Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a peculiar sickness that afflicts power in its final season. It begins to believe its own praise singers. It mistakes the echo of its own courtiers for the voice of the people. And in the South West of Nigeria today, that sickness has produced a number so absurd that it deserves to be framed and hung in the museum of political self-delusion.
Ten million votes. That is the figure the APC establishment has placed on the table for the January 2027 presidential election. The Leader of the Senate, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, announced in Ado-Ekiti that the party had designed a mobilisation plan to deliver at least ten million votes for President Tinubu in the six South West states alone, and the zonal leadership of the party has since adopted the chant. The more modest voices in that camp whisper seven million, as though shaving three million off a hallucination converts it into a forecast.
Let us do to this number what its authors clearly never did. Let us subject it to arithmetic.
A target that exceeds every vote cast for every candidate in the entire region is not a strategy. It is a séance.
THE NUMBERS THEY DARE NOT READ
In the 2023 presidential election, with Bola Tinubu on the ballot carrying the emotional weight of a Yoruba claim to the presidency, with the full machinery of the Lagos establishment behind him, and with the opposition divided three ways, Tinubu polled about 2.28 million votes across the entire South West. Atiku Abubakar of the PDP secured about 941,000 votes and Peter Obi of the Labour Party polled about 849,000.
Add every vote cast for every candidate in all six states and you arrive at a little over four million ballots. The APC is now promising to more than double the total turnout of the whole region and hand every single one of those ballots, and millions of phantom ones besides, to one man. At his absolute political peak, with every advantage of money, machinery and sentiment at his back, Tinubu could not reach a quarter of the figure his lieutenants now pledge on his behalf.
And what a peak it was. Even in that most favourable of seasons, Tinubu lost Lagos, his own political fiefdom, and lost Osun, where Atiku polled 354,366 votes to Tinubu’s 343,945. The emperor could not hold his own courtyard. Now, after three years of the harshest economic punishment visited on Nigerian households in a generation, his men promise a coronation by acclamation.
This is not projection. This is intoxication.
AWOLOWO’S VERDICT ON THE YORUBA VOTER
The men peddling this fantasy have made one fatal assumption: that the Yoruba voter is an ethnic automaton who will queue behind failure because it wears agbada from his own wardrobe. The greatest Yoruba political figure of the twentieth century knew better, and said so on the record.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, describing the very people who formed the core of his own support, called the Yoruba a “fastidious, critical and discerning people”. He warned that they will not do anything in politics merely to oblige a fellow Yoruba, and that if the Yoruba man is satisfied that your policy is good and will serve his interest, he will support you no matter which ethnic group you come from.
Read that again, slowly, and then place it beside the ten million votes fantasy. Awolowo, who commanded Yoruba loyalty as no man before or since, never claimed that loyalty as a birthright. He understood it as a wage, paid for performance, withdrawn upon failure. He built free education, free health care for children and the first television station in Africa, and even then he campaigned for every vote as though he were a stranger asking for trust.
Awolowo earned Yoruba loyalty with free education and full stomachs. His self-declared heir demands it with fuel queues and empty pots.
The evidence is not anecdotal. It is serial. In 1999 the South West looked at Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba general offered the presidency on a platter, and voted against him in his own homeland, handing the region to Olu Falae because sentiment had not yet been justified by conviction. Four years later the same region embraced Obasanjo, not because his blood had changed, but because their assessment had.
In 2003 the South West also swept away the Alliance for Democracy governors it had installed only four years earlier, because sentiment could not survive scrutiny. In 2023 the region’s most cosmopolitan state, Lagos, voted against its own godfather. The results showed that voters in the South West were no longer voting strictly along ethnic or regional lines, but were increasingly influenced by economic realities, governance issues and the appeal of individual candidates. The Yoruba do not worship at the shrine of any politician. They audit him.
Three data points, one law. The Yoruba denied a Yoruba president their votes in 1999, gave them in 2003 on performance, and withdrew regional loyalty from Tinubu’s own Lagos in 2023. Awolowo stated the law. The ballot box has enforced it for a quarter of a century.
THE LEDGER THE VOTER WILL CARRY TO THE BOOTH
And what will that audit find in January 2027? It will find the price of a bag of rice. It will find school fees that have tripled while salaries stood still. It will find the naira’s humiliation, the petrol pump’s daily extortion, and a cost of living crisis that has emptied the pots of the very market women whose votes the presidency now takes for granted.
The APC’s own oracles betray their anxiety. When the Ekiti governor promises between 600,000 and 700,000 votes for Tinubu from a state that recorded about 210,000 APC votes in the 2023 presidential election, he is not making a forecast. He is auditioning. These inflated pledges are not addressed to the electorate at all. They are addressed upward, to one man in Aso Rock, in the ancient courtier’s currency of exaggerated devotion. The louder the pledge, the emptier the ward.
A party confident of its record does not need to announce imaginary armies. It points to full silos, working refineries and safe roads, and lets the people do the counting.
THE ATIKU FLOOR: WHY 1.5 MILLION IS THE MINIMUM, NOT THE DREAM
Now set the delusion of ten million beside a sober opposition projection, and observe the difference between arithmetic and astrology.
Atiku Abubakar polled roughly 941,000 South West votes in 2023 under the worst conditions any candidate has faced in the region in a generation. The APC ticket carried the full emotional and financial weight of the Lagos establishment. The PDP was at war with itself, with Governor Seyi Makinde among the five PDP governors who openly resisted Atiku’s candidacy and worked the region against him. Peter Obi carved away the urban protest vote. Every wind blew against the Waziri, and still nearly a million South West voters marked his name, and still he took Osun outright.
That 941,000 is therefore not Atiku’s ceiling. It is his floor, laid in concrete on the worst possible day.
In 2027 every one of those hostile conditions reverses. The incumbent no longer enjoys the shield of novelty; he carries only the weight of his own record, and the Obasanjo precedent shows exactly what the Yoruba do to a homeboy whose case has not been made. The sabotage wing of the old PDP no longer sits inside Atiku’s structure. The ADC coalition offers the South West protest voter, who showed his independence so dramatically in Lagos in 2023, a credible national vehicle rather than a regional gesture. And the Osun base of over 354,000 votes stands as proof of concept that the region votes conviction, not tribe.
Hold Osun. Grow the Oyo, Ogun and Ondo numbers on the back of economic anger. Harvest even a modest share of the disenchanted 2023 protest vote. On those conservative assumptions alone, one and a half million South West votes for Atiku Abubakar is not optimism. It is the low end of the honest range, and every month of hardship pushes the true figure higher.
Tinubu’s men promise ten million votes from a region that cast four million in total. Atiku’s camp projects 1.5 million from a proven base of nearly a million on his worst day. One of these is politics. The other is poetry recited to a mirror.
CONCLUSION: THE YORUBA ARE NOT WIRED FOR SENTIMENTAL SERVITUDE
The ten million votes proclamation, and its seven million junior sibling, will be remembered as the moment the Tinubu court confused the South West with a captured province. The Yoruba have never been anybody’s province. They rejected Obasanjo in 1999 and rewarded him in 2003, on assessment alone. They gave Awolowo their loyalty because he gave them schools. They gave Abiola their tears because he gave them hope. They will give Tinubu in 2027 exactly what his three years have earned, counted coldly, ward by ward, in the fastidious, critical and discerning manner their fathers taught them.
The race, as Awolowo himself lived it, goes not to the man who claims the Yoruba by blood, but to the man who serves them by works. On that ancient standard, the verdict of January 2027 is already being written in every market in the South West, and it is not written in the arithmetic of delusion.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
9 July 2026
