A Rebuttal to Chibuisi Mba, Lead Director, CEED Foundation, Deputy National Treasurer, NNPP, and Convener, OK-New Nigeria
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Mr Chibuisi Mba, Lead Director of the CEED Foundation, Deputy National Treasurer of the New Nigeria People’s Party and Convener of the OK-New Nigeria Movement, opened his letter to His Excellency, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar with a declaration of disinterested innocence: “I write not as a politician.” He then proceeded, across several hundred words of carefully targeted political persuasion, to do precisely and exclusively what politicians do.
The CEED Foundation describes itself in its own published words as a faith-based non-governmental, non-political organisation. The man who leads this declared non-political organisation has written a political pressure letter, signed it with the titles of two overtly political bodies and opened it by assuring us he carries no partisan interest. A man who begins by telling you he is not a politician, while signing simultaneously as a party treasurer and a political convener, has surrendered the moral authority on which his entire letter depends before his first metaphor arrives.
On the Blessings of Allah: When Scripture Is Read Selectively
Mr Mba catalogues the blessings of Allah upon Atiku, then argues that because God gave more than was asked, the asking must now cease. This theological conclusion does not follow from its scriptural premise.
Consider Abraham. In Genesis chapter twelve, Allah called Abraham at the age of seventy-five and commissioned him to leave everything familiar for a promise not yet visible. Allah did not say: I have already blessed you. Count your favours and sit down. Allah said: arise and go. The blessings were not the terminus. They were the foundation for further obedience.
Consider Moses. Exodus records that Moses was eighty years old when Allah appeared to him at the burning bush and commissioned him to confront Pharaoh and lead Israel to freedom. By Mr Mba’s theological arithmetic, Moses had already received enough. But the text does not say that. The text says Allah said: I have seen the affliction of my people. Go. I am sending you.
The blessings of Allah upon a man are not a ceiling. They are a launching pad. Among the blessings Mr Mba should have counted on Atiku’s behalf is the democratic mandate of 6,984,520 Nigerians who voted for him in 2023. That is not a blessing to be surrendered at the request of a rival party’s treasurer. That is a sacred democratic trust to be honoured through a free and fair process.
On Age and Persistence: What Scripture Actually Teaches
Mr Mba argues that at seventy-nine, having tried six times, wisdom demands retirement. Since he has reached for theological wisdom, let us answer with the text he appears to have skipped.
In Joshua chapter fourteen, Caleb stood before Joshua and declared: “I am this day eighty-five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me.” Caleb asked not for a comfortable valley but for Hebron, the most fortified territory in the promised land. He received what he asked, drove out the enemies and possessed the land. The God of scripture does not retire his servants on the schedule of their political opponents.
Proverbs twenty-four, verse sixteen, states plainly: “For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again.” Seven times. Not five. Not six. Seven times. Mr Mba has counted six campaigns and concluded the seventh represents stubbornness. The wisdom literature of the very tradition he invokes counts seven falls not as defeat but as evidence of the just man’s refusal to be permanently conquered by circumstance.
Furthermore, in which of those previous campaigns was Atiku Abubakar given a genuinely free and fair electoral environment? The question is not how many times he tried. It is whether the process ever produced a clean verdict. It did not. Every serious student of Nigerian electoral history knows this. Nelson Mandela became President at seventy-five. Konrad Adenauer governed Germany from seventy-three to eighty-seven. Age is not the measure. Character, capacity and calling are the measure.
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has publicly stated that 2027 will be his final outing. He is not running from unresolved ambition. He is running because he reads Nigeria’s present crisis with the clarity of a man who has governed at the highest levels and who knows what instruments are required to repair what has been broken.
The Monkey Trap: Jacob at the Jabbok
Mr Mba’s central metaphor is the monkey that reaches into a bottle for a nut, is trapped by its own grip and loses both the nut and its life. Open your hand, he urges Atiku. Let go before the hunter arrives.
It is a vivid parable. But Mr Mba has invoked the wrong tradition.
In Genesis chapter thirty-two, Jacob was alone at the ford of Jabbok when a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man could not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh. And still Jacob held on. The man said: “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And Jacob answered: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” He held on through the night, through the injury, through every instruction to release, until his blessing was secured. His name was changed to Israel, meaning one who has wrestled with God and with men and has prevailed.
The democratic primary is Atiku’s Jabbok crossing. The instruction of scripture, read in its fullness rather than selectively, is not “let go.” It is “hold on until the dawn.” The hunter in Mr Mba’s parable, completed honestly, is not the general election. It is the pressure campaign seeking to trap an aspirant into surrender before the democratic contest has produced its verdict.
The Merger That Lives in Mr Mba’s Imagination
Mr Mba writes as though the Obi-Kwankwaso arrangement is a settled coalition ready for delivery to the Nigerian electorate. It is not. The OK Movement is a political pressure group unveiled by supporters, not by Obi or Kwankwaso themselves. Neither Obi nor Kwankwaso has formally declared a joint ticket, and questions remain about the sustainability of the alliance, its leadership structure and the ability to unify differing political ideologies under one platform.
Ahead of the 2023 elections, the LP and NNPP considered a merger, but the inability of either Obi or Kwankwaso to concede the leadership to the other caused the entire enterprise to collapse. The identical fault line has not been repaired. In a statement reported by The Punch, Kwankwaso himself declared: “I am bigger than Peter Obi politically. I am his elder brother. I am a PhD holder. I have no problem with deputising for Peter Obi, but only if certain conditions are met. We are willing to engage in discussions, provided that trust is established.” Conditions unmet. Trust unestablished. A fact-check by the Nigerian Democratic Report in April 2026 rated the running-mate claim misleading.
Even if a formal merger is announced tomorrow, it changes nothing. A merger of aspirants does not substitute for a primary. The primary remains the only legitimate instrument for producing a flag bearer. Mr Mba has conflated two entirely separate questions. He should not be permitted to do so.
On Zoning: The South-East, the North-East and the Democratic Answer
Mr Mba argues that Peter Obi carries the South-East’s historic claim to the presidency. We affirm that claim without qualification. The South-East has never produced a president in Nigeria’s democratic history, and has not produced a vice president in the current Fourth Republic dispensation that began in 1999. The last time the South-East held executive national office at that level was the Second Republic, when Dr Alex Ekwueme served as Vice President from 1979 to 1983, a tenure cut short not by democratic defeat but by military intervention. That the zone has been excluded from the apex of executive power for over four decades of combined democratic experience is a legitimate and pressing matter of federal justice.
However, the most durable path to that aspiration runs through the democratic primary, not through a pressure-campaign pre-selection. A South-East candidate who wins a genuinely free and fair primary carries a mandate no one can delegitimise. A candidate installed by circumventing that process carries a mandate permanently vulnerable to the same informal pressures that produced it. The South-East deserves the real thing, secured through democratic process, not a shortcut that undermines the very foundation it is meant to establish.
Mr Mba’s letter, in its enthusiasm for the South-East argument, overlooks an equally compelling claim. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar comes from Adamawa in the North-East, the geopolitical zone that has borne the most devastating burden of insecurity, displacement and federal neglect in the Fourth Republic’s entire history. Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Taraba, Bauchi and Gombe have endured years of Boko Haram insurgency, banditry and the displacement of millions from their ancestral homes. The North-East has produced no president. Its communities have been burned. Its children were schooled in IDP camps rather than classrooms. Its voice has been the least heard in the corridors of presidential power.
If zoning and regional justice are the argument, the North-East’s claim is not weaker than the South-East’s. It is, by any measure of accumulated national suffering, democratic exclusion and proportionate neglect, equally compelling and perhaps more urgently argued. Both claims are legitimate, documented and morally serious. Only the primary, weighing all equities simultaneously, can produce a verdict that honours them both. Mr Mba’s letter pre-empts that verdict in favour of one region without the sanction of any democratic process whatsoever.
On Tinubu, Cameroon and the Real Arithmetic
Mr Mba warns that Atiku’s persistence guarantees Tinubu’s return and that Nigeria risks becoming another Cameroon or Uganda. We acknowledge the democratic erosion concern as real and legitimate. But the answer is not the pre-primary elimination of one opposition aspirant at the request of a rival party’s treasurer. The answer is a stronger, democratically produced opposition candidate carrying the full weight of a legitimate primary mandate.
On the electoral arithmetic: in 2023, Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes. Atiku polled 6,984,520. Obi polled 6,101,533. Kwankwaso polled 1,496,687. The combined opposition total is 14,582,740 against Tinubu’s 8,794,726. A united opposition under any flag, including Atiku’s, already outpolls the incumbent by nearly six million votes before a single 2027 rally is held. The threat of Tinubu’s return is a function of opposition division, not of Atiku’s participation. Removing Atiku from the primary does not guarantee opposition unity. It removes one candidate and leaves every other fault line fully intact.
The Father of Which Republic?
Mr Mba offers Atiku the title of Father of Nigeria’s Second Republic. We accept the spirit of the generosity and correct its geography. Nigeria is currently in its Fourth Republic, which began on 29th May 1999. The Second Republic ran from 1979 to 1983 before the military terminated it. The title Mr Mba is offering is either a factual error or a rhetorical flourish. Either way, precision matters.
The scripture that best captures what enduring political greatness requires is not the monkey trap parable but the parable of the sower in Matthew chapter thirteen. Azikiwe and Awolowo cast their seeds broadly, across all seasons, in all kinds of soil. Their legacy is the harvest of ideas and institutions that outlasted every electoral defeat. They earned it by sowing relentlessly until the harvest came. And Mordecai’s question to Esther in chapter four, verse fourteen, applies here with full force: “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Atiku Abubakar has been prepared, tested and refined through decades of democratic contestation and brought to this precise moment for such a time as this.
“Before Dawn Falls”: On Light, Darkness and Who Already Chose It
Mr Mba concludes with extraordinary literary beauty: “Before dawn falls, choose light. Before the bottle breaks, free your hand.” We receive these words in the spirit of their beauty and respond in the same spirit.
Isaiah chapter forty, verse thirty-one, promises: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Atiku Abubakar has waited through six cycles of democratic injustice and not fainted. The dawn Mr Mba invokes is the primary. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar chose that light before the letter was written.
What Atiku Has Already Said and What Mr Mba Has Not
Speaking on Arise Television, Atiku stated: “The first option will be to work out a consensus. If that doesn’t work out, then we will go for primary elections. But I will support anybody who emerges. I will step aside for any winner.” Asked specifically about Peter Obi: “Of course, if he is a contender, why not?” In a DW Hausa interview he added: “We will support and endorse whoever emerges as the flag bearer. How many are we, three or four? In the PDP, more than ten of us contested.”
In the spirit of Jacob at the Jabbok, Atiku has wrestled through the night of multiple contested elections and arrived at the dawn still standing, still speaking the language of democratic covenant while others speak the language of pre-primary pressure.
Now the question Mr Mba’s letter conspicuously avoided: have Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso stated publicly, without conditions, that if Atiku wins a free, fair and transparent ADC primary, they will support him with the same grace he has already extended to them?
We search the record. We find Atiku’s pledge clearly and repeatedly. We do not find its equivalent from the OK-New Nigeria camp. This is the entire revelation. The campaign against Atiku is not a campaign for democratic principle. If it were, its demands would be equal and reciprocal. The selective targeting of Atiku alone, while his own camp issues no equivalent commitment, exposes the enterprise for what it is: not patriotism. Positioning.
The 6,984,520: The People Who Cannot Be Dismissed
They are the IDP families of Borno and Yobe who have not slept in their own homes in years, who want a president who carries their suffering in his bones because he comes from among them. The farmers of Taraba whose land has been contested by violence they did not invite. The schoolchildren of the North-East educated in makeshift classrooms because their schools were burned.
They are the traders in every market whose purchasing power has been destroyed, the graduates who cannot find employment, the young doctors who left not from treachery but from exhaustion of hope deferred. They are the mothers who pack school bags and pray, the women who have mobilised across every zone, the diaspora professionals who wire remittances home and watch them shrink, the teenagers who will vote in 2027 and the children who will inherit whatever this generation builds or destroys.
Isaiah chapter forty, verse thirty-one: they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. These 6,984,520 Nigerians have waited. They have not fainted. They are crusading and maximising support for Atiku Abubakar every day. And they are not going anywhere.
A Final Word to Mr Mba
You invoked divine favour to suggest Atiku should stop. We answered with Abraham at seventy-five, Moses at eighty and Caleb at eighty-five. The God of scripture does not retire his servants on the schedule of their political opponents.
You invoked the monkey trap. We answered with Jacob at the Jabbok: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
You invoked his age and six attempts. We answered with the just man of Proverbs who falls seven times and rises. We answered with Mandela at seventy-five and Adenauer at seventy-three.
You invoked South-East justice. We affirmed it completely, corrected the historical record , Dr Alex Ekwueme served as Vice President in the Second Republic from 1979 to 1983 , and added the North-East’s equally compelling claim as the zone that has bled most, suffered longest and been heard least.
You invoked the spectre of Cameroon and Uganda. We answered with electoral arithmetic: 14,582,740 opposition votes against Tinubu’s 8,794,726. Unity under any flag wins. Atiku’s participation is not the obstacle to unity. Pre-primary pressure campaigns are.
You offered him the Father of Nigeria’s Second Republic. Nigeria is in its Fourth Republic. The Second ended in 1983. Precision matters.
You told him before dawn falls, choose light. He already chose it. Publicly. Unconditionally. In Hausa and in English. Before you wrote a single sentence.
And you asked Atiku to demonstrate democratic grace while your own camp has issued no equivalent commitment to support him should he win the primary. That asymmetry is the most eloquent sentence in your letter, Mr Mba. You did not write it. But it is there, in the silence between every line, and it is the silence that speaks loudest of all.
The primary awaits every aspirant equally. The 6,984,520 Nigerians who voted for Atiku Abubakar in 2023 are crusading and maximising support for him every day. The only thing, the only instrument and the only process that can truly and finally satisfy is a free, fair and transparent primary conducted with the democratic integrity that every Nigerian citizen deserves.
With due respect, Mr Mba: leave Atiku alone. Let the primary decide.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
21 April 2026
