Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a species of politics that survives only on the short memory of its audience. It does not argue. It does not reason. It manufactures a slogan, wraps it in a frightening number, and prays that nobody stops to check the arithmetic. That is the whole method of the APC propaganda mill, and its latest offering, a recycled poster demanding that Atiku Abubakar “explain 16 billion dollars spent on darkness”, is a perfect specimen of the craft.
Understand why the poster surfaces now, because it did not fall from the sky. It is a shield thrown up in a panic. For months Atiku has been firing on every cylinder at this administration, pressing the very questions Tinubu cannot answer: the trillions the IMF flagged as unexplained, the collapse of the naira and the economy, the certificate his own American university could not authenticate, the narcotics forfeiture that will not go away. Missile after missile has found its mark. And having no reply to any of it, the congenital propagandists and pathological liars of the APC do the only thing they know how to do. They cannot debate a fact, so they change the subject. They cannot defend their principal, so they smear the accuser. That recycled 16 billion dollar poster is not an argument. It is a smokescreen, lit to hide a President who has run clean out of answers.
This is the tragedy of these people. They possess neither the capacity nor the maturity to concede a single truth. Lay the facts before them in broad daylight and they will step over them and return, word for word, with the very allegations they arrived with. No matter. Let us lay the facts down regardless, not because the liars will accept them, but because the Nigerian people, who are wiser than those who insult them, will.
You cannot frighten a people who have already checked your figures.
THE FABLE OF THE $16 BILLION
Start with the small matter of whose money it was.
The Vice President of Nigeria does not run the power ministry. He signs no power vouchers, awards no power contracts and supervises no grid. Atiku’s constitutional economic assignment was chairman of the National Council on Privatisation, whose task was to sell off moribund government assets, not to build power stations. The power billions were drawn largely from the Excess Crude Account, controlled directly by the Presidency and the Accountant General, and channelled through the Ministry of Power, the PHCN and the National Integrated Power Projects. To bill Atiku for that account is to bill the co-pilot for the airline’s fuel.
Worse for their story, when the National Integrated Power Projects were conceived Atiku was named to chair the steering committee, and by his account, placed on record during the 2008 probe, he withdrew from it precisely because the President had begun clearing contracts around the committee rather than through it. He walked away from the very table the propagandists now insist on seating him at.
Then look at who the probe actually named. The Ndudi Elumelu committee was hostile to that administration and hunting for scalps. It recommended the President, the power ministers Olusegun Agagu and Liyel Imoke, and a roster of power sector technocrats for investigation. Atiku’s name was not on the list. If the lawmakers combing those files had found his fingerprint on a single kobo, they would have written it in capital letters. They did not, because it was not there.
Now the figure itself, which is a moving target manufactured for effect. President Umaru Yar’Adua first cried 10 billion dollars. Within days it had “grown” to 16 billion. The EFCC later recorded no fewer than five competing figures in circulation: 16 billion, 13.278 billion, 10.3 billion, 8.4 billion and 8.55 billion dollars. Dr Oby Ezekwesili, who ran Obasanjo’s own Due Process Office, put the sum actually released at 5.16 billion dollars. A number that swings between 5 billion and 16 billion depending on who is campaigning is not a fact. It is a rumour wearing a suit.
And here is the part they bury deepest: the House of Representatives discredited its own probe. Barely after the report was laid, the House set up a review panel under Aminu Tambuwal that threw out 84 of the committee’s 88 recommendations as technically and legally unsound. The very chamber that raised the alarm formally junked the findings. There is nothing left to “explain” from a report its own authors disowned.
A charge whose own accusers threw it out is not a case. It is a costume.
So, in the roughly 18 years since, not one court has convicted anybody, and Chief Obasanjo himself released an EFCC report he said cleared him and dared his accusers to reopen the matter. The APC then held federal power for 8 unbroken years under Muhammadu Buhari, with the EFCC, the ICPC and the DSS at its disposal, and it holds power again today under Bola Tinubu. If the party truly believed one kobo was stolen by Atiku, what has stopped it, in a decade of total control of every prosecuting agency in the land, from filing a single charge?
The answer is simple. You cannot prosecute a slogan.
They will wave a clip in which Atiku laments the power situation of those years. But hear what that lament actually is, and do not let them twist it into a confession it never was. By Atiku’s own account it is not the grief of a man who watched money vanish, but the frustration of a man whose counsel was ignored. What he had prescribed on how the projects should be executed was never followed clinically, and the works, which were real and already underway, were abandoned the very moment he and Obasanjo left office. The turbines had been ordered, the contracts signed, the plants begun. It was the governments that came after who let the equipment rot at the ports and placed the National Integrated Power Projects on hold, and it was the APC’s own Muhammadu Buhari who then held power for 8 years and still did not finish them. So the darkness they mock is the fruit of abandonment by those who inherited the work, not of the men who started it. Regret that a government you served in was never permitted to complete what it began is candour, not confession. A thief does not mourn the theft. Only an honest man grieves a collective failure, and they have chosen to punish him for the honesty.
Even the APC’s own statements give away the game. Over the years the party has demanded, in the very same breath, that Obasanjo account for the power billions and that Atiku account for privatisation. Their own words separate the two portfolios. The blending of them at campaign season is not a finding. It is guilt by association, assembled on purpose.
And the “24 trillion naira” flourish is the cheapest trick of all. It takes a disputed dollar figure from the 2000s and converts it at today’s collapsed exchange rate to manufacture a monstrous naira headline. That is not accounting. It is currency theatre, staged on a devaluation this same government caused.
They devalued the naira, then used the wreckage to inflate a rumour their own House had already thrown out.
SO WHO ACTUALLY GAVE NIGERIA DARKNESS?
Since they insist on the word darkness, let us hold it up to the light.
When Obasanjo and Atiku took office in 1999 they inherited a corpse. Generation had collapsed to about 1,500 megawatts, and only 19 of the country’s 79 generating units were working, at barely 28 per cent of capacity, after two decades in which military governments built almost nothing and maintained even less. From that ruin they wrote the Electric Power Sector Reform Act of 2005, unbundled the dead NEPA monopoly, and launched the National Integrated Power Projects to add close to 4,775 megawatts of new capacity. That law and those plants are the very foundation the whole sector still stands on. Every megawatt any government has boasted of since was generated on the fleet Obasanjo and Atiku built.
Trace the line forward and the charge collapses completely. Under Goodluck Jonathan the reform was carried to completion. The privatisation of the sector was concluded in 2013, peak generation had already touched about 4,800 megawatts by December 2012, and installed capacity had been built up to more than 10,000 megawatts, with transmission capacity to match. Whatever else is said of those years, they moved the sector forward and handed the next government a living, privatised industry rather than a corpse.
Then came the APC, and with it the excuses. Muhammadu Buhari inherited that industry in 2015, generating between 4,000 and 4,500 megawatts, with installed capacity above 10,000 and a completed privatisation he never had to fight for. He held power for 8 unbroken years. And at the end of them the sector had barely moved beyond the 2013 and 2014 benchmarks, while on the measure the ordinary Nigerian actually feels, the frequency of total grid collapse, it had if anything gone backwards. The party that now mocks the men who revived the grid was handed the richest inheritance of all, and sat on it.
So when the present government trumpets a record peak of about 6,003 megawatts in March 2025, understand what it is celebrating: fruit from a tree it did not plant, a rise of barely 1,200 megawatts over the 4,800 the grid had already reached back in 2012, after more than a decade of unbroken APC rule. And understand how thin even that boast is. For a nation of more than 200 million people, 6,000 megawatts is not a triumph, it is an indictment, and on an ordinary day the grid actually delivers closer to 4,000 megawatts, rationing about 3,618 to the entire country. The national grid crashed into total blackout 12 times in 2024 alone, a humiliation the sector had long left behind. If any era deserves the word darkness, it is this one, not the one that rescued the grid from its deathbed.
Now weigh the cost of that darkness. In April 2024 this government’s own regulator lifted the Band A tariff from about 66 naira to 225 naira per kilowatt hour in a single stroke, a 3.4 fold jump and the steepest rise in the history of the sector. Nigerians now pay three to four times what they paid before, for power that still fails a dozen times a year. They are charged premium rates for the very darkness the propagandists pin on the men who first brought the grid back to life.
They did not inherit darkness from Atiku. They manufactured it, and then billed you for it.
THE ₦8.8 TRILLION THEY WANT YOU TO FORGET
Notice the sleight of hand in the poster itself. It pleads that Atiku must “explain” before the Federal Government explains “the controversial 8.8 trillion naira”. In one breath they have conceded the real scandal while trying to bury it under an ancient one.
So let us be clear about that 8.8 trillion.
It is not a campaign talking point. It is a finding of the International Monetary Fund’s own 2026 Article IV Consultation on Nigeria. The Fund’s resident representative, Christian Ebeke, stated that spending equivalent to about 2 per cent of GDP, roughly 8.8 trillion naira, or about 6.15 billion dollars, was left out of recent official budgets, making the country’s true deficit appear smaller than it is. Sit with that comparison for a moment. In a single year, off the books, that is more than the 5.16 billion dollars that Obasanjo’s own Due Process Office says was released to the entire power sector across eight years. The rumour they scream about is smaller than the silence they are hiding. The Finance Minister, Taiwo Oyedele, has denied any “shadow budget” and called it a matter of reporting. That denial is his right. But the finding is current, it is Tinubu’s, and it remains unanswered.
And here is the detail the poster is desperate to hide. The man demanding an explanation for that 8.8 trillion is Atiku Abubakar himself. It was Atiku, alongside Peter Obi, who took up the IMF report and formally called on the National Assembly, the anti-corruption agencies and the Auditor General of the Federation to investigate it.
So the poster has the world upside down. Atiku is not the man dodging questions about 8.8 trillion. He is the man asking them.
They accuse the accuser, and hope you will not notice the swap.
WHO IS AFRAID OF THE COURTROOM?
So let me put a challenge of my own to the propagandists. If you truly have an issue with Atiku, if you hold one honest shred of evidence that he stole so much as a naira, then stop screaming it from posters and take him to court. Charge him. Prove it before a judge. You will not, because you cannot, because there is no case to file, only noise to make.
Now set that cowardice beside the record of the man they slander, because Atiku is the most persistent litigant in Nigeria’s democratic history.
Atiku went to court in 2023, to the Presidential Election Petition Court and on to the Supreme Court. He went further than any Nigerian politician before him, filing suit in Chicago to compel Chicago State University to open its records. In that American courtroom the university’s own registrar, Caleb Westberg, testified under oath that CSU could not authenticate the certificate that had been submitted to INEC. That is not a tweet. That is sworn testimony in a court of law.
And the litigation has not stopped. There is today a live Freedom of Information case in the United States seeking the release of federal records from a 1990s Chicago narcotics investigation. It is not Atiku who is fighting to keep those files sealed. It is the President’s side that has sought delay after delay, while the FBI asks a judge for leave to file its reasons in secret.
So the question answers itself. One camp is dragged toward the courtroom and spends a fortune to bar the door. The other walks in freely, documents in hand. Which brings us to the file they raise every time, hoping it wounds Atiku and forgetting whom it actually concerns.
The public record, from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, is that in January 1992 federal authorities first froze more than 1.4 million dollars across accounts linked to Bola Tinubu, and that in 1993, in Case Number 93C4483, the court ordered 460,000 dollars of it forfeited to the United States government, the funds having been tied by federal investigators to a Chicago heroin ring. It must be stated plainly, because truth demands it and the law requires it: Tinubu was not indicted, arrested or convicted, the proceeding was a civil forfeiture, and his denial stands on the record.
But note the posture. Atiku throws these matters open, in Abuja and in Washington, and invites the courts to rule. The other camp spends its energy sealing files and buying time. So we accept the dare with a smile. Take Atiku to court. He is already there, and he brought the documents.
One side subpoenas the records. The other side hides them. The nation can tell the difference.
THE RECORD, IN COLD FIGURES
Strip away the theatre and lay the two records side by side, in numbers no propagandist can wish away.
Under Obasanjo and Atiku the economy expanded from about 58 billion dollars in 1999 to about 270 billion dollars by 2007, close to a fivefold rise in eight years. Nigeria walked out of the Paris Club trap and drove its external debt down to roughly 3.5 billion dollars. Reserves were rebuilt and the naira held its ground.
Now weigh the present, and note that every figure below comes from the government’s own institutions, not from Atiku.
The National Bureau of Statistics put headline inflation at 15.91 per cent in June 2026 and food inflation at 17.52 per cent. The Central Bank’s benchmark rate stands at 26.5 per cent, choking every enterprise that needs a loan to breathe. The World Bank counts more than 6 in 10 Nigerians, over 140 million people, as poor, with roughly 7 million driven under the line in 2025 alone. The Debt Management Office puts the public debt at about 159 trillion naira by December 2025, from about 33 trillion in 2021. The national minimum wage of 70,000 naira is worth about 47 dollars a month. On Transparency International’s 2025 index Nigeria scored 26 out of 100 and ranked 142nd of 182 nations.
That is the team the propagandists now beg you to fear, set against the team that asks you to be patient in the dark and grateful for the darkness.
They wave a disputed figure from 2007 to blind you to the receipts of 2026.
AND THE MANDATE THEY GUARD SO JEALOUSLY
There is a reason this camp fights on rumours instead of records. Look at what the ballot has been doing to it.
Under Buhari the APC polled 15,424,921 votes in 2015 and 15,191,847 in 2019. In 2023 that vote collapsed to Tinubu’s 8,794,726, a fall of about 6.4 million in a single cycle, and he was declared winner with only about 36 per cent of the ballots on the lowest turnout the Fourth Republic has ever recorded. Atiku scored 6,984,520 and Peter Obi 6,101,533. A President carried into office by roughly one in three of those who bothered to vote is not a colossus. He is a minority tenant, and he knows it.
That is why they reach for fear. A leader confident of his own numbers does not spend his days recycling a 2008 report that his own House threw out.
THE PEOPLE ARE WISE
This is the truth the poster factory cannot survive. The Nigerian voter of 2027 is not the voter of their imagination. No fabricated billion, no borrowed innuendo, no currency trick recycled from 2008 will move a people who now read the fine print of their own suffering.
There are 146 days to 16 January 2027. On that day the shouting ends and the only arithmetic that counts, the one at the polling unit, begins. The APC may keep its fables. The masses have kept their memory, and their memory has a thumb.
Take Atiku to court, I say to the APC, if you truly have a case. You have none, so you peddle fables instead. Atiku, for his part, never left the courtroom, and he walked in with the documents. Now come and meet him, and the people, at the ballot, and stop being mischievous.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
24 August 2026
