Aare Amerijoye DOT.B

Chief Femi Fani-Kayode,

Every regime in trouble keeps a rottweiler. It is fed in the back yard, kept on a chain, and let loose whenever the master needs somebody savaged. Nigeria has watched you play that role for twenty years, for one owner after another. Your new jibe at Waziri Atiku Abubakar is the latest bark from that same chain. In it, you tell him he lacks the credibility to criticise you, and you sneer at his pedigree.

You are a bilious, venal, shameless political mercenary. You are a serial turncoat with no fixed address and no fixed principle. Your rage is for rent, your loyalty is by the hour, and your pen is for sale to the highest bidder. And you have the effrontery to ask another man where his credibility went.

Ekiti made us both Aare. Mine is Atayese of Odo Oro. Yours is Ajagunla of Otun. An Aare leads his people into battle. He does not bark at strangers on command from a kennel in Aso Rock.

A KENNEL WITH MANY MASTERS

Count your owners, Chief. Nigerians have.

In 2015, you were the chief attack dog of the Jonathan re-election campaign. You bared your teeth at Muhammadu Buhari, at the APC, and at Bola Tinubu above all. In 2019, you called the APC a filthy, rat-infested sinking ship and swore you would rather die than join it. In 2021, you crawled aboard that same ship. Today, you lick the hand you spent a decade biting and snarl at Atiku Abubakar on its behalf.

A rottweiler does not choose its enemies. Its owner does.

You did not stop at parties. You called a sitting governor a “useful idiot” and worse. Within months, the same man was your champion to beat Atiku “hands down”. Your praise and your abuse come from the same mouth, at different prices.

THE MAN WHO CRIED COUP

You lecture Atiku about credibility? In 2023, you told Nigerians that Atiku was meeting army generals to plot a coup. The DSS summoned you. You walked out tamed, whimpering to the press that you regretted the statement and would guard your words in future.

That was your solemn pledge to the nation. Your new jibe shows what your word is worth. A man who has already been caught inventing a coup has forfeited the right to be believed about anything, let alone about the man he lied about.

AN EXPOSÉ THAT RUNS FROM ITSELF

Read your own essay, Chief, and watch it retreat. On the 2010 US Senate report: no indictment, no conviction, as you yourself admit. On the Jefferson affair: “yet to be proved”. On the Achimugu recording: you cannot confirm the voice. On the visa story: “no way of confirming”.

You bite, then you let go. You bark, then you back off. This is the cowardice of a bully who knows he has no case. He throws the stone and hides the hand in the same breath.

A man who must write “I cannot confirm” again and again has not written an exposé. He has written a wish list.

THE GUTTER IS YOUR HOME ADDRESS

You weep that your former wife was dragged into politics. A few paragraphs later, you declare Atiku’s former wife “fair game”. You smear his marriage with sexual innuendo. You jeer at a sick man as “withering away from some strange disease”. You borrow another man’s line that Atiku needs “mental health support”. Mocking the sick is the lowest act in public life, and you performed it with relish.

Then comes the most despicable sentence you have ever signed: “the tragic misfortune that constantly stalks your closest aides”. Say plainly what you mean, Chief, or withdraw it. That line hints at the gravest crime known to law. It names no one, gives no date and cites no record. It is slander dressed as a hint, whispered by a coward who wants the wound without the lawsuit. You do not have the evidence, and you do not have the courage, so you hide behind a sentence you can later deny.

You call men “dog”, “village idiot” and “prize fool”. Coming from the most famous rottweiler in Nigerian politics, that is not an insult. It is a family reunion.

THE FILES YOU OPENED

You opened the files, so let us read them to the end.

The Senate report. It shows that an allegation exists, not that it is true. For twenty years, hostile administrations at home and abroad have hunted Atiku Abubakar. They have not filed one charge in any court.

The 2006 panel. By Atiku’s own published account, he waived his constitutional immunity and let the investigators into his office: the Attorney General, Nasir El-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu. Nothing was found. Today, Ribadu is National Security Adviser to the master whose leash you wear. If there were a case, your own kennel holds the key. It has never turned it.

Jefferson and the FBI. Atiku was never charged in any American court. He walked openly into Washington in January 2019. The man you invoke had most of the counts against him vacated in 2017.

Mambilla. The International Chamber of Commerce tribunal delivered its final award on 16 September 2026. It noted red flags around a payment. It also recorded that there was “no evidence on the record” that Atiku used his office to foster the award to Sunrise. Red flags are not a conviction, and a rottweiler’s howl is not a ruling.

The suitcases. You cannot even count them. There were 53, not 51. By Atiku’s own account, he was the Customs officer who stood against their passage through the Lagos airport command in 1984.

Obasanjo. You quote Baba’s harshest words and hide the rest. On 11 October 2018 at Abeokuta, with every file before him, the same Obasanjo publicly endorsed Atiku as president-to-be. Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of that verdict.

BETRAYAL IS YOUR BIOGRAPHY

You accuse Atiku of betraying his principal and privatising Nigeria. In 2022, on national television, you said Atiku is right to speak of how wonderful the Obasanjo administration was. By law, the Vice President chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation in that same administration. You cannot praise the house and curse its builder. Nigerians remember what Atiku actually refused to do. He refused to help amend the Constitution for a third term.

Betrayal? Ask the parties you entered and deserted. Ask the principals you praised and then savaged. Ask the APC you called a sinking ship before you scrambled aboard. Betrayal is not Atiku’s story, Chief. It is the only story you have ever lived, and you did not even begin it yourself.

BABA’S VERDICT, AND YOURS ON BABA

You hide behind Obasanjo’s words against Atiku. Then tell Nigerians, Chief, which Obasanjo we are to believe.

When Baba endorsed Peter Obi in January 2023, you did not bow to his wisdom. You wrote that it was his biggest mistake. You titled your essay “What Have They Done to Our Baba?”. You declared his choice an exercise in futility. When Obasanjo’s judgment crossed your paymaster, he was a confused old man who had been got at. When it suits you against Atiku, he is the oracle of Ota. You do not respect Obasanjo. You rent him by the paragraph.

And since you love to tell us what has “allegedly” been said, here is a line Nigerians have long put in Obasanjo’s mouth about you: “Femi is my boy. Give him food and he will eat and sing for you.” Your office rushed to THISDAY in 2021 to call it fake. Strange, Chief. You fill pages about Atiku with things you admit you “cannot confirm”, yet one unconfirmed line about you sends your aides running to the newspapers. Now you know how a rumour feels when it is pointed at you.

You will not live with one whisper about yourself, yet you build an essay on a dozen against another man.

Whether Baba ever said it or not, you have spent twenty years proving it true. Food in 2015 came from the Jonathan campaign, and you sang. Food in 2021 came from the APC, and you sang louder. Today, the plate is in Aso Rock, and the song is against Atiku.

THE STANDARD YOU BEG FOR

You have yourself stood before the courts on EFCC charges. I will not call you guilty of anything, because a charge is not a conviction. Every honest Nigerian lives by that rule. You demand it for yourself and deny it to Atiku. That is the hypocrisy of a bully: one law for the dog, another for the man it is set upon.

THE PEDIGREE YOU PUT ON THE TABLE

You told the Waziri that he is nowhere near you in “pedigree, upbringing or lineage”. You chose that battlefield, Chief. So let us walk it.

Your father, Chief Remi Fani-Kayode, held high public office, and his public record belongs to history. When the Western Region split in 1962, he deserted Obafemi Awolowo, the leader who built the Action Group. He crossed to the Akintola breakaway that became the NNDP and rose to Deputy Premier on the other side of that divide. The 1965 Western election that followed is remembered as one of the most brazenly rigged in our history, the election that set the West ablaze in the Wetie riots. The boast long attributed to your father is that the NNDP would win whether the people voted or not.

The West gave him a name for it: Fani-Power. By your own published account, the soldiers who came for him on 15 January 1966 greeted him with one question: “Where are your thugs now, Fani-Power?” The mutineers had no right to that house. But their taunt tells us exactly how the people of the West saw him. Those are your words, Chief, not mine.

Desert the leader. Ride the stronger side. Take by force what the people refused to give. That is the pedigree, and the son has walked every step of it.

Now set it beside the man you sneer at. Atiku Abubakar lost his father at the age of eleven in Jada. He inherited no title, no estate and no nickname earned by force. He rose through school and twenty years in the Customs Service to Deputy Director, the second highest rank. He then built the American University of Nigeria in Yola with his own money and kept it open through the insurgency.

You inherited a name and spent it. He inherited nothing and built a legacy. Money cannot buy class, you say. Neither can a bloodline. A pedigree that changes masters with every election is not breeding. It is a price tag hanging from a dog collar.

Titles are conferred. Credibility is earned, and you have spent yours on every master who ever held your leash.

You signed off with a page of titles. Nigerians have kept a longer list: your parties, your paymasters, your retractions. Bring your Part 2. Bring evidence and we will answer it line by line. Bring whispers and we will drag every one of them into daylight, as we have done today.

You do not frighten us, Chief. We do not retreat from bullies, and we do not negotiate with rottweilers. We muzzle them.

Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
10 October 2026