Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, that serial turncoat and shameless mercenary of the pen, has returned for a second bite. Answered once and thoroughly humiliated, the rabid rottweiler of the Villa has published what he pompously calls “a final word”. He has run out of facts and fallen back on the only weapons he has ever owned: hearsay, mind reading and abuse.
A WORD TO FANI-KAYODE BEFORE WE BEGIN
Chief, please, do not make it final. We were only just getting started, and you were only just beginning to embarrass yourself.
Continue your innuendos, Chief. Pile them as high as you like. But I guarantee you one thing: you will cry, because every lie you publish will be answered in public until you have none left. I am a restless polemicist. I do not sleep on a lie, and I never leave one unanswered.
Final words are for men who have said all they have to say. You have only run out of facts, and that has never stopped you before. So call it Part Three. Then Part Four. Serialise it like a cheap Nollywood epic: The Seventh Bid, The Seventh Bid Returns, The Revenge of the Rottweiler. Buy a bigger data bundle. Ask your paymasters for overtime. I will be waiting at every episode, with popcorn and the archive.
As I told you in the message I sent to your WhatsApp number, and I repeat it for the whole country to read: bring up anything against Atiku a thousand times, and I will crush it a thousand times.
Atiku is a statesman. He does not stoop to answer every noisemaker who wakes up with a grudge and a data bundle. But his silence is not your licence. Where Atiku chooses maturity, I choose to meet you head on, fact to lie.
I will not fold my arms while a bully, a recycler of stale lies and a hired voice in search of relevance spits insults at a man whose record towers over everything you will ever achieve. Atiku may not dignify your gutter innuendo with a reply. I will. Every single time.
I am armed to the teeth with facts. You would run out of lies long before I run out of answers. You have the data bundle. I have the archive. You have the bark. I have the record.
So keep talking. Write Part One Thousand, and I will publish Reply One Thousand the same evening. Defending Atiku is not a pastime for me. It is the mission of The Narrative Force, and we carry it out without apology and without fear.
Do not call it a final word, Chief. Call it what it truly is: the last gasp of a discredited tongue.
Now to his essay, this sorry heap of hearsay and spite. Let us take the charges one by one, and bury them one by one.
THE WITNESSES HE CALLS
He opens with Babachir Lawal, the man Buhari removed as Secretary to the Government of the Federation in 2017 after a presidential panel investigated the grass-cutting contract. The same man broke with Tinubu in 2022 over the Muslim-Muslim ticket, and his sudden longing to “return to Tinubu” is now offered, with breathtaking dishonesty, as character evidence.
Babachir claims Atiku sees no life in anyone who is not Fulani. It is the dirtiest trick of the bigot: accuse your opponent of your own sickness. Atiku’s first wife, Titi, is a Yoruba woman from Ilesa. The man he trusted to care for Obasanjo’s family in 1998, Otunba Oyewole Fashawe, is Yoruba. And I write as a Yoruba man from Ekiti who serves on his campaign’s policy team. Atiku has never asked my tribe before taking my counsel.
Notice the word Fani-Kayode chose for Babachir’s claims. Not “true”. “Plausible”. A lawyer who settles for plausible has conceded he cannot prove it. That one cowardly word is his confession that he trades in smears.
Then comes Donald Duke, a rival presidential candidate, repeating a story from a book about a whisper Babangida allegedly made over twenty years ago. Hearsay piled on hearsay piled on hearsay. Fani-Kayode writes “allegedly”, then “assuming this account is accurate”, then announces Babangida “was right”. He assumes the story is true to prove it is true. A first year law student would laugh him out of class.
And look closely at what he has done. Fani-Kayode does not quote Babangida. He quotes Duke, quoting a book, quoting Babangida. He has taken an elder statesman who never asked to be part of his quarrel and turned him into a ventriloquist’s dummy, putting words in his mouth exactly as he puts thoughts into Obasanjo’s heart. It is not enough for this man to abuse his enemies. He must also use the elders.
When your star witnesses are a dismissed official, a rival candidate and an elder statesman worked like a puppet, you have no case. You have a grudge with footnotes.
THE MIND READER OF ABEOKUTA
His most pathetic passage concerns Obasanjo’s public endorsement of Atiku on 11 October 2018 as “president-to-be”. He cannot deny the words, so he claims Obasanjo did not mean them: the old man was speaking “tongue in cheek”, “mocking” Atiku before Christian and Muslim clerics and the cameras of the nation.
The rottweiler has become a fortune teller. He cannot quote one word in which Obasanjo said he was joking, so he simply announces what was in Obasanjo’s heart.
Look at his crooked method. What Obasanjo said on 3 October 2018 is gospel. What he said eight days later, after face to face reconciliation, is a joke. That is not analysis. It is cherry picking, the craft of a propagandist whose case cannot survive the whole truth. He even calls the late Obadiah Mailafia as witness, a dead man who cannot be cross-examined and was himself a rival candidate. Fani-Kayode must now dig up the dead to testify for him.
He says Obasanjo forgave Atiku. Forgave him for what? The only wrong ever charged is that Atiku refused to help amend the Constitution for a third term. Refusing to rape the Constitution is not a sin that needs forgiveness. It is a service that deserves thanks.
And the same Obasanjo he now praises as “incisive and insightful”, his “political father”, is the man he mocked as a “flaming Obidient” in September 2023. The spineless son spits on the father on Monday and kisses his feet on Friday, depending on who is paying that week.
One more contradiction. If Obasanjo is so incisive, how was he “deceived” for eight years by the man Fani-Kayode says he brought out of obscurity? He cannot have both. A liar needs a good memory, and his has failed him completely.
THE COMPLAINT OF A MAN WHO NEVER COMPLAINS
Half of this self-pitying essay has nothing to do with Atiku. It is a long, tearful account of his own prosecutions and sufferings, which he ends by insisting he “never complained publicly”, in the middle of a public complaint hundreds of words long. It is the most honest joke in the essay.
The Narrative Force holds to one principle: an accusation is not a verdict. Fani-Kayode was charged and acquitted. Very well. Then what is Atiku, whom twenty years of hostile administrations investigated without producing a single charge? If acquittal earns Fani-Kayode credibility, never being charged at all puts Atiku far above him.
Now ask the question he hopes nobody will ask. Who prosecuted him in 2016? Who detained him for months that year? Who, by his own account, threw him into the Boko Haram section of Kuje prison to punish and silence him? It was the APC government, when Bola Tinubu was the party’s national leader. That is the same Bola Tinubu he would later call heartless, cold-blooded, wicked and a sociopath.
That is the party he now serves, grovelling. That is the man whose envoy he now is. By his own testimony, they caged him among terrorists. He answered by abusing their leader in the most vicious terms he could find. Today he barks for both, wagging his tail at the very gate where, by his own story, he was chained.
He calls Atiku disloyal, yet he licks the hand that locked him up with Boko Haram, and the face he once called a sociopath.
THE BETRAYAL LIST, AND ITS AUTHOR
Then comes his catalogue of fabrications. Every item is either false or a confession of his own habits.
Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. This is the cruellest lie in the essay, and the record buries it.
Before the arrests, it was Atiku who brought the warning. Word had reached him that Abacha would implicate and arrest them, and he urged his leader to leave the country. Yar’Adua refused: the Constitutional Conference was to close in two weeks, and he would not run from duty. Atiku carried the same warning to Obasanjo.
When Abacha’s net closed, it was Atiku who visited Yar’Adua in prison. It was to Atiku that the General narrated his ordeal, including the injection given him by the man prisoners called Dr Death. Atiku asked him to write it down. In an exercise book, in black and white, Yar’Adua recorded everything he suffered. Atiku carried that notebook to London and lodged it in Yar’Adua’s own house, so the truth would never be buried with him. That notebook exists to this day. Fani-Kayode is welcome to ask the Yar’Adua family whose hand carried it to London. He will not ask, because the coward already knows the answer.
Then Atiku went to Obasanjo with the warning that saved his life: they are coming for you. When Dr Death came for Obasanjo, he refused the needle, shouted that he was not sick, and made such a commotion that the man fled. Obasanjo owes his life to that warning. He has never said so.
Atiku himself did not escape Abacha’s terror. In that same dark season, Abacha’s men came for him too. His police orderlies were killed, and he was forced into exile. Escaping an assassin is not betrayal. Where was Fani-Kayode for most of those years, by his own telling? In Britain, safe and comfortable, while better men bled at home.
He says Yar’Adua picked Atiku “from the gutter”. His first essay said Obasanjo brought him “out of obscurity”. Which is it? Even his lies cannot agree with each other. Atiku had already risen to Deputy Director of Customs before he ever entered politics.
The gutter? Yar’Adua saw a young Customs officer who related well with people, told him, as it has been reported, that he would make a good politician, and drew him into his meetings in Lagos. He backed Atiku as National Vice-Chairman of the People’s Front of Nigeria in 1989, made him campaign coordinator in 1992, and when the military banned Yar’Adua from the SDP primary, his political family chose Atiku to carry their flag. And the benefit ran both ways: Yar’Adua brought Atiku into politics, and Atiku brought Yar’Adua into the oil and gas business. Partners who built together, bound by a loyalty that outlived one of them.
A leader does not hand his flag to a man he picked from the gutter. He hands it to the man he trusts most.
Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. Fani-Kayode says Atiku left the PDP after Yar’Adua won. Flatly false. Atiku left before the 2007 election and contested against him, which in a democracy is called an election. He returned to the PDP in 2009, under Yar’Adua.
Goodluck Jonathan. Fani-Kayode says Jonathan brought Atiku back. Wrong again. Atiku was already back in the PDP in 2009, under Yar’Adua, and was there when Jonathan came to power. He needed no one to bring him anywhere. Note, too, how Atiku moves when he moves: in the open, alongside others, to build something larger than himself, a coalition, a platform, a real alternative for Nigerians. That is how opposition is built in a country where the ruling party leaves no room for dissent. Fani-Kayode moves differently: alone, for himself, toward whoever holds the purse. One man builds coalitions. The other chases appointments. And he cannot even get the calendar right, let alone the truth.
Bola Tinubu. The party of 2007 was the Action Congress, which Atiku co-founded, so the ticket was his as of right. And it was Atiku who saved Tinubu in 2003, when Obasanjo moved to take Lagos by force. The debt runs the other way.
The rest of the list rots on contact. Wike lost a free primary in 2022, worked against his own party’s candidate, and is now Tinubu’s FCT Minister: who betrayed whom? The PDP threw its ticket open to all zones, and Atiku won the votes. As for the ADC, Atiku is not its chairman and never has been. Obi and Kwankwaso left as free men may. Atiku won a nationwide direct primary across 8,809 wards on 25 May 2026 with 1,846,370 votes, and the runner-up, Rotimi Amaechi, is now his running mate. A man who rigs a contest does not hand his ticket’s second seat to the man he supposedly robbed.
Now the list he did not write. In 2013 Fani-Kayode deserted the PDP for the APC. In 2014 he deserted the APC for the PDP. In 2015 he accused Buhari of having no certificate and lying on oath. In 2019 he swore he would rather die than join the APC. In 2020 he called Tinubu a sociopath. In 2021 he joined the APC. In 2023 he turned on Obasanjo, his “political father”. If leaving the APC is betrayal, he is the gold medallist of political prostitution.
If betrayal is the charge, let the prosecutor read his own charge sheet first. It is longer than his essay, and far more truthful.
THE DAY THE ROTTWEILER WAS SILENCED IN COUNCIL
In his first essay he boasted of demanding in the Federal Executive Council that the Vice President be thrown out. Those who were in that chamber remember how the scene actually ended. Fani-Kayode stops before the ending, as cowards always do.
He raised his hand. The President recognised him. He began his performance: a man who had taken the government to court should not sit in Council and should be expelled.
When the blabbing was over, Atiku raised his hand. The President recognised him. Atiku told Obasanjo, calmly, that he had power to exclude anyone in that room from the Council except one man, the Vice President himself. Then he reminded the President of the Constitution.
He was right. The Constitution directs the President to hold regular meetings with the Vice President and all the Ministers. Ministers serve at the President’s pleasure. The Vice President does not. He is elected, not appointed, and can be removed only by impeachment. When Obasanjo later tried to declare the Vice President’s seat vacant, the Supreme Court said no, in Attorney-General of the Federation v Abubakar.
This is the simple constitutional truth that stupidity and the madness of his rage would not allow Chief Femi Fani-Kayode to understand, lawyer though he claims to be. A first year law student knows it. The learned rottweiler still does not.
A minister barked. The Vice President cited the Constitution. The bark died in the chamber, and the barker has been whimpering ever since.
THE PATIENT WHO PLAYS PSYCHIATRIST
He ends by diagnosing Atiku with depression and a coming mental breakdown, and prescribing a psychiatrist. He has no medical licence, examined no patient, and his only evidence is that a man he calls “over 80” was, in his opinion, rude to him on WhatsApp. He cannot even get the age right. Atiku is 79. A man who cannot count to 80 now wants to read minds. Quackery dressed as concern.
Of all men in Nigeria, he is the last who should play this game. Look at the front page published with this article. On Monday, 17 July 2006, P.M. News carried his face under a headline in letters taller than any of his arguments: “How I Was Cured Of Madness”. The newly appointed Minister of Culture and Tourism had stood in church the day before to give his testimony. His detractors, he said, had gone digging into his medical history and his mental state to block his confirmation, over an episode some fourteen years earlier in Ghana, of which he declared himself healed. The story is so firmly his that when mischief-makers recently pasted another politician’s face onto that page, fact-checkers had to return it to its rightful owner: Femi Fani-Kayode.
Illness of the mind is no joke, and healing is a mercy. That is exactly why his conduct is so despicable. A man who knows, by his own testimony, what it is to have his mental state dragged before the nation should be the first to show compassion. Instead he throws madness as a missile at a 79-year-old elder statesman.
We take him at his word that he was healed. We only pray, sincerely, that the healing was absolute. Because the healing, he says, reached his mind. Did it ever reach his tongue? Whatever he was healed of, the bite stayed behind, and having read his two essays, millions of Nigerians may be forgiven for joining us in that prayer.
The patient has appointed himself psychiatrist, and his first diagnosis is of the man he envies. Envy is the only illness he has never been cured of.
The rest is the same cheap theatre. He complains of rudeness, the man who turned on a young Daily Trust reporter in 2020 for asking who paid for his travels, then apologised and called his own conduct indefensible. He drags private messages into a newspaper column, which tells you he has no honour. He “refuses” to call Atiku “Kachalla”, the coward’s trick of saying the slur while pretending not to. He calls Atiku’s supporters “accusers of the brethren”, a name the Bible gives to Satan, while publishing two long essays of accusation. Scripture has a word for that: hypocrite. And he signs off “Shalom”, peace from the man who promised peace and returned two weeks later with more poison.
THE BOLD MAN’S CHALLENGE
He is a lawyer. Let him behave like one, for once. Let him make his assertions boldly, where words carry consequences. Let him name the Kano financier. Let him produce the alleged rigging, the alleged hijacking, the alleged betrayals, and defend every line before a competent court.
Nigerian law has remedies for defamation. This time there will be no quiet retraction, no lecture about the courage to admit past comments were wrong. Every false word will be answered, on the page and, where the law allows, in court. This time around, he will not be spared the consequences of his own words.
WHAT NIGERIANS MUST NOW DO
Strip away the Bible verses, the honorific titles and the crocodile tears, and his “final word” is a dismissed official’s bigotry, a rival’s hearsay, a dead man’s opinion, a mind reader’s guess and a betrayal list that describes its author. It is the work of a serial turncoat and a sycophant for sale, who has called Buhari a perjurer, Tinubu a sociopath and Obasanjo a “flaming Obidient”, and now kneels before two of them for a posting. The only thing consistent about him is the bark. The only thing loyal about him is his appetite.
But rottweilers are not defeated by articles alone. They are defeated by people.
So do your part. Answer every innuendo in your own circles the way The Narrative Force has answered this one, with facts, without fear. Collect your PVC and make sure everyone in your house has theirs. And on 16 January, turn out, vote, and stay to guard your vote until the result is declared.
Atiku will not be drawn into the kennel. He has a country to rebuild. I will be here at Part Three, Part Four and Part One Thousand. In 97 days, Nigerians will deliver their own verdict, and no rottweiler, however rabid, however well fed, can bark it away.
#Atiku2027 #ADC #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
12 October 2026
