By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
In 1999, Nigeria was told exactly what needed to be done. The roadmap was clear. The urgency was documented. For eight years it was being actively filled. Then in 2007 it was abandoned. The country is now paying the full and compounding price of that abandonment.
In May 1999, a precise and unflinching prescription was set down for what the incoming Obasanjo administration must do to pull the country back from the edge. It called for institutional reform. It demanded poverty alleviation with urgency, not sentiment. It prescribed radical investment in infrastructure, transportation, and energy. It insisted that democracy be secured not through rhetoric but through measurable governance.
For eight years, that prescription was being actively filled.
Then in 2007 it was abandoned.
Read that document today and you will feel the cold, nauseating sensation of a country that watched its own roadmap being torn up at the height of its momentum and has been wandering without navigation ever since, each successive administration after 2007 adding new layers of dysfunction onto the wreckage left by the one before it, until a government arrived in 2023 that does not merely fail by the standards of that roadmap but appears constitutionally incapable of locating it.
Poverty has not been addressed since that reform era ended. It has been industrialised. Nigeria today holds the undisputed distinction of being home to the largest population of extremely poor people on earth, a record the Tinubu administration has not merely inherited but aggressively expanded through the catastrophic removal of the fuel subsidy without a single cushioning social infrastructure in place. The naira exchanged at roughly 460 to the dollar in May 2023. Today it trades beyond 1,500. Every Nigerian who earns in naira and breathes in a world priced in dollars has felt that devaluation as a physical wound in the chest.
What They Inherited in 1999. And What They Did With It.
Let the record be stated plainly, because the revisionists and the APC propaganda machinery have worked tirelessly to obscure it.
Atiku Abubakar and Olusegun Obasanjo did not inherit a functioning country in May 1999. They inherited a cadaver.
Fifteen years of unbroken military misrule had left Nigeria a pariah state, internationally isolated, economically prostrate, and institutionally gutted. Abacha’s kleptocracy had looted the foreign reserves to near depletion. The country was carrying an external debt burden of approximately 30 billion dollars. The banking sector was paralysed. State-owned enterprises had become monuments to waste. The telecommunications sector was a national joke. The naira had been battered by years of artificial exchange rate management. Foreign investors would not take the country’s calls.
That was the inheritance.
Within the first term alone, the administration with Atiku as its economic engine began the systematic dismantling of this wreckage. The telecommunications sector was liberalised. MTN, Airtel and other serious international operators entered the Nigerian market and built an industry from scratch that today employs millions and contributes materially to GDP. The banking sector consolidation that followed produced a financial system capable of supporting real economic activity. The EFCC was established, giving Nigeria for the first time a credible institutional mechanism for confronting the corruption that had historically swallowed the state whole.
On the debt front, the administration pursued with relentless diplomatic energy the Paris Club negotiations that resulted in Nigeria securing 18 billion dollars in debt cancellation in 2005 and paying off the remaining 12 billion dollars from reserves rebuilt through disciplined fiscal management. Nigeria entered that negotiation as a beggar nation. It left having reclaimed its financial sovereignty. Foreign reserves were rebuilt to approximately 42 billion dollars. GDP expanded from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars. Peak growth reached 15.3 per cent. No Nigerian administration before or since has matched it.
That is what it looks like when an administration inherits catastrophe and governs it into transformation.
Now Look at What the APC Has Done With Its Inheritance.
When the APC assumed office in May 2015, it did not inherit a cadaver. It inherited a growing economy with rebuilt reserves, a liberalised telecommunications sector, a recapitalised banking system, and a rationalised debt profile.
What it produced from that inheritance is a study in the deliberate destruction of productive governance.
The Buhari administration responded to an oil price decline not with diversification but with foreign exchange restrictions so economically illiterate that they drove manufacturers out of the country, collapsed investor confidence, and produced two recessions in four years. For eight years the governing party’s primary communication product was grievance. Complaints about what they inherited. Complaints about saboteurs. Complaints about the judiciary. Not delivery. Grievance.
Then came Tinubu. The subsidy was removed without a safety net. The naira was floated without the monetary policy architecture to manage the transition. Inflation reached levels that made basic food items inaccessible to the majority of households. The National Grid suffered collapses that even the most apologetic government spokespersons could not explain away. Youth unemployment reached proportions that constitute a national security emergency.
And the response from the presidency? More complaints. About global headwinds. About how Nigerians must endure the pain of transformation.
The men who transformed a cadaver into a 270-billion-dollar economy did not ask Nigerians to endure pain without evidence of gain. They delivered the gain. They showed the work.
The APC, across eleven years and two presidents, has produced measurable deterioration and called it reform.
The Infrastructure Argument Has Been Waiting Since 2007
Nigeria has spent billions on the power sector across multiple post-2007 administrations. The spending is not the problem. The problem is that the spending has been consistently detached from outcomes, supervised by officials with interests in the perpetuation of the problem, and never subjected to the ruthless performance accountability that a man of Atiku’s private sector orientation would demand and enforce.
Atiku has committed to restructuring the power sector through genuine liberalisation, private sector entry at scale, and the removal of the regulatory chokepoints that have made serious investors walk away from Nigerian energy for two decades. Rail transport contributed a miserable 0.5 per cent to GDP between 1981 and 1997, a decline the 1999 to 2007 reform agenda had begun reversing before the momentum was killed by its successors. Atiku’s economic blueprint addresses multimodal transport as a productive sector, not a welfare project.
On Democracy, the Warning Was Issued in 1999 Too
What Nigeria has witnessed since May 2023 is the systematic degradation of every institutional check that the 1999 prescription was designed to protect. The independence of INEC has been placed under sustained pressure. The judiciary has delivered rulings that legal scholars across the continent have struggled to rationalise. The legislature has functioned as an instrument of executive consolidation rather than a counterweight to it.
Atiku Abubakar went to court. He challenged the 2023 result through every legitimate constitutional channel available to him. He did not reach for extralegal means. He did not encourage his supporters toward violence. He respected the process even when the process failed him.
That restraint is not weakness. It is the foundational temperament of a democrat.
The Coalition Is the Message
Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, one of the most formidable organisational forces in northern Nigerian politics, formally registered with the ADC on 30 March 2026. That is not a rumour. That is a declaration. When Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Rotimi Amaechi, men who contested against each other in 2023 with genuine ideological and regional distinctions, find themselves converging toward the same primary process, that convergence is not coincidence. It is diagnosis.
The combined opposition vote in 2023 reached approximately 14.5 million against Tinubu’s 8.8 million. That is not a defeated opposition. That is a suppressed majority. An ADC that consolidates behind a tested, credible candidate does not merely compete in 2027. It wins.
The Prescription Still Bears His Name
The man who inherited a cadaver of a nation and returned it to the international community as a credible economy, who built the GDP record that all of his successors have spent their tenures dismantling, and who demonstrated in office that Nigeria’s poverty is not a destiny but a political choice, is asking for the mandate to finish what was started.
The APC had eleven years to prove that the reform era of 1999 to 2007 was replaceable. It produced instead the most comprehensive catalogue of governance failure in Nigeria’s post-military history.
Nigeria has run out of reasons to say no.
And 2027 is running out of time.
The pharmacy is called the ballot box.
The prescription still bears his name.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B,
Director General,
The Narrative Force,
thenarrativeforce.org
16 April 2026
