The more they try to disorganise Atiku through intimidation, the more determined the suffering Nigerian masses become to vote Atiku. Kebbi, oya now!
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
A government that has to padlock an opposition office to stay in power has already lost the argument.
That is where Tinubu’s APC stands in November 2026. It is not campaigning, because there is nothing to campaign on. Instead it is padlocking offices, blocking roads and stationing marshals at state boundaries to count the opposition’s buses. A party confident of winning does not behave like this. This is a party that has looked at the hungry faces of Nigerians and seen its own defeat.
Let us begin with a woman who knew this kind of government well.
THE WOMAN THE STATE COULD NOT ERASE
In 1964, Bessie Head crossed from South Africa into what was then Bechuanaland with a small son, a suitcase of manuscripts and a one-way exit permit. The apartheid state had given her a way out and no way back.
She had been born in 1937 inside a mental institution in Pietermaritzburg, because her mother was white and her father black, and the law of that land treated their love as a crime. A white foster family took her in as a baby and handed her back once her complexion showed who her father was. From her first breath, the state tried to tell her what she was, where she could live and what she was worth.
She settled in the village of Serowe in Botswana, waited 15 years for citizenship, never went home, and wrote novels the world still reads. The regime that pushed her out has collapsed. The library in the city of her birth now carries her name.
In A Question of Power, Bessie Head drew a line between love that nourishes and power that feeds on another’s soul “like a ghoul.”
Nigeria knows that kind of ghoul. It lives off the hardship of the people and calls it reform. When the Catholic bishops told it the nation was bleeding, it told them the nation was not.
A ghoul can feed on a people for a season. It cannot feed on them forever.
SOKOTO: THE CONFESSION IN PADLOCKS
Look at what was done to our party in Sokoto this week, and read it as the confession it is.
The APC-controlled state government sealed our secretariat. We were refused the use of public squares. Hotel rooms our people needed were taken over, allegedly by the state government. Vehicles carrying our markings were turned back at the state’s entry points. That is the record of a ruling party that is afraid.
There was worse. Unknown gunmen opened fire on the convoy of our governorship candidate near the airport. On the day of the rally, our supporters were attacked on the way to the venue, and two were reportedly shot. Whoever pulled those triggers, this was the climate in which our people were asked to stay at home.
They did not stay at home. The people of Sokoto lined the road from the airport to Ilorin Road. The rally was held, peacefully, before a sea of faces. Atiku Abubakar stood before them and summed up the whole week in a single sentence: they said we would not hold the campaign rally, but we have come.
This is what the APC still does not understand. Every padlock it fixes on our door becomes a sermon in the mosque. Every roadblock becomes a story in the market. Every convoy it turns back becomes a family that has decided how it will vote. The APC thinks it is breaking the opposition. In fact it is recruiting for us, and doing it for free.
Every barricade they raise is a banner they hand to us.
THE POETS IN THE KITCHEN
In Brooklyn in the 1930s, a little girl named Paule sat at a kitchen table with women who had almost nothing.
They were Barbadian immigrants. By day they cleaned the homes of richer families, for employers who barely noticed them. In the evening they gathered in a kitchen over tea, and in that room nobody could silence them. They took apart the powerful, mocked the proud and passed judgement on the politicians of the day. The girl grew up to become the novelist Paule Marshall. She called those women the poets in the kitchen and said they taught her everything she knew about language.
She also recorded exactly where they stood. “If F.D.R. was their hero, Marcus Garvey was their God.”
They had no power at work, no money and no standing in the city. What they had was their voices and their verdict. No employer or landlord could take those away.
Tinubu’s Nigeria is now full of such kitchens. You find them under the neem tree in Birnin Kebbi, at the motor park in Sokoto, at the market stall in Onitsha, in the beer parlour in Makurdi, at the mechanic’s workshop in Ado Ekiti, and in a thousand WhatsApp groups that never go quiet. In every one of them, the same verdict is being reached about this government.
The verdict goes like this. Food has climbed out of reach. The naira has been broken. The minimum wage of 70,000 naira is gone before the middle of the month. The subsidy savings that were promised to the people have disappeared into debt servicing. And every month the people are told to keep tightening a belt that has no more holes.
The APC can padlock a secretariat. It cannot padlock a kitchen, and it cannot padlock an empty stomach.
THEY ARE BUYING CARDS BECAUSE THEY CANNOT BUY HEARTS
In Sokoto, Atiku gave a warning that every polling unit in Nigeria must take to heart. He said APC agents are going round northern villages buying voters’ cards.
Think about what that means. A party with a record to stand on asks for your vote. A party with nothing to stand on tries to buy your card. Tinubu’s APC is shopping for PVCs in the villages because it knows it has already lost the argument in the kitchens.
So hear this, suffering Nigerian. Your PVC is not for sale. Sell it for a bag of rice today, and you will buy back the same rice at three times the price for four more years. Sell it for ten thousand naira, and you have sold your children’s school fees, your mother’s medicine and your own future to the people who made you poor.
They buy cards because they cannot buy hearts.
Against all this, Atiku has set plain commitments before the people. He will restore security in every part of the country. He will open Nigeria’s land borders to legitimate cross-border commerce. He will make Hajj and Christian pilgrimage affordable again. He will make life affordable for all. One side offers a plan. The other offers a padlock.
KEBBI, OYA NOW!
Sokoto opened the gate yesterday. Today the campaign comes to Kebbi.
Kebbi has already told Tinubu what it thinks of him. In the last presidential election, with a sitting APC governor using every advantage of his office for Tinubu, Kebbi voted Atiku. That governor has since gone on to a federal ministry. The ordinary people of Kebbi got no such reward, only rising prices and strangled trade. They did not follow their governor then, and they will not follow anyone’s instructions on 16 January 2027.
Kebbi is rice country and border country, where the farmer’s harvest meets the trader’s road into Niger and Benin. Under Tinubu, the farmer’s inputs have become unaffordable, and the honest trader crossing the border meets more checkpoints, more extortion and fewer buyers. When Atiku promises to open the land borders to legitimate commerce, nobody in Kebbi needs it explained. It is the price of dinner tonight.
Our governorship candidate, Abubakar Malami, stood with Atiku in Sokoto yesterday. Today it is Kebbi’s turn to stand.
To the people of Birnin Kebbi, Argungu, Yauri, Zuru, Jega and Gwandu: you saw what was tried in Sokoto. Don’t wait for anyone to try it on you. Come out in your numbers, come out peacefully, and come out ready. Fill the roads, fill the rally ground, and on 16 January, fill the ballot box so completely that no padlock in Nigeria can lock out the result.
Kebbi, oya now!
THE DIARY OF A GIRL IN A MINING TOWN
There is one more woman who belongs in this story.
In 1893, in Diamantina, a remote diamond-mining town in the highlands of Brazil, a 12-year-old girl named Alice Dayrell began keeping a diary. Her town was ten days from Rio de Janeiro, eight of them by mule. Slavery had been abolished only five years earlier, and the diamonds that once made the town rich were running out. Her teacher made every girl write something every day, and Alice did, for three years.
She wrote about her grandmother, her quarrelsome relatives and her father’s long hunt for diamonds. She questioned the racial prejudice of the adults around her. She was a freckled girl from a town the powerful never thought about, and she recorded the plain truth of ordinary people’s lives.
Half a century later, the diary was published under the name Helena Morley. The great American poet Elizabeth Bishop translated it and travelled to meet its author, by then an elderly woman. Bishop said the book was proof that “it really happened; everything did take place, day by day.”
That is Helena Morley’s lesson for 16 January. Those in power remember whatever suits them, and the people’s own record is the only thing that outlives them. In 2023, a large share of results did not reach the portal when they should have, and Nigerians were asked to trust what they could not see. Never again.
So keep the diary of your own vote. At every polling unit, count each ballot in front of the crowd. Make sure the result sheet is signed and posted. Photograph it and send it to a hundred people. Stay until the record is complete. A result the people have recorded with their own eyes and phones cannot be quietly rewritten in Abuja.
THE LAW THAT WILL BURY THE APC
Bessie Head was driven out of her own country and outlived the regime that did it. Paule Marshall’s mothers were invisible at work, and from their kitchen table came a voice the world still hears. Helena Morley came from a forgotten mining town, and her daily record outlived every important person who looked down on it.
All three teach the same law: what is pressed down grows strong, and what is shut out learns to endure. No padlock has ever held back a people who have made up their minds.
Tinubu’s APC forgot that law in Sokoto, and it is about to be reminded in Kebbi. The reminder will be repeated in every ward, every polling unit and every kitchen in this country, until 16 January 2027, when the suffering masses turn their determination into votes.
They sealed our office, so we are opening the country. They blocked our roads, so we are taking the road to Aso Rock. They bought cards in the villages, and the villages will vote with the cards that were not for sale.
2027 is coming, and the APC is going.
There are 73 days left. Sokoto has spoken. Kebbi, oya now!
#AtikuAmaechi2027 #ADC #KebbiOyaNow #RepressionBreedsDetermination #APCIsGone
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
5 November 2026
