Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Pictured with me recently: Alhaji Kashim Ibrahim-Imam, chairman of Alpha Beta Consulting and, for 36 years, one of President Tinubu’s closest allies and business partners, who parted ways with the President and now stands with Atiku Abubakar under the ADC.
A few days ago, over a quiet table, a friend leaned in and told me, with the serene confidence of a man reciting a verse he had memorised, that Shettima would deliver the North for Tinubu in 2027.
I laughed. Not to mock him, but the way a man laughs when he has walked the very ground the other has only read about. I have slept in Northern towns. I have sat in their markets and listened to traders curse the price of a single bag of rice. I have watched mothers ration less food among more children, and young men surrender another year to certificates that now buy nothing.
So I told him plainly. You can believe that only because you have not felt how savagely the North has been battered by the reckless improvisations of this government, and by the squandermania of the men who orbit the President. The North is not merely struggling. Walk its villages and see for yourself. In too many places, the North is quietly dying.
The North does not eat a ticket. It eats bread. And under this government, there is no bread.
A TICKET IS NOT A MANIFESTO
He grew warm and reached for the oldest line in the book. The North, he insisted, will vote a Muslim-Muslim ticket, and that alone settles the matter.
I gave him the truth every honest Northerner already carries in his chest. The North will vote its hunger for good governance and the competence of a candidate who can drag it out of the poverty now devouring its households. Faith fills the mosque on Friday. It has never once filled the pot on Monday.
The Northern voter is not the simpleton your propaganda imagines him to be. He knows, down to the last naira, the difference between a government that lifts him and one that grinds him into the dust. A shared religion at the top has never put fertiliser in his field, fuel in his tank, medicine in his clinic, or a single soldier on the road the bandits have seized. Piety at Aso Rock does not disarm a kidnapper on the highway.
Ask the farmer in Katsina who can no longer reach his own farm. Ask the trader in Maiduguri watching his profit shrink by the week. Ask the graduate in Sokoto whose degree gathers dust while he hawks sachets to survive. Then tell them their salvation lies in a matching pair of prayer mats at the head of the ticket. They will laugh at you the way I laughed at my friend.
THE ARITHMETIC THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO SEE
When he kept pushing, I did the one thing propagandists dread. I laid the numbers on the table.
Look at what has become of the APC vote. Under Buhari the party polled 15,424,921 in 2015 and 15,191,847 in 2019. In 2023, with Tinubu carrying the flag, it collapsed to 8,794,726. That is a haemorrhage of roughly 6.4 million votes in a single cycle, the feeblest mandate handed to any elected President since 1999. A party does not bleed like that while it is winning hearts. It bleeds like that while it is losing them by the million.
Now weigh the North on its own scale. In 2023 Atiku Abubakar won 9 Northern states. Five in the North East, being Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Taraba and Yobe. Four in the North West, being Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi and Sokoto. That is not the yield of a man the North had rejected. That is the yield of a man the North had already chosen, and that was before hunger sharpened its verdict.
Then study the paradox of the North West that the APC prays you never examine. Of that zone’s 7 states, Atiku won 4, Kwankwaso took only Kano, and Tinubu managed a bare 2, Jigawa and Zamfara. Yet the aggregate was announced in Tinubu’s favour. A man wins the clear majority of the states and is still declared beaten on the count. To the North that inversion has only one name, suppression, the quiet padding of figures where its votes were strongest, and it is a charge the zone has filed away and will not forget.
Win the states, lose the count. That sum balances only in the ledgers of the desperate.
It was the North Central, not the far North, that surprised many by embracing Tinubu in 2023, where he took 4 states while Obi took 2 and the Federal Capital Territory. I walked my friend through it, state by state, showing him why that belt will not renew the experiment in 2027, and why the wider North has already begun its turn. He had no reply. He simply sat there, helpless.
And here is the figure that dismantles the entire myth of a captured North. On the certified totals the two men finished all but shoulder to shoulder across the North, Tinubu on 5,587,757 and Atiku on 5,233,473, parted by a whisker. That was the margin before three brutal years of hunger, insecurity and collapsing purchasing power went to work on Northern loyalty. As the only Northerner actually seeking the presidency itself on the 16 January 2027 ballot, with Tinubu of the South West and Obi of the South East as his real rivals, Atiku enters this race with a Northern floor that has nowhere left to travel but upward. On the present temperature of Northern anger, a projection of 9 million Northern votes for him is not a boast. It is a baseline.
WHEN THE PULPIT BECOMES A PODIUM
Cornered by the figures, my friend abandoned arithmetic for the sermon. He directed me to a Sheikh thundering his endorsement of the Muslim-Muslim ticket and waving away everyone outside it.
That cleric is Sheikh Sani Yahaya Jingir, a prominent Izala scholar. At a Kano mass wedding on 8 August 2026 he lauded Tinubu’s ticket, recast the 2023 election as a triumph of Muslims over Christians, and openly conceded that those he branded “infidels” were embittered by his words. Pressed afterwards on BBC Hausa, he offered neither apology nor regret.
Here lies the whole tragedy of the Muslim-Muslim project. It does not feed the North. It fractures the nation, and then, with cruel irony, it turns its fire on the North itself.
Consider what my colleague in The Narrative Force media warriors, Gajo Elleman, surfaced this afternoon on the platform, drawn from a Facebook post by Hon. Aliyu Bello. A video is circulating that allegedly shows youths in Bodinga, Sokoto State, assaulting the imam of a Juma’at mosque. I placed a call to Aliyu Bello to confirm the details, but it would not connect, and I must note that several commenters, some claiming local knowledge, dispute the video’s authenticity, its date and even its location. I therefore report it strictly as an unverified allegation. The reported trigger was a dispute over displaying a political candidate’s poster inside the newly renovated mosque. Tellingly, that mosque is said to belong to the Izala organisation, the very body Sheikh Jingir leads.
Let me be clear, and let me be careful. If the allegation proves true, it is troubling on both counts at once. A mosque is a house of worship, not a campaign secretariat, and no cleric should ever convert the minbar into a party podium. Yet no youth on this earth has the right to raise a hand against a scholar. Gaskiya, wannan abin bai dace ba. I do not support the beating or the insulting of any malam, even as I insist, without flinching, that clerics who descend into partisanship must also correct themselves.
Sokoto, of all our states, knows too painfully where inflamed religious rhetoric can lead. A mature and responsible North rejects both poisons at once, the sectarian sermon and the vengeful mob. Anyone who imagines Tinubu’s re-election can be built on a Muslim-Muslim slogan, or on the fantasy that faith can be made to cancel reason, is deceiving only himself. Northerners know the taste of good governance from bad, and no ticket, however it is arranged at the top, will ever switch off their power to think for themselves.
THE RIGGING BLUFF
When the arithmetic collapsed and the sermon collapsed, my friend did what the cornered always do. He blurted it out. They will rig. Tinubu will rig.
And I asked him one quiet question. Where?
Let the record show exactly what I said, and let no mischief-maker twist it. The North will not be rigged in silence. Not because anyone hungers for confrontation, but because a people this awake, this aggrieved and this resolved will guard every ballot, watch every polling unit, and pursue every stolen vote through every lawful and democratic channel open to them. Osun in 2026 already delivered the lesson in full. Federal might, the entire weight of incumbency, even a frozen state treasury, none of it could overturn the settled will of ordinary people at the poll. What the masses decide, the masses will defend, at the ballot box and in the courtroom, not by violence but by a vigilance that cannot be bought, blocked or bribed.
You cannot rig a river. You can only pretend the flood is not coming.
He sat there, damp with sweat and emptied of words. And I confess I wondered, not unkindly, what juicy appointment he had been promised to keep reciting a script that even he has plainly stopped believing.
THE INSIDER WHO CROSSED THE FLOOR
I closed our contest with a memory still fresh from my recent visit to Abuja, where we sat with Alhaji Kashim Ibrahim-Imam, chairman of Alpha Beta Consulting and, for 36 years, one of President Tinubu’s closest allies and business partners.
Understand precisely who this man is before you weigh his words. Alpha Beta is the firm long tied to Lagos revenue and, by wide account, to the President himself. If any living man knew the engine from the inside, bolt by bolt, it was Kashim Imam.
In February 2026 he rose and walked away. He said he could no longer stomach the injustice, that his fear of God had at last outgrown his fear of power, and he declared for Atiku Abubakar under the ADC. He said it with the flat certainty of a man who has counted Nigerian votes for four decades. “Governors do not vote. The poor hold the vote.”
And let no propagandist wave this away as the pique of one disappointed man. Defiance of overbearing power is the Imam inheritance. His father, the late Ibrahim Imam, was the very engine of the progressive Borno Youth Movement, the Northerner who broke from the establishment of the Northern Peoples Congress and, by the late 1950s, threw his movement behind Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group, confronting the conservative order of the North East and rising into one of the most formidable voices of opposition in the Northern House of Assembly. The son who stands today against Tinubu is doing precisely what the father did before him, refusing to bow to the powerful merely because they are powerful. Courage of that order is not bought. It is bred.
When we sat with him, he was calm, sure footed, entirely unhurried. He told us how firmly the North has now set itself for Atiku, calling him the region’s new Buhari and its rallying leader. When a verdict of that weight falls from the lips of Tinubu’s own former confidant, and a man of that bloodline, it does not whisper. It thunders across the whole North.
THE LAST CONSOLATION
As we rose to part, my friend reached for one final comfort. He fell back on the governors, reminding me how many now fly the APC flag, as though a governor were a sack of votes to be carried up to the President on demand.
I gave him the one answer that ends that argument. Recall 2023. In five states where sitting APC governors bent the full machinery of incumbency to Tinubu’s cause, being Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Yobe and Gombe, the people still handed those states to Atiku. And Tinubu, for all his governors, lost Lagos itself, the very fortress his camp has held since 1999, to Peter Obi. Governors do not own the votes. They never did. The masses do. It was exactly as Kashim Imam had told us. The poor hold the vote.
Then I reminded him of the one force no governor can bribe or command. Hunger. The hunger now gnawing at every Nigerian household has turned every old calculation on its head and set all the odds against the man in power. A governor may deliver a handshake and a rally. He cannot deliver a stomach that has already made up its mind.
My friend is a fine conversationalist, one of the best I know, yet the facts I reeled out left him rattled and quiet. When we parted he greeted me grudgingly, and I felt the weight behind it. He had invested so much of himself in the expectation of a Tinubu re-election that plain arithmetic now landed on him like a personal loss.
HISTORY IS WATCHING
So let the propagandists chant their two tired incantations, ticket and rigging. Both are bluffs. And on 16 January 2027, the North will call them both together.
The North is not ignorant. The North is not for sale. And the North, let me say it slowly so that even the wilfully deaf may read my lips, is most certainly not for rent.
It is dying under this government. And a dying people do not queue in the sun to vote for the very hand that is starving them. They vote for respite. They vote for competence. They vote for the one candidate who is truly their own. On that January morning, the North will not be voting a religion or a rumour. It will be voting its own survival.
Informed. Inspired. Involved.
NorthForAtiku #Atiku2027 #ADC #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
25 August 2026
