By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
There are characterisations that, once uttered, refuse to be dismissed. Not because they flatter, but because they fit. When it is said of Atiku Abubakar that he is a colossus among presidential gladiators across political parties, one more sinned against than he ever sinned, that is not the language of partisan cheerleading. It is the language of sober, evidence-anchored historical assessment. And it is a characterisation that time, with its unflinching impartiality, will vindicate beyond all reasonable contestation.
Atiku Abubakar is not merely a politician. He is a phenomenon, a man whose biography is, in many ways, the biography of modern Nigeria itself: forged in poverty, tempered by ambition, enlarged by experience, and humanised by loss. Born in Jada, in what was then the Northern Region, to a family of modest means, he rose without the cushion of inherited privilege. He built himself from the ground upward, through education, through enterprise, through the relentless application of will to circumstance. That origin story is not incidental to who he is. It is foundational. It explains the empathy, the tenacity, and the refusal to quit that define him to this day.
To measure Atiku against the current field of presidential aspirants across all parties is not comparison; it is contrast. The difference between granite and gravel.
ON EXPERIENCE
In experience, no living Nigerian presidential aspirant comes close. Atiku Abubakar served as Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for eight years, from 1999 to 2007, presiding over an economy in painful transition from military extraction to democratic governance. He sat in the cockpit of federal power at its most consequential post-military moment. He has since made five attempts at the presidency, through primaries and general elections, in 2007, 2011, 2015, 2019, and 2023, each bid deepening his mastery of Nigeria’s political geography, its fault lines, its grievances, and its aspirations. This is not the resumé of a man chasing relevance. It is the record of a man answering a calling. That is not obsession; that is vocation.
ON WISDOM
Wisdom is not the accumulation of victories. It is the capacity to extract instruction from defeat and return stronger than before. Atiku has demonstrated this capacity with a consistency that should command respect even from his fiercest critics. A lesser man, broken by the rigours of repeated electoral combat, much of it conducted on an uneven field, would have retired to Jada, bitter and silent. Atiku chose instead to rebuild, re-strategise, and re-emerge. After 2019, he went to court. After 2023, he went to court again, not to make noise, but to make a record. He understands that in a democracy still under construction, every legal challenge filed is a brick laid in the foundation of electoral accountability. That is not stubbornness; that is statesmanship.
ON HUMANITY AND GOOD-NATUREDNESS
The testimonies to Atiku’s humanity are not manufactured for campaign seasons. They are decades old, rooted in a philanthropic tradition that predates his presidential ambitions by a generation. Through the American University of Nigeria in Yola, he has educated tens of thousands of young Nigerians who would otherwise have had no access to world-class tertiary education. Through his various empowerment initiatives, he has seeded entrepreneurs across the country with capital and mentorship. The political adversaries he has forgiven rather than pursued are too numerous to catalogue. His inner circle spans religions, ethnicities, and geographies, not because his political consultants advised such optics, but because that is simply how the man has always lived. His philanthropy is not performative. It is constitutive. It is part of the architecture of the man himself.
ON VISION
Atiku Abubakar has been Nigeria’s most consistent and articulate advocate for restructuring, true federalism, and private-sector-led economic growth for more than two decades. In 2019, he went to the Nigerian electorate with a detailed economic blueprint that prescribed deregulation, privatisation of critical national assets, devolution of powers to states, and aggressive foreign direct investment courting. He was mocked for it by the same political establishment that has since been forced, by the weight of fiscal reality, to implement pale, poorly executed versions of the same prescriptions. The naira has been floated, though chaotically. Fuel subsidies have been removed, though cruelly. These are not signs that his critics were right; they are confirmation that Atiku was ahead of his time. The same voices that dismissed his vision in 2019 are today borrowing from its vocabulary while delivering none of its competence.
ON PAN-NIGERIANISM
Pan-Nigerianism is the rarest of all Nigerian political qualities. It is easy to profess; it is extraordinarily difficult to live. Atiku lives it. He has built alliances, businesses, friendships, and political structures across all six geo-political zones, across every major religion, across every significant ethnic nationality. He is as conversant with the concerns of the Ijaw fisherman in Bayelsa as with the anxieties of the Kanuri trader in Maiduguri. He is as warmly received in Ekiti as he is in Katsina. That reach is not the product of political machinery alone. It is the product of a lifetime of deliberate, genuine engagement with Nigerian humanity in all its astonishing diversity. That is not political opportunism; that is national identity in its truest form.
MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING
The record of what has been done to Atiku Abubakar is a damning indictment of the political culture that has governed Nigeria’s democratic experiment. He has been pursued by allegations, many originating in the organs of state power wielded by political opponents, that have collapsed one after another in courts of law. He has been betrayed by allies he elevated and trusted. He has been denied victories that the Nigerian people, in their millions, conferred upon him. Yet through every persecution, every betrayal, and every judicial ambush, he has neither fled Nigeria nor abandoned his convictions. He has stayed, fought, and remained committed to the democratic process despite its demonstrated capacity to fail him.
That is the profile of a man of extraordinary character.
A colossus, yes: in experience, in wisdom, in humanity, in vision, and in pan-Nigerian identity. And in 2027, with the African Democratic Congress as his platform and a reawakened Nigerian electorate as his jury, this colossus will finally receive the mandate that justice, history, and the Nigerian people have long owed him.
The pedestal awaits.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
28 May, 2026
