Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
I watched the interview on Arise Television. Sambo did his work with the patience of a professional, putting the questions a journalist is paid to put. Across from him sat a man who had come to national television to announce a discovery. I sat forward in my chair. Then I laughed.
I laughed because I know what a case looks like. A case has a charge number. It has a court, a judge, a docket, an arraignment date, a first witness, and above all it has a loss. What arrived on Arise Television had none of these. It had a letter, a courier, and a stamp of acknowledgement.
A stamp of acknowledgement proves that an envelope was delivered. It proves nothing whatever about the man named inside it.
BEGIN WHERE ANY HONEST INVESTIGATOR BEGINS. WHERE IS THE MONEY?
Every real corruption case in the history of the world starts with a hole. Money leaves a place and does not come back. There is a victim, a loss, a beneficiary and a trail from one to the other. Strip away 20 years of noise and ask the only question that has ever mattered in this matter.
What was missing?
Atiku Abubakar’s position from 2006 to this day has never wavered. The Petroleum Technology Development Fund money was placed in fixed deposit accounts. It earned interest. It was returned to the Federal Government of Nigeria in full, with that interest. The Senate ad hoc committee that examined the affair recorded exactly that, which is why its recommendation against him concerned procedure and supervision and not theft, and why the same committee could not point to any transaction showing that he personally took the principal or pocketed a naira of gratification.
The Fund exists today. It is funded today. It sends Nigerians abroad on scholarship today. There is no hole in it from 2006. There is no missing 145 million dollars sitting in a foreign account waiting to be recovered, because the money was never missing.
Twenty years of accusation and not one naira has ever been shown to be gone. That is not a scandal. That is an audit that came back clean and refused to die.
Every serious anti-corruption recovery in this country produces something. A forfeited house. A frozen account. A returned sum. A convicted officer. Twenty years of hunting Atiku Abubakar has produced a filing cabinet.
THE IMMUNITY LIE, WHICH DIED TWICE
Here is the sentence on which the whole edifice rests, and it sits in the petition itself. That the EFCC vowed to prosecute him as soon as he left office, he being covered by constitutional immunity at the time.
Read it again slowly, because it destroys itself.
Atiku Abubakar left the office of Vice President on 29 May 2007. From that morning he has been a private citizen like you and me. That is 19 years without immunity. Nineteen years in which any prosecutor in Nigeria could have walked into any court on any working day and filed a charge. Umaru Musa Yar’Adua came and went. Goodluck Jonathan came and went. Muhammadu Buhari governed for 8 years on an explicit anti-corruption mandate, faced Atiku Abubakar as his principal opponent in 2019, and left in 2023. The present administration has held power since May 2023. Not one of them filed anything. The immunity excuse expired with the tenure. It cannot be exhumed in 2026 to account for 19 years of silence.
It died a second time, earlier, and by his own hand.
When Obasanjo wrote to the Senate and assembled the machinery, Atiku Abubakar did not hide behind Section 308 of the Constitution, which he was fully entitled to do. He temporarily waived that immunity and submitted himself to investigation. By his own published account, given repeatedly and never withdrawn, he opened his office to the investigators, among them the then Attorney General of the Federation Bayo Ojo, Nasir el-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu, then chairman of the EFCC. They came. They looked. They found nothing to charge.
Those men are alive. Two of them have held high office since. Any one of them is free to appear on the same Arise Television tomorrow and say the account is false. In 20 years not one has.
A man who surrenders his own shield cannot afterwards be accused of hiding behind it.
And there is a detail in this story that its retailers never mention. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was established in 2003, by the very administration in which Atiku Abubakar served as Vice President and chaired the economic policy machinery. He helped to build the institution that was then turned on him. A man planning a life of plunder does not first construct the instrument of his own arrest.
WHAT THE SUPREME COURT ACTUALLY HELD, AND WHY
The second lie is the whisper that the courts let him off on a technicality, or on immunity, or on some quiet accommodation between big men. Let us go to the judgment, because it is published and anybody with a telephone can read it tonight.
The case is Action Congress and Atiku Abubakar v Independent National Electoral Commission, SC 69/2007. The Supreme Court announced its decision on 16 April 2007 and delivered its reasons on 28 June 2007. The leading judgment was given by Katsina-Alu JSC, sitting with Musdapher, Onnoghen, Ogbuagu, Tabai, Tanko Muhammad and Aderemi JJSC. Seven justices of the Supreme Court of Nigeria.
INEC had struck his name out under Section 137(1)(i) of the 1999 Constitution, the paragraph on a person indicted for embezzlement or fraud by a judicial commission or administrative panel where government has accepted the indictment. These are the reasons the Court gave for setting that aside.
One. Nothing in Section 137(1) confers any power of disqualification on INEC. The Court read the provision over and over and found the commission mentioned nowhere in it except in the paragraph on forged certificates. No such power exists anywhere else in the Constitution, expressly or by necessary implication.
Two. The Court rejected the argument that the paragraph was self-executing. It cannot operate by itself, because invoking it requires an inquiry into whether the panel concerned was of the character the Constitution contemplates, read together with Section 36.
Three. Section 36(1) guarantees a fair hearing before a court or tribunal constituted so as to secure its independence and impartiality. Section 36(5) presumes every person charged with a crime innocent until proved guilty. The Court held that disqualifying a man for embezzlement or fraud on the strength of an administrative panel’s indictment strips him of a right and presumes his guilt, in derogation of both.
Four, and this is the heart of it. Trial and conviction by a court is the only constitutionally permitted way to prove guilt, and therefore the only lawful basis for a penalty for embezzlement or fraud. Convictions and punishments belong exclusively to judicial power. In the Court’s own words, an indictment is no more than an accusation. It cited Sokefun v Akinyemi and Garba v University of Maiduguri, and quoted Fatayi Williams CJN to the effect that a man accused of crime must be tried in open court where his accusers can be heard in public, and that no panel or committee will serve.
Five. A power to organise, undertake and supervise elections, under paragraph 15 of the Third Schedule, does not contain within it a power to disqualify anybody.
Six. On the statute, the Court contrasted the Electoral Act 2002, which had expressly given INEC power over qualification, with the Electoral Act 2006, under which the National Assembly deliberately took that power away and placed it in the courts.
Now read that list again and find the word immunity. It is not there. It appears nowhere in the reasoning, because it was never the question before the Court. Atiku Abubakar did not escape on immunity. He won on the presumption of innocence, on the right to fair hearing, on the separation of powers, and on the plain text of two statutes.
And understand what was really being decided that day, because it was never only about one man. Had INEC won, then any Nigerian could be stripped of a right by a panel assembled overnight by whoever holds power, with no trial, no cross examination and no appeal. The shield the Supreme Court held up in 2007 covers the trader in Ado Ekiti and the teacher in Benin City exactly as it covers a former Vice President. Those now sneering at that judgment are sneering at their own protection.
THE LOUDEST CHARGE IN THAT FILE, AND WHAT BECAME OF IT
Since the archive has been opened, let us take out its loudest page. He did not raise it on Arise Television. I raise it, because a file must be read whole or not at all.
The central sensation of 2006 was the claim that public money from the Fund was parked in a commercial bank and used to finance the Globacom telecommunications licence, and that the Vice President was a concealed beneficiary of the company. That was the accusation that filled the front pages and made the arrests. Mike Adenuga was picked up by the EFCC in July 2006 in pursuit of it.
Follow what happened to it.
The Senate ad hoc committee examined the claim and could not establish it. Its report found no lending relationship between the bank and the telecommunications company involving those funds, and recorded that the deposits earned interest and went back to government.
The late Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, addressed the same episode in his autobiography, published under his own name and now beyond any suspicion of campaign convenience. His account is that the licence was paid for with financing obtained from BNP Paribas, and that the EFCC visit of 9 July 2006 had a purpose other than the one announced.
The Kabiyesi went further, and this is the passage that should end the argument. By his account, after Adenuga had been questioned and released, Obasanjo met him at a social gathering and thereafter invited him to Ota, where he asked that same businessman for help with the construction of the administration block at Bells University, the institution bearing his own family name. Adenuga declined.
Weigh that sequence honestly. A man is pursued by the anti-graft commission of the Federal Republic over public money, and the President in whose name that pursuit was mounted then sends for him privately and asks him to fund a building. Whatever that is, it is not an anti-corruption investigation. It is a market, and the man who refused to trade in it was punished for refusing.
And then the answer no advocate can improve upon. In 20 years no charge has ever been brought against anybody on that allegation. Not against the businessman. Not against the bank. Not against Atiku Abubakar. The loudest paragraph in the file died inside the file, and every remaining paragraph must now be read in the light of what happened to it.
THE AMERICAN DOCUMENT
The second leg of the petition is a report of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations dated 4 February 2010. Let us be precise about what that document is, because precision is again fatal to the performance.
It is a study by a committee of a foreign legislature. Its subject, stated on its own face, is how American banks, American lawyers and an American university failed to apply their own anti-money-laundering controls. The institutions under examination in that report were American. Several foreign political families were used as case histories to illustrate those failures.
A legislative committee in Washington is not a prosecutor. It cannot indict, cannot charge and cannot convict. The United States has had 16 years, an FBI, a Department of Justice and the widest financial jurisdiction on earth. No charge has ever been filed against Atiku Abubakar there. When that same report was recirculated on social media this year as a fresh probe, the international fact checking desk of Agence France-Presse examined it, established that it was the 16-year-old document, and confirmed that it produced no criminal charges against him.
That is the second exhibit. A recycled study, already publicly debunked as fresh news, carried to a Nigerian television studio in September 2026 as a revelation.
THE COUNTER-FILE, WHICH THE PERFORMANCE NEVER MENTIONS
There is a reason those who wave the 2006 report never read past the pages they like.
When the Senate ad hoc committee reported in February 2007 it did not confine itself to the Vice President. It faulted President Olusegun Obasanjo over the same Fund, over releases made for purposes outside its statutory mandate once supervision had moved to the presidency. An inquiry launched to destroy one man ended up naming the man who launched it.
Nor did Atiku Abubakar stand mute. Through his then media adviser Garba Shehu, who would later spend 8 years as spokesman to President Buhari, his camp placed a set of specific allegations on the public record in 2007. That Bodunde Adeyanju, Personal Assistant to President Obasanjo, made over 100 visits to the Abuja branch of the bank at the centre of the affair between 1999 and 2004. That between 1999 and the 2003 elections Adeyanju drew in excess of 3 billion naira from a company account at that branch on the President’s behalf. That cheques exceeding 100 million naira went to a construction company owned by Obasanjo from the same accounts, and that payments went to the Africa Leadership Forum and to the Obasanjo Campaign Organisation. Atiku further told the Senate committee that 250 million naira of Fund money went to a lawyer to register Galaxy Backbone.
Note the shape of the reply that came from the presidency. Not that Adeyanju had received nothing. That he had received 5 million naira, and that it was a gift.
Note this too, reported at the time and never explained since. The audit material listed Adeyanju as the recipient of 17 million naira. The EFCC questioned him. The commission’s report was silent about him.
A report that goes loud on one man and silent on another, from the same bank, in the same period, over the same money, is not evidence. It is an instrument.
THE BEST WITNESSES FOR THE DEFENCE ARE THE PROSECUTORS THEMSELVES
Now consider what became of the men who built the case.
Nuhu Ribadu led that investigation as pioneer chairman of the EFCC. By Atiku’s own published account, Ribadu later came to him and asked his forgiveness, and Atiku’s answer was that he should return to the same television stations where he had made the accusations and tell Nigerians what he now knew. That account has been in print for years. Ribadu is alive, holds the office of National Security Adviser, and has never denied it. And the file today sits with the security establishment he heads, still with no charge.
Then consider the chief accuser himself. On 11 October 2018 at Abeokuta, Olusegun Obasanjo received Atiku Abubakar publicly, declared that he had forgiven him, and commended him to Nigerians as the better man to lead the country in 2019. This is the same man who had once sworn that God would never forgive him if he supported Atiku for President.
Weigh that honestly. The man who assembled the panel, wrote to the Senate and accepted the white paper stood up 11 years later and asked Nigerians to make Atiku Abubakar their President. A prosecutor who endorses the accused for the highest office in the land has answered the charge more completely than any lawyer could.
WHAT 20 YEARS OF HOSTILE POWER PRODUCED
Since September 2006 that file has sat in the registry of the EFCC through five administrations and a long line of chairmen. Every one of them had motive. It sat there through 8 years of a government whose whole self-description was war on corruption, facing Atiku Abubakar as the leading opposition candidate in two general elections. If a charge could have been drawn from it, it would have been drawn then, in an election season, with the entire machinery of state pushing from behind.
No charge. No arraignment. No trial. No conviction. Not once, in any court, in any country, in 20 years.
There comes a point at which the failure to charge stops being an oversight and becomes a finding.
WHAT THE MAN ACTUALLY DID WITH THE POWER
And while the file was being assembled, what was he doing?
He chaired the National Council on Privatisation, through which the largest transfer of public assets in the history of this country passed. Billions moved under that chairmanship. Twenty years later, from all of it, there is no charge.
In the same years this country licensed the GSM operators and put a telephone in the hand of the ordinary Nigerian for the first time, an industry that now employs and feeds millions. The Pension Reform Act of 2004 rescued the retired Nigerian from the queue and the ledger of shame. The nation cleared its Paris Club debt and walked out of the creditors’ room. Between 1999 and 2007 the economy grew from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars.
That is the administration in which he served, and those are the desks at which he sat. A country hungry today is entitled to ask which of the two records on offer it would rather have back.
ONE MAN SAYS COME AND LOOK
Atiku Abubakar’s answer this week was the answer of a man with empty pockets. Anyone with evidence should bring it. A petition is not a conviction. An acknowledgement stamp is not evidence of guilt. Let it be tested.
He has been saying a version of that sentence since 2006, when he waived his immunity and opened his office to the investigators.
Set it beside the other camp. A civil forfeiture of over 460,000 dollars concluded in the Northern District of Illinois in 1993, with no criminal charge. Then years of lawyering on two continents to keep the underlying papers shut, university records resisted, a freedom of information release fought in a foreign court.
One man says come and look. The other pays counsel on two continents to keep the door closed.
THE ERRAND AND THE ERRAND BOY
Ask finally whose errand this was, because the answer is written on its face.
A governing party holding the security agencies, the prosecuting authorities, the EFCC, the treasury and the airwaves cannot stand before Nigerians and defend the price of a bag of rice. It cannot defend transport fares, or what a graduate earns, or what a widow in Ekiti pays for a cylinder of gas. So it does what a boy does when he cannot answer the question in class. It makes noise at the back of the room and prays for the bell.
That is juvenile delinquency in a well cut suit, and it is what Nigeria watched on Arise Television. Not accountability. Not anti-corruption. Babasala theatre, with costume, timing and a rehearsed punchline, staged by a man who believed that shaking 20-year-old paper at a camera could move Atiku Abubakar one inch.
It moved nothing, because there is nothing to move. Hunger in this country is not 20 years old. It is this morning’s hunger, it is measurable, and no quantity of archive dust will bury it.
On 16 January 2027 Nigerians will not be voting on a stamp of acknowledgement. They will vote on what their lives cost, on who has a plan, and on who has only a distraction.
Atiku Abubakar is clean. No missing money, no charge, no trial, no conviction, and 20 years of hostile power unable to manufacture one. The hunt has become the only evidence in the case, and what it proves is the desperation of the hunters.
AtikuIsClean #WhereIsTheMoney #NoChargeNoCase #ADC2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
6 September 2026
