Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a species of Nigerian politician who, having lost the argument, the primary and the plot, reinvents himself as a performer. Babachir Lawal has embraced the role with relish. His so-called Kachalla Series is not commentary. It is cabaret. And like every tired act, it survives only on the applause of its own author.
Nigeria is in genuine distress. The economy groans, the naira staggers, families ration their meals, and the killing fields spread. A serious country deserves a serious debate. What Lawal offers instead is innuendo, ethnic dog-whistling and recycled bitterness dressed up as principle. It is pedestrian, it is naive, and it deserves to be named for what it is.
THE CHARGE, IN HIS OWN WORDS
Let no one accuse us of ducking his case, so here it is, stated plainly. In the latest instalment of the Kachalla Series, Lawal alleges that the ADC has replaced its Adamawa governorship candidate, Engr. Umar Suleiman, whom he calls a Kilba Muslim from Hong who won the primary in a landslide, with Tukur Moddibo, a Fulani Muslim from Fufore. He claims the change was forced through by pressure from Atiku and the party’s national leadership. From that single episode he erects a sweeping law of Atiku’s entire politics: that to win any favour from the man you must be not only a Muslim but of the Fulani lineage. He brands it ethnic jingoism and a betrayal of common sense, equity and justice, threatens to drag the party to court for breaching the Electoral Act 2026 and its own guidelines, and prophesies that Atiku’s supposed contempt for the rule of law will cost the ADC the state in 2027. It is the same tune he has played since the presidential primary, when his own preferred candidate lost and he pronounced the whole exercise a rigged charade and its winner an incompetent unfit for office.
It sounds, at full volume, like a grave indictment. On inspection it is a house built on sand, and every wall of it falls to a single push.
WHO IS REALLY SHOUTING, AND WHY
Begin where Lawal never begins, with his own place in this story. He was no neutral referee of the ADC primary. He was a partisan, the open backer of Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, and before the ballot he had pledged that coalition members would support whoever emerged. Then, on 25 May, the Nigerian people in 8,809 wards handed the ticket to Atiku Abubakar, Hayatu-Deen finished a distant third, and the pledge evaporated overnight. The primary Lawal had promised to respect became, in his telling, a rigged sham, and the loyal coalitionist reinvented himself as the avenger sworn to stop Atiku by any means. That is not conviction. That is a sore loser reaching for a microphone.
A man does not discover that an election was stolen only on the day his own candidate loses it.
And there is worse, for the accuser is himself accused. The chairman of the ADC electoral committee in Adamawa and returning officer for the state primary, Dr Nicholas Msheliza, has publicly stated that Babachir Lawal telephoned him after the results were compiled and demanded that the outcome in Hong Local Government Area be reversed in favour of Hayatu-Deen over Atiku, a request he says he refused because the figures reflected the actual votes cast, and one he has offered to prove. Read that slowly. The very man now screaming that a primary was rigged for Atiku stands accused, by the official who conducted it, of trying to rig it for his own candidate.
Lawal cries rigging to drown out the charge that he attempted it.
Note, too, the coincidence that is no coincidence. Hong is the home ground of Engr. Umar Suleiman, the very ticket Lawal now poses as defending. The threads of his interest run through one local government, and they do not lead where his sermons pretend. This remains, in fairness, Dr Msheliza’s allegation, and Lawal is free to answer it in the proper forum. But a man carrying that accusation on his own back is in no position to lecture a nation about equity, justice and the rule of law. He has even had to deny, unprompted, that his support for Hayatu-Deen was bought, insisting it was competence and not money. When a man volunteers a denial no one demanded, the public is entitled to notice the question left hanging in the air.
THE THESIS THAT DIES IN HIS OWN HANDS
Strip away the theatrics and the headline charge is that Atiku rewards only Fulani Muslims. Yet Lawal illustrates it with a case in which, by his own account, a Kilba Muslim was displaced in favour of a Fulani Muslim. Both men are Muslim. If a Muslim was wronged in favour of another Muslim, religion cannot possibly be the dividing line. His premise strangles his conclusion in a single breath. Beaten and bitter, he simply plays the religion card in a quarrel between two Muslims and calls it principle, because that card is his oldest reflex; this, after all, is the man whose recent notoriety was built on refusing a Muslim-Muslim ticket in 2023. Religion is not his conviction. It is his instrument.
And nowhere does the charge collapse more completely than in Adamawa itself, the very ground he chose. Adamawa’s own history calls him a liar. Turn to Atiku’s own authorised biography. It records that when he won the Adamawa governorship in 1999, he set out deliberately to balance his ticket with a non-Fulani Christian from the north of the state, and the man he chose was Boni Haruna. It was no accident of convenience. Atiku had mentored Haruna since 1990, drawn him into his inner circle to draft speeches and policy papers, and, when the Abacha years left the young man jobless and grieving his mother, handed him a livelihood as deputy managing director of a Lagos publishing house. He recommended him twice for commissioner. When a search committee drew up a shortlist for the deputy governorship, Atiku insisted Haruna’s name be added, then passed over the committee’s own favourites to choose him, to the surprise of the whole room. By Haruna’s own testimony, Atiku summoned him one morning and told him to prepare for screening as his deputy, a call he says he never expected, having aspired only to become an ambassador. That non-Fulani Christian went on to serve two full terms as Governor of Adamawa. In the one state Lawal offers as proof of Fulani-Muslim exclusion, the deputy Atiku groomed, employed and raised to the governorship was a Christian from a minority people.
That biography even anticipates his poison. It records that non-Fulani communities first met Atiku’s candidacy with suspicion, only to conclude in time that he was a different kind of Fulani altogether, a man from outside the Yola power elite who had no appetite for its old game of domination. That was the verdict of Adamawa’s own non-Fulani Christians in 1999, and it did not stop there. In 2019 Atiku’s running mate was Peter Obi, an Igbo Christian from the South East. In 2023 it was Ifeanyi Okowa, an Igbo Christian from the South South. From 1999 to 2007 he served as Vice President to Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba Christian from the South West. Today he leads a broad, multi-faith coalition drawn from every corner of the Federation. The single most consequential choice any presidential candidate makes is his running mate, and Atiku has made it, twice in succession, in favour of Igbo Christians. A man with that record is a curious poster boy for Fulani-Muslim exclusivity. The facts do not merely fail to support Lawal. They laugh at him.
AND NOW THAT THE NAME HAS CHANGED
Suppose we grant what Lawal now trumpets, that the party has indeed submitted Tukur Moddibo’s name in place of Suleiman’s. Very well. Meet the fact head on, because even confirmed it rescues nothing in his case.
A party that replaces its nominee before the INEC deadline commits no crime. It exercises a right the Electoral Act itself grants, one used routinely by parties of every colour in every cycle. If Lawal believes the change breached the party’s own guidelines, the law hands him a remedy, the courts, and he says he will use them. Good. That is the rule of law working, not the rule of law flouted. A man cannot in one breath call a process lawless and in the next announce that he will submit it to the law.
He is, in any case, the wrong man at the wrong altar. The person entitled to seek redress for a lost nomination is Umar Suleiman, not a self-appointed mourner who backed a different candidate in a different contest. Even Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, the man on whose behalf Lawal first took up arms, long ago met Atiku, accepted the result and chose unity. The principals have moved on. Only the errand-shouter remains on the barricade, fighting a war the soldiers themselves have left. When you are angrier than the aggrieved, the anger has stopped being about the wrong. It is about you.
And here is the wall his whole sermon breaks upon. Lawal did not accuse Atiku of fielding a weaker candidate. He accused him of religious and ethnic bigotry, of a rule that you must be a Muslim to be favoured. But a Muslim was replaced by a Muslim. Confirm the swap a hundred times and that fact will not move. No amount of uploading names to a portal turns a Muslim into a non-Muslim to fit his script. What is left is his ethnic complaint, that a Fulani replaced a Kilba, and on that alone he asks a nation to convict a man of lifelong bigotry. Set that single nomination beside the record already laid out, a non-Fulani Christian raised to the Adamawa governorship, two Igbo Christian running mates, a Yoruba Christian principal, and the charge does not weaken. It becomes absurd. A party may weigh winnability, cohesion and a dozen considerations in choosing its flag-bearer, and Lawal has produced not one shred of proof that ethnicity, rather than any of these, drove this decision. He reads the motive off the outcome, which is the oldest fallacy in the trade.
Mark, finally, the contradiction he cannot escape. He swears the change will cost the ADC a seat it was set to win, yet swears in the same breath that it was the calculated stroke of a power-hungry strategist. Which is it? A man scheming for dominance does not gift away a winnable state. By Lawal’s own account this was self-injury, the very opposite of the masterplan he is selling. He cannot decide whether Atiku is too cunning or not cunning enough, because coherence was never his goal. The accusation was.
THE VERDICT
Babachir Lawal is a self-serving and impervious figure whose scurrilous outbursts are a poor substitute for argument. His platitudes cannot govern a state, his innuendo cannot feed a family, and his wounded ego cannot bend the will of a nation. This is precisely the gutter theatre that makes our politics dirty, and the Nigerian people are wiser than his script assumes. They will not permit hypocrisy and prejudice to rob them of the truth about Atiku Abubakar. No amount of Kachalla cabaret will alter the arithmetic of 25 May, nor the verdict the people are preparing to deliver. On 16 January 2027, the empty entertainer will still be applauding his own delusions. Nigeria will have moved on, and Atiku Abubakar will be its President.
Atiku2027 #ADC2027 #KachallaCabaret #RescueNigeria
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
11 August 2026
