Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
It is not the big names that win Nigerian elections. It is the men and women at the polling units. They built 2015 from the ground up. Now they have moved. And they are chanting a new name.
Forget the press conferences. Elections in Nigeria are not won at that level. They never have been.
They are won in the wards. At the polling units. In the early morning hours when party agents take their positions and the machinery of mobilisation either delivers or it does not.
To understand what is truly shifting, this writer engaged in random conversations with nearly fifty members of The Narrative Force spread across the northern states. What emerged was a pattern impossible to dismiss.
These are not political observers commenting from a distance. They are ward-level operatives, polling unit agents, women’s wing organisers and youth mobilisers who live and work inside the system. They know what is moving beneath the surface because they are the surface.
Their testimonies, offered separately, in different states, at different times, converged on the same conclusion. The momentum, they said, has heavily gathered. It is no longer a trickle. It is a current.
The CPC bloc, that battle-hardened grassroots structure that formed the backbone of Muhammadu Buhari’s political movement long before the APC existed, has formally disengaged from the ruling party.
It did not leave quietly. It left with purpose. It left with direction. And the direction is the African Democratic Congress.
The cry rising from the wards and polling unit structures across the North is no longer Sai Buhari. It is Sai Atiku.
“These are not politicians who follow television debates. They follow the mood of the street, the pressure of the market, the hunger in the home. That mood has shifted. It is Sai Atiku.”
Senior ADC insider, March 2026
Why Atiku? Why the ADC?
Because the streets do not forget what governance feels like when it works.
Atiku Abubakar served as Vice-President during years when the economy expanded, the telecoms sector was liberalised, GDP nearly doubled and foreign capital flowed in with a confidence the present administration cannot summon.
The CPC grassroots bloc did not need a manifesto to make this calculation. They made it at the fuel queue, at the food market, when the naira collapsed and the salary that once fed a family of six could no longer feed three.
One mobiliser from Zamfara put it plainly: the people are tired and they know who stood with them before. Another, from Kano, said his entire unit had already committed. A third, from Bauchi, described ward meetings where Atiku’s name drew the energy that Buhari’s name drew in 2014.
These were not coordinated responses. They were independent accounts from different states. That is precisely what makes them so significant.
Tinubu came to power with every instrument of governance at his disposal and every mandate to deliver. What he chose to do with that power was inflict a cost-of-living catastrophe on a population that had already suffered enough. The ward-level mobilisers who kept faith with the APC through two administrations have concluded that this government does not deserve a third.
The APC Has Lost the Foundation, Not Just the Roof
The CPC bloc was never merely a faction within the APC. It was the load-bearing wall. It was the structure that made northern delivery possible.
Every vote Tinubu received in the northern states in 2023 was delivered, in significant part, by the same grassroots apparatus now relocating to the ADC.
The APC strategists who understand this are not sleeping well. Because in 2027, when those polling unit agents take their positions, they will not be working for the ruling party.
They will be working for Atiku Abubakar. They will be chanting the name already echoing through the wards.
Sai Atiku.
The APC did not merely lose supporters. It lost the people who know how to win.
The big names can wait. The polling units have already decided.
Sai Atiku.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
