEF PLAN IS TO BUY A NEW ENGINE
Confronted with the suffering, the Presidency unveils its grand plan for the masses. Compressed Natural Gas. Simply convert your vehicle, dear Nigerian, and enjoy fuel 70 per cent cheaper.
Wonderful. And with what money does the man who cannot afford a meal convert his engine? The relief for the poor is to first find money they do not have, then pray that transporters will kindly pass on the benefit out of the goodness of their hearts. That is not an economic policy. It is a GoFundMe.
The absurdity is almost self-parodying. A government creates or worsens an affordability crisis and then presents another expense as the pathway to relief.
The Nigerian worker is told to spend money he does not have in order to enjoy savings he may never see.
That is not how economic relief works.
A RECORD IN A CURRENCY THEY FLATTENED
They wave the July figure like a trophy. Three trillion naira shared. A record.
Of course it is a record. Crush the value of the naira and everything costs more naira, so every nominal figure becomes a “record”. Print the same photograph larger and you have not taken a better picture. You have only used more paper. Ask the honest question in dollars, or in what a market woman can actually buy, and the record shrinks to what it truly is.
A record in nominal naira does not automatically mean a record in purchasing power.
The government can celebrate the size of the number. The market woman experiences the size of her basket.
And that basket is getting smaller.
BOTH OF THEM FOUGHT A SCARECROW
Notice what unites the loudmouth and the letterhead. Neither engaged what Atiku actually proposed.
Onanuga spends paragraphs slaying a “30 trillion naira subsidy windfall” Atiku never claimed. Atiku said plainly: let nobody misrepresent the argument. He did not say 30 trillion was subsidy. He did not say 30 trillion was stolen. He said roughly 30 trillion across the Federation Account needs a full, month by month reconciliation. The Presidency invented a claim, dressed it up, and heroically defeated the thing it had invented. A grown man wrestling a scarecrow he stuffed himself, then taking a bow.
And neither Wike nor Onanuga lays a finger on Atiku’s real plan, the audited, capped production model, because they cannot argue against transparency, so they pretend it was never offered and go back to flogging the dead regime of 2023. You do not ignore your opponent’s actual argument unless it frightens you.
This is the central weakness of their response: they are fighting a man they have rewritten rather than the man who actually spoke.
The scarecrow is convenient because it cannot answer back.
Atiku can.
A LECTURE ON CONSISTENCY, FROM THESE MEN
Wike, of all Nigerians, rose to lecture the country that a leader must not say one thing in the morning and another at night.
This from a man whose whole career is a weathervane. Who has served, betrayed and served again whichever camp fed him, who campaigns for one party and governs for another’s interest. For Nyesom Wike to accuse anyone of inconsistency is for the flood to accuse the rain of being wet.
And note his final incoherence. He declares Atiku finished, 2027 “gone”, the opposition too feeble to matter, then pours his whole energy into attacking that same finished man. You do not empty your gun into a corpse. The ferocity is fear wearing the mask of contempt.
If Atiku is truly finished, Wike should stop campaigning against him.
But he cannot.
That is the punchline.
THE PUNCHLINE THEY WROTE THEMSELVES
Here is the masterstroke of the whole performance. The government, which holds every ledger, every account, every FAAC record, every naira of the 15.8 trillion its own minister celebrated, spent a Minister’s breath and a Special Adviser’s release demanding that the man in opposition produce arithmetic.
Transparency for the challenger. Opacity for the government. Atiku must show his sums to the last kobo, while the Presidency that controls the books answers “where is the money” with insults and a scarecrow. In June 2026 alone, 4.501 trillion naira was reported available, yet only 2.551 trillion was shared. Nearly 2 trillion, in a single month, unexplained.
So we accept the challenge, and we return it. Publish the ledger. Show the deductions. Show the transfers. Show the savings you say are both imaginary and record-breaking. Do that, and this debate ends tomorrow.
There is nowhere to hide from that demand.
The books are not in Atiku’s office.
The ledgers are not in the opposition’s possession.
The government has them.
So open them.
THE RECORD WILL BURY THE NOISE
Atiku made his case on a document, a model and a demand for transparency. Wike answered with playground names. Onanuga answered with a scarecrow. One man brought a plan. The others brought their mouths and their letterhead.
Nigerians paying painfully high prices for fuel, watching the cost of food and virtually everything else climb, burying dreams they can no longer afford, are not confused about who has failed them. They know a confession when they read one, even when it is shouted at a roadside or typed on Statehouse paper.
Let them keep talking. Every insult and every press release is an admission that they have no answer to the only question that matters. We will keep the receipts. And when the accounting finally comes, and it will come, it is not Atiku who will have been struck dumb.
The government can continue producing insults. We will continue producing questions.
The government can continue producing press releases. We will continue producing receipts.
The government can continue producing political theatre. Nigerians will eventually produce the verdict.
WHAT COMES NEXT
None of this ends on a comment page. It ends at a ballot box, on 16 January 2027.
Between now and then, the government will keep sending its criers. Expect more roadside abuse from Wike, more press releases from Onanuga, more figures polished to shine in a currency they themselves flattened. Let them come. Each outing repeats the same tell: loud where they should be transparent, personal where they should be factual, busy attacking a scarecrow while the real question stands unanswered on the table.
Our task is simpler, and it is theirs to fear. We will keep asking the one question the Presidency cannot survive: where is the money? We will hold up Atiku’s plan, audited, capped, transparent, beside their insults, and let Nigerians see which side brought a policy and which side brought a tantrum. And we will take that contrast to every ward, because the verdict does not belong to Wike’s microphone or Onanuga’s letterhead. It belongs to the market woman, the trader, the driver, the graduate with no job, the mother who can no longer fill the pot.
They have the letterhead. We have the masses. In 2027 we will find out which one counts at the polls.
The suffering is not a talking point to the people living it. It is a memory they will carry into the voting booth. Wike and Onanuga are, day by day, writing the opposition’s campaign for it. We thank them, and we keep the receipts.
Informed. Inspired. Involved.
WhereIsTheMoney
SchrodingersSavings
AtikuForNigeria
ADC2027
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
20 August 2026
