By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
The notion that the next President of Nigeria must be experienced, focused and determined is no longer a matter for debate. In 2027 it has hardened from an opinion into a national emergency. The Nigerian people, and the masses upon whose backs this government has heaped its failures, know that a leader of Atiku Abubakar’s calibre, a man whose vast experience, forensic grasp of our national wounds, and unquenchable will to heal them, is the only serious answer to a country that has been driven into the intensive care unit and left there to gasp.
This is no longer a season of promises. It is a reckoning.
Let us name the deception plainly. In 2015 they came bearing the mantra of Change. In 2019 they renamed the same emptiness Next Level. In 2023 they repackaged it once more as Renewed Hope. Three slogans, one result. The All Progressives Congress has delivered, with grim consistency, deeper hardship, sharpened disunity, spreading insecurity, entrenched poverty, a naira battered beyond recognition, and prices of food, fuel, medicine and transport that now strangle the ordinary Nigerian in his own home. Hope was not renewed. It was auctioned.
THE MASSES ARE THE VERDICT
There is no contesting the fact that the Nigerian people and the masses are the determinants of who mounts the notch of leadership in 2027. It is a verity beyond the reach of any manufactured entitlement. The power to elect the next President does not belong to those who puff and rage like a provoked adder, pouring expletives and mistaking noise for strength. It belongs to the common man, and the common man has run out of patience.
His verdict is being written at Ayedun in Ekiti, at Oguta in Imo, at Kwashi in Kaduna, at Ofrekpe in Cross River, at Kaishingi in Gombe, at Amuju in Benue, in every ward where a mother now measures her children’s meals against a market that mocks her. The masses are anguished. The economy has been shipwrecked. And no shroud of fresh mantras, no awning of personality, will persuade a hungry and frightened nation to renew the very hands that emptied its pockets and endangered its households.
A government that could not secure the harvest cannot ask the farmer for another mandate.
WHY ATIKU, AND WHY NOW
Atiku Abubakar is, indisputably, the solution to Nigeria’s leadership problem. He is deep and transcendental. He is a man of robust thinking, sharp administrative instinct and rare leadership capacity, a concentrated mind and a profoundly strategic personality who understands, as few do, the flexible and heterogeneous character of this country, and knows that its growth can be built only on sound economic policy and disciplined management that turn a suffering land into a land of opportunity.
This is not the rhetoric of a stranger. As Vice President from 1999 to 2007, he stood at the centre of an economy that grew from fifty eight billion dollars to two hundred and seventy billion dollars, a leap the present managers of our misery can only dream of. He has a working policy document for a new Nigeria, anchored on security, on the economy, on education, on healthcare, and on a fair power-sharing among our regions. He is imbued with vision, political will, inner strength and confidence in the plans he has drawn to get Nigeria working again.
And he is a workaholic, as I can personally attest. I have had cause to see him preside over meetings deep into the night, spending his strategic and tactical mind on the smallest details of national repair while others sleep on the nation’s pain. Atiku is possessed of an unstoppable dedication to hit the ground running and to pull every lever the office allows. That is why I am, and remain, Amerifiedly Atikulated.
THE COALITION OF THE RESCUED
The African Democratic Congress has become the rallying point of a broad coalition of Nigerians who have resolved that 2027 will not be another wasted cycle. On 25 May 2026, across all 8,809 wards of the Federation, ADC members queued in their millions in a nationwide direct primary and, by the party’s declared result, handed Atiku Abubakar a grassroots mandate no boardroom could manufacture. That is not the arithmetic of imposition. It is the arithmetic of a people choosing their own rescue.
The ruling party may ridicule the momentum, as it always does. Let them laugh. The masses are not asking the APC’s permission to reclaim their country.
THE ASSIGNMENT
Nigeria needs Atiku. Wherever you belong, support him. Let us carry his gospel into offices, motor parks, marketplaces, restaurants and beer parlours. Let us argue him on radio and television. Let us press his case among the youth, the women, the artisans and the communal associations. Let us write him on social media, in the pages of newspapers, in every publication that will carry truth.
On 16 January 2027, the ballot will ask one question and one question only: ruin or rescue. History is watching, and the masses have made up their minds. With the will of the people, and with God, Atiku Abubakar is the next President of Nigeria.
Atiku2027 #ADC2027 #RescueNigeria #Atikulated
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
10 August 2026
