By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a particular kind of enemy a man should pray for. Not the one who lies about you, because lies can be answered. The dangerous enemy is the one who has to reach for the lie because the truth will not cooperate.
That is where Atiku Abubakar’s detractors now find themselves. They have spent twenty seven years searching for the thing that will finish him, and they keep coming back empty handed, because the record keeps refusing to say what they need it to say.
So let us stop pretending this is a debate about character. It is not. It is a manhunt. And the hunt has failed, over and over, for one simple reason. You may hate Atiku. You cannot take democratic from him. You cannot take upright from him. The man is too good, and it is driving them mad.
The democrat they cannot un-write
Start with the word they least want attached to him: democrat.
In 2006, a sitting President of the Federal Republic wanted a third term. The Constitution did not provide for it. What followed was, by the sworn public testimony of the men who were there, the most expensive bribery operation in the history of the National Assembly. Senator Bala Ibn Na’Allah has said he was offered fifty million naira and refused it. Former Senate President Adolphus Wabara has described what was brought to his door. Senator Olusola Adeyeye has said the figure discussed rose from fifty million to seventy. Members of the House of Representatives have repeated the same figures, on the record, by name, for two decades. Not one of them has been sued for saying it.
The amendment failed. The Constitution held. Nigeria did not become another sit-tight republic.
And the Vice President of that government stood on the side of the Constitution while it happened.
Think carefully about what that means, because his enemies work very hard to stop you thinking about it. Atiku Abubakar was not a bystander in 2006. He was the second most powerful man in the country. He had everything to gain by looking the other way and everything to lose by resisting. He resisted anyway. He put the Constitution of Nigeria above the pleasure of the man who could destroy him, and the man duly tried to destroy him, and is still trying today.
You want to call that disloyalty. Fine. But understand what you are actually saying. You are saying that a Vice President’s first loyalty should be to his principal’s ambition rather than to the nation’s Constitution. You are saying he should have helped break the law because the man who wanted it broken had been good to him.
Nigerians have a shorter word for a man who chooses the Constitution over his benefactor when the two collide. That word is democrat. And no book, no letter, no interview, no bitterness has ever been able to take it off him.
He accepted the rank the day it was offered
They tell you he was overshadowing his boss, plotting to upstage him, running a rival power centre from the first day. Then look at the day the offer was actually made.
When Obasanjo formally told Atiku he had been picked as running mate, he put one question to him: “Turaki, are you prepared to take orders from me?” Atiku’s answer, recorded and available to anyone who cares to read it, was: “I have always taken orders from you, sir. You know you are a General.”
That is the schemer, in his own words, at the very moment of selection, accepting subordination without a flicker of hesitation.
And it did not end at words. Obasanjo then sent him to lobby party chairman Solomon Lar, who had his own preferred candidate and was proving difficult. Atiku went. He told Lar plainly that he had not lobbied for the job and could not be blamed for anyone’s loss, and that as Vice President he would serve Lar as well as, if not better than, the chairman’s own man. Lar came around, and the ticket held.
Weigh that against the charge. The man they call a usurper spent the hour of his elevation pledging obedience to his principal and then going out to win over the very people obstructing his principal’s wishes. This is not the conduct of a rival. It is the conduct of the most loyal lieutenant a leader could ask for.
He did not even want the seat in the first place. On a plane at Abuja airport, Obasanjo cleared everyone off except Atiku and told him, “You know I am not a politician. You people brought me into this. You will have to join me on the ticket.” Atiku replied that his ambition was to govern Adamawa, and that he would take the national role only if his services were truly needed. He had just won that governorship. He surrendered it. And note what the press said when the pick was announced: many were surprised, because Atiku had not featured at all in the media speculation about running mates. A man secretly building a machine for himself leaves fingerprints. The reporters looking for them found none.
The witness who was in the room: Orji Uzor Kalu
If you will not take it from me, take it from a man who cannot be accused of loving Atiku’s party. Take it from Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, former Governor of Abia, a founding figure of the opposition to Obasanjo, and one of the plotters himself.
In interviews he has given openly, on camera and in print, Kalu has told the story of 2003 without varnish. There was a movement to stop Obasanjo before that election. Kalu was in it. And the man they turned to at the centre of it was the Vice President himself, Atiku Abubakar.
And here are Kalu’s own words. When they went to Atiku, Atiku told them no, that he had made up with his boss. Kalu says the group was left stranded, that they could have used one governor to remove Obasanjo, and that before the 2003 election Obasanjo was, in Kalu’s phrase, as good as gone.
Sit with what that eyewitness is telling Nigeria. The machinery to end Obasanjo’s presidency existed. The votes were there. The governors were there. The man they needed at the centre of it was the Vice President himself. And the Vice President said no, because he had reconciled with the President he served.
That is not my characterisation. That is the sworn recollection of a rival, a man Obasanjo would later persecute, a man with every reason to tell the story to Atiku’s disadvantage if the facts allowed it. They do not. Kalu remembers Atiku choosing loyalty when disloyalty was lying on the table, fully loaded, ready to fire.
Kalu remembers something else too. He says Obasanjo did not only kneel to beg Atiku in 2003, he also knelt and begged Kalu himself, in Kalu’s bedroom. Picture that, and then read Obasanjo’s letter again. The man who now writes that his deputy plotted against him “by hook or by crook” was, on the account of the governors who were actually there, on his knees begging the same deputy to save him. He was saved. And this is the thanks.
Three years later the pattern repeated. Kalu has said publicly that Obasanjo summoned him to the villa to reveal the third-term ambition, that he told the President it was not possible, and that his refusal to support it began their fallout. He has said that resistance cost him his airline, his bank, an oil block, and more. The men who stood between Olusegun Obasanjo and a life presidency have all paid for it in one currency or another. Atiku has been paying for twenty years. Kalu paid in businesses. The Constitution is the only party to that quarrel that came out whole, and it came out whole because these men chose it over the President.
The man who talked himself out of power
They tell you he was consumed by ambition from birth. The record tells you something else entirely.
When Abacha died and the presidency reopened in 1998, Atiku Abubakar was a former presidential aspirant with the machinery to make a serious run. A newspaper asked him directly whether he would contest. He said no. He said that as a northerner he was bound by the decision to zone the presidency to the South, and that it would be futile to elect a novice, and that this was why they were backing Obasanjo.
Read that again. A man with the delegates in his pocket publicly argued himself out of the biggest prize in the country and pointed the nation at another man. Ambition does not behave that way. Ambition does not zone itself out of the race it could win.
A greedy man clutches. Atiku let go, twice over, of things most Nigerian politicians would kill to hold: first the presidency he talked himself out of, then the governorship he surrendered on that plane. The greed they accuse him of is simply not in the evidence.
The record that the manhunt keeps hitting
Here is what truly torments his enemies. They have already tried the courts. They have already tried the state.
They probed him. They set the agencies of the Federal Republic on him. They built a case to keep his name off the ballot in 2007, and the Supreme Court of Nigeria threw that case out and restored him. After the panels, after the petitions, after the full weight of the presidency was aimed at one man, there was no conviction. There was no judgment. There was nothing.
That is the part they can never forgive, and never mention. When you control the entire apparatus of the state, and you point all of it at a single man, and it comes back with nothing, you have not proven his guilt. You have proven his cleanliness. A dirty man does not survive that kind of scrutiny. Atiku did, because there was nothing there to find.
So the venue changed. What the courts would not deliver, the memoirs would. Allegations that could not survive a courtroom were moved into the pages of books, where no defendant may cross examine and no judge may rule. And those pages became the entire armoury of every anonymous account online that wants to wound Atiku Abubakar without the inconvenience of proof.
Ask yourself one honest question. If the file was real, why did the courts never see it? If the intelligence report existed, why produce it in a book in 2026 rather than before a tribunal in 2007? A man who has evidence goes to court. A man who has only a grievance goes to print.
The builder they turned into a villain
Strip away the noise and look at what Atiku Abubakar actually did with power, because this is where uprightness stops being a slogan and becomes a paper trail.
He funded a party before he wanted anything from it. One hundred million naira to the PDP at a single fundraiser. An offer to pay two years of the national secretariat’s rent. Committee expenses covered. A car bought for a former deputy governor found boarding a commercial bus. This was a man spending his own money to build an institution he was not even angling to lead.
He built the bench that a whole government then ran on. He recruited the men, argued for them, placed them. The finance director, the strategist, the coordinators, the field operators, and yes, even the South South fixer that Obasanjo rejected to his face before being persuaded to accept, “he can do what we cannot do, he will deliver.” The performance that Obasanjo’s own admirers still boast about was delivered, in large part, by people Atiku Abubakar found and installed.
He defended his principal’s name in public at his own cost. When the donation scandal broke in 1998 and Nigerians said Obasanjo was buying the ticket, it was Atiku who stepped in front of the press and took the hit so his boss would not have to.
This is not the profile of a schemer. It is the profile of a builder. And a nation looking for a President in 2027 might reasonably prefer the man whose entire career is a record of building institutions and finding talent, over the men whose careers are a record of tearing down the one who built theirs.
The silence that speaks loudest
And now the fact that ought to end the argument by itself.
For twenty seven years, Atiku Abubakar’s benefactor turned tormentor has called him every name a man can be called in print. Schemer. Ingrate. Unfit. Corrupt. The insults have filled books and headlines and now a fresh letter on the eve of an election.
Atiku has never once replied in kind.
Not out of weakness. Not for lack of material, because heaven knows the material is there. He has stayed silent out of respect for a relationship that once meant something, and out of a discipline that his accusers plainly lack. He absorbed the blows standing up and refused to trade them.
Weigh the two men by that measure alone. One spends his retirement hunting a former deputy through memoir after memoir. The other, holder of grievances that would justify a hundred rejoinders, simply keeps quiet and keeps working. Which of them is behaving like the elder statesman? Which of them is behaving like the democrat?
The silence is not evidence of guilt, as his enemies pretend. The silence is the uprightness. It is a man declining to set fire to a house he helped build, even as the other man throws matches.
Too good, and that is the whole problem
Let us name the thing plainly.
The campaign against Atiku Abubakar is not fuelled by evidence of his wrongdoing. It is fuelled by frustration at his rightdoing. He stopped an unconstitutional third term, and they cannot forgive the democracy. He was investigated and came up clean, and they cannot forgive the cleanliness. He gave up power twice for other men, and they cannot forgive the humility. He has been insulted for a generation and never hit back, and they cannot forgive the restraint.
Every arrow they fire bounces off the same armour, and the armour is simply his record.
So here is the settled truth, offered to admirer and enemy alike. You are entitled to dislike Atiku Abubakar. Dislike is free and it is nobody’s business. But you cannot lift democratic off a man who saved the Constitution when he had power. You cannot lift upright off a man the whole machinery of the state investigated and could not touch. You cannot lift builder off a man who financed the party, staffed the government, and surrendered his own mandate for another.
Hate him if your heart insists. The record will not move. The man is too good, and in January the Nigerian people will say so at the ballot box, in the one language his enemies have never been able to bribe, probe, or write their way out of.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force.
