Every election cycle, the desperation of a collapsing political machinery produces a particular species of propaganda. It wears the costume of constitutional scholarship. It carries a PhD byline. It quotes sections of law. And then it falls apart the moment any literate citizen reads the very provision it claims to rely upon.
The piece circulating in APC WhatsApp groups alleging that Atiku Abubakar is not a Nigerian citizen was not written in 2027. It was not written recently. It was written in 2019, published, circulated, ignored by every court and electoral institution in this country, and has now been exhumed and repackaged as fresh intelligence. It is a seven-year-old political hit job dressed in a borrowed gown, recycled by a propaganda machine that has run out of original material.
The citizenship argument did not originate with Awoyemi. It first surfaced within the political machinery of the Buhari administration in 2019, advanced most prominently by the late Abba Kyari, then Chief of Staff to the President. From there it entered partisan political circulation, where willing scribes later dressed it in academic language and attempted to pass it off as constitutional scholarship. Seven years later, the same recycled document is being pushed again as though history has forgotten what every institution in this republic already settled.
We shall undress it here, charge by charge.
THE AUTHOR CANNOT READ THE PROVISION SHE IS QUOTING
Section 25(1)(a) of the 1999 Constitution provides that a person born in Nigeria before independence qualifies as a citizen by birth if either of their parents or grandparents belongs or belonged to a community indigenous to Nigeria.
The author quotes this provision. Then she immediately discards it and substitutes her own invented test. She argues that none of Atiku’s parents or grandparents were citizens of Nigeria in 1960 or 1946.The Constitution does not ask that question. Not once. Not anywhere in Section 25.
The constitutional test is indigeneity to a community. Not citizenship of a colonial state. Not registration on a British roll. Not a passport. The test is whether the family belongs or belonged to a community indigenous to Nigerian territory.
The author answered a question the Constitution never asked, declared victory, and called it scholarship.
That is the entire foundation of her argument, and it is made of air.
SHE ASSUMES THE VERY CONCLUSION SHE IS SUPPOSED TO PROVE
The author states that none of Atiku’s grandparents were born in Nigeria. She provides no evidence. No genealogical record. No birth register. No sworn affidavit. No census document. Nothing whatsoever.She states it because she needs it to be true for her argument to function, then uses it as a premise to reach the conclusion it was invented to support.
In logic, this is begging the question.
In plain language, it is fabrication dressed as argument.
THIS ARGUMENT HAS BEEN REJECTED SIX TIMES BY NIGERIA’S OWN INSTITUTIONS
INEC cleared Atiku Abubakar to contest the presidency in 1993, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023.Nigeria’s electoral and judicial institutions have examined his eligibility across six electoral cycles spanning three decades and found no disqualifying defect.
Note the timing.
INEC cleared Atiku in 2019, the very year this article was written and published. It made no difference then. INEC cleared him again in 2023, four years after the article had been in public circulation.This argument has been rejected six consecutive times by the institutional processes of this republic, including twice after this specific piece existed in the public domain.
The author wrote an entire article about Atiku’s citizenship without mentioning this record once.
A constitutional analyst raising a question already answered six times by the bodies constitutionally empowered to answer it, and choosing silence on that record, is not making an oversight.That is deliberate suppression of the most important evidence bearing on the question she purports to answer.
In academic publishing it is misconduct.
In political discourse we call it what it is: a calculated lie by omission.
THE LOCUS STANDI ARGUMENT IS LEGALLY MEANINGLESS
The piece argues that Atiku has no locus standi to approach Nigerian courts because he is not a citizen by birth.
Locus standi attaches to any person with a sufficient legal interest in a matter.Non-citizens litigate in Nigerian courts every day.Nigerian jurisprudence has never restricted court access on the basis of citizenship category.
A presidential candidate challenging decisions affecting his own candidacy has the most direct personal interest imaginable.This is not a legal argument.
It is legal-sounding words that communicate nothing coherent.
UNVERIFIED STREET ALLEGATION IS NOT CONSTITUTIONAL EVIDENCE
The piece leans on an unverified street allegation about physical markings on Atiku’s body as corroborative material in a constitutional citizenship analysis.An unverified allegation circulated by those with transparent political motivation carries no evidentiary weight in serious legal or scholarly discourse.
It is not evidence.
It is noise.
A newspaper article on the geography of the Northern Cameroons plebiscite zone is equally insufficient.
Geography is not genealogy.
The location of a colonial referendum zone does not establish the ancestral origins of any individual.
Conflating them is either ignorance or deliberate misdirection.
After the constitutional quotations and the PhD preamble, the author closes with that body marking allegation and a photograph.
That closing paragraph is not an embarrassment tacked onto an otherwise serious piece.
It is the confession of the entire document.
The constitutional language was decoration. The section numbers were costume. The audience was never a court or a scholar.
It was a WhatsApp group that needed ammunition, not argument.That same group is still circulating it seven years later because nothing better exists to replace it.
OUR FINDINGS HAVE NOW SETTLED THIS PERMANENTLY
Everything above demolishes the argument on its own constitutional terms.What follows makes its entire factual premise irrelevant.
Our research and investigations, tracing Atiku’s Fulani lineage to its established roots in the Sokoto and Jigawa axes, have established facts that do not merely weaken the argument.
They destroy its entire factual architecture.
The Awoyemi argument stands entirely on the claim that Atiku is Chamba and therefore tied to the colonial Northern Cameroons jurisdiction. That identification is the load-bearing premise of the entire disqualification argument. Once that premise collapses, the constitutional disqualification argument collapses with it.
Our independent investigations , not mere belief , including direct interrogation of Atiku himself, have established without ambiguity that Atiku Abubakar is Fulani, not Chamba. The Chamba identification is the load-bearing wall of the entire disqualification argument.
Remove it and the structure collapses.
Awoyemi constructed a constitutional disqualification case against a man whose ethnicity she could not correctly identify.That single failure renders the exercise an embarrassment no PhD credential can rescue.
Our research has further established that Atiku’s paternal grandfather’s roots trace to Wurno in Sokoto State, and his maternal grandmother’s roots to Dutse in Jigawa State.
Wurno. The heartland of the Sokoto Caliphate.
Dutse. Jigawa State.
These are not border communities. Not trust territory zones. These are the deep interior of Nigerian territory across every administrative arrangement from the British Protectorate to the present Fourth Republic.Under Section 25(1)(a), the ancestral lineage our investigations have placed on record satisfies the constitutional test comprehensively.
Any lawyer, any judge, any constitutional scholar reviewing this would close the file.
THE ARGUMENT IS OVER
The Awoyemi piece is demolished on constitutional grounds: wrong legal test, six-cycle institutional rejection suppressed, conclusion assumed without evidence, street allegation as constitutional authority, body-marking conspiracy at the close.
Demolished on factual grounds: wrong ethnicity, wrong geographic community, wrong ancestral territory, wrong in every material particular.Demolished on chronological grounds: written in 2019, rejected by INEC that same year and again in 2023, now served to a 2027 audience as though none of that happened.
When a man’s lineage traces a grandfather to Wurno and a grandmother to Dutse, this argument has nowhere to stand.When the best ammunition a party can deploy in 2027 is a document that failed on contact with every institution it encountered, that party has already lost.
To every APC foot soldier still circulating this material: the argument was always a lie.It is now a seven-year-old, institutionally rejected, factually demolished, and permanently buried lie.
Leave it where it belongs.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
April 14, 2026
