Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a peculiar species of foot soldier manufactured in the workshop of Nigerian politics. Call him the Obidient. He arrives armed not with argument but with decibels, not with reason but with rage, not with substance but with slogans. He invades every digital marketplace, every comment section, every public square, hurling pedestrian insults at Atiku Abubakar as though volume were a substitute for validity, as though shouting could somehow simulate thought.
Yet the spectacle turns truly theatrical when this same mob proceeds to canonise Peter Obi. Canonise him. As though his own recorded words and his own documented manoeuvres do not betray, with damning clarity, a man whose conduct is treacherous, duplicitous, disingenuous, perfidious, and opportunistic to the bone.
What we are witnessing is not principled advocacy. It is a carnival of contradictions. A choreography of cant. A festival of moral posturing in which sanctimony is the costume, hypocrisy the script, and self-interest the only authentic emotion on the stage.
A movement that claims the moral high ground cannot, in the very same breath, excuse double-faced rhetoric, selective amnesia, and backtracking on every inconvenient principle the moment convenience whispers a different tune.
This is not the politics of substance. It is the politics of convenient outrage. Loud. Combustible. And hollow at its core.
History, as ever, is merciless to such fragile constructs. It strips away the varnish of populist fervour and exposes, with surgical precision, the unprincipled foundations upon which such noisy crusades are erected.
Now read, with forensic attention, the words that flowed from the pen of this very deceitful, double-faced, hypocritical, treacherous, duplicitous, disingenuous, perfidious, opportunistic, unprincipled, insincere, manipulative, self-serving, calculating, evasive, inconsistent, unreliable, backtracking, and contradictory Peter Obi to Atiku Abubakar:
“I most sincerely apologise.”
“It is with sincere pain, and difficulty that I write this note to you.”
“I am constrained by shortness of time available to me and the prevailing circumstances.”
“Mr President, you remain my Leader and dear elder brother, and I will always remain respectful, loyal, and available to you.”
“My humility became weakness and my team and I were being called names and blamed for every wrong.”
“very toxic Environment within the ADC have become too much for me to bear.”
“This present situation will not be the ending of the Coalition, but the beginning of a new Phase as I strongly believe that the Coalition will inevitably continue stronger, after the Party Primaries.”
Now consider the character of the man who composed those lines. Weigh his hypocrisy. Then tell me what name fits him.
How sincere is a man who addresses as “Mr President” the very figure he is determined shall never become President?
Atiku Abubakar offered Peter Obi the Vice Presidency, and he did so as a matter of deep conviction, persuaded that it was the surest, the most strategic, and the most honourable pathway by which the South East could finally reach the Presidency of the Federal Republic. For Atiku has long held, and continues to hold, that a South East Vice Presidency is itself a clear runway to the Presidency for the zone, a settled stepping stone in the architecture of national succession. That was the elevation Atiku designed for Obi. That was the door he opened for the South East. That was the staircase he constructed for an entire region.
What did Obi design for Atiku in return? Elimination.
Atiku’s intent was to lift Obi to the second-highest office in the land, with the Presidency of Nigeria in clear view thereafter, not for Obi alone, but for the South East as a zone whose hour had come. Obi’s intent is to ensure that Atiku himself never reaches the office at all. Yet the same Obi pens letters dripping with the syrup of “Mr President” and “dear elder brother.”
Is this love? Is this loyalty? Is this respect? Or is it the polished prose of a calculating actor performing affection whilst sharpening a dagger behind his back?
He swears that Atiku shall remain his “Leader and dear elder brother.” He pledges to be “respectful, loyal, and available.” Yet his Obidients are deployed daily as a noisy artillery, shading Atiku, slandering Atiku, smearing Atiku, calling him every unprintable name their fevered imagination can manufacture.
What species of loyalty marches with such a mob at its heels?
He then invokes humility. “My humility became weakness,” he writes, “and my team and I were being called names and blamed for every wrong.” Read that line again. Slowly. Then ask: who started this war of words?
It was not Atiku. It was not the Atikulates. It was not The Narrative Force. The aggression flowed, and continues to flow, from Obi’s foot soldiers, who treat the daily insulting of Atiku as a vocation, a duty, a sport. Atiku’s defenders, and notably The Narrative Force, have answered with the maturity of statesmen and the lethality of fact. Robust in temper. Devastating in substance.
That is what Obi calls being “called names.” That is the alleged grievance from which his coalition flight pretends to flee. He lit the fire, then complained about the smoke. He launched the missiles, then wept about the recoil.
Then comes the next line in the catalogue of his evasions. He cites a “very toxic Environment within the ADC have become too much for me to bear.” The man who manufactured the toxicity now flees the toxicity. The arsonist points at the flames and pleads asylum from the heat.
This, then, is Peter Obi. A genius in deception. A virtuoso of treachery. A man whose followers proselytise lies with the zeal of converts, feeding the gullible a daily ration of falsehood and rebranding it as moral clarity.
And lest anyone imagine the charge is rhetorical, consider the arithmetic of their absurdities.
You must have heard them, the same chorus, the same megaphones, declaring that within seventy-two hours of Obi’s arrival in the NDC, the party has registered “11 millions membership.” Eleven million souls. In seventy-two hours. A figure that exceeds the total votes the declared winner of the 2023 Presidential election mustered to claim Aso Rock, a figure larger than the registered voter rolls of entire Nigerian geo-political zones, allegedly recruited as card-carrying members of a single party in three days, conjured from thin air and recited with a straight face.
Yet this is the same Peter Obi and the same Obidient enterprise that, throughout their entire residency within the ADC, could not, between them, register six hundred thousand verified members. Not six million. Not even close. Six hundred thousand. A figure that ought to be the bare minimum for a movement claiming custody of a nation’s conscience, yet a ceiling they could not breach in months of opportunity. The man whose machine allegedly recruits eleven million in three days could not assemble even a respectable provincial gathering whilst he pretended to belong to the coalition.
You must have heard them too, with their other magic number, the boast that they shall “deliver 20 millions votes to Obi in 2027.” Twenty million votes. Pulled, like the rabbit, from a hat that has neither structure, nor secretariat, nor presence in half the polling units of this Federation.
These are not exaggerations. These are not the harmless excesses of campaign enthusiasm. These are industrial-grade fabrications. Lies are not an accident of their conduct. Lies are their operational strategy. Falsehood is their doctrine. Mythology is their manifesto.
And let the record breathe, for memory is the enemy of the propagandist.
These very Obidients, who today swagger as though they command the Federation, were the same movement that, in the 2023 general election, had no party agents in fully half the polling booths across the Federal Republic. Half. Whilst they trumpeted a tsunami, they could not even cover a tide pool.
And when their principal stood in court to prosecute his 2023 presidential election petition, on what spine did his case lean? On whose evidentiary architecture did his lawyers depend? On the Atiku Abubakar Presidential Election Situation Room. The same Situation Room they now mock. The same Atiku they now insult. The same campaign they now belittle furnished them, in their hour of legal nakedness, with the facts, figures, and forensic evidence without which their petition would have collapsed into rubble before the bench.
They borrowed our intelligence in court and now rent abuses against us in the marketplace. They drank from our well and now urinate into it. This is the moral economy of the Obidient project. Liars. Deceivers. Peddlers of falsehoods who cannot be trusted with the truth of yesterday, let alone the future of a nation.
Now, beyond all doubt, you know the kind of man Peter Obi is.
And whilst we are settling accounts, let us settle the most enduring myth of all. The myth that the 2023 Obi vote was the harvest of Obidient noise. The myth that hashtags built that tally. The myth that digital aggression hauled those ballots to the polling box.
The historical record returns a very different verdict.
The bulk of Peter Obi’s 2023 vote flowed from three identifiable reservoirs, and none of them were the handiwork of the noisy Obidiots.
The first reservoir was ethnicity. The South East and the South South delivered for Obi as a son of the soil, not as the candidate of any digital crusade. Igbo solidarity, long denied at the Presidential threshold, found in him a vessel of communal aspiration. That vote was sociological in nature. It was not manufactured in any Twitter Space. And in the very same logic, just as the South East mobilised for one of its own in 2023, so too will the North East, a zone that has equally awaited its turn at the Presidency, tilt with deliberate force towards Atiku Abubakar in 2027. What ethnicity gave Obi yesterday, regional justice now owes Atiku tomorrow.
The second reservoir was religion. The North Central States, alongside significant Southern States and Lagos State foremost amongst them, particularly amongst Christian populations alarmed by the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the APC, gravitated towards Obi as the available alternative. That was a vote of faith and fear. It was not a vote of Obidient persuasion. It would have moved towards almost any credible Christian candidate on offer in those circumstances.
The third reservoir was the disenchantment of the urban youth, concentrated in Lagos and Abuja, where a cosmopolitan generation, exhausted by the failures of the existing political class, lent him the rebellion of their ballots. That was a protest vote against the status quo, not a coronation of the Obidient vanguard.
Combine the three and you account for the overwhelming majority of his tally. Subtract them and the mythical Obidient tsunami evaporates into the digital mist from which it was always conjured.
In other words, Peter Obi rode three currents he did not himself create: an ethnic current, a religious current, and a generational protest current. The noisy Obidiots were the loudspeakers of a movement they did not power. They mistook the volume of their own voices for the velocity of his vote.
But 2027 will be different. Profoundly different. Decisively different.
The ethnic arithmetic has shifted. The South East and the South South are reading the political map with sharper eyes, weighing the sober question of which platform actually carries the capacity to dislodge Tinubu, and recognising that ethnic sentiment alone, untethered from a national coalition, has neither delivered the Presidency in 2023 nor will it deliver it in 2027.
The religious calculus has matured. Christian voters in the Middle Belt and beyond have observed three years of this administration’s record and drawn their own conclusions about who can, and who cannot, deliver national redemption.
And the urban youth, having watched the post-2023 trajectory of the Obidient project, with its serial defections, its broken promises, and its inability to convert noise into infrastructure, are no longer content to serve as the cheap fuel of any vanity campaign.
2027 will not be carried by ethnicity alone. It will not be carried by religion alone. It will not be carried by urban protest alone. It will be carried by a coalition of competence, capacity, and credibility, anchored by a candidate, Atiku Abubakar, whose national reach traverses every geo-political zone, whose record speaks beyond any single demographic constituency, and whose machine is built to deliver, not merely to trend.
The Obidient noise can shout. It cannot govern. It can hashtag. It cannot harvest. It can mock. It cannot mobilise.
Let it be understood, plainly and without ambiguity. 2027 is not 2023. The days of unanswered insult are over. The era of one-sided abuse has expired. Whoever raises a tongue against Atiku Abubakar shall meet the full thunder of our cylinders, fired without restraint, returned without apology, and delivered without mercy.
And to every warrior of The Narrative Force, to every Atikulate across this Federation, hold your line. Sharpen your pen. Stand your ground. This scenario was long envisaged. Only a poor strategist fails to anticipate the recalcitrance of men like Obi and Kwankwaso, who would rather torch a coalition than serve under any flag they do not personally carry.
Atiku Abubakar remains formidable. He presses on. We press on with him. Like the Apostle Paul, “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling.”
Nothing. No defection. No slander. No carnival of Obidient noise can circumvent the inexorable march of Atiku Abubakar to the Presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B,
Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
4 May 2027
