Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is an image that has circulated in Nigerian political thought for years, one that refuses to lose its accuracy no matter how many administrations rise and fall. It is the image of a ruling class that behaves like a man who owns the kitchen, controls the pantry, decides who eats and who starves, and still cannot stop reaching for more.
A class that has mastered the art of acquisition without creation, of taking without building, of ruling without serving. A class whose relationship with public office is fundamentally extractive, dressed in the borrowed language of patriotism and reform, performing sacrifice while practicing indulgence.
That image was not drawn for the Tinubu administration specifically. But stand in any Nigerian market today. Speak to any civil servant, any trader, any mother calculating what she can afford to put in the pot tonight, and the testimony is consistent across every geography and every tribe.
A political elite that has grown fatter as the nation has grown leaner. That has accumulated more as ordinary Nigerians have been left managing less with each passing season.
This is the country the APC has built over eleven years. And this is why 2027 is not merely another electoral cycle. It is a reckoning Nigeria cannot afford to waste.
When Reform Becomes a Costume.
What separates the current administration’s record from ordinary incompetence is the pattern legible beneath its decisions. Incompetence is random and directionless. What Nigeria has experienced since May 2023 has carried a more troubling consistency: policy choices that transferred economic pain sharply downward while the comfort and entitlements of those at the top remained largely undisturbed.
The removal of the fuel subsidy was defensible in principle. Economists across ideological persuasions had long5 argued that the subsidy was poorly targeted, fiscally unsustainable, and structured in a way that disproportionately rewarded the wealthy over the poor. The case for reform was sound. What was not sound was the execution, and the absence of any meaningful safety architecture for the millions of Nigerians who would absorb the immediate shock.
A government genuinely committed to its most vulnerable citizens would have rebuilt the nation’s refineries before deregulating pump prices, so that domestic production could moderate the market impact. It would have deployed coordinated monetary and fiscal policy to stabilise the naira rather than allowing it to collapse in ways that multiplied the cost of every imported good.
It would have created visible, verifiable cushioning programmes that reached those most affected before the policy took full effect. None of that happened with the coherence or urgency the moment required.
Transport fares doubled, then tripled. Food prices climbed so steeply that items once considered staples became aspirational purchases. Across Nigeria, families began quietly restructuring their lives around scarcity, withdrawing children from school, deferring medical attention, abandoning plans that once seemed entirely within reach.
The informal sector, which absorbs the majority of Nigerian workers, contracted under cost pressures that left small business owners choosing between restocking their shelves and feeding their households. The market that once hummed with possibility fell into a silence that statistics alone cannot fully capture.
Meanwhile government expanded. Appointments multiplied. Overseas travel continued at a pace that contradicted every austerity message directed at citizens. The gap between what was communicated from the corridors of power and what was felt in the streets of Ado Ekiti, Kano, Onitsha, and Port Harcourt grew into something no press release could honestly close.
Femi Falana SAN, one of Nigeria’s most rigorous advocates for working people, has documented the administration’s neglect of the labour class with legally grounded, evidence-backed consistency. Oby Ezekwesili, whose record in public finance spans the World Bank and the federal cabinet, has argued with characteristic precision that Nigeria’s problem is not a scarcity of resources but a persistent failure of political will to deploy those resources in genuine service of the majority.
These are not partisan voices. They are Nigerians of demonstrated expertise and integrity, giving name to what the data already confirms. The suffering is not a matter of perception or opposition propaganda. It is a documented, measurable policy outcome.
Eleven Years Is a Verdict, Not an Experiment
There are voices that counsel patience with the APC. They argue that structural transformation takes time, that the foundations being laid today will yield harvests in seasons ahead, that Nigerians must trust the process.
But eleven years is not a process still in its early stages. It is a result already fully delivered.
The APC has governed Nigeria at the federal level since 2015. In that span, the country recorded its two deepest economic contractions in a generation. Insecurity, which the party made the centrepiece of its mandate to govern, spread geographically and intensified, moving from the Northeast into the Northwest, into farming communities across the Middle Belt, and into urban spaces that once felt safely removed from the violence of the margins.
The education sector continued its chronic, underfunded decline. Infrastructure gaps that were promised closure widened instead. Youth unemployment reached proportions that drove a generation of talented, educated Nigerians to seek futures on other continents, calculating that their skills were better valued almost anywhere but home.
Now, approaching 2027, the same political architecture prepares to request yet another mandate from the same people it has consistently failed. The faces at the front will be repositioned for electoral optics. The slogans will be freshly minted.
But the network of interests beneath the surface remains structurally intact: the same patronage systems, the same culture of impunity, the same fundamental indifference to the distance between what is announced in Abuja and what is experienced in Gashua, in Ogoja, in Ado Ekiti, in Asaba.
A nation engineered into repeated patience with the same failing class is not being governed. It is being managed into resignation. Nigerians in 2027 must reject that management with everything the ballot permits.
Atiku Abubakar: Elite by Circumstance, Reformer by Choice.
Here a question must be confronted honestly, because it will certainly be raised by those who prefer distraction to debate: is Atiku Abubakar not himself a member of the elite class this article indicts? He is wealthy. He has held the second highest office in the land. He moves in circles that most Nigerians will never enter.
The answer is yes. And it must be stated plainly, because the argument for Atiku does not rest on the false premise that he stands outside Nigeria’s privileged class. It rests on something more substantive and more verifiable: the distinction between elites who consume the system and elites who choose to challenge and reform it.
That distinction is not rhetorical. It is evidenced.
When Atiku Abubakar built the American University of Nigeria in Yola, he did not build it in Lagos or Abuja where the political and economic returns would have been maximised. He built it in Adamawa, one of Nigeria’s most underserved states, using personal resources, as a deliberate investment in human capital for a region the Nigerian state had chronically neglected.
Thousands of graduates have since emerged from that institution. They are working in technology, law, medicine, and business across Nigeria and beyond. They represent the compounding returns of what intentional elite investment in people, rather than in personal accumulation, actually looks like in practice.
When Atiku has consistently championed fiscal federalism and the restructuring of Nigeria’s over-centralised federal architecture, he has advocated for a policy that would directly reduce the concentration of federal power. The very power base from which Nigeria’s extractive elite most profitably feeds.
An elite protecting elite interests does not champion the devolution of federal resources to states and communities. It fights that devolution at every turn. Atiku has championed it across administrations and at genuine political cost, maintaining his position when it was convenient and when it was decidedly not.
As Vice President from 1999 to 2007, he was the principal architect of economic reforms that opened previously closed sectors. The liberalisation of telecommunications alone transformed the daily lives of over a hundred million Nigerians and created an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people directly and indirectly.
The privatisation programme he led was not hundred percent perfect, as all bold structural reforms inevitably are. But its orientation was correct: reduce state monopoly, expand private enterprise, and redirect government energy toward regulation and genuine public service. The sectors liberalised under that framework became the sectors that subsequently drove Nigeria’s economic growth story.
Nigeria has had wealthy leaders before. The question has never been the size of a leader’s personal fortune. The question is what they build with their access, whose lives they invest their influence in, and what structures they are willing to dismantle even when those structures personally benefit them.
On each of those measures, Atiku’s record places him in a different category from the class this article indicts. He is not a perfect man. He is a tested one. And tested, in Nigeria’s present circumstances, is precisely what the moment demands.
The ADC: A Platform Built for This Moment.
Nigeria in 2027 does not need a party that merely promises to replace the faces at the top while preserving the architecture of extraction beneath. It needs a platform structurally positioned to break that architecture and rebuild governance around the citizen rather than around the officeholder.
The African Democratic Congress is that platform. Not because it arrived in Nigerian politics without history, but because under David Mark’s leadership, and Atiku networking it has been deliberately repositioned as the vehicle for a coalition that the country has long needed: progressive Nigerians, reform-oriented technocrats, civil society voices, and a politically awakened youth population that has run out of patience with performative governance.
The ADC’s platform carries concrete programmatic commitments that distinguish it from the familiar cycle of electoral promises that dissolve after inauguration. Genuine fiscal federalism that returns resource control closer to the communities that generate those resources. A private sector-led economic framework designed to create jobs at scale rather than manage poverty statistics with carefully worded press releases.
Investment in education and health positioned as non-negotiable national priorities, funded with the seriousness that a country of 220 million people demands rather than treated as residual budget lines. A security architecture rebuilt around professional, accountable, and adequately resourced institutions that exist to serve citizens rather than to protect political interests.
These commitments are not born in a vacuum. They are rooted in a reform orientation that Atiku demonstrated during his years in government, that he sustained in his institution-building outside of government, and that he has articulated consistently across every electoral cycle in which he has participated.
The ADC under his leadership is not offering Nigerians a leap into the unknown. It is offering a tested reform agenda, housed in a platform free from the internal paralysis that has repeatedly prevented good intentions from becoming good governance in other parties.
That combination, tested leadership and a liberated platform, is precisely what this moment in Nigerian history requires.
The Table Belongs to the People.
The extractive political class that has governed Nigeria across the past decade embodies a pathology older than any single administration. It is the pathology of those who regard public office as personal inheritance, who treat the commonwealth as a private feast, who measure the success of governance by what they have accumulated rather than what they have built.
That pathology does not cure itself. It does not respond to moral appeals or editorial indignation. It responds to one instrument alone: a mobilised, coordinated citizenry that uses the ballot to communicate, clearly and without ambiguity, that the terms of governance have changed permanently.
In 2027, Nigeria has that opportunity. Not through violence or despair, but through the disciplined, collective exercise of a franchise that generations of Nigerians have paid dearly to preserve and defend.
Atiku Abubakar and the ADC are not offering a perfect Nigeria. No honest political movement should make that promise, and no discerning Nigerian should accept it from anyone who does. They are offering a Nigeria governed by people who understand that the office is a service, not a feast.
A Nigeria where public resources are deployed toward the citizens who generate them. A Nigeria where security is a lived reality in every geopolitical zone. A Nigeria where the next generation can build careers, families, and futures at home, without calculating the economics of emigration as a survival strategy.
The extractive elite has occupied the table long enough. It has eaten well, eaten long, and eaten without apology.
In 2027, Nigeria must take back the table, restructure it, and ensure that this time, the meal reaches every household that built it.
Vote Atiku. Vote ADC. Vote Nigeria forward.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
