By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Nigeria is bleeding, and the APC has called a press conference about a first name.
Mothers buy rice by the cup. Farmers have abandoned their farms to bandits. Graduates have stopped applying for jobs that do not exist. Into all of this walks Dele Alake, Minister of Solid Minerals Development and spokesperson of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, clutching his pearls. His complaint is that Atiku Abubakar, the most accomplished statesman on the 2027 ballot, called the incumbent “Bola”.
Not a scandal. Not a theft. A name.
When a ruling party has nothing to defend, it goes looking for something to be offended by. That is what Alake’s statement is. Let us take it apart, error by error, until nothing is left standing.
THE NAME ALAKE SWORE BY
Bola is the name on the man’s own ballot paper. It is also the name Dele Alake himself had to defend on national television.
In 2022, Nigerians were asking whether the candidate had been born under another name. Alake went on Channels Television and declared that “his name, as far as I know, is Bola Ahmed Tinubu.” Then he dared the whole country to produce evidence to the contrary.
Mark the irony. The only candidate in this race whose very name has had to be defended on television is the one whose spokesman now faints when that name is spoken.
In 2022, “Bola” was a fact to be defended with Alake’s last breath. In 2026, it has become an obscenity. A spokesman whose outrage changes with the weather is not defending an office. He is defending a mood.
In 2022 Alake dared Nigerians to disprove the name. In 2026 he cannot bear to hear it.
A CANDIDATE IS NOT A CROWN
Alake confuses the office with the man in it. The office of President belongs to the Nigerian people. It is not a family heirloom, and respect for it was never a licence for worship.
By Alake’s own admission, his principal is seeking a second term. That makes him a candidate. On the campaign field there are no thrones, only contestants waiting on the verdict of the voter.
A man cannot beg for votes in the morning and demand a royal salute in the evening. If the APC wants its candidate addressed only by his titles, it should keep him off the ballot and away from the people.
THEY WANT A LECTURE ON AFRICAN VALUES? HERE IT IS
The statement reaches for African tradition. It should have left tradition alone, because tradition is the most damning witness against the APC.
In our tradition, comrades who walked the same hard road call one another by name. Atiku and Tinubu stood in the same SDP of June 12. They sat in the same Action Congress they built together. For more than thirty years they have been Atiku and Bola to each other.
And Tinubu has never troubled himself with titles for the man who served eight years as Vice President of the Federal Republic. In July 2022, his own statement called that former Vice President “dear old Atiku”. Not Your Excellency. Not Waziri. Not even Alhaji. Dele Alake issued no lecture on protocol that day. The office Atiku held was mocked in print, and the APC’s guardian of decorum said nothing.
Atiku never needed the statement’s protection, because he never asked for it. Asked once on live television how he wished to be addressed, whether as Your Excellency, Turaki or Waziri, he answered simply: just call me Atiku.
This is the cosmopolitan bigness of a man who has nothing to prove. His dignity does not live in titles, because it lives in the record.
What tradition does not forgive is ingratitude. It does not forgive the man who climbs the ladder and then mocks the hands that held it. In Abeokuta in June 2022, the APC’s own candidate stood before a crowd and told the nation that the sitting President, his own party leader, owed his office to him. Among the Yoruba, there is no deeper breach of omoluabi than to belittle, in public, the man under whose roof you are seeking shelter. That was not familiarity. That was contempt, and Dele Alake was in the front row, clapping.
Nor does tradition honour the man who demands what he has never paid. In African tradition, respect is a debt settled in both directions. A President who dismissed Atiku’s plan for hungry Nigerians as serious ignorance has no ledger from which to collect courtesy.
One man says just call me Atiku. The other needs a spokesman to defend his first name.
AN AMBITION THAT KNOWS HOW TO KNEEL
Alake accuses Atiku of “uncontrollable ambition”. The charge comes from the party of Abeokuta 2022, whose candidate announced to the world that it was his turn. It deserves no more than that one reminder.
Now look at Atiku’s supposedly uncontrollable ambition. It stood down at Jos in 1993. It stood down again in 1999. It stood down a third time in 2003, each time in favour of the stronger position.
Alake himself is a witness. In June 2025, in a wide-ranging interview with ARISE News, the Minister of Solid Minerals Development set out to answer Sule Lamido on the history of June 12. In doing so he recounted the Jos primaries of 1993, when Atiku Abubakar laid down his own ambition so that Abiola could prevail.
Alake tells it as though the glory belongs to the men who came to plead. But pleading is not deciding. Many voices may knock at a man’s door in the night, and only one man can open it. That man was Atiku. The decision was his, the sacrifice was his, and it was on that sacrifice that Abiola carried the day against Kingibe.
The spokesman who now calls Atiku’s ambition uncontrollable has spent years recounting the night that ambition chose, of its own free will, to yield.
Atiku has stood down three times for others. Not once in thirty three years has he asked a stronger man to yield to him.
WHICH MODEL SHOULD THE YOUNG FOLLOW, MR ALAKE?
The statement warns young Nigerians never to aspire to be like Atiku. Fine. Let the young read both files, side by side, and choose.
Here is Atiku’s file. He lost his father at eleven and built himself from nothing. He served twenty years in the Nigeria Customs Service and retired as Deputy Director, the second highest rank, after reforming Apapa. He chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation, both by force of law.
He founded the American University of Nigeria in Yola with his own money. It kept its doors open through the insurgency and fed displaced people in their hundreds of thousands. Every hostile government since 2007 has turned his files inside out. Not one charge has been filed.
Now open the other file. It is thick.
- In 1993, the United States Justice Department went to the Northern District of Illinois and alleged that money in accounts linked to him was the proceeds of heroin trafficking. He forfeited 460,000 dollars in a civil settlement, the price a man pays to make an American courtroom go quiet.
- In 1999, he told INEC he attended the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago said it had no record of him, and when the matter was pressed in Lagos he admitted the claims were wrong and blamed his aides. A man who could not tell the truth about his own school is now the guardian of our national decorum.
- In 2011, the Code of Conduct Tribunal arraigned him over foreign accounts allegedly operated while he was a sitting governor. The charges were dropped, but they were never answered.
- In 2019, on the eve of a presidential election, bullion vans were filmed rolling into his Bourdillon home. His answer to the nation was that it was his money and his house.
- In 2022, asked to show his primary and secondary school certificates, he left the column blank and said the soldiers of Abacha stole them. Of all the treasures in that house, we are asked to believe, the soldiers wanted his school certificates.
- Also in 2022, asked where the fortune came from, his spokesman said he had been “trading in stocks”. No company, no portfolio and no ledger have ever been placed before the Nigerian public.
- Since his years in office, a private firm, Alpha Beta Consulting, has collected the revenue of Lagos State on commission. A former executive of that firm, Dapo Apara, alleged that it served as a private pipe into the public purse. The firm denies it. The questions have never died.
- In 2025, an American litigant asked the FBI and the DEA to release their files on the 1993 matter. Tinubu’s lawyers rushed into court to keep the files shut.
Over three decades, his name, his age and his early schooling have been questioned, and he has settled none of these questions with a single document.
One man says come and look. The other pays lawyers on two continents to keep the door shut. Which of the two should the young shun, Mr Alake? You did not say. We know why you did not say.
One file is a record. The other is a dossier in agbada.
THE CONVERSION ON THE ROAD TO ABUJA
The statement claims the campaign has “implored” its members to treat Atiku with every respect. That is a miraculous conversion.
This is the same Presidency whose spokesman put out a statement titled “When Will Atiku Abubakar Report Himself To President Trump?” It is the same Presidency whose principal sneered that Atiku’s welfare plan was born of serious ignorance.
And it is the same Dele Alake who, as the APC’s Director of Strategic Communication in 2022, described Tinubu’s critics as indolent, lazy, and soaked in inertia and lethargy.
In that very June 2025 ARISE interview, this new apostle of African respect for elders explained away Sule Lamido’s words as selective amnesia or a brain wasted by old age. Lamido is a former governor and an elder statesman. That is how Dele Alake speaks to an elder who disagrees with him. Now he lectures Atiku on decorum.
They insult for four years and then discover courtesy in a single press release. A party that has to instruct its own members in writing to show respect has admitted, in writing, that respect was never there.
“WE WILL FOCUS ON ISSUES.” REALLY?
Alake closes with a promise that his campaign will focus on issues. He makes that promise at the bottom of a statement about a first name.
That is the joke. The APC cannot campaign on issues, because the issues are its own indictment. The fare that swallowed the trader’s capital. The ward where the clinic has no drugs. The highway where travellers are sold like goats. The kitchen where three meals became one. Every one of them is a charge sheet.
The Minister of Solid Minerals Development has found the time, in the middle of his official duties, to write press releases about a first name. Nigerians may ask how many mining sites went uninspected while that statement was being drafted.
“From reforms to prosperity,” Alake chants. The reforms came like a flood. The prosperity has not been sighted anywhere in Nigeria. A campaign that promises issues and delivers a grammar lesson has confessed that it has no answer.
They took the food, the fuel, the fare and the future. Now they want our manners as well.
THE GIANT THEY CANNOT ANSWER
Strip away the perfume and this is what the statement really is: a frightened party trying to change the subject. It wants a quarrel about etiquette because it has already lost the argument about record.
Take falsehood away from the APC for one week and the party would be wheeled into intensive care. Lies are its oxygen and propaganda its drip. A party that cannot survive on the truth of its record has no choice but to manufacture offence from a first name.
Atiku Abubakar is the most experienced, most magnanimous and most battle-tested democrat on the 2027 ballot. He builds bridges across every region and faith. He has always taken his grievances to the courts and never to the streets. He waived his own immunity to let his accusers into his office.
He has published his plans in advance for every Nigerian to examine. Against a man like that, the APC has nothing to throw except a dictionary.
Call him Bola. Call him Asiwaju. Call him Mr President, as many times as Alake likes. On 16 January 2027, the suffering Nigerian will call him something else: former.
96 days to go.
#AtikuAmaechi2027 #VoteADC #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
13 October 2026
