Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Let us dispense with pleasantries. Nigeria is bleeding.
Every credible economic indicator, every lived reality in the markets, every mother calculating how far a thousand naira stretches, every young graduate staring down the barrel of unemployment: all of it points to the same damning verdict on the All Progressives Congress and the Tinubu administration.
Eleven years of APC governance have not merely failed Nigeria. They have systematically dismantled the foundations upon which any serious nation builds its future.
The naira, once trading at roughly 197 to the dollar when the APC assumed power in 2015, has been reduced to little more than wallpaper. Fuel subsidies were removed with theatrical fanfare and zero structural alternative, detonating a cost-of-living crisis that the poorest Nigerians, who were already on their knees, have had to absorb with their bare hands.
Inflation has savaged household purchasing power. The national debt has ballooned to figures that would have been denounced as apocalyptic had they occurred under any PDP administration. And yet the APC’s acolytes speak of progress. The audacity would be remarkable if the consequences were not so catastrophic.
This is the country Bola Ahmed Tinubu inherited from his own party, and then made worse.
Into this wreckage steps a man who has seen Nigeria at its best. A man who was present at the table when this country’s economy was transformed from a stunted, oil-dependent backwater into a continental powerhouse registering double-digit growth. A man whose record as Vice President from 1999 to 2007 reads not as political biography but as economic proof of concept.
Atiku Abubakar presided over an era in which Nigeria’s GDP expanded from a paltry 58 billion dollars to an extraordinary 270 billion dollars. Growth peaked at 15.3 per cent, figures that contemporary African economies would consider miraculous.
The telecoms sector, now the lifeblood of Nigerian commerce and communication, was liberalised under his watch. Debt was restructured, foreign reserves rebuilt, and the architecture of a modern Nigerian economy was laid stone by deliberate stone. These are not campaign talking points. They are documented, verifiable history.
Critics will say: that was then. The world has changed.
Of course it has. But what has not changed is the quality of judgement required to navigate a complex economy. What has not changed is the institutional knowledge needed to manage a federation of 36 states with competing interests, ethnic fault lines, and security emergencies that demand statesmanship rather than spectacle.
What has not changed is the fundamental truth that Nigeria needs a leader who has actually governed competently before, because the alternative is what we are currently living through.
Atiku is not a perfect man. No serious political analyst would claim otherwise. But in the arena of Nigerian politics, perfection is not the standard. Demonstrable capacity is the standard. A coherent economic vision is the standard.
The ability to build coalitions, command institutional respect, and attract the calibre of technocratic talent needed to govern a complex nation: that is the standard. And by every one of those measures, Atiku Abubakar stands apart from his rivals.
Now consider the vehicle through which he rides into 2027: the African Democratic Congress.
The ADC is not simply a party. It is the nucleus of a coalition that, if properly consolidated, represents the single most powerful electoral force that Nigerian opposition politics has assembled in the Fourth Republic.
The 2023 presidential election produced a remarkable fact that has not received the analytical attention it deserves: the combined votes of the major opposition candidates exceeded those of the declared winner. The mandate of the Nigerian people, fragmented by the absence of a unified opposition, was hijacked by a plurality that commanded no majority.
That fragmentation is now being repaired. Former Governor Nasir el-Rufai, once a pillar of the APC’s northern establishment, has defected. Rotimi Amaechi, Tinubu’s erstwhile ally and campaign co-traveller, has walked away. Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, who served the APC as minister through some of its most turbulent years, has departed in public disgust.
Senator David Mark, elder statesman of Nigeria’s democratic history, has added his voice to the swelling chorus of realignment. And most significantly, Alhaji Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, commanding hundreds of thousands of loyal, organised Kwankwasiyya followers and the political infrastructure of a formidable northern movement, has formally registered with the ADC.
Let that coalition sink in. Northern bloc. South-west intelligentsia. South-south political machinery. Pan-Nigerian civil society. The building blocks of a historic majority are being assembled in plain sight.
Some will counsel patience. Wait for 2031, they say. Let Tinubu complete his term. Allow the process to play out.
But Nigeria does not have the luxury of patience. Every month of this administration’s continued economic mismanagement represents compounding damage to a generation of young Nigerians who will carry its scars into middle age.
Every dollar added to the debt stock today is a burden that will not be repaid by today’s politicians but by tomorrow’s citizens. Every business that closes, every skilled professional who boards a flight out of Lagos or Abuja or Port Harcourt, every farmer who abandons his land to insecurity: these are not statistics. They are irreversible losses in the human capital of a nation that cannot afford to bleed talent.
The philosopher-activist tradition has always understood that analysis without action is complicity. It is not enough to document the failures of the APC. It is not enough to write learned articles about what Nigeria could be.
The moment demands mobilisation. It demands organisation at ward level, at local government level, at state level. It demands that every Nigerian who has looked at the state of this country and felt the burn of righteous anger in their chest must now convert that anger into actionable political energy.
The Narrative Force says this plainly: the ADC under Atiku Abubakar offers Nigeria its most credible path out of this catastrophe. Not because Atiku is a messiah, for Nigeria has had enough of messianic politics, but because he brings a record, a coalition, and a vision that can be interrogated, debated, and held accountable.
That is more than can be said for the incumbent.
Nigerians chose wrongly in 2023. The courts did not save them. The Independent National Electoral Commission did not save them. Only the Nigerian people can save themselves, and the instrument of that salvation is the ballot, deployed with unity, discipline, and strategic clarity in 2027.
Register with the ADC. Mobilise your community. Hold your ward delegates accountable. Demand internal party democracy. Build the ground game now, not in 2026.
The APC has had its chance. It has consumed that chance and squandered it with both hands. Nigeria deserves a government that has actually earned the right to govern, and in 2027, Atiku Abubakar and the African Democratic Congress will make that case to every last Nigerian voter.
The reckoning is coming. Be part of it.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
