By Akin Samuel KAYODE.
Chief Femi Fani-Kayode has written another lengthy intervention against Atiku Abubakar, sufficiently dramatic to attract attention and sufficiently angry to create the impression that something devastating has been established. But strip away the indignation, historical recycling and political theatre, and very little remains. Your submission, Chief Femi, is not a serious rebuttal to Atiku; it is an elaborate prosecution of Atiku’s character. You were presented with an opportunity to defend a government in power, yet instead of dismantling Atiku’s economic arguments, challenging his diagnosis of Nigeria’s condition or demonstrating that Nigerians are better off under the present administration, you gave Nigerians Atiku’s political biography. That is not a defence of Tinubu. It is an escape from defending Tinubu.
Atiku criticises the present government, and you respond by taking Nigerians backwards: Obasanjo, Jonathan, Shettima, old alliances, old quarrels, old quotations and old grievances. One would almost imagine that Nigeria’s present problems began decades ago and that today’s hardship can be explained by something Atiku said twenty years ago. It cannot. Nigeria is being governed today; the policies being implemented today belong to the present administration; and their consequences are being experienced by Nigerians today. If Atiku’s criticism is wrong, demonstrate that it is wrong. If his figures are false, produce the correct figures. If his proposals cannot work, explain why. If his vision is inferior to Tinubu’s, demonstrate the superiority of Tinubu’s. That is how political arguments are won, not by excavating an opponent’s past whenever the present becomes uncomfortable.
The irony becomes sharper when one examines the substance of your accusations. You call Atiku ambitious, yet discuss his ambition instead of his programme. You question his loyalty, yet loyalty is not an economic policy. You question his temperament, yet temperament does not determine whether inflation is hurting households. You question his political history, yet history does not establish whether Nigerians are better off today. In other words, you have substituted character prosecution for policy examination. Atiku may have weaknesses, made mistakes and accumulated controversies; none of these facts proves that the present administration is performing well. If Atiku’s record is imperfect, that does not make Tinubu’s record perfect. If Atiku changed political alliances, that does not reduce the cost of living. Two wrongs do not manufacture one right.
There is also a contradiction at the heart of your argument that you cannot escape. You appear to suggest that Atiku’s political past somehow disqualifies him from questioning the present government. But if that principle were applied consistently, virtually no Nigerian politician would possess the standing to criticise anyone else. Nigerian political history is full of alliances that became rivalries, rivalries that became alliances, accusations followed by reconciliations and politicians who once condemned positions they later embraced. If a politician’s past permanently cancels his right to criticise the present, then opposition loses its legitimacy, political experience becomes a permanent sentence and democracy becomes a loyalty club. Historical scrutiny is legitimate; using history as a permanent gag order against inconvenient criticism is not.
Your argument also follows an unmistakable formula: Atiku says something uncomfortable, you remind Nigerians of something he did years ago; Atiku proposes an alternative, you attack his character; Atiku criticises government, you discuss his political history. The more Atiku speaks about Nigeria, the more you speak about Atiku. That is not rebuttal. It is displacement. An opposition politician does not need an immaculate history before he can question a government. A critic does not need to be perfect before identifying failure. If Atiku says something false, expose it. If he makes a bad proposal, dismantle it. If he misreads the economy, provide the evidence. But telling Nigerians that they should disregard his criticism because he is ambitious, controversial or historically imperfect is not democratic reasoning. It is political gatekeeping.
The real question you avoided is painfully simple: Has Nigeria become better for the ordinary Nigerian? What has happened to purchasing power, the cost of living, productive investment, employment, security and the capacity of businesses to survive? What has happened to the confidence of families trying to plan their futures? These are not Atiku’s questions alone; they belong to Nigerians. The worker knows what his salary buys. The parent knows what school fees cost. The trader knows what it takes to restock. The farmer knows the cost of production. The small business owner knows what inflation has done to capital. No political essay about Atiku’s personality can make those realities disappear.
You have also personalised what should be a policy debate. Again and again, you move from what Atiku said to what you think Atiku is. You tell Nigerians what motivates him, why he wants power and what kind of politician you believe him to be. But Nigerians do not need political psychoanalysis. They need jobs, security, purchasing power, opportunity and competent governance. They need politicians to explain how Nigeria will work and how their policies will improve ordinary lives. Arguments are tested by evidence; policies are tested by results; governments are tested by performance. None of those tests can be passed simply by producing a darker portrait of the man asking the questions.
And President Tinubu certainly does not need a “bodyguard of adjectives.” He has the presidency, the Federal Government, ministers, advisers, official data, policy documents and the institutional machinery of the state. If Atiku is wrong, the administration has more than enough capacity to prove it. So why are you doing the arguing for the government, and why is so much of that argument directed at Atiku’s personality? When a government’s defender is given an opportunity to dismantle an opponent’s substantive case but instead concentrates on the opponent’s character, Nigerians are entitled to wonder whether the substance is simply harder to defend.
So, what exactly did your submission rebut? Did you disprove Atiku’s economic diagnosis? No. Did you dismantle his alternative policy proposals? No. Did you establish that Nigerians are substantially better off? No. Did you demonstrate that the government’s economic direction is superior? No. Did you answer the substantive concerns raised in his Independence Day intervention? No. What you did was tell Nigerians that Atiku is ambitious, politically controversial, historically imperfect and supposedly disrespectful. Very well. And then what? How does any of that answer the argument? It does not. A government cannot be defended by proving that its opponent is flawed; it must be defended by proving that its own record and policies deserve public confidence.
This is why your submission reads less like a defence of the administration than an attempt to change the subject. You wanted Nigerians to examine Atiku’s past when they should be examining the government’s present. You wanted them to debate his personality when the real issue is policy. You wanted the spotlight on the man challenging power instead of the record of those exercising it. But Nigerians are not required to follow that script. They can examine Atiku’s history and still demand answers from Tinubu. They can acknowledge Atiku’s imperfections and still ask whether the government’s policies are working. Accountability is not cancelled by the imperfections of the person demanding it.
Chief Fani-Kayode, nobody is asking you to support Atiku Abubakar or abandon your political allegiance. You are entitled to defend President Tinubu. But if you choose to defend him, defend him. Do not defend economic policy by discussing political friendships. Do not defend government performance by discussing somebody’s ambition. Do not defend the present by endlessly excavating the past. Do not mistake volume for validity. An argument is not strengthened by the number of paragraphs devoted to avoiding its central question. If the administration’s record is defensible, defend it with evidence. If its policies are producing results, show Nigerians those results. If Atiku is wrong, dismantle his claims. That is the burden your submission never carried.
Atiku has put governance on the table. You have put Atiku on trial. But Nigerians are not sitting in your courtroom. They are living in theirs. Their courtroom is the market; their evidence is the price of food, the cost of transport, the state of their businesses, their security, their wages and their opportunities. Their verdict will not be based on how many adjectives Femi Fani-Kayode can deploy against Atiku Abubakar. It will be based on performance, credibility and the promise of a better Nigeria. That is the debate, and that is the contest. No amount of political invective can permanently substitute for the lived experience of millions of Nigerians.
And that is where your intervention finally collapses. You set out to discredit Atiku, but in doing so you exposed the weakness of the defence you were trying to make. You wanted Nigerians to examine the man challenging the government; Nigerians are entitled to examine the government itself. You wanted the country to debate Atiku’s past; Nigerians are living with the consequences of the present. You wanted his character to become the subject; he made governance the subject. Atiku challenged the government. You attacked Atiku. You never answered the argument. That is why your submission is not the devastating rebuttal you intended it to be. It is an elaborate argument against an argument you never actually answered, political gibberish wearing the costume of intellectual engagement.
Akin Samuel KAYODE.
Member, The Narrative Force.
