Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Africa has always known what it needs. The tragedy is that Africa has too often been denied it.
From the towering intellectual architecture of Kwame Nkrumah to the pan-continental fire of Gamal Abdel Nasser, from the cultural sovereignty of Léopold Sédar Senghor to the raw self-determination of Thomas Sankara, the continent has repeatedly produced the visionary template. The question that has stalked every election and every constitutional moment since independence is brutally simple: will Africa’s nations have the courage to choose the leader that the moment demands?
Nigeria faces that question now. And the answer, stripped of sentiment and propaganda, is Atiku Abubakar.
THE COST OF GETTING IT WRONG
There is a particular kind of national suffering that comes not from war, not from famine, but from the slow grinding violence of incompetent governance. Nigeria is living through that suffering today.
The naira exchanged at roughly 460 to the dollar when the current administration assumed office in May 2023. It has since collapsed beyond 1,500 to the dollar, a devaluation of over 200 per cent in less than three years. The National Bureau of Statistics confirmed that over 133 million Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty. Debt servicing consumed 96 kobo of every naira of government revenue in 2023 according to the Debt Management Office’s own published figures. Food inflation exceeded 40 per cent.
These are not opposition talking points. They are the Federal Government’s own statistical record.
Nigeria did not arrive here by accident. It arrived here because it elected a government with no coherent economic doctrine, no demonstrated record of national stewardship, and no mandate beyond the raw arithmetic of a flawed electoral process that multiple tribunals interrogated at length. The question for 2027 is whether Nigeria will compound the error or correct it.
THE RECORD THAT CANNOT BE ERASED
Every serious analysis of Nigeria’s Vice Presidential years between 1999 and 2007 arrives at the same conclusion. The numbers do not lie.
Nigeria’s GDP grew from approximately 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars during that period. The growth rate peaked at 15.3 per cent, placing Nigeria among the fastest growing economies on the planet. The telecommunications sector, privatised and deregulated under the direct supervision of the Atiku-chaired National Council on Privatisation, grew from fewer than 500,000 fixed lines to over 40 million active GSM subscribers by 2007. Every Nigerian who sends mobile money, accesses a bank account through a handset, or registers a business online is living inside a legacy that Atiku Abubakar helped construct.
Those who prosecute privatisation as scandal are invited to name the alternative. State-owned enterprises that bled public funds for decades without producing electricity, communication, or transport. The honest comparison is not between privatisation and perfection. It is between privatisation and the documented record of state ownership, which was uniform institutional decay.
On the corruption allegations deployed reflexively against him, the record is equally clear. Atiku Abubakar has been investigated by every agency available to those in power, across multiple administrations, across two decades. Not a single criminal conviction has been secured. Not one. In a country where the apparatus of state prosecution has been weaponised with considerable enthusiasm against political opponents, the absence of a conviction after twenty years of sustained pursuit is not luck. It is innocence sustained under pressure.
INSTITUTION BUILDER, NOT MERELY POLITICIAN
Atiku Abubakar established the American University of Nigeria in Yola, a functioning institution that has produced graduates competing globally, located in a region that insurgency and governmental neglect had consigned to educational poverty. That university is not a political announcement. It admits and graduates students every year. It stands as a monument to what private commitment to public good looks like when it is serious rather than ceremonial.
He has built businesses from nothing, employing thousands across multiple sectors over four decades. He understands that a nation’s economy is its nervous system and that when the economy fails, everything fails. He has lived that understanding through practical enterprise, not theoretical exposition.
THE PLAN FOR WHAT COMES NEXT
Nostalgia wins no elections and governs no nations. Atiku Abubakar’s 2027 economic framework is therefore not a request to revisit 2003. It is a structured programme for a different era. A managed return to exchange rate stability anchored on production rather than rent. A security architecture that addresses insurgency, banditry, and farmer-herder conflict through simultaneous military, economic, and educational investment rather than military deployment alone. A restructured federation that returns resource control to the federating units, unlocking the productive energy that over-centralisation has suppressed for five decades. And a deliberate national artificial intelligence and technology policy that converts Nigeria’s 220 million population, the majority of them under thirty, from a demographic pressure point into a globally competitive digital workforce. These are not slogans. They are published, costed, and available for scrutiny. The question is not whether the plan exists. The question is whether Nigeria will elect the man with the capacity and the record to execute it.
THE COALITION THAT HISTORY IS BUILDING
When Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rotimi Amaechi stand on the same platform under the same banner, Nigeria is watching history rehearse itself. Three of the most formidable political figures of their generation, drawn from the North, the South-East, and the South-South, united not by the desperation of defeat but by the shared conviction that Nigeria deserves better than what it is currently enduring.
This coalition represents over 14.5 million votes cast across the opposition in 2023, votes that were fragmented by structure but united in purpose. In 2027, that vote will not be fragmented. The platform has been chosen. The standard bearer has been identified. The coalition is assembling with the discipline of people who understand that they will not get a third opportunity.
THE CHOICE
Africa asks where its visionary leaders are. The question deserves a direct answer.
They exist. They have always existed. The problem has never been the absence of vision. The problem has been the consistent preference, engineered by those with access to power and propaganda, for the manageable over the formidable, for the compliant over the competent, for the familiar over the transformative.
In 2027, Nigeria has the opportunity to make a different choice. The GDP record is there. The institution-building record is there. The coalition is there. The policy framework is there. The twenty-year forensic pursuit that produced no conviction is there.
Everything required to make the right decision is in plain sight.
Choose well.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
15 April 2026
