A RICH NATION ON ITS KNEES: NIGERIA HAS NO BUSINESS BEING WHERE TINUBU HAS PUT IT
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
In Part 1, we met a woman in an Adamawa market going home with half a basket. Today, look beneath her feet. You are about to see why her hunger is not fate, and why only one man on the ballot has shown he can turn a rich land into rich people.
THE INVENTORY OF A BLESSED LAND
God did not short-change Nigeria. Any honest inventory of this land reads like the will of a generous father.
Beneath our soil lie proved reserves of about 37 billion barrels of oil and more than 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, the largest gas reserves on the African continent. That is the official estimate of our own regulators.
Above the oil lies a mineral belt the world envies. Gold in Zamfara and Osun. Lithium, the metal of the electric age, in Nasarawa and Kwara. Bitumen in Ondo. Tin on the Jos Plateau. Iron ore at Itakpe. Coal at Enugu.
Above the minerals lies the land: yam and rice, cocoa and cassava, sesame and cotton. The Niger and the Benue cut through it and meet at Lokoja. The sun shines on it all year round.
And above every other gift, God gave us people: more than two hundred million of the most hardworking, most enterprising, most resilient people on earth.
Nigeria is not poor. Nigeria is being governed poorly.
WHAT HAS BEEN DONE WITH THE BLESSING
In April 2025, the World Bank’s Africa’s Pulse report showed Nigeria alone accounting for about 19 per cent of all the extremely poor people in sub-Saharan Africa. The country with the continent’s largest gas reserves now carries the continent’s heaviest load of extreme poverty.
The naira tells the same story. Before this government floated it in 2023, the official rate stood in the region of 460 naira to the dollar. By June 2026, the Debt Management Office was converting at 1,379 naira to the dollar. A nation that imports its fuel, its medicine and much of its food watched its money fall to about a third of its value.
India and China both began poorer than Nigeria in living memory. India turned its people into engineers and software houses that serve the world. China became the workshop of the planet and, by the World Bank’s account, lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty. What separated them from us was not luck. It was leadership that saw a workforce where ours sees a crowd to be managed until the next election.
Under Tinubu, one word has become the only policy anyone remembers: endure. Endure the pump price. Endure the exchange rate. Endure the tariff. Endure the taxes. Endure the bandits.
But endurance is not an economic plan. It is what the governed are left with when the government has none.
THE NATION OF QUEUES
A nation so endowed should stand among the leading countries of the world. Instead it stands in queues. Queues at the embassies, where our brightest children wait for visas. Queues at hospitals the doctors have already left. Queues at politicians’ gates for a handful of rice handed out as palliative.
Nigeria once fed itself and fed others. Groundnut pyramids rose in Kano. Cocoa from the West paid for universities and the first television station in Africa. Palm produce from the East and the South South built a region. Today the farmer cannot reach his farm because bandits own the road, and a country with this much gas cooks with firewood.
We have no business being here. None at all.
THE MAN WHO TURNS WEALTH INTO WORK
Now set beside this waste the man who has spent a lifetime turning Nigerian assets into Nigerian jobs.
Between 1999 and 2007, Atiku Abubakar chaired the National Economic Council under the Constitution and the National Council on Privatisation under the Public Enterprises Act. Under that Council, more than 100 public enterprises were reformed or divested, including Eleme Petrochemicals, the state cement plants and the seaport concessions. GSM licences auctioned in 2001 turned a country with fewer than 500,000 telephone lines into a nation where the market woman carries a phone. That is what it looks like when a leader sees a workforce.
For 2027, his committed plans go to the root of the waste.
He will restructure the federation by reworking the Exclusive and Concurrent Legislative Lists, devolving powers to the states so that every state can develop the gold, the lithium, the bitumen and the farmland God put within its borders, instead of waiting in Abuja for a monthly allocation.
He will build a smaller, leaner federal government by implementing the Oronsaye Report, cutting the duplication and waste that swallow money meant for development.
He will revive the eastern port corridor of Port Harcourt, Calabar and Warri, and support the Uyo Deep Sea Port, so that the wealth of the South South and the South East moves through its own gates instead of queuing in Lagos.
He will reopen the land borders to legitimate trade and rebuild Nigeria as a destination for serious investment, anchored on job creation, private sector expansion and fiscal discipline.
One man inherited a rich nation and brought it to its knees. The other has already shown how to make it stand.
WHY ONLY HE CAN DO IT
Any candidate can describe Nigeria’s wealth. Only one has managed it at the level of the nation, and has the results to show for it.
Restructuring is not a slogan Atiku picked up for this election. He has argued for it consistently for years, against the comfort of the centre, because he understands that a federation of 36 strong states will always produce more than one overloaded government in Abuja. Privatisation is not a theory to him. He chaired the Council that carried it out. Investment is not a word in a manifesto. He spent his career in business and in government bringing it in.
So when he says that a rich nation can be made to work for its people, he is not guessing. He is remembering.
Tinubu sees a crowd to be managed. Atiku sees a workforce to be employed.
THE RIGHT TO STAND AGAIN
Everything that made Nigeria rich is still here. The oil is still in the ground. The gold is still in the hills. The land is still fertile. And the people, the greatest resource of all, are battered but unbroken.
A rich nation does not stay on its knees once its people decide to stand. On 16 January 2027, stand up, collect your card, and vote for the man who has made Nigeria stand before.
Coming next, Part 3 of 10: BRILLIANT ABROAD, ABANDONED AT HOME. There is a Nigerian resource worth more than all the oil in the Delta, and it is boarding planes every night at Murtala Muhammed Airport. Part 3 shows where it is going, why, and the 10 billion dollar plan to bring it home.
#Awalokan #Atiku2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
12 October 2026
