By Adeyemi Bayode Adebisi
Let it be said plainly, and let it be said first. There are people who wear titles and people who carry a cause. Hon (Mrs) Victoria Pamugo, President of the ADC Global Network National Platform, carries the cause, with a constancy that shames men twice as loud and half as useful.
She reads what is written about our candidate, she marks it, and she sends it to The Narrative Force. This rebuttal exists because a woman thousands of miles away decided that a falsehood would not be permitted to travel unanswered.
What she sent us is 800 words of insinuation against Atiku Abubakar from a man who talks from both sides of his mouth with his tongue permanently in his cheek. He denounces a policy nobody proposed. He defends a market that does not exist. He speaks for a government that never hired him, under the banner of a movement he founded to oppose it, in the name of a party that refused to put his name on a ballot.
He is not a critic. He is a noisy gasbag. Enormous volume, no cargo, and a leak at every seam.
And let us be honest about what that article actually is. It is not a contribution to national debate. It is a job application typed in the language of policy and published in the hope that the right household would read it. Everything else in it, the 1973, the smugglers, the arithmetic of Adamawa, is packaging around the only sentence he was too cowardly to write outright. Look at me. I am available.
THE SUBSIDY HE SAYS IS DEAD IS SITTING IN THE ACCOUNTS
His entire piece rests on one assumption. That subsidy died on 29 May 2023 and Nigeria now runs an honest market.
The assumption is false, and the refutation is not ours. It is in the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company.
In statements issued on 21 and 23 August 2026 through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Atiku Abubakar pointed to roughly 7.13 trillion naira recorded in NNPC’s 2024 audited accounts as energy security expenditure, and to roughly 17.5 trillion naira in related energy costs, every naira of it incurred after the podium announcement that subsidy was gone. Whether the government calls it shortfall, under recovery or energy security, public money was still bridging the gap between economic cost and the price at the pump.
Those same statements set out the Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Projects incentives, under which qualifying petroleum developments can receive production tax credits beginning at $3 and $4.50 per barrel and rising as high as $11.50.
Subsidy did not die. It changed address. It moved out of the pocket of the woman queuing in Ado Ekiti and into the balance sheet of a man who drills.
Showunmi has written a eulogy for a corpse that is upstairs, dressed, and collecting an allowance. A man who cannot see 7.13 trillion naira sitting in an audited account, printed and available to any Nigerian with a telephone, has not come here to reason with us. He has come here to be seen not seeing it. At that magnitude it is not confusion. It is a service being rendered.
HE IS QUARRELLING WITH A MANIFESTO HE NEVER READ
He warns Nigeria against reviving the 1973 import subsidy with its smugglers, middlemen and fraudulent marketers.
Nobody proposed it. Not once. Not anywhere.
What Atiku Abubakar has committed himself to, in his published manifesto, is a production support mechanism that is targeted, capped, time bound, independently audited and tied to verifiable domestic output. Its entire design purpose is to move support from importation to production, from middlemen to Nigerian refineries, from claims nobody can check to barrels that can be counted at a gate.
Showunmi did not quote one line of it. He did not name it. He did not dispute a single term. He described a policy from 1973 at length and then pretended he had answered a manifesto commitment made in 2026.
He did not read it because reading was never the assignment. Reading would have obliged him to engage a specific mechanism with specific safeguards, and that is dangerous work for a man whose entire professional asset is vagueness. So he went to the archive, dug up a corpse from 1973, dressed it in Atiku’s clothes, and stabbed it in public. He calls this narratology. In Ekiti we call it fighting a scarecrow and demanding a medal.
AND THEN HE ENDORSES ATIKU WITHOUT KNOWING IT
Read his own closing prescription again. Strengthen competition. Improve domestic refining capacity. Expand social interventions for the truly vulnerable.
Expanded social intervention for the vulnerable is a subsidy. It is public money deployed to cushion citizens against a price. He spent seven paragraphs calling that wishful thinking and prescribed it in the eighth.
And improving domestic refining capacity is the whole question, not an answer to it. Refineries are not improved by adjectives. They are improved by capital, crude access and fiscal support tied to output, which is precisely the instrument he came here to abuse.
Read that again slowly, because it is the whole man in one paragraph. He wrote 800 words denouncing a policy, then in his final breath recommended the same policy, and did not notice. The insult to Atiku was the point. The economics was filler, and he could not keep the filler consistent for the length of a single article.
THE REFINERY QUOTE THAT CONVICTS HIS OWN SIDE
He reaches for Atiku’s old position that government has no business running refineries and offers it as proof of inconsistency.
He has handed us the file, so let us read it aloud.
In July 2025 NNPC announced that the Port Harcourt refinery was not for sale. The Warri plant consumed $897.6 million in maintenance, was publicly declared operational, failed to produce a single litre of petrol, and was shut on 25 January 2025 over a safety fault in its crude distillation unit main heater. Port Harcourt resumed and ran at under 40 per cent of installed capacity.
In February 2026, at the Nigeria International Energy Summit, the NNPC Group Chief Executive Officer Bashir Ojulari said Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna had been shut because they were running at monumental loss and destroying national value, and that there had been political pressure to keep them running anyway. On 30 April 2026, in Jiaxing City, NNPC signed a memorandum with two Chinese companies to complete and operate the same plants.
Atiku said government cannot run refineries. Government kept them, spent on them, garlanded them, closed them, and has now travelled to China to find somebody else to run them.
$897.6 million. Not one litre of petrol. He introduced that quote himself, unprompted, and detonated it under the very men he is auditioning for. A man who cannot fire a weapon without first pointing it at his intended employer.
THE COMPETITION HE PRAISES IS IN COURT TRYING TO END COMPETITION
He asks Nigeria to stay the course and let market forces normalise the sector.
In May 2026, in suit number FHC/L/CS/857/2026, the Dangote Petroleum Refinery went to the Federal High Court against the Attorney General of the Federation, the midstream and downstream regulator, NNPC Limited and several major marketers including NIPCO, A.A. Rano, Matrix, AYM Shafa, Pinnacle and Bono, seeking to nullify fuel import licences on the argument that they may issue only where a proven physical domestic shortfall exists. The marketers and state respondents replied that the Petroleum Industry Act creates no monopoly.
He is composing hymns to competition while competition is in the dock fighting for its licence.
Meanwhile that same refinery has twice applied what it openly called a deliberate festive price support intervention, absorbing cost to hold prices down, before realigning its gantry price upward in January 2026 to 799 naira with retail at 839 naira. By August 2026 its gantry price stood at 1,165 naira, with Lagos depots ranging from 1,167 to 1,199 naira, after Brent crude ran past $100 on Middle East supply disruption.
When a private company cushions a price, he calls it market stability. When Atiku Abubakar commits to cushioning a Nigerian, he calls it wishful thinking. The policy is identical. Only the beneficiary offends him. He has no objection to intervention. He objects to the poor receiving any. A subsidy paid to a billionaire is stability. A subsidy paid to a widow is a monster from 1973. Hang that sentence on his wall, because it is the sum total of his economics.
And note what deregulation without domestic insulation has actually delivered. A farmer in Abeokuta now pays, at her local pump, for a shipping lane in the Strait of Hormuz she will never see. He calls that normalisation.
THE ADAMAWA STUNT, RETURNED TO SENDER
He invites Atiku to fund subsidy personally in Adamawa and watch the claims multiply.
The experiment has already been conducted. It ran nationally, for over three years, at full scale, by the government he is defending. The receipts are the 15.8 trillion naira of savings the administration claims for June 2023 to December 2025, which Atiku has spent a year asking it to account for and which it has not accounted for.
Nigerians did not need a pilot scheme in Yola. Nigerians have been the pilot scheme. They have paid the school fees. He is now asking them to repeat the class.
Since he enjoys dares, here is one back. Let Otunba Segun Showunmi publish, this week, a single paragraph accounting for the 15.8 trillion naira. Not a defence of it. Just the figures. Where it went, what it built, whose life it improved. He will not do it, because the tears are cheaper than the arithmetic, and because the men he is writing for have not authorised him to open that ledger.
THE CRYING ADULT
Picture the scene. A grown man at his desk. A keyboard, a doctorate in narratology, and no client.
And he begins to weep.
He weeps for 1973. Nobody mentioned 1973. But the crying adult has prepared his tears for 1973 and 1973 shall receive them. Somewhere a marketer thirty years dead turns in his grave and wonders who is shouting.
He weeps for consistency. This is the loudest crying. Consistency, he sobs, consistency. This from the convener of an opposition movement founded in November 2024 to rescue Nigerian democracy, who by August 2026 was publishing a tribute to the President’s son and telling the President he was genuinely happy for him. He rescued democracy so thoroughly that it now lives on Bourdillon.
A man who cries about consistency while holding a photograph from Sallah Day is not making an argument. He is making a bid.
He weeps for the ballot he never reached. Observe the Facebook biography, unchanged to this day. Governorship Candidate, PDP, Ogun State. Four years of it.
And here is the tenderest part. Through all the weeping he never once names what he actually wants. Not a word about the tax credits of $3, $4.50 and up to $11.50 per barrel flowing to deep offshore operators. Not a syllable about the 15.8 trillion naira never reconciled. Not a whisper about the $897.6 million that went into Warri and produced no petrol. All those tears, and not one of them falls anywhere near a Nigerian.
The curtain falls. Nobody claps. The hall was empty the whole time, and he performed anyway, because performing is the only skill he was ever paid for and nobody has told him the theatre closed.
THE FILE: BOURDILLON, A PHOTOGRAPH, AND A CHANGE OF CLIENT
Now to consistency in earnest, since he was reckless enough to raise it.
In April 2026 the writer Kio Amachree published an open letter to him, carried in the press, under the title of a response to his cowardly defence of Gilbert Chagoury.
Amachree alleged that in 2025 Showunmi walked into Tinubu’s private Bourdillon residence on Sallah Day, took a photograph with the President, and went on Channels Television to announce that Tinubu is smarter than Peter Obi and that his brain is very alert, and to declare himself not anti Tinubu. This, of the same government he had been paid to oppose.
Amachree further alleged that Showunmi was recruited as Atiku’s spokesman after Reno Omokri interviewed him and negotiated his salary, and he mocked the honorary doctorate in narratology, describing it as the art of telling whichever story suits whoever is currently paying attention. Amachree made further allegations about Chagoury’s record and dealings which remain contested and unadjudicated. Showunmi replied on Facebook, calling the letter a misguided tirade.
Then the quarrel spread inside the house. Paul Ibe, media aide to Atiku, publicly dismissed Showunmi’s warning to him as an empty threat and alleged that Showunmi had shown interest in financial gain during his time on the 2019 campaign team. That allegation stands as Ibe’s, unadjudicated, and Showunmi is free to answer it.
These are public allegations by named men, on the record, unretracted. We invent nothing. We simply decline to pretend they were never made.
A man carrying that file does not get to lecture Atiku Abubakar about consistency. He gets to answer questions.
Note the pattern, because the pattern is the man. The threat is always coming. The evidence never arrives. He warns, he hints, he announces that his silence has been deliberate, and then he goes quiet and waits for the noise to pass.
THE CANDIDATE WHO NEVER MADE THE BALLOT
Here is the record behind that Facebook biography. On 25 May 2022 two parallel PDP primaries were held in Abeokuta. At the one in the NUJ secretariat, Showunmi was declared winner with 554 votes. In July 2022 the national leadership of the PDP recognised the other primary and issued the certificate of return to Ladi Adebutu. Showunmi called that lawless shenanigans. On 28 September 2022 a Federal High Court annulled the recognised primary. When Ogun voted on 18 March 2023, the PDP candidate on the ballot was Adebutu, who polled 262,383 votes against Dapo Abiodun’s 276,298.
Segun Showunmi was not on that ballot. Not one Ogun voter was ever given the chance to vote for or against him.
Understand the weight of this. In a country of over 200 million people, across an entire political lifetime, this man has never once been chosen by an electorate for anything. Not a ward. Not a constituency. Not a state. His single documented mandate is 554 votes in a press hall, and even that his own party looked at and set aside. A title without a term of office. A candidacy without a ballot. A movement without a member. An alternative without a following.
Atiku Abubakar’s mandate was taken in a queue, in the ward, in the open. Showunmi’s was taken in a press centre and died in a courtroom. And from that height of nothing he now looks down and calls Atiku inconsistent.
THE HUNGER
Let us say the plain thing every observer in this country already knows and has been too polite to write.
Otunba Segun Showunmi is hungry. That is the entire explanation. Hungry for attention, hungry for relevance, hungry for crumbs from a table he has not been invited to sit at.
Follow the sequence he created himself. He walked into Bourdillon on Sallah Day. He posed for the photograph. He went on television and praised the President’s mind. He announced he was not anti Tinubu. In November 2024 he had launched the National Opposition Movement Coalition, styled The Alternative, to rescue Nigeria’s democracy, and by August 2026 he was on Facebook writing that no father could have such a son as Seyi Tinubu and not be thankful to God. In July 2024 an APC chieftain was reported publicly courting him for the ruling party. He has done everything a man can do short of printing his own letter of appointment.
And what came of it? Nothing. No office. No portfolio. No board. No call. He performed the entire courtship in public and the household did not answer.
So he has escalated. When flattery produced no envelope, he moved to service. Attack Atiku Abubakar, loudly, in the newspapers, and hope somebody upstairs marks the file when the next list circulates. That is what the article Hon Pamugo sent us actually is. An audition, performed by a man with an empty diary.
The Alternative is not a movement. It is a stomach with a letterhead.
And here is the part that should shame him, if shame were still an operating faculty. He conducts this audition on the backs of suffering Nigerians. While a mother in Abeokuta calculates whether to fuel the generator or buy the evening meal, he is at his desk explaining to her that her hunger is economic normalisation and that any commitment to relieve it is wishful thinking. He is converting national misery into personal positioning, one article at a time, and calling it public affairs analysis.
There is a word in this country for a man who eats from the suffering of others while telling them their suffering is good for them. It is not a word we will print. He knows it. Every Nigerian who has read this far knows it.
A WORD OF WARNING, PLAINLY GIVEN
We are content to leave him to his hunger. Hunger is a private matter and Nigeria has many hungry men.
But let this be understood clearly. If Otunba Segun Showunmi elects to make Atiku Abubakar the object of his attacks, then The Narrative Force will make Otunba Segun Showunmi a subject of daily study.
We have the accounts. We have the court papers. We have the Facebook archive, the television transcripts, the primary results, the certificate that went to another man, the open letters, the quarrels with his own former colleagues, the dates and the receipts. This article has used a fraction of it. There is a great deal more, and we are patient people with excellent filing.
He may write about Atiku Abubakar tomorrow if he wishes. He should simply understand that from tomorrow he becomes our subject matter, every day, for as long as it takes, and that we do not tire.
WHAT THE MASSES ARE ACTUALLY DECIDING
Atiku Abubakar speaks as a candidate, and what he has placed before Nigerians is his manifesto. Not a musing. Not a suggestion. A written commitment, published under his name, costed, and submitted to the suffering masses of this country for the closest examination they can give it.
That is the whole point of a manifesto, and it is the point Showunmi cannot grasp because he has never had to write one for an electorate. Atiku is asking the mother in Abeokuta, the farmer in Ekiti, the trader in Yola and the artisan in Aba to read what he has committed to, weigh it against what has been done to them these three years, examine his record and his intentions, and then decide on 16 January 2027. He invites scrutiny. He does not demand obedience.
On 29 May 2023 a President spoke four words at Eagle Square, and those words were the policy, effective on utterance, with no framework, no transition, no consultation and no vote left for any citizen to cast.
A manifesto you are invited to examine is not the same thing as a decree you must survive.
Nigerians do not need Otunba Segun Showunmi to explain incentives to them. They have been living inside the incentive structure he is defending. They know what the pump says. They know what the market did when crude moved. They know the savings were announced and the accounting was never produced.
And they know exactly what he is. Not a thinker. Not an economist. Not an opposition figure. A voice for hire between engagements, filling the silence with volume so that the right household remembers the name when the list is drawn.
The gasbag has made his noise. When the appointment finally comes, as such appointments do, he will dry his eyes on the first press statement and tell us all that he was never anti Tinubu.
He has already told us that. On Channels Television. In 2025.
The rest of this, the 1973, the smugglers, the Adamawa arithmetic, is just the sound a man makes while he waits.
Let him wait. Nigeria has a manifesto to examine and an election to win, and no vote in this Federation has ever been cast for a man nobody has ever voted for.
The Narrative Force has read the accounts, read the court papers, and read his file.
Adeyemi Bayode Adebisi
Member, Social Media Firestorm
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
7 September 2026
