Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Three Years of a Purchased Presidency Have Cost Nigeria Everything. The Bill Is Due in 2027.
There is a political pathology so deeply embedded in Nigerian governance culture that it has survived every republic, outlasted every reform charter, and defeated every generation of idealists who believed it could be cured by sincerity alone. It is the pathology of the auction. The iron conviction, held with predatory confidence by those who control the machinery of power, that political office in Nigeria is a purchasable commodity. That the highest bidder wins. That credentials are decorative beside cash. That the electorate can be managed, bought in portions, or simply overwhelmed into irrelevance on election morning.
Three years of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s presidency have not merely confirmed this pathology. They have elevated it into state philosophy.
The auctioneer is now in Aso Rock. And he is selling everything.
I. The Anatomy of a Purchase
Tinubu did not win the 2023 presidential election. That precise formulation must be stated, cited, and repeated until it enters the permanent record of Nigerian political history.
He received 8,794,726 votes. Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi together drew nearly 12.8 million votes between them. When every opposition candidate’s certified figure from INEC’s own announced results is aggregated, the total surpasses 14.5 million votes cast against Tinubu’s 8.79 million.
A man who received the endorsement of fewer than one in three presidential voters was inaugurated as president of all of them.
The Electoral Act was litigated with urgency and precision. The courts found a way, repeatedly and at every appellate tier, to look away. The inauguration proceeded. And Nigeria, as it has done at every previous auction, was handed the bill.
II. What Three Years of the Purchased Presidency Has Cost
The naira, at the time of Tinubu’s inauguration, traded at approximately 460 to the dollar on the official market. It has since collapsed beyond 1,500. This is not the natural depreciation of a currency navigating a difficult global environment. This is the arithmetic consequence of removing a petroleum subsidy without a functional social safety net in place, of floating a currency without the reserves to stabilise the float, and of presiding over a confidence collapse so total that foreign capital has treated Nigeria as a jurisdiction to exit rather than enter.
The pump price of petrol now sits at a level that renders the monthly earnings of working Nigerians mathematically incompatible with basic household survival. Transportation costs have transmitted themselves through every supply chain, landing finally on the price of rice, of cooking oil, of school fees, of hospital bills. The citizen who did not vote for this outcome is paying for it regardless.
The debt-service-to-revenue ratio has breached ninety per cent. Read that figure slowly. For every one hundred naira the Federal Government earns, more than ninety naira departs immediately to service debt obligations. What remains must fund a federal bureaucracy, a security apparatus fighting active insurgencies on multiple fronts, a health system in structural collapse, an educational infrastructure that has been on intermittent strike for the better part of a decade, and a road network that kills Nigerians daily through disrepair.
The arithmetic does not work. It was never designed to work. A government purchased on credit, by a man who needed to recover his investment, was always going to prioritise the recovery of that investment above the welfare of the governed.
The President’s academic credentials remain a subject of unresolved public controversy. His 1993 narcotics forfeiture record in a Chicago federal court stands as an unrebutted matter of public document. His travel expenditure across foreign capitals, tallied while his citizens queue at filling stations and weigh garri by the cup, runs into hundreds of millions of naira.
This is not misgovernance in the conventional sense. Misgovernance implies an intention to govern that was merely executed poorly. What Nigeria has endured since May 2023 is the systematic extraction of a national asset by a man who bought it.
III. The Case That History Has Already Made
Atiku Abubakar did not enter Nigeria’s public life through the side entrance of patronage or the back corridor of godfather appointment. He built a customs career of professional distinction in an institution notorious for institutional rot, and emerged with his reputation intact. He built a private sector enterprise of continental reach that today employs tens of thousands of Nigerians across maritime logistics and allied industries, generating foreign exchange and tax revenue without requiring a subvention from the treasury. He built a university at his personal expense, because he understood that the deficit in Nigerian human capital was not a government problem alone. It was a national problem, and national problems belong to citizens of means as much as they belong to the state.
He then served as Vice President through one of the most structurally transformative economic periods in Nigeria’s post-military democratic history.
The numbers from that era are not contested, because figures do not have political allegiances. Nigeria’s GDP expanded from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars between 1999 and 2007. Annual growth peaked at 15.3 per cent. External reserves climbed from the position of technical insolvency that the military bequeathed to a civilian-era high of 42 billion dollars. The Paris Club debt, which had functioned for two decades as a fiscal collar strangling every administration’s ability to invest in infrastructure and human capital, was retired in full.
These outcomes did not emerge from accident or from the benevolence of global commodity markets alone. They emerged from a government in which the Vice President’s portfolio was prosecuted with economic rigour, private sector discipline, and a command of macroeconomic architecture that subsequent administrations, including the current one, have conspicuously and catastrophically lacked.
That is the record Alhaji Atiku Abubakar brings to the contest in 2027. Not a manifesto drafted by consultants. Not a slogan road-tested in a focus group. A record. Built across decades. Verified by data. Resistant to revision.
IV. The Field That Changes Everything
The African Democratic Congress now carries within its primary field a concentration of national political talent that no single party has assembled in a generation. Atiku Abubakar. Peter Obi. Rotimi Amaechi. Rabiu Kwankwaso. These are not recycled figures performing relevance. These are men with demonstrated executive records across different regions, different administrative challenges, and different demographic constituencies.
The breadth of that field is itself a political argument. It says, plainly and without requiring elaboration, that the best of Nigeria has gathered in one place. That governance-capable Nigerians from the North-East, the South-East, the South-South, and the North-West have looked at the available options and reached the same conclusion: the current direction is unsustainable, and the vehicle for correction is the ADC.
The APC cannot assemble a comparable field because the APC’s selection mechanism is not merit. It is loyalty. And loyalty, in a party whose central operating principle is the distribution of access to a purchased president, does not reliably produce the competent. It produces the compliant.
V. The Accumulation That Precedes a Reckoning
The most lethal miscalculation a political machine can make is to confuse the purchase of electoral machinery with the purchase of popular will. They are not the same transaction. Machinery can be bought. Will cannot.
And the will of the Nigerian people, compressed and constrained and denied its expression across three years of this purchased presidency, has not dissipated. It has accumulated.
The petty trader whose working capital has been devoured by inflation has accumulated. The civil servant whose real wage has been halved by currency collapse without a commensurate salary adjustment has accumulated. The manufacturer who cannot source raw materials at a viable exchange rate has accumulated. The graduate who finished university into a labour market that this administration has made structurally more hostile to entry has accumulated. The farmer who cannot deliver produce to market because diesel costs have made logistics economically irrational has accumulated. The mother who stood at a pharmacy counter and discovered that the medication her child needs has tripled in price has accumulated.
None of these people required political education to arrive at their conclusion. The market educated them. The filling station educated them. The school fees invoice educated them. The salary alert that does not cover the month educated them.
They are educated now. And they will vote.
VI. The Verdict That 2027 Must Deliver
The 2027 presidential election is not a routine democratic exercise. It is a constitutional audit of whether this republic has a functioning immune system, whether the machinery of popular sovereignty can still override the machinery of political spending, and whether Nigeria’s democracy is a living instrument or a ceremonial one.
Atiku Abubakar’s candidacy is the most coherent available answer to every question that three years of the Tinubu presidency has raised. His economic vision for private sector activation, federalism restructuring, security architecture reform, and exchange rate stabilisation is not aspirational. It is the applied lesson of a vice presidency during which Nigeria demonstrated that it was capable of genuine macroeconomic transformation when led by people who understood what they were doing.
The alternative before Nigeria is another auction. Another purchased term. Another cycle of extraction dressed as governance. Another four years of a debt-service ratio that crowds out hospitals and roads and schools. Another term of a president whose primary obligation is to those who funded his ascent, not to those who will suffer its consequences.
Nigeria has paid that price before. It knows what it costs. It knows how long the recovery takes.
In 2027, the auctioneer must be removed from Aso Rock. The republic must be restored to its owners.
The owners are ready. The bill is due. And the verdict will be delivered at the ballot box.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
April 2026
