Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Nine.
Remember that number. In 2023, of the 19 states of northern Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar won nine. No other candidate came close. Tinubu won seven. Obi won two. Kwankwaso won one.
Atiku won those nine against sitting APC governors who used every lever of incumbency to stop him. He won Kaduna under an APC governor. He won Katsina, Buhari’s own home, under an APC governor. He won Kebbi, Yobe and Gombe, all under APC governors. He swept five of the six states of the North East.
That was Atiku with the federal machine against him and Buhari’s goodwill pulling the other way. That was the floor of his northern support, not the ceiling.
On 16 January 2027 the North will not be discovering Atiku. It will be confirming him.
The North does not need to be introduced to Atiku. It has already voted for him, state after state, against everything power could throw at it.
THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION
Every presidential campaign spends its first months telling voters who the candidate is. Atiku’s campaign is spared that labour. From Sokoto to Maiduguri, from Kaduna to Yola, the northern voter already knows him.
He knows the young Customs officer who served the nation for 20 years and retired as Deputy Director, the second highest rank in the service, with a reputation for integrity at the busiest ports in the country.
He knows the businessman who started from nothing, lost his father as a boy, fended for himself and built his first house with his own hands in his twenties.
He knows the man who founded the American University of Nigeria in Yola with his own money, the first American style university in sub-Saharan Africa, which refused to close its gates through the worst years of the insurgency and fed displaced people in their hundreds of thousands while others fled.
That is not a campaign biography. That is a life the North has watched for half a century.
THE RECORD THAT SPEAKS FOR HIM
When Atiku was Vice President, the law placed the engine of national economic policy in his hands. Under the 1999 Constitution he chaired the National Economic Council, where the Federation and the states sit together to plan the economy. Under the Public Enterprises Act he chaired the National Council on Privatisation, which reformed or divested over 100 public enterprises.
Look at what that government delivered. Nigeria’s economy grew from $58 billion in 1999 to $270 billion in 2007. Foreign reserves rose from $3.7 billion to about $45 billion. The Paris Club wrote off $18 billion of our debt in 2005 and Nigeria walked out of that creditors’ club in 2006.
In 1999 the whole country had fewer than 500,000 telephone lines. GSM licences were auctioned in 2001 at $285 million each, and within a few years the ordinary trader in Kano Market had a phone in his pocket. Banking consolidation took Nigeria from 89 weak banks to 25 strong ones. The Pension Reform Act of 2004 gave workers a future. By 2007 inflation stood at 5.4 per cent.
Nasir El-Rufai, who served in that government, said publicly in February 2025, with Atiku present, that nobody gives Atiku credit for the economic policymaking of those years, and that much of what was done was done under his leadership.
The North remembers those years. It remembers when a salary could feed a family and a farmer could travel to market without an armed escort.
Other candidates promise what they will learn in office. Atiku shows you what he has already done there.
A NORTHERNER WHOM ALL NIGERIA CAN TRUST
Atiku is the only presidential candidate from the North in this election. Tinubu, Obi and Makinde all come from the South. But his strength in the North has never come from region alone. It comes from a creed.
For decades, long before it was fashionable, Atiku has preached restructuring: a federation where the states are empowered to compete, grow and reach their full potential, and a lean centre that stops strangling the federating units. He believes the farmer in Kebbi and the trader in Aba suffer from the same disease, an over-mighty centre that takes too much and delivers too little.
He has also shown the rarest quality in Nigerian politics. Three times he stood aside for the stronger position, before any contest had been decided: in Jos in 1993, in 1999, and in 2003, when he was pressed to run for President in his own right and chose instead to campaign as deputy on the ticket. Not once in thirty three years has he asked a stronger man to yield to him.
That is why the North trusts him, and why the rest of Nigeria can.
THE ARMY HE HAS ASSEMBLED
A man is known by the company that marches with him. Look at who now stands with Atiku, and look at where they come from.
At the head of his Presidential Campaign Council sits Alhaji Kashim Ibrahim-Imam, its Chairman, a veteran political organiser who has spent decades building structures across this country and knows its wards the way a farmer knows his land. Beside him as Deputy Chairman is Nasir El-Rufai, the same man who marshalled Kaduna for the other side in 2023. He has crossed the line and brought his maps with him.
Running the campaign from day to day is Senator Austin Akobundu, Director General and Campaign Manager. He is the serving senator for Abia Central, a retired Colonel of the Nigerian Army and a former Minister of State for Defence. A soldier’s discipline sits at the command desk, and a son of the South East sits at the heart of the northern candidate’s machine. That single appointment is Atiku’s idea of Nigeria.
Aminu Waziri Tambuwal stands with him again. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, two term Governor of Sokoto and serving senator, he directed Atiku’s campaign in 2023 and knows every road in the North West that leads to a polling unit.
Senator Ehigie Uzamere, former senator from Edo, Special Adviser to Atiku in his last campaign and Patron of The Narrative Force, brings decades of South South political experience and a loyalty to Atiku that has never wavered. Beside him in that zone stands Rotimi Amaechi, the running mate, who completed and put into service about 700 kilometres of standard gauge rail as minister. Another son of Edo, former Governor John Odigie-Oyegun, chairs the Campaign Advisory Council.
David Mark, former Senate President and soldier, chairs the party. Rauf Aregbesola is its National Secretary. In Kebbi, former Attorney General Abubakar Malami carries the ADC governorship flag.
From Sokoto to Abia, from Kaduna to Edo, this is not a lonely candidate. This is Nigeria, organised behind one man.
THE NORTHERN MAP IS ATIKU’S MAP
The North holds 56,014,673 registered voters, 54.16 per cent of the national register of 103,428,715. The 19 northern states alone have added about 5.69 million new voters since 2023. Whoever owns the North owns the presidency, and the map already bears Atiku’s footprints.
In the North East, his home ground, he won Adamawa by 417,611 to 182,881. He took Bauchi, the zone’s biggest state with 3,012,547 voters, by 426,607 to 316,694. He won Gombe by more than double, 319,123 to 146,977.
In the North West, the largest bloc in the country with 25,083,411 voters, he won Kaduna with 554,360 votes, and Kaduna now has 4,662,640 voters and El-Rufai on his side. He won Katsina by 6,762 votes in Buhari’s own backyard. He won Kebbi by 285,175 to 248,088, and Kebbi now has Malami on the ADC ballot.
He won Sokoto by 3,235 votes. Since then Sokoto’s register has grown by 21.23 per cent, the fastest in the country, swelled by young voters who came of age in these hard years. And Tambuwal’s machine, which governed that state for eight years, is back on the field for Atiku. That narrow edge of 2023 is ready to become a flood.
In Kano, 6,570,276 voters, the old certainties are broken. The governor has crossed to the APC with his lawmakers, but a governor can ferry lawmakers across a river in one canoe. He cannot carry the market. Atiku’s roots in Kano run older and deeper than any defection season.
In the North Central, Niger gave him 284,898 votes in 2023 and is a door left ajar. Plateau, Nasarawa and Benue rejected or barely tolerated the APC. Every one of these states is ground Atiku can take.
THE ARITHMETIC OF VICTORY
In 2023 Tinubu drew 5,507,784 votes, 62.6 per cent of his national total, from the very northern states where Atiku won the most contests. His whole national margin was 1,810,206. If just 20 per cent of that northern vote moves, 1.1 million votes are gone, more than 60 per cent of his entire margin, before Atiku gains one extra vote in the South.
And the North is moving. The goodwill Tinubu borrowed from Buhari has been called in. The coat has been returned to its owner. What stands in its place is the man the North chose in nine states while that coat still hung on his rival’s shoulders.
Atiku polled above 5.2 million northern votes in 2023 against all of that. With a larger register, a stronger coalition and the only northern ticket in the field, The Narrative Force projects that Atiku cannot poll less than 9 million from the North on 16 January 2027.
Add the South South that Amaechi, Uzamere and Oyegun are organising, add the South East reach of a campaign run by a son of Abia, add the South that is splitting three ways among Tinubu, Obi and Makinde, and the road to Aso Rock runs straight through Atiku’s front door.
The North gave Tinubu a presidency on credit. It is giving Atiku a mandate on trust.
NINETY DAYS
Today there are 90 days to 16 January 2027.
Atiku has done his part. His record is written. His plans are published and placed before the people to examine and own. His coalition is assembled, from Ibrahim-Imam at the council table to Akobundu at the command desk. His map is drawn.
The rest belongs to you. Collect your PVC. Know your polling unit. Go early. Stay until the count is announced and the result sheet is pasted on the wall. Bring your neighbour, your brother, your wife, your son who just turned 18.
The North has chosen before. On 16 January, it chooses again, and this time it chooses to win.
Atiku Abubakar. The man the North already knows. The President Nigeria needs.
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Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
19 October 2026
