Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
In the grand theatre of Nigerian politics, where the curtain rises on one tragedy after another, the 2023 production has now run its full and ruinous course. The ticket was sold cheap. Millions were persuaded to trade the only power that ever truly belonged to them, their vote, for a single note of 10,000 naira. Today, standing in that same market with that same note, they cannot buy back a fraction of what they surrendered.
For every 10,000 naira collected in 2023, the buyer has since repaid it many times over, in hunger, in fuel, in school fees, and in stolen tomorrows.
This is the arithmetic of Emilokan. A people entitled a man to power on the strength of turn-by-turn, and were handed, in return, a masterclass in how quickly a nation can be made to suffer. We are more than 200 million, the greater number of us young, creative, hardworking and unyielding, with a median age of about 18. That youth should have been our engine. Under this All Progressives Congress government it has been left to idle in joblessness, with youth unemployment above 40 per cent, while the future we should be building today is quietly mortgaged.
THE MARKET DOES NOT LIE
Let no one confuse a falling headline with a full plate. In July 2026 the government celebrated a headline inflation figure that eased to 15.43 per cent. In that very same month, and in that very same report, food inflation rose to 20.31 per cent, its sixth consecutive monthly climb and the highest in 10 months. On a month-on-month basis, the prices of rice, tomatoes, onions, pepper, beef, eggs and garri did not fall. They ran.
They point at the headline. The mother in the market points at the pot.
This is the true dividend of APC democracy: a statistic that improves while the family that must eat grows thinner. Petrol now averages about 1,600 naira per litre. The cost of preparing an ordinary pot of jollof rice has more than doubled since the reforms began. The interest rate sits at 26.5 per cent, punishing every trader who dares to borrow. And by the reckoning of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, about 35 million Nigerians now face acute food insecurity. Even our own African Democratic Congress has said it plainly this week: a government that answers rising hunger with recycled talking points has run out of ideas.
A Yoruba proverb settles the matter. Bi iro ba lo ni ogun odun, ojo kan ooto a maa baa. No matter how far the lie may travel in 20 years, the truth will overtake it in a single day. The APC condemned others from opposition and swore it held every solution. The country has now audited that boast, and found that the only thing distributed in abundance is poverty.
INVESTORS ARE SMILING. THE PEOPLE ARE NOT
We are told the reforms are working. The exchange has rallied, foreign confidence has returned, and Nigeria is celebrated once more in the language of markets. All of it may be true, and none of it fills a pot. A reform that flatters the ledger while emptying the kitchen is not a rescue. It is a rearrangement of who is allowed to suffer. The household eats no part of a stock-market gain.
Contrast this with a Nigeria that once knew how to grow. Between 1999 and 2007, under a government in which Atiku Abubakar served as Vice President and drove the economic team, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product grew from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars. That is not nostalgia. That is a record. It is the difference between men who understand how an economy is built and men who understand only how power is seized.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS NO LONGER A THEORY
The suffering masses now have somewhere to take their anger, and it is not a wish but a movement. In a nationwide direct primary held on 25 May 2026, simultaneously across the 8,809 wards of the Federation, ordinary members of the African Democratic Congress queued in the open and spoke. The party declared Atiku Abubakar its presidential candidate on 27 May 2026 with 1,846,370 votes. That is not a candidacy handed down in a hotel hall. That is a grassroots ward mandate. Paired with Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, the party calls it a unity and rescue ticket, and the description fits the hour.
To the doubters who say the coalition is too young to win, history returns a short answer: novelty has never stopped a determined people. In the Osun governorship election of August 2026, a modest platform defeated the APC despite the full weight of federal machinery. The APC itself was a party of barely two years’ standing when it removed a sitting President in 2015. Parties do not win elections. Mass support wins elections, and mass support is now moving in one direction.
Consider, too, the raw ledger of votes. In 2015 and 2019, the APC polled above 15 million at the presidential level. In 2023 that figure collapsed to 8,794,726, a fall of about 6.4 million in a single cycle, with the hardship yet to bite as it bites today. As the only Northern candidate in the 2027 race, Atiku enters a Northern field with no rival of his standing, and the projection across the region, as its bloc turns from a failing centre, is that he cannot poll less than 9 million from the North alone. Incumbency did not save the APC from its own decline in 2023. It will not save it from the reckoning of a hungry electorate in 2027.
THE VERDICT IS ALREADY WRITTEN
No country is ever divinely given. The nation-state is not an eternal verity but a work of human consciousness, and that consciousness is now advancing. The people have done the sum. They know what the 10,000 naira cost them. They know what the market says every morning. And on Saturday, 16 January 2027, they will convert that knowledge into the one currency the APC cannot inflate away: the ballot.
They sold their voice once, for 10,000 naira. In January they will use it, for free, to take their country back.
Public campaigns opened on 19 August 2026. The road to 16 January is now open, and it runs in only one direction. The End-Bad-Governance movement is no longer a slogan on a placard. It is a decision forming in millions of homes at once. Tinubu was entitled to his turn. The suffering masses are now entitled to theirs, and they will exercise it by retiring this government at the polls.
Nigeria will eat again. Nigeria will breathe again. It begins on 16 January 2027.
EndBadGovernance #Atiku2027 #ADCForNigeria #16January2027 #InformedInspiredInvolved
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
19 August 2026
