Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
He said it without flinching, and every hungry household in Nigeria heard the truth of it.
You do not build a federation by impoverishing citizens to send bigger cheques to governors. That is robbing Nigerians to subsidise governments.
That is Atiku Abubakar. He names the theft for what it is. And that single habit, telling Nigerians the truth and standing on it, is precisely what Bola Tinubu and Kashim Shettima cannot do, because the truth of their record is a charge sheet.
So let the record be read, administration by administration, figure by figure. Not to be fair to Tinubu. There is no fairness owed to a government that has done this to a people. Only to establish, beyond argument, that no season of the Fourth Republic has broken Nigerians the way this one has.
THE NAIRA: A CURRENCY HE TOOK OUT AND SHOT
The value of the naira is the value of a Nigerian’s labour, savings and dignity, and Tinubu destroyed it faster than any leader in our history.
Under Obasanjo and Atiku the official rate moved from about 21.89 naira in 1999 to 128.29 naira by 2007. Under Yar’Adua and Jonathan it moved to roughly 197 naira by 2015. Under Buhari it reached about 461 naira by 2023.
Then Tinubu arrived. In one year the rate crashed from 462 naira to beyond 1,500 naira, a collapse of about 245 per cent by his fifteenth month, a depreciation of about 129 per cent in 2024 alone, the worst in a decade. He did not inherit this. He did it, in a single reckless stroke, and then told Nigerians to endure it.
Others let the naira slip. Tinubu took it out and shot it.
THE HUNGER: THE MOST EXPENSIVE PLATE OF FOOD IN OUR HISTORY
Under this President a Nigerian cannot afford to eat, and the state’s own figures prove it.
The National Bureau of Statistics records that the cost of one healthy meal per adult rose from about 703 naira in October 2023 to 1,541 naira by March 2026, a jump of about 119 per cent in under three years. In our own Ekiti it is the highest in the country, 2,091 naira per adult per day. Food inflation tore to about 40.5 per cent by May 2024. Headline inflation hit 33.95 per cent, the worst in twenty eight years, and peaked near 34.8 per cent in December 2024.
Set that beside the men he sneers at. Jonathan handed over inflation of about 9 per cent, the calmest in the democratic era. Obasanjo and Atiku averaged about 12.3 per cent. Even Buhari averaged about 14.56 per cent. Tinubu doubled the pain and called it reform.
No Nigerian ruler in living memory has made a plate of food this dear. That is his monument.
THE POVERTY: MILLIONS SHOVED OFF THE EDGE ON HIS WATCH
The World Bank projects that roughly 13 million more Nigerians will be driven below the poverty line by the end of 2025, pushed there by his shock therapy, the abrupt subsidy removal and the naira float with nothing laid down to catch the poor. Independent reviews reach the verdict that matters: household welfare under Tinubu is the worst in Nigeria’s recorded data.
His men will wave reserves at you. They will quote credit ratings and growth charts. Let them. A Nigerian cannot eat a credit rating. A child does not sleep on a bond upgrade. The chart climbs while the people it was drawn on starve beneath it, and a government that celebrates the chart over the hunger has told you exactly whom it serves.
THE WORKERS: A WAGE WORTH FORTY TWO DOLLARS
Ask the civil servant, the teacher, the nurse, what this President made of their labour.
He raised the minimum wage to 70,000 naira in 2024 and called it relief. In real money it is worth about 42 dollars a month, among the most worthless legal wages on earth, and his own inflation of above 33 per cent swallowed the increase before it cleared the bank. He then left at least 27 of the 36 states unable to pay even that without begging federal allocations. So the worker was handed a bigger number and a smaller life.
Tinubu doubled the figure on the payslip and halved the food on the plate. That is not a raise. That is a receipt for his failure.
THE INSECURITY: THE KILLING DID NOT STOP, HE INDUSTRIALISED IT
Under Tinubu and Shettima the guns never fell silent, and the numbers are an indictment written by the government itself.
Beacon Consulting recorded 13,346 Nigerians killed and 9,207 abducted between May 2023 and September 2024. Amnesty International documented at least 2,600 deaths across more than 50 communities in little more than a year. And the President’s own National Bureau of Statistics, in its December 2024 report, recorded 614,937 deaths linked to insecurity in the twelve months to April 2024. His own bureau. His own figure. His own verdict on himself.
The children are still being taken. 287 pupils seized in one morning at Kuriga in March 2024, and school after school since. SBM Intelligence counted 2,938 people kidnapped in the North West alone between July 2024 and June 2025. Under this man kidnapping stopped being a crime and became an economy, a ransom industry running in daylight while the state looks away.
And here is the cruelty that is his alone. He fused the two afflictions. The same Nigerian is now seized on the road by the bandit and stripped bare at the market by his policies, robbed twice in a single day, by the gun and by the naira.
Under Tinubu the kidnapper and the market hunt the same citizen.
THE DARKEST FILE: WHAT ATIKU WAS BUILDING, WHAT TINUBU WAS FORFEITING
Read the two men against the same years and let Nigerians choose which story they are voting for.
In the years that made him, Atiku Abubakar was building. A customs career, then real enterprises across ports and logistics, agriculture, beverages and a university that still carries Nigerians on its payroll and its rolls today. Institutions. Jobs. Things that stand.
In those same years, Bola Tinubu was in a Chicago courtroom.
The record is documented and it is exact. In July 1993, in Case No. 93 C 4483 before Judge John Nordberg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the American government moved to seize funds that its own sworn affidavits, filed by an Internal Revenue Service agent, alleged were the proceeds of a white heroin ring run out of Chicago by Adegboyega Mueez Akande and Abiodun Agbele. On 4 October 1993 the court ordered 460,000 dollars held in a First Heritage Bank account in the name of Bola Tinubu forfeited to the United States as money the decree treated as narcotics proceeds.
Understand what that kind of case is, because his defenders will try to blur it. An American forfeiture action does not sue the man, it sues the money. The government does not have to prove the person guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It only has to show reason to believe the funds are tied to a drug crime, and the burden then falls on the account holder to prove the money is clean. Tinubu did not clear that bar. He did not fight it to a verdict that could have vindicated him. He surrendered the 460,000 dollars, settled, and made the matter go quiet. In thirty three years he has never given Nigerians an honest account of how an account in his name came to hold money a United States court decreed to be drug money.
THE FILE HE IS STILL FIGHTING TO BURY
If there is nothing in that file, why is the President of Nigeria spending American lawyers, in 2026, to keep it shut?
Because the matter is not history. It is live in a Washington courtroom right now. An American transparency campaigner, Aaron Greenspan, sued the United States government under the Freedom of Information Act to force out the records the FBI, the DEA and the Justice Department hold on the Chicago heroin investigation naming Tinubu and three others.
In April 2025, United States District Judge Beryl Howell ruled against the agencies. She struck down their refusal to confirm or deny that the records existed, and she did so on a finding that should be read aloud in every market square in Nigeria: that the agencies had already acknowledged Tinubu was the subject of a criminal investigation. A United States federal judge. On the public record. That he was the subject of a criminal investigation.
Then watch what the President did with that. A leader with nothing to hide throws the file open and clears his name in a day. This one did the opposite. In August 2026 the FBI went back to the court asking to justify, in secret, behind closed doors, why parts of the file must stay hidden, arguing that release could expose its investigative techniques and endanger the safety of individuals named inside it. And Tinubu’s own legal team joined the Justice Department in fighting for more delay, straining for extra time to keep the records from the Nigerian public that elected him. The judge refused the long delay and set a hard deadline, and no later, of 28 August 2026.
Be precise, because precision is the weapon here. That safety exemption is the standard shield thrown over the informants, witnesses and third parties buried inside a sensitive investigative file. It does not, on its own, prove what the file says about Tinubu. So do not take my word for his guilt. Take the facts and ask the only question that matters. A US court has said he was the subject of a criminal investigation. The records exist. They are being forced into daylight. And the President of Nigeria is burning lawyers and favours to stop you reading them.
An innocent man opens the file. Tinubu has spent thirty three years, and is still spending, to keep it sealed.
One man spent those years signing the founding cheques of a party and the wages of legitimate companies. The other spent them signing away money a court called drug proceeds, and is now paying to keep the rest of the story hidden. Nigeria is entitled to know which biography it put in Aso Rock.
THE POINT OF IT ALL: ATIKU MEANS IT, TINUBU NEVER DID
Return to where we began, because honesty is the thread, and Tinubu snapped it long ago.
Take the subsidy, the defining act of his presidency. In January 2012, out of power, it was Bola Tinubu himself who rose to condemn the Jonathan government for removing subsidy too abruptly, who warned of the hardship it would inflict on the poor. That article is genuine and on the record. Then in May 2023, holding power, he did the very thing he had condemned, in one brutal stroke, with the four words that emptied a nation’s pockets. The critic became the executioner. The man who wept for the poor in opposition starved them in office.
That is the difference. Atiku tells you the savings from subsidy removal, valued by the government itself in the trillions, must be accounted for and returned to Nigerians rather than converted into fatter cheques for governments while citizens go hungry. Agree with him or not, you always know where he stands, because he says it and he stays there.
The gulf between the two men is not eloquence. It is honesty. One means what he says. The other has never meant a word, and cannot even face his own file.
Nigeria tried the salesman, and it cost a currency in ruins, the dearest food in our history, a wage worth 42 dollars, millions shoved into poverty, a killing season the government tallies against itself, and a President still fighting a foreign court to hide his past. On 16 January 2027 the country decides again, and history is watching what a broken people do the moment the truth is finally spoken to them plainly.
Ability. Capacity. Capability. Truth, honesty and transparency. A man who means what he says.
Let the reckoning begin.
AtikuMeansWhatHeSays
TruthCapacityTransparency
EkitiUnitedForAtiku
ADC2027
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B,
Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
26 August 2026
