A REPLY TO ALAYANDE ADENIYI SUNDAY
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
THERE ARE MOMENTS IN THE LIFE OF A NATION when the quality of its political discourse sinks so catastrophically low that silence becomes complicity. The piece authored by one Alayande Adeniyi Sunday against the presidential candidacy of Atiku Abubakar is one such moment. It is not a political argument. It is not commentary. It is not even competent propaganda. It is the feverish midnight scribbling of a man whose fear has outrun his reasoning, whose panic has strangled his logic, and whose desperation to wound a candidate he cannot defeat on merit has produced what must stand as one of the most intellectually bankrupt political documents of this election cycle. The Nigerian public deserves better than to receive this manufactured poison without a disinfectant being applied at full force.
Mr. Alayande opens with the declaration that Atiku is “playing dirty politics” and that “Nigerians only focus on the Tinubu administration.” Read that slowly. A man writing a piece dripping with unverified allegations, ethnic insinuation, and character assassination accuses his subject of playing dirty politics. The audacity is almost artistic. It is the pickpocket who screams thief. It is the arsonist who calls the fire brigade. If Mr. Alayande wishes to hold a referendum on dirty politics, we invite him to begin with the document he has just signed his name to.
And if Nigerians are focused on the Tinubu administration, it is because that administration has given them no other place to look. Petrol, which sold at one hundred and sixty-five naira per litre when Tinubu swore the oath of office, now bleeds Nigerian families dry at prices multiplied beyond the reach of the working poor. The naira has been reduced to a currency traders in neighbouring countries now decline to accept. Hunger, real hunger, the kind that empties children’s eyes of light, has metastasised across a nation that once fed a continent. Bandits operate with impunity across the North West, collecting ransoms running into billions while the government negotiates from its knees. Schools have been emptied at gunpoint. Entire communities sacked and displaced by insurgents who move freely across state boundaries as though there is no army and no government in Abuja. Nigerians are focused on the Tinubu administration the way a patient with a machete wound is focused on the machete. That is not a testimonial. That is a prosecution.
THE WEAPONS CHARGE: A CONFESSION IN DISGUISE
MR. ALAYANDE TELLS US with theatrical gravity that Atiku will deploy “two weapons,” security and propaganda, as though he has cracked a code that eluded every other observer. We ask him plainly: in which democracy, on which continent, in which century, is it sinister for an opposition politician to campaign on the security failures of an incumbent? When bandits kidnapped over two hundred schoolchildren in Kaduna in March 2021 and collected ransom before releasing them, should opposition politicians have politely looked away? When terrorists bombed the Abuja-Kaduna train in March 2022, killing passengers and abducting survivors for ransom, was that too sensitive for political contest?
Security is not Atiku’s weapon. Security is Tinubu’s wound. It is the open, festering, undeniable wound of an administration that inherited a bleeding country and has watched it bleed further. And propaganda? Mr. Alayande launches this accusation from inside a piece that is propaganda in its purest, most uncut form. There is not one sourced claim in his entire submission. Not one date. Not one document. Not one name attached to a verifiable event. The word propaganda, deployed against Atiku by a man writing propaganda, does not land as an insult. It lands as a confession.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS FALLACY: AN EDUCATIONAL EMERGENCY
MR. ALAYANDE ANNOUNCES, without a tremor of uncertainty, that Atiku “doesn’t have any achievements to use for his campaign in 2027.” This single reckless sentence tells us everything about the depth of his research and the seriousness of his engagement with Nigerian political history.
Atiku Abubakar served as Vice President for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2007. In those eight years, the Nigerian economy grew from a GDP of fifty-eight billion dollars to two hundred and seventy billion dollars. That is not a talking point. That is an economic transformation no Nigerian government before or since has replicated. The Paris Club debt of thirty billion dollars, which had strangled Nigerian development for decades, was extinguished under that administration. The National Council on Privatisation, chaired by Atiku, restructured the commanding heights of the Nigerian economy and opened the doors for private enterprise. These are not slogans. These are entries in the ledger of Nigerian economic history that no social media commentary can expunge. The man who says Atiku has no achievements has never opened a book on the subject he presumes to discuss. That is not a political disagreement. That is an educational emergency.
THE DEBORAH DEFLECTION: MANUFACTURING A CONVICTION FROM THIN AIR
NOW WE ARRIVE at what Mr. Alayande considers his sharpest blade, a deleted social media post connected to the murder of Deborah Samuel Yakubu in Sokoto in May 2022. He wields it with the confidence of a prosecutor holding a smoking gun. Let us examine this gun with the clinical precision Mr. Alayande refuses to apply to his own submissions.
The context he deliberately withholds is this: in the days following Deborah’s murder, Northern Nigeria was a tinderbox. Protests had erupted. Politicians were calculating every word with extreme care in an environment where a careless statement could trigger further violence and cost more innocent lives. A post reviewed and managed in that atmosphere is not evidence of endorsement of murder. It is evidence of a politician navigating a volatile security moment with the awareness that reckless words could produce more corpses. That is not cowardice. It was responsible statecraft.
But the full record demolishes Mr. Alayande’s insinuation completely. On the twenty-first of December 2021, Atiku publicly condemned the killing and kidnapping of Nigerians, stating unambiguously that no cause justifies the taking of innocent life. In February 2022, he issued a formal statement condemning the abduction of students in Kagara, Niger State, demanding their immediate release. Following the Abuja-Kaduna train bombing in March 2022, Atiku was among the first national figures to publicly condemn the attack, describing it as an assault on the Nigerian state. These are dated, sourced, retrievable public statements in newspaper archives and on his verified platforms. They are the permanent record of a man who has spoken against the killing and kidnapping of Nigerians with a consistency his critics cannot match and dare not honestly contest.
To take one social media management decision made inside a security emergency and use it to incinerate that entire documented record is not political criticism. It is deliberate fabrication. Ambiguity is not guilt. One cautious online moment set against years of documented public condemnation does not produce a verdict of complicity. It produces nothing. Mr. Alayande’s attempt to manufacture a conviction from nothing is the most telling measure of how empty his ammunition box truly is.
FEAR IS THE FATHER OF THIS ENTIRE EXERCISE
THE WRITER ACCUSES Atiku’s followers of “shallow brains” for supporting their candidate without checking his antecedents. This charge is delivered by a man who has just demonstrated in real time that he checked nothing, sourced nothing, verified nothing, and evidenced nothing. He has produced a piece entirely devoid of research and then summoned the breathtaking audacity to charge other people with intellectual shallowness. He has looked into a mirror and described what he saw as someone else.
Let us now name what this document truly is. It is not analysis. It is not commentary. It is not even effective propaganda, because effective propaganda at least maintains internal consistency. What Mr. Alayande has produced is the literary equivalent of a man throwing everything within arm’s reach at an advancing figure he cannot stop. It is chaotic. It is desperate. It is the product of a mind that has looked at the 2027 political horizon, seen Atiku Abubakar standing on it as the confirmed presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, and been seized by a panic it can neither control nor conceal.
The opponents of Atiku are not attacking him from strength. They are attacking him from terror. They attack because they cannot afford a single moment of silence in which Nigerians might compare his record to what they are living through today. They attack because the contrast between what Nigeria was under his stewardship and what Nigeria has become is so devastating that their only defence is to keep the noise level high enough to prevent that comparison from being made in the cold light of evidence.
Every smear launched against Atiku Abubakar is a free campaign advertisement for him. Every fabricated allegation drives one more Nigerian to ask the question his attackers most dread: if this man is so dangerous, why are they so afraid of him? And when Nigerians ask that question and look honestly at the evidence, they arrive at the same answer every time.
You do not deploy this level of firepower against a man you believe you can defeat.
You deploy it against a man you know you cannot.
Atiku Abubakar can win. He will win. And the hysteria encoded in every panicked line of Mr. Alayande’s submission is the most honest political forecast this election cycle has yet produced.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
7th June 2026
