Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There are only two questions a nation ever truly asks of the men who would rule it. The first is ancient. What is your wealth for? The second is merciless. Can you defend what you claim to know? Every other question is decoration. On the sixteenth of January, two thousand and twenty seven, Nigeria will answer both at once, and the answer is already taking shape in the hands of a determined people.
The questions are old. The reckoning is fixed. It falls on the sixteenth of January.
WHAT IS YOUR WEALTH FOR
Chief Obafemi Awolowo settled the first question long before most of today’s rulers were born. He did not leave it as the property of one party to inherit. He left it to the nation as a measuring rod. Wealth, he insisted, is not an ornament but an instrument, and the instrument has one purpose, to lift the ordinary man and woman out of want. He warned, too, that the help offered by the great powers arrives wrapped in conditions engineered to fatten the giver and hollow out the receiver, until the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting relatively poorer.
That is not a partisan slogan. It is a national standard, and a standard is built to measure every man who reaches for power, in whatever party, under whatever flag.
So measure the present against it. The argument was never whether a bleeding subsidy could last forever. Reasonable people, Atiku among them, long accepted that it could not. The crime is in the manner. It was torn away in a single night with no cushion beneath the citizen, no buffer, no sequence, while the naira was set loose to drown and families that once ate three times a day were left to ration one. A government that calls fresh borrowing an achievement and calls dependence reform has failed the test Awo set. It has turned the wealth of the nation away from the people it was meant to serve.
CAN YOU DEFEND WHAT YOU KNOW
Now the second question, and it is the one our politics flees from. When William Clinton stood before a difficult America and spoke for forty eight minutes without a single cheap promise, he was not performing. He was proving a point that ought to govern our own choice. A serious leader can be cross-examined on every figure he has ever quoted, dragged through his own arithmetic, doubted by the harshest fact checker in the land, and still left standing.
That is the test. Not noise. Not theatre. Not promises no arithmetic can carry. Depth. Mastery. The nerve to be interrogated.
A leader who cannot defend his arithmetic is not a leader. He is a rumour holding a microphone.
THE MAN WHO PASSES BOTH
Hold both questions up to the light and ask who, measured against that rod and tested by that standard, stands without flinching.
Atiku Abubakar.
He chaired the National Council on Privatisation and the National Economic Council in the years this economy moved from $58bn in 1999 to $270bn in 2007. He was part of the government that won historic debt relief and lifted a crushing burden off the backs of the unborn. He helped open the sectors long strangled by state monopoly, and the telecommunications liberalisation of those years put a phone in the hand of the market woman and the okada rider.
But the deeper proof is not in the title he held. It is in what he has built with his own hands and his own resources. He raised a university in Yola where there was none, and has met its payroll, and the payroll of his enterprises, month after month, for decades. A man who has actually built institutions and balanced real books does not fear the examiner. So put his record in front of any inquisitor you choose. That invitation, freely offered, is itself the answer the present cannot give.
WHAT NIGERIA WILL RECOVER
This is not an argument for a man. It is a prospectus for a people.
Recover the classroom. We have proof, banked in our own history, that wealth turned into schools can educate a generation for free and still raise wonders, towers and stadia that stand to this day. The method is no mystery. Ringfence a fixed share of the budget for learning and defend it from raiding. Return education to the centre of the national plan rather than the margins of the national apology.
Recover the workplace. An economy that grows is an economy that hires. Back the small enterprise, lower the cost of doing honest business, and the young men now exporting themselves across the Mediterranean will find reason to stay and build.
Recover the road home. A nation cannot pretend to govern while it pays ransom to move through its own highways. Security is the first contract between a state and its citizen, and it begins with intelligence, with equipment, and with a chain of command that answers for failure rather than explains it away.
Recover the federation itself. Restructure it so the components breathe, so that power and resource sit close enough to the people to answer to them.
Recover, above all, the dignity to be a partner of the world and not its ward, to bargain from strength rather than from need.
THE PRICE OF SLEEP
Hear me plainly. None of this arrives by miracle, and none of it arrives by complaint.
The machinery that ran this country into the ditch will not hand over the keys with a smile. It will buy time. It will buy silence. It will buy votes where it cannot buy minds. It will dress its failure in fresh paint and sell you, one more time, the bogus hope of paradise.
The only thing that defeats that machinery is a determined people. Free education was never financed with sentiment. It was financed with planning and an unbreakable will. No leader ever asked a nation to choose renewal in an easy season. The hard season is exactly when the choice matters, and Nigeria is being asked now.
BE DETERMINED
On the sixteenth of January, two thousand and twenty seven, the presidential and National Assembly elections hold. Three weeks later, on the sixth of February, the governorship and state assembly elections follow. The arithmetic of our deliverance begins on that first date, and it begins with you.
Register. Collect your card. Guard it. On the morning of the sixteenth, leave the house early, vote for Atiku Abubakar and the African Democratic Congress, and then do the one thing this country has too often failed to do. Stay. Watch the count. Walk the result home from the polling unit to the collation centre and refuse to let it be stolen between the two.
History has already framed the two questions. One man answers both. The rest is no longer theory. The rest is you.
On the sixteenth of January, let the answer become a verdict.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
15 June 2026
