Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a kind of politician who believes that if he shouts loudly enough, the market woman will forget the price of a mudu of rice. The All Progressives Congress has built an entire government on that belief. It has failed.
Propaganda has a natural enemy, and it is not the opposition. It is arithmetic. You cannot photoshop a market price. You cannot spin an empty pot. And in 2027, on 16 January, the Nigerian people will do to this government what no amount of vituperation from Bourdillon can undo. They will count.
THE PEOPLE HAVE LEARNED TO COUNT
For years the APC governed Nigerians as though they were children to be distracted. Every failure was recast as sabotage, every question as an insult, every hungry citizen as an agent of the opposition. That trick has expired.
You can lie to a people once. You cannot lie to their stomachs every single day.
The Nigerian people are now the wisest electorate in our history, schooled not by pamphlets but by pain. No innuendo, no orchestrated smear, no rented crowd will move them from what they have decided. They are going to vote for Atiku Abubakar, and they have their reasons written on every receipt they can no longer afford to pay.
A ROLL CALL THE APC WANTS YOU TO FORGET
Before the APC lectures anyone on going to court, let the record speak. This is the paper trail that has followed Bola Tinubu into Aso Rock, each item a matter of public documentation, not of rumour.
- United States federal investigators, Chicago. Tinubu forfeited 460,000 dollars from bank accounts that the FBI and IRS tied, in sworn affidavits, to the proceeds of a heroin trafficking network. Case number 93C4483, Northern District of Illinois.
2022 to 2023. Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, at the Presidential Election Petition Court and the Supreme Court. Both challenged Tinubu’s qualification over the forfeiture and over the documents he submitted to INEC.
- A United States District Court in Illinois ordered Chicago State University to release Tinubu’s academic records to Atiku Abubakar. It was Atiku who went to that court. Remember that.
- The Supreme Court dismissed the certificate petition. Read the judgment carefully: it declined to admit the fresh CSU deposition because the 180 day window had closed. He was saved by the calendar, not cleared on the substance.
- The FBI, the CIA and the DEA went to court in the United States to block the release of Tinubu’s files, invoking a Glomar response to neither confirm nor deny what they hold.
- Atiku’s counsel, Barrister Kalu Kalu, carried a petition to the European Commission in Brussels over the alleged false certificates and the 460,000 dollar forfeiture.
That is the record. Now ask yourself who has been running from the courts, and who has been running to them.
THE DARKEST FILE
Of all of it, one file will not die, and the APC knows it. In 1993 Bola Tinubu forfeited 460,000 dollars that American investigators linked to a Chicago heroin ring.
His defenders make one narrow, honest point, and we will concede it plainly, because TNF does not deal in falsehood: that forfeiture was a civil proceeding, not a criminal conviction. Tinubu was never indicted, never convicted, and holds no criminal record in the United States.
But hold the concession to the light and watch it embarrass them. A serving President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria once surrendered almost half a million dollars that a federal agency of the United States tied, on oath, to narcotics money. And when Nigerians asked to see the full file, three American security agencies went to court to keep it sealed.
A man with nothing to hide does not need three foreign spy agencies to hide it for him.
The question was never whether a judge jailed him. The question is why, three decades later, the records must still be buried. That is not the profile of an innocent man. It is the profile of a protected one.
THE RECEIPTS THAT NEVER CAME
Now to the theft in broad daylight. This government’s own Minister of Finance, Taiwo Oyedele, has boasted that subsidy removal and the foreign exchange changes mobilised 15.8 trillion naira for the Federation between June 2023 and December 2025.
Fifteen point eight trillion naira. Say it slowly. Then look around you.
Where are the roads? Where is the light? The Socio Economic Rights and Accountability Project has documented that despite these trillions shared across the states, there has been little to show in infrastructure or public services. In the same 2026 budget, debt servicing was set at more than 15 trillion naira, exceeding the combined allocation to health and education.
A government that cannot show you its receipts is not managing your money. It is spending your silence.
And the cruelty of it. The IMF records that the poorest households enrolled in this government’s cash transfer scheme have received, at most, a total of three payments of 25,000 naira since 2023. Roughly 18 dollars, over more than two years, to a family drowning. That is the APC’s answer to 15.8 trillion naira in savings.
WHAT THE SUFFERING COST
This is the ledger the APC prays you never total. Every figure below is from an institution they cannot dismiss as opposition.
The World Bank puts Nigeria’s poverty rate at about 63 per cent in 2025. That is roughly 139 million Nigerians below the poverty line, up from about 40 per cent only a few years earlier. The Bank estimates that a further 10 million Nigerians fell into extreme poverty in 2025 alone.
The naira has collapsed from about 460 to the dollar in May 2023 to around 1,400 today, one of the steepest currency falls anywhere on earth in that span.
Food. According to analysts at Chatham House, food prices are more than 80 per cent higher than they were at the 2023 election. The National Bureau of Statistics puts food inflation at 20.31 per cent as recently as July 2026, still climbing even as the government celebrates a softer headline figure. Petrol, after the removal, tripled.
That is the true scorecard. Not the reserves the government waves at us, but the empty plate it has set before the people.
THE MAN THEY TELL YOU TO SUE
So when APC spokesmen sneer, take Atiku to court, understand it for what it is. Misdirection.
Atiku Abubakar is the man who did go to court. To the tribunal. To the Supreme Court. And to a federal court in the United States to compel Chicago State University to open its records. He has never hidden behind a technicality or a foreign agency’s Glomar. He asked, in open court, to be shown the truth. It is Tinubu’s camp that has spent a decade fighting to keep the file shut.
You do not tell a man to sue when he is the one holding the summons.
A RECORD, NOT A RUMOUR
And what do they offer against Atiku? Innuendo. Because they cannot touch the record.
Remember what competence looked like. Under the Obasanjo and Atiku administration, in which Atiku chaired the economic team, Nigeria’s GDP grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars by 2007. That is not nostalgia. That is measurable, and it is the exact opposite of what this APC decade has produced.
On subsidy, note the honest history the APC rewrites. The gradual, managed path to deregulation belonged to the Obasanjo and Atiku years, adjusted in measured steps while the economy absorbed each one. Tinubu himself, as an opposition leader in January 2012, publicly condemned an abrupt one step removal as a tax on the poor. Then in May 2023 he did the very thing he had condemned, in one reckless stroke, with no cushion prepared. When Nigerians protested a smaller move in 2012, that government listened and rolled the price back within a fortnight. This one turned its back and told the hungry to endure.
Atiku’s answer is not noise but a plan. Through his Economic Recovery Plan, he has set out to shift support away from the importation racket toward Nigerian production, capped, budgeted, independently audited, and to recover the savings this government cannot account for. Reform with receipts. That is the difference.
And the mandate is already his. In the ADC’s nationwide direct primary of 25 May 2026, held across the wards of the Federation, the party declared that 2,527,977 members voted and that Atiku emerged with 1,846,370 votes. That is not a backroom deal. That is a grassroots verdict.
The arithmetic of the map finishes the argument. In 2023 the APC’s national vote crashed to 8,794,726, a fall of some 6.4 million from its 2019 tally. As the only Northern presidential candidate in a field where the APC’s northern base is collapsing toward him, Atiku’s floor in the North alone is projected to rise well past 9 million. The APC cannot conjure those numbers from a South West that has already shown it cannot deliver them.
HISTORY IS TAKING ATTENDANCE
Let this government remember that no propaganda machine in Nigerian history has ever outrun a hungry generation to the ballot box. Buhari’s APC could not save itself from arithmetic in the end. Neither will this one.
The people are not confused. They are not deceived. They are simply waiting, with their voter cards and their memories, for 16 January 2027.
Propaganda writes the headline. The people write the result.
And this time, the people are going to write ATIKU.
AtikuFor2027 #ADCRising #TheArithmeticOfHunger
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
24 August 2026
