Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
“When fuel prices rise, transport fares rise; when transport rises, food prices follow. When food prices soar, families suffer. I will break that wretched chain.”
His Excellency, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, GCON, Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC)
THE QUESTION THEY CANNOT ANSWER
On 29 May 2023, the Nigerian masses were handed a sacrifice. The subsidy is gone, they were told; tighten your belts, endure the pain, and the savings will transform your lives.
The masses obeyed. They tightened their belts until the belts cut into their ribs. They paid the new pump price, the new fare, the new food price. They buried the businesses that could not survive it and rationed the meals of their children.
Then they looked up to see what their sacrifice had purchased. And what did they see? Not schools. Not hospitals. Not cheap transport. They saw a ruling class living a life so sweet that it can no longer hear the crying of the hungry over the hum of its own convoys.
So the suffering masses of Nigeria are entitled to ask one question, and to keep asking it until 16 January 2027: where did our subsidy money go? Let the record answer, date by date.
THE ROLL CALL OF OPULENCE
29 May 2023. The subsidy is declared gone in one sentence of an inaugural speech. The pump price multiplies within hours, and the wretched chain of fuel to transport to food to family hunger is fastened on the poor.
July 2023. Barely weeks into the hunger, the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, announces on camera that a token has been sent to senators’ accounts to enable them to enjoy their holidays, before hastily amending it to prayers when the microphone proved disloyal. This is the same chamber whose leadership had earlier counselled Nigerians to let the poor breathe.
Late 2023. The National Assembly proceeds to acquire luxury sport utility vehicles for its members, at a widely reported cost in the region of 160 million naira per vehicle, running to tens of billions in total, and its leadership vigorously defended the purchase. Each such vehicle equals what a minimum wage worker would earn in about 190 years.
November 2023. The 2023 supplementary budget arrives carrying a 5.09 billion naira line item for a presidential yacht, alongside billions more for official vehicles, including for the Office of the First Lady, and lavish renovations of official residences. The Navy protested that the vessel was an operational boat, and after national outrage the lawmakers reallocated the yacht money towards student loans, but the instinct had been revealed: in the first budget season of the hunger, somebody sat down and typed the word yacht.
December 2023. While families could not fund one journey to the village for Christmas, Nigeria accredited 1,411 delegates to the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, one of the largest delegations on the face of the earth, drawing national and international criticism. In the same season, reports emerged of bulletproof Cadillac Escalades joining the presidential fleet.
January 2024. The minister superintending humanitarian affairs and poverty alleviation, of all portfolios, is suspended by the President himself over the reported transfer of 585 million naira of public funds into a private account, while related investigations touched billions more in the same ministry. The very ministry created to feed the poor became a crime scene of allegations. The cases remain allegations before the law, but the symbolism is a national indictment.
August 2024. A new Airbus A330 presidential jet is acquired for the fleet, at a cost widely reported at around $100 million, while the government pleaded poverty to workers negotiating a living wage. The masses were told to sacrifice; the palace upgraded its wings.
1 July 2026. Reuters reports an IMF Article IV finding of some 8.8 trillion naira in off-budget spending, a shadow treasury beyond the eyes of the National Assembly and the people. The Finance Minister denies it. The people, watching their leaders’ lifestyles, draw their own conclusions.
30 July 2026. The same Finance Minister, Taiwo Oyedele, admits to Reuters that the celebrated subsidy savings were largely absorbed by debt servicing. So the money the poor bled for did not build their lives; it serviced the debts of the borrowing class.
August 2026. Oyedele announces that subsidy removal generated 15.8 trillion naira for the federation between June 2023 and December 2025, of which 5.4 trillion went to the Federal Government and 10.4 trillion naira was shared among the state and local governments.
Hold that last figure before your eyes, because it convicts an entire class.
AND THE GOVERNORS? ASK THEM ABOUT THE 10.4 TRILLION
By the Federal Government’s own accounting, 10.4 trillion naira of your subsidy sacrifice was handed to the governors and the local governments in barely 30 months. Ten point four trillion naira.
Now walk through your state. Are the rural roads passable? Ask the teachers about their pay, and before any government spokesman shouts that the minimum wage was raised from 30,000 to 70,000 naira, make him finish the arithmetic. On the day this government took office, 30,000 naira was worth about $65 at the official rate of the time. Today, 70,000 naira is worth about $47, and the naira has lost more than two thirds of its official value while food prices doubled and doubled again. They more than doubled the number on the payslip and still shrank what it buys. A bigger figure that carries home a smaller bag of rice is not a raise; it is poverty re-denominated with ceremony. Ask the primary health centre if the drugs arrived. Ask the market woman if any governor’s windfall ever reached her table.
Then watch the same governors. The convoys have grown longer, not shorter. The sirens that sweep ordinary citizens off the road announce men travelling in bulletproof comfort through the poverty they administer. The security votes, unaudited by law or custom and estimated by civic researchers in billions monthly across the federation, flow on in silence. The chartered flights flow on. The foreign trips flow on. The government lodges are renovated while the classrooms leak.
The masses were told federalism meant the subsidy savings would reach them through their states. The savings reached the states. They never reached the masses. Let every governor now campaigning for the ruling party in 2027 first publish, kobo by kobo, what became of his share of the 10.4 trillion.
THE DARKEST FILE: THEY SECRETLY BROUGHT BACK THE SUBSIDY FOR THEMSELVES, THEN MOCKED THE MAN WHO WOULD DO IT HONESTLY FOR YOU
Now open the darkest file of all, because it exposes not just greed but breathtaking hypocrisy.
Today, the government ridicules Atiku Abubakar’s pledge of relief. On 20 August 2026, the President himself, receiving a visiting governor at the Villa, described the proposal to return subsidy as a demonstration of serious ignorance on governance and economy. On 24 August 2026, his Information Minister published an article warning that restoration would reverse the gains.
But here is what the record shows. In February 2024, the IMF itself reported that this same government had, through the backdoor, resumed paying petrol subsidy by capping pump prices, partially reversing its own celebrated removal. The government’s own Accelerated Stabilisation and Advancement Plan document later admitted that 3.6 trillion naira went to subsidy in 2023, the very year it was declared dead, with 5.4 trillion projected for 2024. Petroleum workers’ leaders said it openly at the time; the government denied it; the government’s own papers confessed it.
So understand what happened, suffering Nigerians. They removed the subsidy from you loudly, collected the applause of foreign lenders, then paid it quietly when it suited them, denied it to your face, and let trillions move in the dark where no audit follows. And now they call the man who proposes a transparent, honest alternative ignorant.
And how did Atiku answer them? On Tuesday night, 25 August 2026, in a video address to his supporters, he slammed the door on the mischief-makers who had tried to spin an aide’s comment into a contradiction of his pledge. He repeated it in his own voice and on his own authority: “I want to repeat categorically that what I said, I will return subsidy, I will. Nigeria is rich enough to look after the welfare of its citizens.” He made clear the aide was not speaking on his authority, reminded the nation that the removal of subsidy has driven more Nigerians into poverty than at any other time, and named his two governing priorities without decoration: the welfare of the citizen, which is the fundamental responsibility of any government, and the security of the country. No ambiguity. No fine print. No quiet caps paid in the dark and denied by daylight.
That is the difference on the ballot. Atiku will return the relief, and he has now said so categorically; and under his Economic Recovery Plan it returns in the open: targeted, capped, transparently budgeted and independently audited, shifted from importation to production, from middlemen to Nigerian refineries, from unverifiable paper claims to verifiable barrels. Done in the open, written in the budget, checked by auditors. And he has vowed that whoever is found to have stolen the people’s subsidy savings must return the money. The men who did it in the dark fear nothing more than the man who will do it in the light and then open the books on them.
THE TALLY OF THE TWO NIGERIAS
Set the two Nigerias side by side and let the contrast do the arguing.
In their Nigeria: an Airbus in the sky, Escalades reported on the tarmac, a yacht in the budget, 160 million naira vehicles in the legislative car park, 1,411 delegates in Dubai, a shadow 8.8 trillion naira reported off the books, and 10.4 trillion naira sunk into state treasuries without visible trace.
In your Nigeria: headline inflation of 15.91 per cent and food inflation of 17.52 per cent and rising as of June 2026, by the National Bureau of Statistics. Roughly 6 in 10 Nigerians, on the order of 140 million people, in poverty by the World Bank’s assessment. A minimum wage of 70,000 naira, worth about $47 a month. One meal where there were three. Life is sweet, yes, but only above a certain altitude. Below it, the masses wallow in misery that the men in the convoys no longer even slow down to see.
COMPETING WITH THIEVES: THE CANDIDATE READS OUT THE CHARGE SHEET
In that same Tuesday night video, Atiku Abubakar summed up this entire ledger in words that will follow this government into the history books: “We are competing with thieves. They stole the election. Now they have stolen the economy. They have stolen everything.”
Some will call the language harsh. Very well. Let them first answer the roll call above, item by item and date by date. The yacht in the budget. The Airbus in the sky. The Escalades reported on the tarmac. The 160 million naira vehicles in the legislative car park. The holiday token announced on camera into senators’ accounts. The 585 million naira reportedly routed into a private account at the very ministry of the poor. The subsidy paid through the backdoor and denied through the front door. The 8.8 trillion naira reported off the books. The 10.4 trillion naira that entered state treasuries and never entered the people’s lives.
That is not rhetoric. That is evidence. Atiku did not invent the charge; he merely read aloud what the record had already written. The dispute over the stolen mandate of 2023 is his longstanding conviction, argued before the tribunals; the stolen economy needs no tribunal, because every empty pot in every kitchen in Nigeria is a court exhibit.
HISTORY IS WATCHING, AND SO ARE YOU
Every kobo of that opulence was minted from your sacrifice. Every convoy runs on the fuel of your hunger. And every one of them, President, governors, ministers, lawmakers, will stand before the same judge on the same day.
That judge is you. The date is 16 January 2027, with the governorship reckoning to follow on 6 February 2027. Only 144 days remain.
They have the yacht line, the jet, the Escalades and the sirens, and everything else they have taken. You have the one thing they cannot steal if you guard it: your vote. Collect your PVC. Guard it. And on that morning, let the suffering masses of Nigeria rise in their tens of millions and vote for the one man who saw your hunger, named the wretched chain, and promised, with a record of competence behind him, to break it: Atiku Abubakar, and the African Democratic Congress.
Ìgbà díẹ̀ ló kù. Lokaci kaɗan ne ya rage. Obere oge ka ọ fọdụrụ.
AtikuIsComing #ADC2027 #WhereIsTheSubsidyMoney #BreakTheChain #16January2027
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
26 August 2026
