ATIKU’S PLANS ARE PRO POOR AND PRO ENTERPRISE, AND HE IS THE ONE CANDIDATE WHO CAN NAME THE PROGRAMMES HE HAS ALREADY BUILT
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Find a Nigerian who was drawing a salary between 1999 and 2007 and ask him what those years felt like. He will not quote you a growth rate.
He will tell you about the primary or secondary school teacher who moved out of a rented room and laid a foundation in his home town. The clerk on grade level eight who bought his first car. The nurse who put a roof on a bungalow and finished it slowly, year by year, out of a monthly salary. The junior officer whose children stopped changing schools because the family had stopped moving.
That was not luck and it was not sentiment. It was policy, and every instrument that produced it can still be named.
Which is the whole point of this article. Any politician can call himself a friend of the poor. Very few can be handed a sheet of paper and asked to write down the programmes, the years and the beneficiaries.
Adjectives are free. Programmes have names, dates and registers.
TWO LEDGERS, ONE PURPOSE
A serious government keeps two ledgers at once and never mistakes one for the other.
The first is the pro poor ledger. It puts a trade, a school place, a clinic card or an income directly into the hands of a household that has none.
The second is the pro enterprise ledger. It takes obstacles off the neck of the man trying to build something, so that the household he would employ has somewhere to work.
Run only the first and you create dependence. Run only the second and you create a stock exchange floating above a hungry country. Atiku Abubakar has spent his public life arguing that both must run together, and he has the receipts for both.
THE PRO POOR LEDGER, 1999 TO 2007
Name them.
The National Poverty Eradication Programme of 2001, whose Keke NAPEP scheme put tricycles into the hands of young men on hire purchase and converted unemployment into a trade with a daily takings book.
The Universal Basic Education Act of 2004, which made basic education free and compulsory as a matter of law rather than of goodwill.
The National Health Insurance Scheme, formally launched in 2005.
The second National Fadama project, which routed development funds directly to smallholder farmer groups instead of into a ministry’s contract file.
The NEEDS framework of 2004, and the Pension Reform Act of the same year, which gave the Nigerian worker a retirement savings account carrying his own name rather than a promise from a ministry.
And the salary itself. In 2000 the pay of federal public servants was reviewed upward, in some grades by more than 600 per cent. A director on grade level 17 earning 328,860 naira a year in April 1999 was on 1,094,346 naira by May 2000, and 2,271,280 naira by January 2007. The lift ran down the grades to the men and women at the bottom of the service.
THE PRO ENTERPRISE LEDGER, 1999 TO 2007
Name these too.
In 1999 Nigeria had fewer than 500,000 telephone lines. In 2001 the GSM licences were auctioned at 285 million dollars each, and within a few years millions of Nigerians who owned nothing owned a trade. Recharge card vendors. Call centre operators under umbrellas. Handset repairers. Accessory sellers. The entire informal telecommunications economy that still feeds households in this country today. No poor Nigerian had to be enrolled in anything. The policy simply handed him a market.
The Small and Medium Industries Equity Investment Scheme, agreed by the Bankers Committee in 2000 and launched in August 2001, required every bank in Nigeria to set aside 10 per cent of pre tax profit for equity investment in small and medium enterprises, at a time when a small manufacturer could not get a bank to return his call.
Banking consolidation took 89 banks to 25 on a 25 billion naira capital base, creating institutions large enough to lend at scale. The Bank of Industry was reconstituted in 2001 out of three moribund predecessors. The seaport concessions of 2005 and 2006 broke a bottleneck that had been strangling every importer in the country.
And note whose desk the last of those sat on, because this is law rather than claim. Under section 153(1) and the Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution, the National Economic Council is chaired by the Vice President. Under the Public Enterprises Act of 1999, the National Council on Privatisation is chaired by the Vice President, with the Bureau of Public Enterprises reporting to that Council alone. Over 100 enterprises were reformed or divested through it, among them Eleme Petrochemicals and the state cement plants.
Even on the question his opponents now distort, the method is on record. Deregulation in that period was gradual. Petrol moved from 20 naira to 75 naira in roughly seven measured steps across eight years, through the PPPRA framework, with the economy given room to absorb each move. It was built so that the poor would never be asked to bear an entire adjustment in one morning.
THE SALARY THAT OUTRAN THE PRICE OF CEMENT
Now return to the teacher and his foundation, because a rising salary alone does not build a house.
Under the monetisation programme, official vehicles were withdrawn from the government fleet and sold to serving civil servants at 50 per cent discount after depreciation, with a revolving loan so an officer could finance a car against his own repayments. Housing allowance was monetised and paid to the worker himself, at 50 per cent of annual basic salary on grade levels 1 to 6, 60 per cent on grade levels 7 to 14, and 75 per cent on grade levels 15 to 17. For the officer who preferred to build rather than rent, government ran site and services schemes in satellite towns nationwide so that a salary earner could acquire land of his own.
Then place the last piece beside all of it. Inflation stood at 5.4 per cent in 2007. The naira traded at roughly 120 to 130 to the dollar. A bag of cement, a bundle of rods, a second hand car and a bus fare were priced in a currency that had not been hollowed out.
So the money in the worker’s hand was not merely more money. It was money that still meant something on a building site.
That is the entire method, and it is not complicated. Raise the earning. Hand the benefit directly to the earner instead of spending it on his behalf. Then hold the price level steady, so the earning survives contact with the market.
A man does not build a house on a rising salary. He builds it on a salary that outruns the price of cement.
WHAT WAS HANDED OVER IN 2007
A government is judged twice. Once by what it did while it held office, and once by what it left on the table for the men who came after it.
In May 2007 that table was not bare.
Nigeria had walked out of the Paris Club in 2006, 18 billion dollars written off against a debt of roughly 30 billion and 12.4 billion paid down. At the end of May 2007 the country’s gross reserves stood at 43.13 billion dollars, made up of 31.5 billion in external reserves at the Central Bank, 9.43 billion in the Excess Crude Account and 2.18 billion in federal government savings. The same country had come into 1999 with reserves of 3.7 billion dollars and an external debt of about 28 billion.
The Excess Crude Account was itself the invention of that period, created in 2004 to take every dollar earned above the budget benchmark price of crude and hold it back against a bad year. It was a rule written against the oldest habit in Nigerian public finance, which is to spend a boom as though booms were a permanent condition.
And the rule kept working after the men who wrote it had gone home. The account climbed above 22 billion dollars by 2008, the highest it has ever stood in the history of this federation, and it was that money that carried Nigeria through the global financial crash of 2008 and 2009 while far richer economies were tearing up their budgets. Five billion dollars of it was pledged by the three tiers of government to the National Independent Power Project.
That is what a foundation means in public finance. Not a speech. A cleared debt, a funded account, and a savings rule that outlives the government that wrote it.
The Peoples Democratic Party then governed this country without a break from 1999 to 2015, and Atiku Abubakar is one of the men who founded that party and one of the men who financed it into existence. What came after 2007 did not descend onto empty ground. It was run inside a party he built, on a fiscal base laid while he chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation, and it was run by the same method he had helped install. Name the programme. Register the beneficiary. Put the benefit into the citizen’s own hand.
A foundation is not a footnote. Everything that stands afterwards is standing on it.
THE VOUCHER ON THE FARMER’S PHONE, 2011 TO 2015
The Jonathan and Sambo administration kept both ledgers open on that foundation, and the current government is counting on you having forgotten it.
On the pro poor side: the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme, running a Maternal and Child Health scheme, a Graduate Internship Scheme, a Community Services, Women and Youth Employment scheme and vocational training, every one of them with an enrolment register. The Almajiri Model Schools, of which 124 were initiated, the first 35 delivered through TETFund and 64 more handed over on 2 November 2013 by Vice President Namadi Sambo himself, built for the most abandoned children in this federation. Nine new federal universities in 2011, sited in states that had never had one, so that a poor family’s brightest child no longer had to travel a thousand kilometres to sit in a lecture hall. The Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company, created to bring formal housing finance within reach of low and middle income earners.
On the pro enterprise side: the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Fund, established on 15 August 2013 with seed capital of 220 billion naira, structured to lend at single digit interest through microfinance institutions, with 60 per cent of the commercial component reserved for women, 10 per cent for start ups and 2 per cent for economically active persons living with disabilities. The Nigeria Incentive Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, launched in 2011, which attacked the real reason banks would not lend to farmers by sharing the risk instead of lecturing the farmer. The Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act of 2010, which for the first time compelled that industry to give Nigerian firms and Nigerian hands the work. The automotive policy of 2013, which brought vehicle assembly back onto Nigerian soil.
And the one that says everything. The Growth Enhancement Support Scheme put the fertiliser voucher on the farmer’s own mobile phone. Not in the hands of a contractor. Not in a warehouse guarded by a politician’s cousin. On the phone of a named, registered smallholder, redeemable at an accredited agro dealer. Independent peer reviewed evaluation found that participating farmers raised maize yields by 26.3 per cent and lifted maize income by 19,730 naira.
The YouWiN programme ran as a national business plan competition for young entrepreneurs, drawing nearly 24,000 applicants and disbursing 36 million dollars in grants at an average of about 50,000 dollars per winner. Part of the awards were deliberately allocated by a draw among the semi finalists, which meant no godfather could bend an outcome, and the whole thing could be independently evaluated by the World Bank’s own evaluation unit. It was.
Notice what every programme in this article shares. A name. A register. A beneficiary you could telephone. A disbursement someone outside government could audit.
AND NOW, THE GRAVEYARD
Set that entire record beside the condition of Nigerian enterprise in 2026 under APC.
In July the Director General of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, Segun Ajayi Kadir, said something that ought to be read twice. Nigerian manufacturers are now selling below production cost, absorbing outright losses simply to move goods and keep their factories open, scrambling to clear close to 2 trillion naira of unsold inventory. Not because they cannot produce. Because the Nigerian standing in front of them can no longer buy.
The same association recorded 767 manufacturing companies shut down and 335 distressed in 2023 alone. In the South East, manufacturers said openly this year that energy costs and the price of money are closing their plants.
On 2 September 2026, Uber ended twelve years in Nigeria. The company spoke of a review of priorities. Its own drivers had been saying something plainer for years, through their union and in the streets of Lagos, that fuel and operating costs had climbed past what the work returns. Whatever the boardroom chose to call it, thousands of ordinary men woke up the next morning without the livelihood they had built.
The ADC put it in one phrase through its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi. This economy is becoming a graveyard of businesses.
Nobody who has ever run a business believes that enterprise dies of bad luck. It dies of the cost of diesel, the cost of credit, the cost of clearing a container, and the vanishing purchasing power of the customer in front of you.
SEVEN COMMITMENTS: FOUR FOR THE HOUSEHOLD, THREE FOR THE WORKSHOP
Which brings us to what has been placed before Nigerians for 16 January 2027, in advance, in documents any citizen may examine and reject.
Atiku’s platform carries seven commitments under one governing instruction: put Nigerians first.
Four of them are pro poor, aimed straight at the household. A targeted fuel cushion to crash transport costs and break the energy driven spiral in food prices. A direct attack on the cost of living, to restore what a day’s earnings actually buys. A security overhaul reaching down to the grassroots, protecting not only lives but the farmland a family eats from. And full local government autonomy, bringing governance back within walking distance of the poor. To these he has added a review of the student loan scheme and the writing off of qualifying student debt, so that a young Nigerian leaves school with an opportunity rather than a liability acquired because his parents could not pay.
Three of them are pro enterprise, aimed at the workshop and the shop floor. A jobs drive through the sectors capable of absorbing this country’s enormous pool of idle talent. Ten billion dollars in dedicated youth financing, directed at young entrepreneurs and technology driven enterprise, which is capital rather than charity. And the reopening of the land borders, to restart regional commerce, lower food distribution costs and revive the trading economies that whole border towns live on.
On the energy question specifically, the working document is precise. Support shifts from imported refined products to domestic production. Qualifying local refineries receive crude at subsidised rates, refine it here and supply the Nigerian market at lower prices. The intervention is capped. It is budgeted in the open. It is independently audited. Diversion of subsidised crude or product to more profitable foreign markets is barred, so that no Nigerian pays the fiscal cost of a cargo he never receives.
That is not the old regime of importers, middlemen and unverifiable claims. It is the opposite of it. It moves the money from a paper claim to a measurable barrel.
And when the question comes about where ten billion dollars is to be found, look first at the 12.8 trillion naira Service Wide Vote sitting inside the 2026 budget of a country that says it cannot afford to relieve its own people. Nigeria does not have a money problem. It has a custody problem.
THE MAN AND THE METHOD
Every era described in this article belongs to one unbroken line of policy, built on the same three moves. Atiku was present at the laying of it, present in the party that carried it forward, and has published his intention to repeat it.
Put a trade in the poor man’s hand. Take the obstacles off the businessman’s neck. Then hold the value of the money steady, so that neither gain evaporates before the month ends.
The Narrative Force says openly what it wants. We are an advocacy organisation, we want Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi elected on 16 January 2027, and we sign our names to every line we write.
But we are not asking Nigerians to take a feeling to the polling unit. We are asking them to take a list.
Ask every candidate on that ballot to name the programmes he has built, the years he built them, and the Nigerians who can be telephoned today to confirm it.
One of them can hand you a fertiliser voucher on a farmer’s phone, a tricycle bought on hire purchase, a retirement account in a worker’s own name, a market conjured out of a telephone licence, and a teacher’s house standing in a village that anyone may drive to and see.
129 days.
AtikuAmaechi2027 #NameTheProgrammes #PutNigeriansFirst #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
10 September 2026
