2027: THE NIGERIAN PEOPLE WILL SAY NO TO AN ESCOBAR.
HAVING TINUBU IN ASO ROCK IS A MISTAKE THAT WILL BE CORRECTED BY THE NIGERIAN PEOPLE.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
In the last week of August 2026, the Tinubu administration and the men who speak for it dragged the privatisation file out of the archive, dusted it, and aimed it once more at Atiku Abubakar. The power sector. The 16 billion dollars. The public assets. The same recycled charge sheet, reprinted and pushed into the news cycle as though nobody had read it the first six times.
On Wednesday, 26 August 2026, Atiku answered in terms that should have ended the exercise on the spot. Investigate me. Prosecute me. Bring the evidence.
He pointed out that the National Assembly investigated the power projects and never once invited him to answer a single allegation. He confirmed what everyone already knew, that he chaired the National Council on Privatisation as Vice President, and stated that the implementation of the power project was the responsible minister’s, a concept he had disagreed with in the first place. Then he asked the only question that matters to a country skipping meals: where is the people’s money?
Aso Rock did not answer. Aso Rock cannot answer.
And here is why the timing of their little exhumation is the most self destructive act of political theatre in this Republic’s recent memory.
In the very fortnight that the President’s men were brandishing a 20 year old file at Atiku Abubakar, the President himself was in a United States District Court fighting to keep his own file sealed.
What manner of man lectures Nigeria about privatisation outcomes when he himself walked into the Presidential Villa carrying a documented record of civil asset forfeiture to the United States government, on funds that American federal investigators identified as narcotics trafficking proceeds?
At the close of August 2026, that man went before a United States District Court and argued that his narcotics investigation records should remain sealed from the public.
He did not deny the file. He did not open the file. He hired lawyers to sit on the lid.
The privatisation of public assets is a policy instrument with a long and respectable global pedigree. The forfeiture of narcotics proceeds to a foreign government is a matter of judicial record. One is governance. The other is evidence. He mocked the first while litigating to bury the second, and he expects 220 million people not to notice the difference.
He audits another man’s factory in Kogi while paying attorneys in Washington to keep his own file shut.
I. THE FORFEITURE THAT CANNOT BE ERASED
In 1993, 460,000 dollars held in an account in Bola Tinubu’s name was forfeited to the United States government under a civil asset forfeiture proceeding. The order of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Case Number 93C4483, recorded that the funds represented proceeds of narcotics trafficking or were involved in financial transactions violating American money laundering law.
This is not allegation. This is not ADC propaganda. This is court record, filed, indexed, and accessible to any journalist or government on earth that troubles itself to look.
No criminal conviction was entered. A civil forfeiture was. He has denied wrongdoing consistently and calls it a settlement. That distinction matters in law and I state it plainly, because unlike his spokesmen I do not need to lie to win this argument.
But the distinction does not alter what the court order said the money was.
And here is what he prays you will not follow. This is not ancient history rendered harmless by time. It is a live docket, and it has been moving all year.
In June 2023, the American transparency activist Aaron Greenspan sued after twelve Freedom of Information requests to the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, the State Department and the CIA were stonewalled. The investigative journalist David Hundeyin pushed the same door from the other side.
In April 2025, Judge Beryl Howell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the agencies’ refusal even to confirm that such records existed, holding the posture neither logical nor plausible, and finding that the public interest outweighed the privacy claim.
In February 2026, the same judge, patience visibly exhausted, imposed a hard timetable. Interim releases. Joint status reports every 14 days. Production complete by 1 June 2026.
June came. June went. Nothing was produced.
In August 2026 the court granted a final extension of 4 days and fixed 21 August 2026 as the deadline. On 20 August, the FBI instead filed a motion asking to explain itself in secret, submitting sealed declarations ex parte and in camera, on the extraordinary argument that releasing the material could endanger life. The judge permitted the private submission and gave the FBI, the DEA, the Department of Justice and President Bola Tinubu until 28 August 2026, and in the court’s own words no later, to oppose disclosure.
And then, at the close of August, the sitting President of Nigeria filed his own list of reasons why Americans should be forbidden from showing Nigerians his file.
Read it again. Slowly. Because our press reported it in one news cycle and moved on to a governor’s convoy.
A man asking 220 million citizens to renew his mandate in 136 days spent the last fortnight of August in a foreign courtroom fighting for the right to remain concealed from them.
Nigeria, you are not being asked to vote. You are being asked to sign a document you are forbidden to read.
Now hold that beside the man he mocked.
In 2006, when Olusegun Obasanjo set up an administrative panel to investigate his own Vice President, Atiku Abubakar held full constitutional immunity. He could have folded his arms and dared them to try. By his own repeated public account he waived it, and opened his office to the Attorney General Bayo Ojo, to Nasir El-Rufai, and to Nuhu Ribadu, then Chairman of the EFCC. They came. They looked. Twenty years, four administrations, several of them openly hostile, and not one charge has ever been filed. Nuhu Ribadu, the very man who led that investigation, is today National Security Adviser to President Tinubu. The file sits in the hands of the incumbent’s own security chief. Still nothing.
One man says come and look. The other pays lawyers on two continents to keep the door shut.
That is the whole election in a single sentence, and it fits on a poster.
Pablo Escobar built roads in Medellin. He built football pitches. He put up housing and the poor sang his name for it. None of it purified a single dollar of what paid for it. The Nigerian people are not obliged to be dazzled by concrete poured on a foundation that cannot survive forensic scrutiny. A flyover is not an alibi. A ribbon cutting is not an acquittal.
Before leaving the Villa that Thursday, he sneered that the ADC convention was a street convention. He intended contempt. He handed us a compliment and did not notice.
The streets of Nigeria are where a bag of rice now costs what a family once spent in a month. The streets are where graduates queue at filling stations begging for work. The streets are where 220 million Nigerians conduct a daily referendum on presidential competence, and he loses it every morning before breakfast.
If the ADC draws its power from those streets, then he has correctly identified the thing that is going to remove him, and he should be very afraid of it.
A man who forfeited narcotics proceeds to a foreign government does not possess the moral standing to decide which democratic gatherings are dignified.
THE PRIVATISATION ATTACK: A FORENSIC VERDICT
Now to the steel, since they will not stop dragging it out.
The President set the tone himself at the Villa, before an audience of Renewed Hope Ambassadors, demanding to know whether the Delta steel plant was working, whether Ajaokuta was working, and adding for the amusement of his courtiers that Atiku had even tried to privatise another man’s political party. He preened. They applauded. The cameras were fed. Nobody in that room asked him a single follow up question, which is precisely why the man is where he is.
Let us take it item by item, since no one there had the courage to.
Ajaokuta Steel Company was not conceived, built, or destroyed by the Obasanjo and Atiku administration. Nigeria announced plans for an indigenous steel complex in 1958. Construction commenced under Shagari in 1979. The mill reached 98 per cent completion in 1994, under the Abacha military dictatorship. Not one day of those 40 years fell under Atiku Abubakar’s executive authority.
Worse for his script, the choice of Ajaokuta over the more suitable Onitsha site was a post civil war political decision taken in 1974, a quarter of a century before the National Council on Privatisation existed. The asset inherited in 1999 was not merely unfinished. It was misplaced by design and rusted by 6 administrations running through Shagari, Buhari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abacha and Abdulsalami.
The NCP did the only rational thing left on the table. It sought private capital to complete what 6 governments had comprehensively failed to complete. The concession to GIHL collapsed amid allegations that the concessionaire stripped the asset, and that concession was terminated in 2008 by the Yar’Adua administration. Not by Obasanjo. Not by Atiku. The record of that programme, its rationale, its method and its outcomes, is documented in detail by Nasir El-Rufai in The Accidental Public Servant. El-Rufai was in the room. He wrote down what he saw. He is now in the ADC coalition, which tells you something about where honest men end up.
Then comes the fact his speechwriters prayed nobody would check.
In 2022, the Buhari administration paid 496 million dollars to settle the international arbitration arising from that collapsed concession. The claim against Nigeria at the point of settlement stood at 5.258 billion dollars. An APC government wrote the cheque that closed the file. An APC President now performs outrage about the file his own party settled.
And observe which assets he carefully named. Ajaokuta and Delta Steel. The two carcasses handed over pre ruined. He said nothing whatsoever about Oando Plc, Conoil Plc, Ardova Plc, Indorama Eleme Petrochemicals, Benue Cement Company or Transcorp Hilton Abuja. Every one of them emerged from the same privatisation programme. Every one of them is trading today.
Naming 2 failures and hiding 6 successes is not analysis. It is a rigged sample. Any first year student of economics would fail him for it.
But the killing blow is not hypocrisy of argument. It is hypocrisy of conduct.
In September 2024, the Tinubu administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Russian firm Tyazhpromexport to revive Ajaokuta, while simultaneously courting Chinese partners because the war in Ukraine had complicated the Russian arrangement.
That is a concession. To a foreign technical partner. For Ajaokuta. In 2024.
The man mocking the NCP for seeking a concession partner in 2002 instructed his own ministry to seek a concession partner in 2024. He did not reject the model. He photocopied it 22 years late and then abused the authors to a hall of paid applauders.
This is not policy analysis. It is plagiarism dressed as contempt.
The pattern runs through the whole sector. Atiku Abubakar argued for years, against ferocious resistance, that the national oil company should be commercialised and the refineries handed to credible operators. The Tinubu administration has since commercialised the national oil firm. It merely did so with less transparency than the men it mocks. On subsidy, the Obasanjo and Atiku administration moved petrol upward in roughly 7 measured steps between 1999 and 2007 and built the PPPRA framework so the economy could absorb each move. Tinubu, who in January 2012 published an article denouncing abrupt removal as a tax on the poor, stood up on 29 May 2023 and did it in one unrehearsed sentence, with no framework, no cushion and no vote left for anyone to cast.
He did not disagree with the policy. He waited 22 years, copied it badly, and jeered at the men who wrote it.
III. THE CONSTITUTIONAL HERESY OF ONANUGA’S DECREE
Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga has declared that Tinubu must complete two terms, and that North and South rotation demands it.
This is not a political point. It is an anti democratic declaration.
Sections 131 and 137 of the 1999 Constitution as amended set out the qualifications and the disqualifications for election to the office of President with precision and completeness. Power rotation appears in neither section. It possesses precisely zero constitutional force. It is a private arrangement between politicians in a back room, and it binds nobody who was not in that room.
When a presidential spokesman informs the Nigerian people that their votes on 16 January 2027 are subordinate to a cartel timetable, he has not defended a President. He has insulted a Republic.
A President is not crowned for 8 years. A President is hired for 4 and may be dismissed by the sovereign will of the people. Femi Falana SAN has stated the law with meticulous precision: no provision of Nigerian law prohibits any qualified citizen from contesting any election at any time.
The Presidency cannot make law by press release. Onanuga cannot amend the Constitution on X.
IV. 2027: THE CORRECTION
Presidential spokesman Daniel Bwala argued that Atiku was already a coalition candidate in 2023 and still lost. It sounds sharp until you do the subtraction.
In 2023 the presidential vote was split across 4 competitive candidates. Tinubu did not defeat a unified opposition. He won a plurality in a shattered field, collecting 8,794,726 votes, roughly 36 per cent, on the lowest turnout in the history of the Fourth Republic, while the combined total of his principal opponents ran to some 14.6 million, close to double his own tally.
Now look at 2027 and see who the fragmentation is cutting this time.
There are three tickets. Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi on the ADC. Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso on the NDC. Seyi Makinde and Bala Mohammed on the APM. I will not insult you by pretending the opposition is united. It is not.
But study the map, because Bwala clearly has not.
Tinubu is from the South West. Obi is from the South East. Makinde is from the South West. Three Southern candidacies are now carving into one Southern electorate. Atiku Abubakar is the only presidential candidate from the North.
The entire South West produced roughly 4 million votes for all candidates combined in 2023. So every fantasy of 7 to 10 million South West votes for this President is not ambition. It is arithmetic that does not exist in nature.
Meanwhile the North, which delivered him 5,587,757 votes in 2023 against Atiku’s 5,233,473, is consolidating behind the only Northern name on the ballot while his party bleeds out across the region. The APC polled 15,424,921 votes in 2015 and 15,191,847 in 2019 under Buhari. It polled 8,794,726 in 2023. That is a collapse of roughly 6.4 million votes in 4 years, and everything that has happened to the price of food since has happened in the direction of making it worse.
They will tell you the ADC is a new party. Accord was a small, unfancied party when it beat the full weight of the federal machine in Osun on 15 August 2026, with a state account freeze documented against the man it backed. The APC itself was barely 2 years old in 2015 when it removed a sitting President. Parties do not win elections. Mass anger wins elections.
They will tell you the governors are theirs. In 2023 Atiku won 5 states where sitting APC governors deployed the full apparatus of incumbency against him, among them Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Yobe and Gombe. And Tinubu lost Lagos, the fortress his camp has held since 1999. Governors do not own votes. The people who stand in the queue own them.
And strip away every document in Illinois, every filing in Washington, and there is still a governing record that no spokesman on earth can defend.
Roughly 6 in 10 Nigerians now live below the national poverty line, the World Bank tracking the share from 56 per cent to 63 per cent across 2023 to 2025, with about 7 million people pushed under in 2025 alone. Inflation stood at 15.91 per cent in June 2026 with food at 17.52 per cent and climbing. Growth in the first quarter of 2026 was 3.89 per cent in a country whose population outruns it. The new minimum wage of 70,000 naira is worth about 47 dollars a month. Nigeria scored 26 out of 100 on the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index. The naira, near 460 to the dollar when he took the oath in May 2023, has spent his tenure beyond 1,700 at its worst, a destruction of value that no Nigerian household has been spared.
And the money that was supposed to justify every hour of that suffering? His own tax reform chairman put the subsidy savings at 15.8 trillion naira between June 2023 and December 2025, then conceded in July 2026 that the savings had been swallowed by debt servicing. The pain was collected in full and in advance. The dividend was never delivered and never will be.
He has been through courtrooms in Illinois. He has been through certificate controversies so persistent that Chicago State University became a fixture of Nigerian political vocabulary. He has presided over a currency in freefall, a countryside under the gun and a generation queuing for exit visas. And in the last week of August 2026, with 136 days left on the clock, he was in an American court arguing that his file should stay shut.
These are not opposition accusations. They are the lived reality of 220 million people and the public record of a foreign judiciary.
A man with live, court compelled disclosure proceedings in Washington does not get to lecture Nigeria about transparency.
A man who forfeited narcotics proceeds to a foreign government does not get to lecture Nigeria about governance.
A man who spent August begging a foreign judge to seal his past does not get to demand that Nigerians open their future to him in January.
A President whose spokesman declares an election subordinate to a rotation cartel does not get to invoke democracy.
Aso Rock is not a throne. It is a hire, and the contract expires. On 16 January 2027 the Nigerian people hold the corrective authority, and they will exercise it with a thumbprint, in daylight, in numbers too vast to be counted away.
136 days. Ìgbà díẹ̀ ló kù. Lokaci kaɗan ne ya rage. Obere oge ka ọ fọdụrụ.
Atiku2027 #ADC #16January2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org | 3 September 2026
