Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
For almost twenty years Nigerians have argued over who poisoned the partnership between President Olusegun Obasanjo and his Vice President, Atiku Abubakar. On Sunday, 27 September 2026, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode settled the argument. He did not intend to.
In his essay “The Seventh Bid of Waziri”, written to prove that Atiku betrayed his principal, the former Minister of Aviation instead published the membership list of the faction that made war on the Vice President from inside the government. He boasts that they took the battle to the Vice President’s gates and, in his own words, “gave him hell over the next four years”.
Read that line slowly. It is not an accusation against Atiku. It is a confession.
THE CONFESSION
A Vice President of Nigeria is not a houseboy of the Presidency. He is elected on the same ticket as the President, by the same millions of votes. A minister is appointed, and serves at the pleasure of the man who appointed him.
Fani-Kayode now tells the nation that he and a band of appointees organised themselves, for four full years, against the second highest elected officer of the Federal Republic. He calls it loyalty. In any orderly government it has another name: a palace faction at war with the Constitution’s own arrangement.
Those who have long said envious courtiers drove the wedge between Obasanjo and Atiku no longer need to prove it. One of the courtiers has signed the statement.
The man who drove the wedge is now asking Nigerians to blame the log for splitting.
THE HONOUR ROLL THAT TURNED AGAINST HIM
He named his comrades. From the Presidency and the cabinet: Nasir El-Rufai, Nuhu Ribadu, Akin Osuntokun, Abiye Sekibo, Frank Nweke, Uba Sani, Adamu Bello and Julius Ihonvbere. From the governors: Peter Odili of Rivers, the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of Katsina and Ahmad Makarfi of Kaduna.
He offers this list as proof of Atiku’s guilt. Time has turned it into proof of something else.
Nuhu Ribadu led the investigation of Atiku as Chairman of the EFCC. By Atiku’s own published account, Ribadu later came to ask his forgiveness, and Atiku told him to return to the same television stations and tell Nigerians he now knew Atiku was not corrupt.
Ribadu did more than make peace. He made family. On 3 October 2020, in Abuja, he gave his daughter Fatima in marriage to Atiku’s son Aliyu. Among the guests was Bola Tinubu, the same Tinubu whom Fani-Kayode, before that month was out, would be calling heartless and wicked.
The man who held the files, who probed Atiku with the full power of the Nigerian state, looked at all of it and gave his own daughter into Atiku’s house. No father does that to a family he believes to be rotten.
The EFCC chairman who investigated Atiku later made him an in-law. That is the verdict of the man who read the files.
Today Ribadu is President Tinubu’s National Security Adviser. The file sits with the incumbent’s own security chief, who is also Atiku’s in-law, and still there is no charge.
Nasir El-Rufai was one of the men who searched Atiku’s office in 2006. In February 2025, publicly and with Atiku present, he said nobody gives Atiku credit for economic policymaking under Obasanjo, and that much of what they achieved was done under his leadership.
On Thursday, 24 September 2026, Atiku named El-Rufai Deputy Chairman of the ADC Presidential Campaign Council. He did so while El-Rufai sits in the custody of the ICPC, held by the very government Fani-Kayode now serves. El-Rufai has pleaded not guilty. No court has convicted him.
In 2023 El-Rufai mobilised the North to put Tinubu in Aso Rock. His reward was a ministerial nomination that never made it into the cabinet, and today, custody. Meanwhile the man whose office he once searched has given him one of the highest seats in his campaign.
Atiku gave a seat of honour to a man who once searched his office. Tinubu’s government holds in custody the man who helped carry him to Aso Rock. Now tell Nigerians who repays good with evil.
The two sharpest swords in Fani-Kayode’s army have laid down their charges. One became Atiku’s in-law. The other now helps lead Atiku’s campaign. Both are alive. Let either contradict it.
EVERY MASTER HAS HAD HIS TURN
Before Nigerians accept a lecture on loyalty, they should see the lecturer’s own record.
Before Obasanjo brought him in, he was a critic of Obasanjo, writing against the very government he would later serve.
In 2003 he entered the Obasanjo Presidency and made himself its loudest tongue. As the President’s spokesman, he turned his fire on those who stood against the Third Term agenda.
In mid-2013 he left the PDP for the APC. In 2014 he was back in the PDP. By 2015 he was directing media and publicity for the campaign against the APC.
In that campaign he told Nigerians that Muhammadu Buhari had no school certificate and had lied on oath about it. He painted the APC candidate as a friend of the insurgents butchering the North East. He warned of a secret APC plot for Yemi Osinbajo to step aside after the inauguration so that Bola Tinubu could seize the presidency.
In 2019 he swore he would rather die than join the APC.
In October 2020 he turned on Tinubu in the most personal terms he could find. “You are heartless, you are cold-blooded, you are wicked,” he wrote to him. He accused Tinubu of lacking empathy for the suffering, branded him a sociopath, called him a man blinded by ambition, and said he regretted ever supporting him.
In September 2021 he joined Tinubu’s party.
In 2023 he was Director of New Media and Special Operations in Tinubu’s presidential campaign, raining abuse on Tinubu’s critics from the same keyboard that had called Tinubu a sociopath.
Confronted with his old words, he now retracts them, and in February 2026 he even lectured others that it takes courage to admit when past comments were wrong. The insults were sincere enough to publish and cheap enough to withdraw. With Fani-Kayode, a conviction lasts exactly as long as the payroll that inspires it.
In September 2023, when Obasanjo backed another candidate, Fani-Kayode publicly savaged the old man and mocked him as a “flaming Obidient”. The principal whose honour he now defends against Atiku was, three years ago, the target of his own tongue.
In September 2026, writing as Tinubu’s Ambassador-Designate, he calls Atiku a political wanderer and a betrayer of Obasanjo.
He has bitten every hand that fed him, including the one he now accuses Atiku of biting.
STARVED, HE PRAYED. FED, HE BARKS
Tinubu took the service and kept the reward. When the cabinet was unveiled in August 2023, the Director of New Media and Special Operations was not on it. He had lobbied, and he lost the slot.
What followed was a lean season. The loudest tongue in the campaign fell quiet. He took to the pulpit. In that same season he was looking toward the very camp he now abuses, and he said as much on his own Facebook page.
Then, in December 2025, the envoy nomination came. The Facebook post was retracted.
Within weeks the bark was back. In March 2026 he spent three days trading vicious insults with the publisher Dele Momodu for calling Tinubu a dictator. In September 2026 he threatened a 100 million dollar lawsuit against an American lobbyist. And now, the long essay against Atiku.
Left without a bone, the dog prayed and wagged its tail at the opposition. Handed a bone, it deleted the evidence and bared its teeth.
This is not conviction. It is appetite.
Nigerians who watched him in 2015 said openly that once his paymaster fell, he would crawl back to the party he was savaging. He did exactly that. His prophecy about Atiku is written by the same hand that got every one of his own loyalties wrong.
THE CABINET SCENE
The centrepiece of his essay is a story in which he, a minister, twice demanded in full Federal Executive Council that the Vice President be thrown out of the chamber. He tells it as heroism. It reads as insubordination against an elected office.
Notice the part he hurries past. On both occasions, by his own telling, Obasanjo refused to expel his deputy. The principal whose honour Fani-Kayode claims to defend overruled him twice.
Meanwhile the law kept Atiku exactly where it had placed him. The Constitution made him Chairman of the National Economic Council. The Public Enterprises Act 1999 made him Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation. No minister’s outburst could move him from chairs the law had given him.
The scene rests on one witness, the man who wishes to be its hero. Every member of that cabinet was present. Let one of them step forward and tell it the same way.
THE ABSALOM WHO WON HIS FATHER A SECOND TERM
Fani-Kayode’s gravest charge concerns 2003. He says Atiku rallied governors to topple Obasanjo, sat on campaign funds, and was defeated only by divine intervention and the money of a wealthy Kano businessman whom he declines to name.
A charge that depends on a benefactor who cannot be named is not evidence. It is a rumour wearing a suit.
The record is simpler. Governors and members of the National Assembly pressed Atiku to run for President in his own right in 2003. He declined, backed his principal’s return, rallied the North behind the ticket, and campaigned as the deputy, not the challenger. The ticket won with 24,456,140 votes to 12,710,022 for Muhammadu Buhari.
Fani-Kayode himself concedes that Atiku remained on the ticket and was elected with Obasanjo. His biblical Absalom, the son who raised an army against his father, turns out to be a man who raised votes for his principal and handed him a second term.
HE DID NOT REPAY THE GOOD. HE CREATED IT
Fani-Kayode’s refrain is that Atiku repays good with evil. What good did Atiku ever receive that he had not first created with his own hands?
The essay says Obasanjo brought Atiku out of obscurity. By 1998 Atiku had served twenty years in the Nigeria Customs Service and retired as its second highest officer, stood down for MKO Abiola at Jos in 1993, led the People’s Democratic Movement, helped found and finance the PDP, and been elected Governor of Adamawa State. Obscurity was never his address.
Long before there was any good to repay, Atiku was already doing good to Obasanjo. By Atiku’s own account, when word reached him in 1995 that Abacha planned to arrest Obasanjo over the phantom coup, he rushed to Ota to warn him. After their leader, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, died in Abacha’s prison, Atiku warned Obasanjo in detention to refuse any injection offered to him. If saving a man’s life is not loyalty, the word has no meaning.
When Obasanjo left prison in 1998 without means, he thanked the foreign friends who paid his children’s school fees. He has never named Atiku. Yet by Atiku’s account, it was Atiku who assigned Otunba Oyewole Fashawe to raise funds for the upkeep of Obasanjo and his children.
Then Atiku built the house Obasanjo would live in. He poured his own resources into the new PDP, including a personal donation of 100 million naira, while seeking no national office for himself. His northern network made a Southern candidate acceptable to the North, and at Jos Obasanjo defeated Alex Ekwueme by 1,658 delegates to 521 with Atiku’s bloc behind him.
Having created the good, he nurtured it: eight years carrying the economic engine of that government, and in 2003 a second term handed to his principal when he could have taken the prize himself. Beyond politics, he founded the American University of Nigeria in Yola with his own money, and when the insurgency came it stayed open and fed displaced people in their hundreds of thousands.
Atiku never repaid good with evil. He created the good, nurtured it, and watched other men take the credit.
If there was evil in that government, Fani-Kayode has told us where it came from: the courtiers who, by his own boast, gave the Vice President four years of hell.
CONTEMPT FOR THE SOUTH?
Fani-Kayode claims Atiku holds Southern aspirations in contempt. In 1993 at Jos, Atiku stood down for MKO Abiola, a Southerner. In 1999 he deferred his ambition so that Obasanjo, a Southerner, could lead. In 2003 he refused to challenge that same Southerner. Not once in thirty three years has he asked a stronger man to yield to him.
For a generation the South’s loudest demand has been to restructure the federation. No law or convention required a Northern candidate to make that cause his own. Atiku did, as a lifelong creed: strong states empowered to compete, a lean centre confined to defence, foreign affairs and monetary policy, state police and resource control, through constitutional amendment.
A man with contempt for the South does not spend thirty years carrying the South’s own demand as his creed.
THE STATISTICS OF A PROPHET
Fani-Kayode counts seven bids by adding party primaries to general elections. Atiku has stood on the presidential ballot three times: 2007, 2019 and 2023. The 2027 election will be his fourth.
Muhammadu Buhari lost in 2003, 2007 and 2011, and won in 2015 on his fourth attempt, defeating the campaign whose media Fani-Kayode directed. His own foreign example, Abdoulaye Wade, won the presidency of Senegal after losing four times. His statistics refute themselves.
Then comes the prophecy of a divine injunction on Atiku’s ambition. In October 2020 he assured Tinubu that his ambition to rule Nigeria would never be realised. Three years later Tinubu was sworn in, and the prophet was on his campaign payroll. A man whose prophecies expire faster than his loyalties should not be issuing injunctions in the name of God.
On 11 October 2018, at Abeokuta, Obasanjo himself publicly endorsed Atiku as “president-to-be”, after once swearing that God would never forgive him if he backed Atiku. He gave that verdict with every file of their years together before him.
If there was ever an injunction, the plaintiff himself withdrew it.
THE LAWYER WHO FORGOT EVIDENCE
He was trained in the law, where a charge without evidence is thrown out before lunch. Yet his case against Atiku rests on a Kano financier he will not name, a cabinet scene only he remembers, and a list of files he admits never produced a trial.
He lists Mambilla, Siemens, Halliburton and more, then concedes that none produced a Nigerian trial or conviction. He has written the defence himself.
On Mambilla, the ICC tribunal flagged the $500,000 payment as raising significant red flags. The same tribunal recorded that there was “no evidence on the record” that Atiku exercised his official duties in a manner that fostered the award to Sunrise. An allegation is not a finding. Red flags are not a conviction.
In 2006, by Atiku’s own published account, he waived his constitutional immunity and opened his office to investigators. Nothing was found. His invitation stands: anyone with evidence of a crime should take it to the investigative authorities and a competent court.
His craft is not argument. It is abuse. In 2020, when a young Daily Trust reporter, Eyo Charles, asked him who was paying for his travels, he turned on the journalist in public. He later apologised and called his own conduct indefensible. That is the temperament now instructing Nigerians on who is fit to lead them.
THE SUBSIDY AND THE LOBBYIST
Fani-Kayode warns that Atiku will restore subsidy. Atiku will return it, categorically and in the open: under the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan, a production subsidy on products refined in Nigeria, capped, appropriated by the National Assembly and independently audited. It is a committed plan published before the vote, not a decree announced from an inauguration podium.
The Washington engagement is registered with the United States Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, fee and all, for anyone to read. A registered contract is the opposite of a secret. When a diplomat reaches for a man’s surname instead of his argument, the argument has run out.
AN ENVOY’S DUTY
Fani-Kayode signs his essay as Nigeria’s Ambassador-Designate to South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini. An envoy represents every Nigerian abroad, including the 6,984,520 who voted for Atiku in 2023. A man who cannot hold his tongue at home is being sent to speak for the nation abroad.
THE ONLY CONSTANT IS THE BARK
An attack dog is not judged by how loudly it barks but by whom it barks at, and why.
Before 2003 he barked at Obasanjo. From 2003 he barked for him. In 2015 he barked at Buhari and Tinubu. In 2020 he barked at Tinubu again. In 2023 he barked for Tinubu, and at Obasanjo. Left without a bone, he fell silent, prayed, and wagged his tail at the opposition. Handed an ambassadorship, he deleted the evidence and barks at Atiku. The targets change with the payroll. The only constant is the bark.
One man has spent thirty three years building, giving and yielding, and even his investigators ended up as his family. The other has spent them barking for whoever held the bone. Nigerians can tell the difference between a builder and a barker.
He closes his essay by saying he comes in peace. Nigerians will take him at his word, and take his confession with it.
The courtiers of 2003 gave Atiku four years of hell and failed to finish him. Twenty years later he is on the ballot, the ADC candidate and the only Northerner in the race. One of those courtiers now helps lead his campaign. Another is his in-law. In 111 days the people, not the palace, will give their answer.
#Atiku2027 #ADC #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
28 September 2026
