A REPLY TO SUNDAY DARE: THE CHIEFS OF JOGBO WHO TOOK THE BATTLE ABROAD FIRST, THEN CRIED FOUL AT HOME
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Sunday Dare, the President’s own Special Adviser on Media and Public Communications, has spent his week accusing Atiku Abubakar of offshoring Nigeria’s grievances to Washington. Before the palace scribe reaches for that word again, he should watch Saworo Ide, because anyone who has knows how the story of Jogbo ends.
A king ascends who will not submit to the covenant. He dodges the sacred incision, because a man who intends to loot the land cannot afford to be bound by an oath to it. Around him gather the chiefs, fat and flattering, drumming his praises while the forests of Jogbo are stripped and sold. And above the whole rotten court hangs the crown of brass bells, the saworo ide, patient as a grave, while an old palace sage sings a warning no one in power wants to hear, that this matter will bear its consequences in the end.
That is not an old film. That is Nigeria in 2026, and Jogbo is the name we shall give her here, our own troubled town with its stripped forests, its suffering people and its brass crown of consequence. And this weekend, one of Jogbo’s own senior chiefs walked out of the palace and told us exactly how the throne was bought, the very confession Sunday Dare was hoping you would never hear.
THE CONFESSION FROM INSIDE THE PALACE
Let us be plain about the man. Babachir Lawal is the same big-mouthed lout and gasbag this platform has called out since the day he made Atiku Abubakar his adversary, a chief who never met a microphone he could resist. But there is a mercy in a loud mouth. It cannot keep a secret.
For once, the gasbag has gassed in the right direction.
He is no man of Atiku. He is a founding chief of the All Progressives Congress. So when he sat before Symfoni TV and emptied his memory, this was not opposition noise. This was a witness for the prosecution wearing the accused’s own robes, and blurting, in his usual careless flood, the very thing the palace most needed kept quiet.
By his account, Bola Tinubu reached across the Atlantic and hired American consultants he called Barack Obama’s people, and the money paid to those foreigners ran, in his words, beyond two billion naira in dollar terms. At the exchange rate of that season, that is over twelve million dollars. Not for Nigerians. For imported hands brought in to build a President from scratch.
By his account, Tinubu personally financed Osinbajo’s campaign and personally settled the heavy bills off the books, far from any ledger the public was ever permitted to see.
And here is the beauty of it. Whatever we think of Babachir Lawal, and we have never hidden what we think, the words are now on the record in his own voice. There is only one way to make them disappear, and that is for Bola Tinubu to come forward and refute them, point by point, with proof. Until he does, and he has not, the claims stand. Unanswered. Uncontradicted. Waiting in the open for a reply the palace cannot give.
The men now screaming about foreign interference are the men who invented it, priced it, and paid for it in dollars.
THE ARITHMETIC THAT ENDS THE ARGUMENT
Lay the numbers on the table and watch the outrage strangle itself.
Atiku Abubakar has retained American counsel for one point two million dollars, filed in the open under United States law, to place a public document before public officials.
Tinubu’s camp, on their own chief’s sworn recollection, spent more than ten times that sum on American consultants to seize Jogbo in 2015.
Ten to one. And these are the people wagging a finger at Atiku about selling Nigeria’s dignity abroad. Their own kingmaker has read the receipt aloud, and every figure on it is in their handwriting.
THE AMERICANS THEY IMPORTED
Notice where the money went, and where it did not. Not to Buhari, and not from him. Lawal is careful on this point, and it does the late President credit. He tells us Buhari was no money man, that he grew uneasy the moment campaign finance was raised, that he kept his distance from the whole business of raising and spending. Whatever else is said of him, that speaks to a personal restraint many who now surround the throne have never possessed.
The dollars were another matter. By Lawal’s account they were Tinubu’s initiative. It was Tinubu who reached across the Atlantic. It was Tinubu who brought in the American consultants. It was Tinubu who paid them the sum said to exceed two billion naira in dollar terms, and who settled the heavy costs himself, outside the official books.
So when the Presidency now recoils in horror at the sight of Atiku engaging American counsel, understand exactly who is speaking. Not the soldier who kept away from the money. The men who imported the foreign hands in the first place, and the chiefs who ate at that table.
The playbook they now brand an affront to Nigeria was written, bought and paid for by the palace itself. Atiku did not bring Washington into Nigerian politics. They did. Years ago. In dollars.
WHY THE CHIEFS CLING SO HARD
Now you understand why the panic is so loud. Look closely at the men drumming around this throne, and ask a simple question. What were they before?
For most of them, this is the summit of their lives. Jogbo handed them a stage they had never stood on, a national platform their own careers could never have earned them, offices and access and importance far beyond anything their records deserved. They did not rise to the National level. They were lifted there, and they know it.
That is the whole secret of their venom against Atiku Abubakar. It is not principle. It is terror. A man of genuine national weight is challenging for the crown, and if he takes it, the borrowed importance evaporates. The convoy shrinks. The microphones go quiet. The chiefs of Jogbo return to being what they were before the palace found a use for them.
So they will say anything. They will coin any phrase, smear any record, invert any fact, because they are not defending a country. They are defending a lifestyle. And a man fighting to keep a life he was never entitled to fights with a desperation an honest man never needs.
But over all their drumming, if they listen, an older voice is singing.
Baba Opalanba warned Jogbo long ago. That the people do not yet grasp what is happening, but tomorrow they will, and by then it will be too late for the plunderers. That this matter will have its reckoning. Oro yii, a mo leyin. It will bear its consequences in the end.
The chiefs are afraid of one date, and only one. They are afraid that the sixteenth of January 2027 is the day the song comes true.
THE CHIEFS AROUND THE THRONE
And here they are, exactly as the story drew them.
The palace criers who write the hit pieces. The spokesmen who coin elegant little phrases like grievance offshoring to make a crime in Atiku’s hand sound noble in their own. The advisers who chant the greatness of a throne while the citizens outside ration hunger and bury the victims of a security collapse no press release can hide.
They are loud. They are well fed. They are certain the drumming will never stop.
But the drumming always stops. In Jogbo it stopped the day a chief turned on the covenant breaker. In Abuja it stopped this weekend, when Babachir Lawal, in the very same breath he used to recount the American millions, looked at the government he helped install and called it a failure, and accused the men in power of feeding themselves while the nation starves.
You cannot quote the chief on Atiku and pretend he fell silent on the throne in the same interview. The recording will not allow the lie.
THE FRAUD CALLED GRIEVANCE OFFSHORING
This is why their coined phrases collapse the moment you press them. Grievance offshoring. Affront to sovereignty. Elegant inventions, all of them, built to criminalise in Atiku’s hands the precise instrument they perfected in their own.
The international arena was statecraft when it built their victory. It becomes treason only now that the roles have reversed. That is not principle. That is a burglar demanding the locks be changed the day someone else learns to open a door.
THE ADMISSION SUNDAY DARE COULD NOT AVOID
And here is the sentence that undoes the scribe’s entire brief, written by his own hand.
In the very article where Sunday Dare piles decades of innuendo on Atiku Abubakar, he is forced to concede the one fact that collapses all of it. That in nearly thirty years of the fiercest scrutiny any Nigerian public man has ever faced, no court, at home or abroad, has ever secured a conviction or an indictment against him. Not in Nigeria. Not in the United States. Not anywhere.
Read that again, because Dare wrote it and hoped you would hurry past it. After every panel, every leaked tape, every hostile administration and every foreign investigation, the ledger of proof is empty. No conviction. No indictment. Nothing.
After thirty years of digging, the only thing they have found is that they have found nothing.
So the palace scribe does what men do when the evidence refuses to arrive. He tells you that perception matters as much as proof. That is not journalism. That is a confession that he has no verdict, only a mood he is paid to manufacture. He asks a whole nation to convict on atmosphere because the courts, over three decades, would not convict on fact.
A man that thoroughly investigated and never once convicted is not a man with something to hide. He is a man they have failed, year after year, to pin anything on. And they know it. Dare admitted it. In writing.
WHY THEY TRULY FEAR THE WORLD IS WATCHING
Ask the honest question. Why does a government so proud of its Renewed Hope tremble at the thought of international eyes?
Not because the outside world is hostile to Nigeria. Because there are matters of public record, in courts they cannot edit and archives they cannot burn, that they would rather no lawmaker in Washington ever reads aloud. Their fear of the international arena is not patriotism. It is self preservation dressed as national pride.
Atiku holds up a public document and asks the world to read it. They would prefer the world close its eyes. Only one of those instincts belongs to a man with nothing to hide.
THE CROWN REMEMBERS
This is the part the palace fears most, and it is why they flinch whenever the world looks in.
There are matters they cannot edit. A forfeiture in a United States court in 1993, sitting in the public record where any lawmaker may read it. Credentials that have never quite survived a second glance. A mandate the courts were asked to believe and the people never did.
That is the saworo ide of our Republic. Not brass and bells, but the permanent record. It does not shout. It does not campaign. It simply waits, around the neck of every ruler who broke his oath to the land, and it tightens on its own appointed day.
JOGBO VOTES ON THE SIXTEENTH
So let the chiefs drum. Let them coin a fresh phrase by nightfall.
Politics keeps no permanent victims and no permanent victors. It keeps only permanent records. And the record now shows, in the voice of their own founding chief, that the men lecturing Atiku Abubakar about foreign interference are its pioneers, its heaviest spenders, and the last people alive with the standing to raise the subject.
They took the battle abroad first. Now, beaten at home and exposed abroad, they want the rules rewritten in the middle of the game.
It is too late. On the sixteenth of January 2027, the people of Jogbo, which is to say the people of Nigeria, will place the crown where it belongs, and this time every bell will ring.
Oro yii, a mo leyin. Let the chiefs of Jogbo remember what Baba Opalanba told them. This matter will have its reckoning, and its day has a name. The sixteenth of January.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B,
Director General,
The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
27 July 2026
