By Adefemi Bayode Adebisi
Otunba,
Before anything else, a small matter of reading.
My name is Adefemi. You wrote Adeyemi. You had it in front of you, printed, at the head of the very article you were answering, and you still could not carry a single letter across.
Calm yourself, Otunba. Steady the hands. Take a breath and look again, because a man whose nerves are that frayed at the sight of one article is in no condition to lecture anybody about arithmetic.
Adefemi. F, not Y. Read it slowly. Write it as it is.
I raise it only because of what you built your reply on. You wrote to me about pedigree. You wrote about ancestry, and you meant it as a wound. Yet you could not spell a Yoruba name that was sitting in front of your eyes.
That is the whole method in miniature. You did precisely the same with the figures. The 7.13 trillion naira was in front of you, printed, and you could not carry it across either. One letter, one audited account. Both on the page. Neither of them survived contact with your reading.
Now to the substance.
You have replied. Sixteen hundred words. Let me tell you at once what is inside them, because it is the shortest audit ever conducted in Nigerian public affairs.
Zero figures.
Not one. You used the word actuarial as a walking stick. You demanded to know who pays, how much, for how long, under what risk assumptions. And in the whole of your reply there is not a single naira figure, not a dollar figure, not a percentage, not a barrel, not a litre, not one digit of arithmetic anywhere.
You wrote a sermon about arithmetic containing no arithmetic. You accused me of producing a biography and you produced an autobiography. Then you announced that arithmetic remains stubbornly indifferent to outrage. It does, Otunba. It has been stubbornly indifferent to you for two essays now.
A man who will not count should not make counting the whole of his case.
I GAVE YOU EVIDENCE AND YOU CALLED IT GOSSIP
Look at what was placed before you. Roughly 7.13 trillion naira in NNPC’s 2024 audited accounts as energy security expenditure, and roughly 17.5 trillion naira in related energy costs, all of it after subsidy was declared gone. Deep offshore production tax credits beginning at $3 and $4.50 per barrel and rising to $11.50. $897.6 million spent on Warri, which produced no petrol and was shut on 25 January 2025. NNPC’s own Group Chief Executive Officer saying in February 2026 that the three refineries were closed because they destroyed national value. A memorandum signed on 30 April 2026 with two Chinese firms to run those same plants. Suit number FHC/L/CS/857/2026 in the Federal High Court, in which the market’s largest refiner asks that other operators’ import licences be cancelled. And 15.8 trillion naira of claimed savings, unreconciled to this day.
Audited accounts. Court filings. A named public official on the record. Published national figures.
You called it gossip. You called it references to photographs and Facebook posts. You waved your hand at it and said you had been attacked.
An audited financial statement is not gossip, Otunba. A suit number is not a Facebook post. The word of NNPC’s own Chief Executive is not amateur psychoanalysis. You did not refute one of those items. You did not so much as name one of them. You wrote a full reply, left every figure standing exactly where I put it, and then informed the public that I had abandoned the debate.
The debate did not move. You walked around it and kept talking.
YOUR CLEVEREST SENTENCE INDICTS YOUR OWN PATRONS
Now to the sentence you were proudest of. Call it support, you wrote. Call it intervention. Call it energy security. Call it production incentives. Call it strategic stabilisation. The actuarial question, you said, remains exactly the same.
Read that back slowly.
Energy security is not my phrase. It is not Atiku’s phrase. It is the line item in NNPC’s audited accounts under which 7.13 trillion naira of public money was spent by the government you have spent three years shielding.
You have just told Nigeria that energy security spending is subsidy wearing a new coat, that it is the same failed experiment in fresh packaging, and that those who practise it are guilty of political superstition.
You did not set out to indict President Tinubu. You did it in one sentence, in public, over your own signature, while trying to sound clever.
And your blade cuts the tax credits too. If every state action that alters a price outcome is the same discredited instrument, then $11.50 per barrel handed to a deep offshore operator is subsidy, and by your own reasoning it is superstition, and your question applies to it in full. Who pays for that one? How much? For how long? Under what risk assumptions?
You will not ask. You have never asked. In three years you have not once pointed that question at a beneficiary who wears a suit.
Who pays is an excellent question. It becomes a fraud when it is only ever asked about the poor.
SCORE YOUR OWN EXPERIMENT
Your central conceit is the experiment. Subsidy was tried, you say. The outcome was observed. It failed. Serious people do not repeat failed experiments.
Very well. Apply your method honestly.
Removal was also an experiment. It began on 29 May 2023 with stated promises. The savings would be released. The poor would be cushioned by targeted intervention. Refining would come home. Prices would normalise as competition matured. That experiment has now run for over three years, at national scale, on 200 million subjects.
Score it, Otunba. You are the actuary. Score your own trial.
The claimed savings stand at 15.8 trillion naira, reconciled to nothing. The refineries were kept rather than sold, consumed public money, produced no petrol, and were shut for destroying national value. The competitive market you celebrate has its dominant player in the Federal High Court seeking to cancel its competitors’ licences. Petrol at 839 naira in January 2026 was moving at gantry prices of 1,165 naira by August. And the spending you insist ended is sitting in the accounts at 7.13 trillion naira.
You demand that Nigeria accept the verdict of one experiment while forbidding it to score the other. That is not the experimental method. That is a man who runs the trial, hides the result, and then lectures the patients about evidence.
The old subsidy regime failed. I have never said otherwise, and neither has The Narrative Force. What is before Nigeria in 2027 is not its resurrection. It is capped, time bound, independently audited production support tied to metered domestic output, paid on barrels counted at a gate rather than claims that cannot be verified at a port.
You were told this. You replied without engaging one term of it. Then you wrote that a bad idea does not become good because it is wrapped in a manifesto. Otunba, you cannot review a wrapper you refuse to open. Twice now you have been handed the document and twice you have chosen to argue with 1973, because 1973 cannot answer you and the manifesto can.
YOU SAID POLICY IS NOT A PERSONALITY CONTEST, THEN CONTESTED THE PERSONALITY
This is the passage that destroys your own essay, and it is entirely your own work.
You wrote that public policy is not a personality contest. That the issue is not whether Atiku is popular or famous or ambitious. That criticism of ideas is not an attack on a man.
Then, in the same document, you gave your longest passage to the man. Rejected repeatedly. Two decades of asking. The electorate hesitates. His challenge has always been trust. Repeated candidacy is not proof of wisdom.
What is that, if not a personality contest? You built your argument out of one man’s electoral history and then instructed the rest of us that electoral history is irrelevant to policy. You cannot forbid the personal in one paragraph and live inside it for the next six.
And examine the logic, since you enjoy the word. You are arguing that a policy is unsound because the man proposing it lost elections. That is the crudest fallacy in the book. If losing an election refuted an idea, every idea Nigeria ever adopted after an opposition victory would be false on the day of its adoption. Awólọ́wọ̀ lost. His free education has fed this country’s professional class for seventy years.
Ballots decide who governs. They have never once decided whether a number is correct.
ATIKU KÌ Í ṢE ẸNI A RÍ FÍN
Now to the sneering, which is the true content of your reply and the reason you sat down to write it.
Pedigree cannot be manufactured, you announced. Ancestry cannot be manufactured. History cannot be manufactured.
Ancestry. In a debate about petroleum pricing, you reached for ancestry. Nobody raised bloodline. Nobody raised lineage. It came out of you unbidden, because it is what you actually think and what you actually meant, and it tells Nigeria exactly what kind of man was at that keyboard.
So let me say it once, in the language you will understand. Atiku kì í ṣe ẹni a rí fín. Atiku is not a man to be looked upon with contempt.
Here is what he is. Turaki of Adamawa. Waziri of Adamawa. A man who rose from Jada with nothing, served this Republic as Vice President for eight years, chaired the National Economic Council through the recovery that carried Nigeria’s GDP from $58 billion in 1999 to $270 billion in 2007, built businesses that employ thousands of Nigerians, founded a university that has graduated thousands more, and for thirty three years has stood down for other men rather than break the house he helped build.
In 2023 he polled 6,984,520 votes. Nearly seven million Nigerians, in twenty six states, at their own cost, in their own queues.
That is the man you have decided is beneath your ancestry.
And what do you place beside him? Your single documented electoral mandate in an entire lifetime is 554 votes in a press centre in Abeokuta, a mandate your own national party examined and set aside, awarding the certificate of return to another man in July 2022. When Ogun voted on 18 March 2023 the PDP candidate on that ballot was Ladi Adebutu with 262,383 votes. Your name was not on the paper. Not one Ogun voter has ever been given the chance to accept you or reject you.
Yet you wrote, in your own hand, I have contested elections.
Which one, Otunba? Name it. Give me the date, the ballot, the constituency and your figure as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission. I will publish it here in full and I will apologise. I will wait.
Six million, nine hundred and eighty four thousand, five hundred and twenty. Against five hundred and fifty four in a press hall. And the man with 554 lectures Nigeria on pedigree.
YOUR INDEPENDENCE POINTS ONLY ONE WAY
You offered a testimonial to yourself. I have built movements. I have disagreed with allies. I have praised opponents when they were right. I have criticised friends when they were wrong. You called it intellectual independence.
Let me save you the search, Otunba, because I have already done it.
I know what you will reach for. In August 2026, on Channels Television’s Politics Today, you observed that Tinubu’s legs are wobbling in Lagos and that he could struggle in Oyo. That is not criticism. That is a bookmaker reading a card. You were discussing whether the man will win, not what he has done to Nigerians, and a remark about his prospects in Oyo has never once lowered the price of garri in Abeokuta.
And on that same programme, in that same month, you delivered your actual verdict on him. I pity him, you said, because after he wins they are going to start saying he rigged.
Read your own sentence, Otunba. In the fourth year of this hardship, with the accounts unreconciled and the refineries shut, the emotion you selected for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was pity, and the injury you identified was that people might one day doubt his victory. Not the mother rationing the evening meal. Not the trader who cannot fuel a generator. Him. His feelings. His coming vindication.
So I withdraw nothing. I sharpen it, and I put it to you as a direct challenge before the whole country.
Name it. One occasion, with a date, on which you publicly criticised this administration’s conduct toward the Nigerian people. Not its electoral arithmetic. Not its internal quarrels. Its conduct. One article. One broadcast. One paragraph on the subsidy accounting, the tax credits, the 15.8 trillion naira, the shut refineries, the pump price. Three years of national anguish. Produce a single line.
I doubt that you have. I have looked, and I did not find it.
But if you have, do not merely announce it. Publish it in full, with its date and its platform, and set it down beside the rest of your record. Beside the visit to Bourdillon on Sallah Day in 2025, per Kio Amachree’s published open letter. Beside the photograph. Beside your declaration on national television that the President is smarter than Peter Obi and that his brain is very alert. Beside your announcement that you are not anti Tinubu. Beside the tribute to Seyi Tinubu in August 2026, in which you wrote that no father could have such a son and not be thankful to God. Beside the July 2024 report of an APC chieftain publicly inviting you into the ruling party and praising your sagacity. Beside the movement you founded in November 2024, styled The Alternative, to rescue Nigeria’s democracy from the very man you now pity.
Lay it all out in one place, in order, with the dates showing, and let Nigerians read the two columns side by side.
Then let them judge for themselves whether there is any consistency in it.
I am content to leave that verdict entirely to them. You should be too, if what you claim about yourself is true.
Friends criticised. Opponents pitied. You described your own practice with perfect accuracy. You merely omitted which column is which.
An independence that flows in one direction only is not independence. It is a current, and a current runs downhill toward whatever is holding the water.
YOU SAID PROCEED. I PROCEED
You affected amusement at the promise of scrutiny. How terrifying, you wrote. Will journalists investigate politicians? Please proceed. Public life comes with public examination. I have no objection.
Notice that two pages earlier you condemned the same material as personal attacks beneath contempt. You could not decide within one essay whether examination is contemptible or welcome, and you took both positions because neither is a conviction. Both are postures chosen for the paragraph they sit in.
But I accept your invitation, and I thank you for putting it in writing.
Understand what you have done, Otunba. You did not have to say that. You could have let the matter close. Instead you replied at length, in public, with insult, and you formally invited examination. That invitation now sits on the record over your signature, and The Narrative Force accepts it in full.
I have the audited accounts. I have the court filings. I have the primary results and the certificate that went to another man. I have the judgment. I have the television transcripts. I have the Facebook archive with its dates intact. I have the open letters. And I have the public quarrel of April 2026 in which a serving media aide to the former Vice President alleged that you had shown interest in financial gain during the 2019 campaign, an allegation that stands unadjudicated and, to this day, unanswered by you.
You called it gossip. You did not call it false. Every lawyer in this country knows the difference.
AND ONE LAST THING, ABOUT WAGES
You are entitled to your opinions. You are entitled to change your patrons. Nigeria is free.
But there is a thing men of honour do not do, and it has nothing to do with economics.
You were spokesman of the Atiku Abubakar Presidential Campaign Organisation. You carried that man’s name into studios. You defended his positions on national television. You drew your living from that association, in a role you have never denied.
A man may leave a principal. That is politics, and nobody begrudges it. What a man does not do is turn round and pour innuendo on the head of the very principal whose campaign once paid his wages, in the season when that principal stands before the people, in the service of a household that has not even offered him a chair.
In Ekiti we say that a man who eats in a house and then spits into the water pot is not a critic of the house. He is simply a man who is still hungry.
So hear it plainly, since you asked for plainness. Atiku kì í ṣe ẹni a rí fín. If you spew innuendos at a man who once paid your wages, we will launch at you from all cylinders, and every cylinder will be loaded with a document.
YOUR QUESTION, ANSWERED
You closed on it, so I will close on it. Who pays?
Nigerians pay, Otunba. They are paying now. They have been paying since 29 May 2023. They paid the 7.13 trillion naira in the energy accounts. They paid the $897.6 million that went into Warri and produced nothing. They are paying the $11.50 a barrel that reaches men who will never stand at a pump. They are paying for 15.8 trillion naira of savings that were announced to them and never returned to them.
That is your answer. It was in the article you refused to read, in figures you refused to touch, and you have now written two full essays without once looking at it.
The Atiku Abubakar of 2027 is not the Atiku of 2023, and Nigeria is not the Nigeria of 2023 either. The masses have been to the market. They have counted their change. They will read the manifesto, weigh the record, examine the intentions, and decide for themselves on 16 January 2027.
They do not need an actuary who cannot produce a number, nor an alternative who has never been on a ballot, to explain to them what their own empty pot has already said.
And when you sit down to reply to this one, Otunba, calm the nerves first. Then read the name. Then read the figures. Adefemi Bayode Adebisi. Seven point one three trillion naira. Both are on the page. Neither has moved. Neither is going anywhere.
Adefemi Bayode Adebisi
Member, Social Media Firestorm
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
7 September 2026
