Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
The Presidency set out on Sunday to call Atiku Abubakar a demagogue. What it published instead is a signed confession, stamped with the seal of the State House and delivered by the very hand that should have burnt it.
Dr Sunday Dare, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public Communications, has given Nigerians a document so riddled with contradiction, so drunk on its own arrogance and so pitilessly contemptuous of the suffering it pretends to address, that it needs no opponent. It only needs a careful reader.
This is not a rebuttal. It is a tantrum in a three-piece suit, the howl of a cornered government that has run out of results and is now spending its last coins on adjectives.
Let us turn every brick of it back on the heads of the killjoys who laid it. Then let us look at the man who laid them.
THE CONFESSION IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPHS
Dare begins by parading foreign leaders as models. He tells us the American President signed an executive order for emergency tax relief on diesel, and that leaders in about 10 other countries are using “various means to provide relief for citizens.”
Stop there. A government cutting tax on fuel is the public treasury standing between the citizen and the pump. Call it what you like; it is a subsidy in a borrowed suit.
So by Dare’s own examples, responsible governments intervene when global prices punish their people. Only in Aso Rock is caring for citizens treated as a crime when someone else commits to it, and as statesmanship when they stumble into it themselves.
And what does the ADC candidate’s Atiku Economic Recovery Plan commit to? A targeted, capped, transparently budgeted and independently audited production subsidy, shifting support from importation to production and from middlemen to Nigerian refineries.
Dare spent his first five paragraphs making Atiku’s case, then spent the next forty abusing him for it. Rarely has a hired pen worked so hard to stab its own employer.
And his British example? A Prime Minister offering citizens a Google Maps link to find cheaper petrol. If that is the relief this Presidency admires, Nigerians know what awaits them: directions to hunger, with turn-by-turn navigation.
A subsidy does not stop being a subsidy because Aso Rock has renamed it modulation.
“NOT A SUBSIDY,” SAYS THE SUBSIDY
Read Dare’s own description of the 30-day scheme. NNPC Retail forgoes its profit margin, sells at landing cost and uses its balance sheet to absorb global volatility, “backed directly by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.”
NNPC belongs to the Federation. Its margin is the people’s money. When a state-owned company sells below its cost structure with the President standing behind its books, that is a subsidy. No economics textbook calls it anything else, and no amount of State House perfume will change the smell.
Then comes the N1,350 per litre ceiling on ex-gantry costs, which he insists is “not price control.” A price ceiling set by government is the dictionary definition of price control. Only a government this shameless would fix a price with one hand and swear with the other that it has fixed nothing.
Worse, refiners and importers will “absorb” costs above the ceiling and “recover those costs later.” That is a deferred bill, an unbudgeted IOU, precisely the “hidden accumulation of opaque state liabilities” Dare claims his scheme prevents. He describes the disease and the cure in the same breath and cannot see they are the same poison in two bottles.
And who pays that IOU “later”? The same masses. After the election, when the cameras are gone and the votes are counted. That is a post-dated cheque written on the backs of the poor.
He says the ceiling is reviewed against “published cost audits.” Then publish them. Today. Every line. Nigerians will be waiting, and so will The Narrative Force.
The quarrel was never that relief exists. It is that this one is an unbudgeted, unaudited, import-side giveaway timed for an election, while the Atiku plan is budgeted, capped and audited in public before a single naira moves.
THE MARKET THAT NEEDED A CEILING
Three years ago, Nigerians were told the subsidy was gone and the market would set everything right. Dare repeats the boast: queues vanished “because market forces drive supply.”
If the market has worked so gloriously, why does this government now need a price ceiling, a 30-day discount, a strategic reserve, windfall taxes and transport vouchers? A patient who is healing does not need five drips at once.
Dare even argues that N1,400 today and N1,400 tomorrow beats N1,500 today and N1,300 tomorrow, because erratic prices trigger fare hikes that never come down. Correct. That is the argument for cushioning the people and phasing reform, the argument this government sneered at in 2023 when it chose shock over sense and a podium sentence over a plan. Three years late and soaked in the people’s tears, Aso Rock has crawled to the doorstep of the doctrine it mocked, and now pretends it built the house.
A queue does not disappear because supply improved. It disappears when the poor can no longer afford to join it.
THE 700,000 BARRELS THAT DESTROY DARE’S ARGUMENT
Dare’s centrepiece is arithmetic. Nigeria produces about 1.8 million barrels a day, he says, but fewer than 700,000 barrels of unencumbered crude remain after contractual obligations. Therefore any production-side support is “economic illiteracy.”
Then, a few paragraphs later, he boasts that the government “has secured domestic refining operations through naira-for-crude arrangements.”
Which is it, Dr Dare? If the state can supply crude to domestic refiners in naira, the instrument for production-side support already exists, and you have just bragged about operating it. The man who lectures Nigerians on illiteracy cannot keep his own argument straight for eleven paragraphs.
Notice too the words he has to invent: “blanket,” “unlimited.” Neither describes a targeted, capped, audited plan. Unable to defeat the plan Atiku has published, Dare built a scarecrow, dressed it in Atiku’s name, set it alight, and is now dancing around the ashes calling it victory. That is not debate. That is political witchcraft.
He then tells us America sells petroleum “strictly at market-determined prices.” This is the same America whose President, by Dare’s own second paragraph, has just signed tax relief on diesel. If this is the quality of thinking at the top, Nigerians need no further explanation for the state of their pots.
KACHALLA AND THE SCHOOL OF HYGIENE
When the argument runs dry, the agbalomeri reach for the gutter. And they reach deep.
A Special Adviser, writing on behalf of the President of the Federal Republic, called a former Vice President “Kachalla.” Every Nigerian in the North West knows that title. It is borne by bandit warlords who have turned villages into graveyards and farms into ransom markets. To toss it around as a schoolyard taunt is a spit in the face of every family that has buried a son or emptied its savings for a daughter’s release. Men who cannot defeat the bandits in Zamfara have decided to use their title as a punchline in Abuja.
Then the sneer about a “school of hygiene.” Contempt for the nurse, the sanitary inspector and the community health officer who keep rural Nigeria alive, from a government that cannot keep its doctors in the country.
The man Dare mocks went on to study law at Ahmadu Bello University’s Institute of Administration, served 20 years in the Nigeria Customs Service rising to Deputy Director, chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation by law, and founded the American University of Nigeria in Yola with his own money.
As for the “first-class accounting graduate”: American universities do not award first-class degrees. Dare has awarded his principal a classification that does not exist in the country that issued the degree. And the records of that degree had to be pried loose through a United States court while the President’s own lawyers fought to keep them sealed. Dare should have left that stone unturned. Now he must live under it.
One man built a university. The other fought in a foreign court to hide his transcript. Dare chose to start the conversation about certificates.
THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN
Who, then, is this Sunday Dare who presumes to lecture a former Vice President on sophistication?
He is a mouthpiece without a mind of its own, a ventriloquist’s dummy that has mistaken the hand inside it for a backbone. He is a courtier in the costume of an adviser, a salaried echo, a megaphone for hire that amplifies whatever is whispered into it and calls the noise policy.
He once wore the badge of the journalist, the trade that exists to question power, and has traded it for a lanyard that exists to flatter it. History will record that he did not lose his voice; he leased it.
He is arrogant without achievement, abusive without argument, verbose without substance and pompous without a single number of his own. He borrows his economics from a minister on Channels, his examples from foreign capitals and his insults from the bandit camps of the North West. The only thing original in his entire document is its contempt.
He is a sneering, sanctimonious, shallow-minded propagandist who calls the hungry unsophisticated and the grieving demagogues. He is a pitiless apologist for pain he will never feel, writing from an air-conditioned office about queues he will never join, fares he will never pay and pots he will never see empty. He is the chief killjoy’s chief cheerleader, the agbalomeri’s appointed bard, paid to sing over the sound of a nation’s stomach rumbling.
But strip away the bluster and you will find the real author of that press release. Its name is fear.
Sunday Dare has watched the crowds. He has read the mood in the markets, the motor parks, the mosques and the churches. He knows the popularity of Atiku Abubakar among the suffering masses has grown into a flood no press release can dam, a flood fully capable of washing his principal’s government out of Aso Rock on 16 January 2027.
And he knows what that means for him. The office goes. The convoy goes. The allowances, the lanyard, the front row at state functions, the borrowed importance of standing near power: all of it goes. The lollipop will be taken from his mouth.
So, like a baby who feels the sweet slipping from his lips, he is crying. Not with reason, but wailing, kicking and spitting malice at the man he blames for the coming loss. Every insult in that release is a tear. Every “Kachalla” is a tantrum. Every sneer about hygiene school is the bawling of a child who senses that playtime in the palace is almost over.
Men who are confident of victory explain their record. Men who are terrified of defeat insult their opponent.
Every failing government has one: the loud, loyal, unblinking scribe who will swear the emperor is clothed until the morning the emperor leaves the palace. Then he will rediscover his conscience and write his memoir. We will be waiting for that one too.
THE “RECORD” DARE WANTS YOU TO APPLAUD
Meanwhile, the crying baby still wants applause for his principal’s record. Let us oblige him.
Record FAAC allocations to the states, he says. Nigerians did not eat FAAC. Ask the trader in Kano’s Kurmi market, the yam seller in Makurdi, the mechanic in Onitsha, the widow in Ikole who now cooks once a day. The allocations rose. Their tables shrank. The money went up in the ledgers and vanished from the kitchens, while Aso Rock counted applause.
Direct cash transfers to “millions of vulnerable households,” he says. Name the number. Name the states. Publish the list. A government that hides its beneficiaries is not hiding them for modesty.
And the jewel of the whole document: NIPOST digital address codes will “drastically” reduce food distribution costs. A postcode will bring down the price of garri. A postcode will fill the pot of the mother in Sokoto. This is what happens when men who have never queued for anything are asked to explain hunger to the hungry.
KILLJOYS OF THE MASSES
Strip away the jargon and Dare’s paper says one cruel thing: the people’s pain is “temporary transitional discomfort,” and anyone who names it is a demagogue.
Temporary. Three years of it. Transitional. To where? Discomfort. Tell that to the father who sold his motorcycle to buy medicine, the graduate who has stopped looking for work, the pensioner choosing between food and drugs. Only the comfortable call starvation discomfort.
That is the creed of the killjoy. They took the joy out of the kitchen, the school fees envelope, the bus fare, the salary that no longer reaches mid-month, the Christmas families now dread and the Sallah that comes without a ram. And when a man stands up to say so, they call him a bandit.
That is the method of the agbalomeri. Sweep everything into the lap of power, rename every failure a reform, every subsidy a modulation, every price control a shock absorber, every hungry citizen an ignorant one, and dare the people to object.
They are heartless in policy, reckless in arithmetic, shameless in language and cowardly in accountability. They insult the suffering, then ask the sufferers for their votes.
Dare tells us the Nigerian electorate is “far too sophisticated” to be deceived. On that single point, we agree with him completely.
Nigerians are sophisticated enough to recognise a subsidy in disguise, and a 30-day pump discount rolled out three months before a presidential election by men who accuse others of electioneering. Sophisticated enough to hear the difference between a statesman’s argument and a frightened courtier’s wail, and between a man who publishes his plans for their scrutiny and a government that publishes insults to hide its record.
The killjoys have had their three years. The agbalomeri have swept the floor bare. The crying baby can keep his lollipop until January. On 16 January 2027, the masses will sweep them all out.
#Atiku2027 #ADC #KilljoysOfTheMasses #Agbalomeri #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
11 October 2026
