Why the suffering millions are turning to Atiku Abubakar, and what he has committed to do with their trust
By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Before any politician is named, consider a morning in this country.
In Kano, a woman lights her fire before five o’clock to fry kosai, and by the time she has bought oil and beans she is selling yesterday’s profit at today’s prices. In Aba, a trader opens a shop he can no longer restock, and calls it business because the alternative is to call it what it is. In Benue, a Tiv farmer harvests yams he cannot move, because the lorry that used to come for them now charges more than the yams will fetch. On the road out of Bauchi, a Fulani herder walks his cattle further each season through grass that is not there. In Okene, an Ebira widow measures garri into a cup instead of a bowl and tells the children it is the same thing. In Ekiti, a teacher who has taught for nineteen years works out, in the staff room, how much of the month his salary will cover, and stops at the twelfth day.
None of this is weather. Nobody was struck by lightning. Every one of those mornings is the arithmetic of decisions taken by named men in air conditioned rooms, and it is on that ground, and no other, that the argument for 16 January 2027 must be settled.
THE TEST OF THE NAIRA SIGN
There is one test that separates a plan from a wish, and it is not eloquence.
Put a price on it. Say where the money will come from. Say in what order it will be done, and say who will be able to check.
A promise that will not carry a naira sign is a prayer with no budget line, and a prayer is what a government hands you when it intends to be judged by its intentions rather than by your plate. Ask what a programme costs and you will be told about vision. Ask where the funds are and you will be told about sacrifice. Ask who audits it and the conversation ends.
Ask a man what he will do, then ask him what it costs and who may inspect the books. The first answer is a speech. The second is a government.
Apply that test to the candidate of the African Democratic Congress and it is answered before you finish asking. Atiku Abubakar has put his economic recovery plan into writing and into public circulation ahead of the vote, named the instruments he intends to use, and invited Nigerians to examine both the plan and the man who wrote it. That is the whole meaning of a working document. It is not a leaflet of good wishes. It is a commitment placed before the people while they still hold the power to reject it.
That sequence matters more than any sentence in it. A plan published before a mandate is a plan the people can still refuse. A policy announced after a mandate is a thing you survive.
WELFARE IS NOT CHARITY, IT IS THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT
In his address to Nigerians on the night of 25 August 2026, Atiku named his two priorities without decoration: the welfare of citizens and their security. He called welfare the fundamental responsibility of government, and he said, in words that ought to be pasted on every ministry wall in Abuja, “Nigeria is rich enough to look after the welfare of its citizens.”
Read that again, because it contains an accusation and a policy at the same time.
The accusation is that the hunger in this country is not a shortage of national wealth. The policy is that a government exists to convert that wealth into the ordinary safety of ordinary life: food a labourer can buy, a clinic that has drugs, a classroom with a roof, a road that does not eat the farmer’s profit, a wage that survives the month.
The suffering Nigerian does not need to be taught economics to understand that principle. He has been living the opposite of it. When 70,000 naira is a national minimum wage and about 47 dollars is what it fetches, the citizen already knows the difference between a country that is poor and a country that is being managed poorly. When the World Bank reports that roughly six in every ten Nigerians are living below the poverty line, the figure is not news in Kano or Okene. It is a description of the compound.
THE SUBSIDY, IN THE OPEN
On the same night, on the question that has been thrown at him from every government microphone for a month, he did not blink: “I want to repeat categorically that what I said, I will return subsidy, I will.”
Understand precisely what is being committed to, because the palace is working hard to make you misunderstand it.
He is not offering to resurrect the old importation racket, that pipeline of unverifiable claims through which fortunes were made on paper cargoes. Under his recovery plan the support moves from importation to production, from middlemen to Nigerian refineries, from unverifiable claims to verifiable barrels. It is to be targeted, capped, written into the budget where you can see it, and audited by people the government does not own.
And the second half of the commitment is the part that frightens them: that those who took the money must return it. By the government’s own accounting, presented by its own tax chief, some 15.8 trillion naira was released by the withdrawal of subsidy between 2023 and the end of 2025: 5.4 trillion to the federal government and 10.4 trillion shared among the states and the local governments. The people who bore that pain in their transport fare, their food, their rent and their school fees are entitled to ask, kobo by kobo, where every naira of it went, in Abuja and in all 36 state capitals alike. Atiku’s charge is that the savings never reached them. The government has not published the ledger that would answer him.
Deregulation was never the crime. Doing it to a people without cushioning them, and then losing the proceeds, is the crime.
This is not a new instinct in the man. The measured, phased path out of fuel subsidy in this country was the work of the administration in which he served, taken in deliberate steps across eight years through a pricing framework built for the purpose, so that the economy absorbed each move. The method was gradual because the people were the point.
POWER RETURNED TO WHERE THE PEOPLE LIVE
The other half of his creed has been constant for as long as he has been in public life, and it is the most pro-people idea in Nigerian politics: bring government back within reach of the governed.
He has committed to devolving power to strong federating units, with a lean centre holding defence, foreign affairs and monetary policy; to resource control that lets a state develop what lies under its own soil; to state policing, so that the man who investigates a kidnapping in Katsina is answerable in Katsina; and to doing all of it through constitutional amendment, not decree.
The suffering masses feel the absence of this every single day, even where they have no vocabulary for it. It is why a rural road waits fourteen years for a federal contractor. It is why a police division four hours from the shrine of authority cannot act until Abuja is consulted. It is why a state with fertile land, cattle, cocoa, lithium or gas must send its wealth to the centre and then queue to beg for a fraction of it back. In his acceptance of the ADC ticket he put the promise in one line: empower the states to compete and attain their full potential.
A MAN WHO HAS DONE IT BEFORE
Everything above would still be argument if it were not for the record.
Between 1999 and 2007, as Vice President, Atiku Abubakar chaired the National Economic Council under the Constitution and the National Council on Privatisation under the Public Enterprises Act. Those are not honorary titles. Both chairmanships are statutory, written into the Constitution and into the law itself, and the man who held them for eight years has the receipts of what came out.
The economy he helped steer grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars by 2007. Foreign reserves rose from 3.7 billion dollars to about 45 billion. Nigeria settled with the Paris Club in 2005, with 18 billion dollars written off, and walked out of that debtors’ prison in 2006. In 1999 this country of over 100 million people had fewer than 500,000 telephone lines; the licences auctioned in 2001 put a phone in the hand of the woman frying kosai, and no policy in our lifetime has done more for the poor man’s ability to trade. The administration’s banking consolidation took 89 fragile banks down to 25 that could actually lend. The Pension Reform Act of 2004 gave the Nigerian worker a retirement that was not a rumour. The police went from about 120,000 officers to over 300,000. More than 100 public enterprises were reformed or divested, among them Eleme Petrochemicals, the state cement plants and the seaport concessions of 2005 and 2006.
And before any of it, twenty years in the Customs service, retirement in 1989 as a Deputy Director, and a university built at Yola with his own money that stayed open through an insurgency and fed displaced people in their hundreds of thousands.
Ask the naira-sign question of that record and it answers in figures, in years, and in names of institutions still standing.
WHY THEY ARE WALKING TOWARDS HIM
Nobody is being carried. That is what the palace propagandists cannot process.
The ticket itself was taken in a queue in the wards, in the sun, by ordinary members, and not in a hall of hired delegates. And the movement now gathering behind it is made of people who were not consulted about their own suffering and have decided to be consulted about the remedy.
They are not embracing a saviour. They are recognising a workman. In a field where three candidates divide one half of the country, he stands as the only presidential candidate from the North, while the hunger that drives the vote respects no zone at all. From Sokoto to Aba, the same market woman is doing the same arithmetic.
Our own arithmetic at The Narrative Force is simple and public: at least 100 verified votes in every one of the 176,846 polling units of this Federation, and more than that wherever we are strong, guarded from the thumbprint to the collation centre, is the road to 20 million votes. Not a slogan. A morning’s work, repeated everywhere on the same day.
We declare our interest openly, as advocacy should. The Narrative Force is for Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi, it signs its name to every word it publishes, and it asks every Nigerian to organise as visibly. Winning the narrative before the election is our preoccupation, so that no citizen joins that queue on 16 January 2027 without having met the case.
129 DAYS
The people frying beans at five in the morning have already made their assessment, and they made it without a single press statement from Abuja.
Their question is the only one that will be on the ballot: who has written down what he will do, priced it, published it in advance, and can be inspected on a record he has already run?
Bring your PVC. Bring your neighbour. Guard the count.
Ìgbà díẹ̀ ló kù. Lokaci kaɗan ne ya rage. Obere oge ka ọ fọdụrụ.
#Atiku2027 #AtikuAmaechi2027 #ADC #January16 #InformedInspiredInvolved
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
10 September 2026
