An Open Letter to Chief Femi Fani-Kayode

From: Aare Amerijoye DOT.B

Director General, The Narrative Force
4 October 2026

Dear Femi,

You have done it again. You have climbed onto a pulpit made entirely of insults and preached a sermon on manners.

“Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.” Charles Caleb Colton wrote that two centuries ago. He could have been reading your epistle this morning.

I read every florid, overdressed, adjective-drunk line of your attack on the Wazirin Adamawa’s Independence Day address. It was loud. It was factually careless. It was logically bankrupt. I shall take it apart count by count, until nothing is left of it but its spelling mistakes.

THE NAME THAT BURNT YOUR TONGUE

Your great grievance is that Atiku Abubakar called the President “Bola”. Then, in the same breath, you call a former Vice President of the Federal Republic plain “Atiku”, not once, not twice, but seven times in your chorus of “Are you not the same Atiku”. You never hear yourself, Femi. That is your tragedy.

Bola is the man’s name. He signs it on every document of state. A name is not an insult. A pit bull terrier is an insult. A hungry wolf is an insult. Calling millions of Nigerians “fallen angels” is an insult. You promised respect in your third paragraph and threw it in the gutter by your fourth.

And let us settle the matter of dogs. The only dog in this quarrel is you: a rabid, promiscuous Rottweiler who bites on command for whoever holds the leash this season.

You called the address intellectually flawed and dishonest, yet you could not quote one sentence of it, dispute one figure in it or answer one question it asked. Nigerians are hungry, kidnapped and broke, and your only complaint about a national address was the President’s first name. That is not criticism. That is pettiness in a starched collar.

Then came your coward’s trick: “I will not refer to you as Kachalla.” Which is to say, you did. You poured the poison and pretended to hold the cup away. In a country where bandit warlords hold whole villages to ransom, that is not wit. It is recklessness, and recklessness is your biography.

THE MOUTH YOU BORROWED

You hid behind Bashorun Akin Osuntokun. Bad choice. The very passage you quoted says Atiku is entitled to criticise the President, however sharply. Osuntokun conceded the substance and objected only to the form. He called nobody a wolf, and he did not condemn first names while scattering one across his own page, as you did.

You borrowed a gentleman’s sentence and then wrote like a man who has never met one. You say you are not surprised by Atiku’s “rank insolence”. Nobody is surprised by yours, Femi. Nigerians have watched it for thirty years.

LET ME NAME YOU

Falsehood, duplicity and contradiction are not names your enemies invented. Your record gave them to you. You attach yourself to one man after another, never for principle, never for country, always for bread and butter, and you hide it all behind a scaffolding of lies about honour.

You were born with a silver spoon and trained in the law, yet you have never been an honour to your generation. You stand for nothing. You defend every ill with the hunger of a starving man. You speak first and think never.

Since you love adjectives, take these. You are a political mercenary with a law degree. A serial turncoat. A hired tongue rented by the hour. A merchant of bile and a peddler of division. A weathervane in agbada, spinning towards whichever wind blows from the Villa. You are vain, venal, vindictive, shameless, spineless and unrepentant. A bully to the weak and a bootlicker to the strong. An arsonist of the national conversation who arrives afterwards dressed as the fire brigade. The loudest empty drum in Nigerian politics.

When you are hired, you go berserk against anything standing between your paymaster and his ambition. Your propaganda never travels without a bodyguard of lies, and your campaigns run on a simple timetable: a lie a day, seven a week. You are the political market’s errand boy for every job too dirty for others to touch. Friends who came close to you have, one after another, met the devil in you. If loyalty has a surname, yours is betrayal.

You are a rabid, promiscuous Rottweiler. Your rage lies down with any cause that pays, and your teeth sink into whichever hand last fed you. Obasanjo fed you, and you bit him. Jonathan fed you, and you bit everyone he pointed at. Buhari’s party you bit for six years, then crawled into its kennel for scraps. Expecting consistency from you is like expecting a chameleon to keep one colour while crossing a market.

THE SAME FEMI

You built your epistle on “Are you not the same Atiku?” Then sit down, Femi, and hear the record of the same Femi.

You abused Obasanjo in the newspapers until he gave you a job in 2003. Overnight, he became the best man ever to rule Nigeria. You tore at the Jonathan administration as the most inept this country had ever seen. Then you went back to your vomit and became the loudest champion of his re-election.

In 2013 you wrote “The Bitter Truth About The Igbo”, thousands of words telling Ndigbo they live in Lagos as guests. In 2015, as Director of Media and Publicity of a presidential campaign, you told Nigerians the APC was on a mission to Islamise the country. From 2015 to 2021 you called a sitting President, Muhammadu Buhari, tribalistic and deaf to the slaughter of his citizens. Your reverence for the Office of the President was on leave until you changed your collar.

In 2016 the EFCC arraigned you on 17 counts over about N4.9 billion of campaign money, and you were remanded in prison custody pending bail. You pleaded not guilty. The prosecution later alleged that medical reports you tendered to stall the trial were fake.

In 2019 you called the APC a “filthy, rat-infested sinking ship” and swore you would rather die than join it. In 2020 in Calabar, a young reporter dared to ask who was bankrolling your tour. You called him stupid to his face, and later confessed your reaction was disproportionate and unduly harsh. In 2021 you walked into that rat-infested ship and announced that God had sent you.

You wrote that Obasanjo would rather have died than kneel. You swore you would rather die than join the APC. You are alive, Femi. And you are in the APC.

WHAT YOU CALLED TINUBU

Now to the man whose name you guard like a kennel gate. You want to teach Atiku how to address President Tinubu? Then let Nigerians hear how you addressed him.

You swore that Tinubu would never become President “as long as Jesus sits on the throne”. In July 2019 you called him a confirmed quisling and a desperate serf, and accused him of selling his soul to the devil.

In the PDP you thundered against a Muslim-Muslim ticket. In June 2022 you vowed to leave the APC if it produced a running mate you considered dangerous to Christians. The Muslim-Muslim ticket came. You did not leave. You became Director of New Media for the Tinubu/Shettima campaign. When Nigerians dug up your old essays against him, you said you had written them while among pigs, and told anyone unhappy with your somersault to drop dead.

Today the “quisling” is your President. The “serf” is your paymaster. And the man you said sold his soul to the devil has nominated you as an ambassador. So answer one question, Femi. Did Jesus leave the throne, or did your conscience leave you? A man who called Tinubu a serf in 2019 and kisses his ring in 2026 cannot teach anyone how to pronounce his name.

THE DARKEST FILE

February 2023. On the eve of a presidential election, you told the nation that Atiku Abubakar had met military generals to plot a coup.

The military dismissed it. The DSS interrogated you for hours. The President’s own spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, said the DSS made clear to you that the report behind your claim was not correct. You offered “regret”. You never offered the man you accused a public apology.

In 2023 you accused Atiku of treason. In 2026 you accuse him of rudeness. Your charges shrink every time someone asks for evidence.

THE MAN WHO SAVED YOUR FIRST PAYMASTER

You accuse Atiku of betraying Obasanjo. Then let us talk about what Atiku did for Obasanjo, because you were nowhere near the story.

By Atiku’s own account, he twice stood between Obasanjo and the grave. In 1995 he rushed to Ota to warn him that Abacha was coming to arrest him. Later, with Obasanjo in prison, Atiku warned him to refuse the needle, the same needle that killed General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. Think of that, Femi. The Obasanjo you claim to defend may be alive today because Atiku Abubakar sent that warning.

And when Obasanjo walked out of prison with nothing but his name, it was Atiku’s political machine, the PDM structure built by Yar’Adua, that carried him, and by Atiku’s account it was largely Atiku’s resources that powered the campaign that made him President in 1999. A man who saves your life and then helps put you in Aso Rock deserves gratitude and applause. He does not deserve insults from a rabid, promiscuous Rottweiler who joined the story four years later as a hired voice.

Now to your 2003 fable. You say Atiku conspired to overthrow Obasanjo at the primaries. Then explain the outcome. Obasanjo got his ticket. Atiku was on it. They won together with 24,456,140 votes. Governors and lawmakers begged Atiku to run in his own right, and he declined. A man plotting to topple his boss had the governors and the momentum in his hand, and he handed them back. A betrayer does not get chosen twice. Obasanjo chose Atiku in 1999 and again in 2003.

You say Atiku insulted Obasanjo from 2003 to 2007. It was that Presidency, the one you served, that cooked an overnight white paper against its own Vice President. It was its electoral commission that struck his name off the 2007 ballot. Atiku did not call a mob. He went to court, and the Supreme Court held that INEC had no power to disqualify him. A deputy who defends himself in court against his own government is not insulting his principal. He is surviving him.

And the Third Term was no excuse. The Senate killed it on 16 May 2006, while you sat inside that Presidency. Refusing to bend the Constitution for one man’s tenure is not treachery. It is service to the Republic. On 11 October 2018 at Abeokuta, Obasanjo himself publicly endorsed Atiku as President-to-be. You cannot be more Obasanjo than Obasanjo.

JONATHAN AND SHETTIMA

You rushed to defend Goodluck Jonathan and fell at the first step. He is 68, not 69. He was never elected Governor of Bayelsa; he succeeded to the office in 2005. Atiku spoke of experience as an elder, while you once called that same administration the most inept this country had seen. If anyone owes Jonathan an apology, look in the mirror.

Shettima wants an account? Here it is. The Vice President chairs the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation, and Atiku held both chairs from 1999 to 2007. In those years GDP grew from $58 billion to $270 billion. Reserves rose from about $3.7 billion to about $45 billion. The Paris Club wrote off $18 billion of our debt.

In 1999 Nigeria had fewer than 500,000 telephone lines. The GSM licences auctioned in 2001 gave a nation of millions its voice. Banks were consolidated from 89 to 25, and the Pension Reform Act came in 2004. That is the account of the tenure. The account of the empowerment begins at home.

ADAMAWA, WHERE CHARITY BEGAN AT HOME

Atiku could have planted his fortune in Lagos, in Abuja or abroad. He chose Yola, the capital of one of the poorest states in the federation. He founded ABTI Academy in 2002, then the American University of Nigeria, the first American-style university in sub-Saharan Africa. One published estimate credits the university with about $100 million in the Adamawa economy.

He incorporated Adama Beverages, makers of Faro water, in 2004. In January 2013, with insurgents close to Yola and investors fleeing the North East, he broke ground on the Rico Gado feed mill. His reason was one line: if we do not do it, who will? The sacks it once bought from Lagos now come from his own Adama Plast factory.

Then the insurgents overran Mubi, Michika and Madagali, and his institutions became Adamawa’s shelter. The Adamawa Peace Initiative, founded at the university in 2012, brought Christians and Muslims together, and the university’s president credits it with keeping Yola safe while towns around it fell. By January 2015 the university was feeding 237,941 displaced people. By the end, more than 300,000 had eaten from its relief, most of them women and children.

Survivors were given land to farm in Bole village. Farmers received seeds when peace returned. Hungry children got a hot meal with their lessons. Escaped Chibok girls found a school that took them in. After the 2018 Mubi suicide bombings, Atiku gave N10 million to the paupers’ fund of the Federal Medical Centre, Yola, his second such gift. Beyond Adamawa, he gave N100 million to Maiduguri’s flood victims in 2024 and N50 million to Bayelsa’s in 2022.

Is this not worthy of applause? Is such a man not owed a standing ovation by every honest Nigerian? You could not find room for one word of it, Femi, because one word would have buried every adjective you wrote.

And let no hireling ask why Adamawa still has poor people. No individual on earth, however rich, can solve the problems of a state with his private purse. If one man’s wealth could, the richest men who ever lived would long ago have banished poverty from their own cities. Lifting a people is the work of government, which holds the treasury, the laws and the power to tax and spend for millions.

The measure of a private citizen is what he does with what is his. The measure of a government is what it does with what belongs to everybody, and on that measure it is your principals who must answer. That is why Atiku asks Nigerians for the second responsibility. The man who did so much with his own money has earned the chance to show what he will do with the nation’s.

WHAT HAVE YOU THREE BUILT?

You demanded to know how many people Atiku has empowered. Now it is your turn, and Shettima’s, and Tinubu’s.

Femi, name the university you founded. Name the factory. Name even one secondary school, in Ile-Ife or anywhere in this Republic. Shettima, you governed Borno for eight years while the insurgency raged. Show us the private factory you raised in Maiduguri with your own money while the guns were firing. Tinubu, show us the university you founded from your own fortune for the children of the poor, or the feed mill you planted in a war zone.

Nigerians are waiting for the receipts. Until they arrive, ask the graduates of Yola, the farmers along Rico Gado’s supply lines, and the women and children who ate from the university’s kitchens when the insurgents came.

NORTHERN CULTURE, FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BITTER TRUTH

You accuse Atiku of hiding behind Northern culture, of stripping Obasanjo naked in 2002, and of leading fallen angels in a tale about kneeling. You produced no document, no witness and no date. You were not in that room. You were not yet on the payroll. And the man who told Ndigbo they are guests in Lagos now lectures the North on its own culture.

Restraint is a man who takes his grievances to the courts, not the streets, and has never called out a crowd to burn anything. Patience is a man who stood down for others three times, at Jos in 1993, in 1999 and in 2003.

You call him a master of intrigue and a mask of contradictions and deceit. Intrigue is a coup story tweeted on the eve of an election. Contradiction is joining the party you called rat-infested. Deceit is a medical report the prosecution says was fake. You were describing yourself, Femi, and you did not even bother to change the pronouns.

AMAECHI AND THE DEAD GIRL IN YOUR BROCHURE

Rivals say hard things in a primary. Rotimi Amaechi now shares one ticket with Atiku, which is what serious men do when the contest is over, and the ward queues answered “unelectable”. If words spoken in battle were permanent, you would still be calling your own party a rat-infested ship.

You dragged the name of Deborah Samuel out of 2022 and called Atiku a liar for good measure. She deserved justice, not a role as a prop in your brochure. And a man the DSS told that his coup claim was baseless is the last man in Nigeria to call anyone a liar.

If Nigerian blood truly moves you, ask the government you serve about the villages emptied in Benue, Plateau and Zamfara. Ask it about Major General Rabe Abubakar, abducted on 30 May and dead in captivity by 13 June 2026. Grief that switches on only against your principal’s opponent is not compassion. It is merchandise.

AMBITION, ACCOUNTABILITY AND PATRIOTISM

You say Atiku is loyal only to his ambition and desperate for power at all costs. A desperate man does not stand down three times for others. Not once in thirty three years has Atiku asked a stronger man to yield to him. Desperation is crossing into the party you swore you would rather die than join.

You say questionable characters should not question others on accountability. Then compare files. By Atiku’s own published account, he waived his immunity before Obasanjo’s 2006 panel, and nothing was found. Twenty years of hostile administrations have produced no charge. Nuhu Ribadu, who led that investigation, now sits as Tinubu’s National Security Adviser, and still there is no charge. Your own file sits in the Federal High Court in Lagos with 17 counts and N4.9 billion.

You call his promises vain, yet his plans are published as working documents in the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan, and you could not quote one page. On patriotism, Atiku fought for June 12 under Abacha. He was almost killed, his police orderlies were killed, and he went into exile, while you were sharpening your pen for whoever would feed you next.

YOUR PROPHECY HAS A RECORD

A rabid Rottweiler barks loudest at the passer-by it cannot catch, and that is all your epistle was.

You declare that Atiku may never attain the Presidency. Your prophecies have a history. In 2015 you swore Jonathan would win. In 2019 you swore you would rather die than join the APC. In 2023 you swore there was a coup. You even swore Tinubu would never rule while Jesus sat on the throne. Not one of them came true.

“Futher”. “Abominal”. “It’s antithesis”. “Kindness” listed twice in one breath. A man who cannot proofread his own insults should not be grading anybody’s manners. Churchill said the only guide to a man is his conscience. Yours resigned long ago.

So here is a prophecy with a better record than any of yours. When Atiku Abubakar wins, nobody in this country will be surprised to find you at his gate, tail wagging, bowl in hand, crawling on your knees and begging for a plate of porridge. You crawled to Obasanjo. You crawled to Jonathan. You crawled to Buhari. You crawled to Tinubu. You will crawl again. Atiku is a generous man, so he may well give you the porridge. He will never give you the microphone.

On 16 January, Nigerians will not vote on what Atiku called Tinubu. They will vote on what Tinubu has done to them. There are 105 days left, and the suffering masses are not reading your adjectives. They are reading their grocery bills.

Yours, in defence of the truth,

Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org