By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
The last meeting of the Federal Executive Council of the Obasanjo administration did not end with a valedictory speech. By the account of the man who sat at the President’s right hand for 8 years, it ended with luggage.
Ghana must go bags, carried into the Council chamber, filled with memoranda from the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. Not memos for deliberation. Memos for money already committed. Approvals already given. Eight years of decisions taken alone, wheeled in at the closing bell so that a Council which had never seen them could bless them on the way out of the door.
Every member of that Council understood what was being asked. One of them refused.
He asked the Secretary to the Government of the Federation to enter his position on the record. Not approved.
That man is Atiku Abubakar. And the man who hissed at him, ordered the proceedings to continue, and walked out of that chamber into 19 years of public sermons about the corruption of other people, is Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
Nigerians have been trained to receive his judgements as though they descend from a mountain. They do not. They come from a man who has never in his life submitted a single day of his own 8 years to the examination he demands of everybody else.
FOUR PORTFOLIOS, ONE MAN
Atiku’s account of how the administration began is not a slur. It is a description of an arrangement Nigerians watched for 8 years.
He has said that the President told him at the outset that he would be President, Minister of Defence, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Petroleum Resources. That the Vice President answered with the plain constitutional point, that ministers must be appointed to those offices. That the President’s reply was that even where he appointed one, he would do the work himself.
The record shows what followed. The petroleum portfolio was held by the President himself for the greater part of 1999 to 2007, with ministers of state operating beneath him. The single richest ministry in the Federation, the source of nearly every naira the country spends, was run as a personal desk in the Villa.
Atiku has further given the account that Lieutenant General Theophilus Danjuma tendered his resignation as Minister of Defence twice in that first term, and that on each occasion it was the Vice President who urged the President not to accept it. That is Atiku’s testimony, and it is set down here as his. General Danjuma is alive and at liberty to speak to it. So is every surviving member of that Council, and so is the former President himself. Let any of them say it did not happen.
WHAT ANTICIPATORY APPROVAL ACTUALLY MEANS
Nigerians should sit with the phrase, because it is the whole scandal in 2 words.
An anticipatory approval is money spent before anybody with the constitutional power to approve it has approved anything. The expenditure happens. The contract is awarded. The funds leave. The Council is then invited, sometimes years later, to ratify what it could no longer stop even if it wanted to.
It converts a constitutional body into a rubber stamp. It converts the Federal Executive Council, the highest deliberative organ of the executive arm, into a room where documents go to be dressed after the fact. This practice, entrenched in those years, has been criticised in the Nigerian press for the better part of 2 decades as an unconstitutional precedent that later administrations learned from and copied.
And in the final session, when the whole 8 years of it arrived in bags on the floor of the chamber, exactly one member said no.
Not the ministers who owed their offices to the President. Not the Council members who would need his goodwill after May 2007. One man, the second highest officeholder in the Federation, who had the most to lose and the least to gain, asked for his dissent to be written into the minutes of the Federal Republic.
Nigeria’s anti corruption movement has never produced a cleaner single act than that one.
THE SIXTH OF SEPTEMBER
There is a date that explains this quarrel better than any speech.
On 6 September 2006, President Obasanjo asked his Vice President to step out of the Federal Executive Council chamber so that the Council could consider an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission report on him. The Vice President walked out. The ministers deliberated on a man in his absence.
Hold the 2 scenes side by side, because they happened in the same room, under the same chairman, months apart.
In one, a Vice President is sent out while a document about him is read by men appointed by his accuser. In the other, the same Vice President is the only person in that chamber with the spine to refuse a bagful of expenditure nobody had authorised.
One of those men was investigated. The other one owned the process. That is not the same thing as one of them being guilty.
THE FILE HE HAS NEVER OPENED ON HIMSELF
Chief Obasanjo has spent 19 years since leaving office as the country’s self appointed examiner of other men’s morals. He writes the letters. He convenes the verdicts. He announces who is fit and who is unfit for Nigeria.
He has never once submitted the years 1999 to 2007 to the standard he applies to everybody else.
The Halliburton bribery scandal, in which foreign courts and regulators established that bribes were paid to Nigerian officials to secure the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas contracts, reached into his years and broke open while he governed. Foreign nationals went to prison abroad. His government convicted nobody at home.
The Siemens corruption case, admitted in a German court, likewise involved payments to Nigerian officials in that period. Again, no domestic conviction of consequence.
In the closing days of that administration, with the handover date already fixed, the nation’s refineries were sold to a private consortium. His successor reversed that sale within months of taking office. The objection is not to selling public assets, which this administration did openly and by law for 8 years. The objection is to a transaction rushed through on the way out of the door, in the same season and the same spirit as the bags in the Council chamber.
While still a sitting President, he raised billions of naira for his presidential library from businessmen, contractors and public officials who had matters before his government, in a single evening of pledges that Nigerians watched on television. In any serious republic that evening alone would have ended a presidency.
He held shares in a conglomerate that proceeded to acquire major national assets under his own administration.
This is the ledger of the man who calls other people corrupt. Not one line of it has ever been put to him under oath, because in this country the accuser is never audited, and this particular accuser has built an entire late career on making sure the subject stays on somebody else.
DO OR DIE
Then there is the small matter of what he did to the vote itself.
On 10 February 2007, at Abeokuta, addressing his own party, the sitting President of the Federal Republic described the coming general election as a do or die affair. Not a contest. Not a choice to be placed before the people. A do or die affair.
He said it in the open. He said it as the chief custodian of the electoral process, the man who appointed the umpire, commanded the police and controlled the security services. And the election that followed those words has been described by observers, scholars and by the beneficiaries themselves as the most discredited poll in the history of this republic. His own successor came into office publicly conceding that the process which produced him was flawed, and set up a committee to reform it.
Now ask the question nobody in this country has ever put to him. Do or die over what, exactly?
He was not on the ballot. He was leaving office. The 2 terms the Constitution allowed him were finished, and the man he had chosen to succeed him faced no serious threat from within his own party. Nothing about that election threatened Olusegun Obasanjo. Nothing, except that the name of Atiku Abubakar was going to appear on a ballot paper in front of the Nigerian people.
That is what turned a routine handover into a matter of life and death. Not a policy. Not the fate of the nation. One name on one ballot.
And watch what the machinery did in the weeks that followed those words. The apparatus of state moved to strike that name off the ballot paper altogether, so that Nigerians would never get the chance to vote for or against him. It took the Supreme Court of Nigeria to hold that the electoral commission had no such power. His name went back on. The ballot papers of the Federal Republic were reprinted, days before the country voted, because the highest court in the land had to rescue one citizen’s right to stand from the government of the day.
That is not a coincidence sitting beside a phrase. That is a stated intention followed by the attempted execution of it, in sequence, on the public record.
Understand what that means. The man who now travels the world as the conscience of Africa personally supervised the theft of the Nigerian people’s voice, announced his intention to do it 2 months in advance, and has never apologised for it a single time in 19 years.
He handed over in 1979 and has been collecting the applause ever since. He tried to abolish the very limit that would have made him hand over in 2007.
That is the whole man in 2 sentences. He wants the credit for leaving power and he wanted the pleasure of never leaving it.
THE SERIAL ANOINTER
Now look at what he does to every human being he ever raised.
He installed Umaru Musa Yar’Adua through that do or die election, and turned on the government he installed.
He was the political father of Goodluck Jonathan, then in December 2013 published a letter comparing that administration to the Abacha years, then in February 2015 tore up his membership card of the party he founded and chaired, weeks before an election, and walked out on the whole edifice.
He endorsed Muhammadu Buhari and voted for him. By January 2018 he had issued a 13 page statement instructing him not to seek a second term.
He endorsed Atiku Abubakar in October 2018 as the president to be, and turned on him again.
He moved on to another candidate in 2023 and history repeated its habits.
There is no man in Nigerian public life he has ever endorsed and not later destroyed. Not one. His blessing is not an honour, it is a lease, and the rent is total obedience.
A man who has quarrelled with every single person he ever elevated across 5 decades is not surrounded by treachery. He is the common factor.
Sunday Awoniyi, who chaired the committee that drafted the founding manifesto of the party that made him President, said it in 1999 before the man had spent one day in that office. He described Obasanjo as incapable of trusting anyone or of being loyal to anyone except himself, and called him unforgiving, vindictive and over rated.
That was a founding father of the party, on the record, 27 years ago. Nothing that has happened since has proved him wrong by a single comma.
HE WAITS FOR THE WITNESSES TO DIE
There is a pattern in this man’s accusations that Nigerians should never again be too polite to name.
The charge against Atiku over the impeachment plot was not brought in 2002. It was brought in July 2026, nearly 3 years after the only man who could have refuted it was lowered into his grave.
That is not carelessness. That is method. You do not accuse a living Speaker who can call a press conference by lunchtime. You wait. You wait until the witness box is a graveside and the reply can only come by miracle.
Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, who died by injection in Abacha’s prison, cannot speak. Ghali Na’Abba cannot speak. Sunday Awoniyi cannot speak. Alex Ekwueme cannot speak. The men who could confirm or demolish the versions of history now being sold to Nigerians are almost all beyond reach, and the last man standing has appointed himself the sole narrator of a story none of them can contradict.
He is not writing history. He is outliving the witnesses to it.
TWENTY YEARS OF LOOKING, AND NOTHING FOUND
Set against that, look at what was done to Atiku Abubakar, and what it produced.
By Atiku’s own published account, when the administrative panel was set up against him in 2006 he was a sitting Vice President clothed in constitutional immunity. He waived it. He opened his office to the investigators, among them the Attorney General of the Federation, Nasir el Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu, then chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, a body Atiku himself had helped bring into existence.
They found nothing.
The indictment that followed was, in his account, a white paper produced overnight by his own government. He challenged it in court. The courts dismissed it as political. The Supreme Court held that the electoral commission had no power to strike his name from the ballot, and the ballots of the Federal Republic were reprinted to put him back on them.
Since then, hostile administration after hostile administration has held the federal machinery. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, the Department of State Services, the entire apparatus. Ribadu, the very man who led that investigation, is today the National Security Adviser to the sitting President. The file has been in the hands of Atiku’s opponents for 20 years.
There is no charge. There is no conviction. There is no case.
One man says come and look at everything. The other man has never permitted a single day of scrutiny of his own 8 years.
THE GRAVE IS NOT A WITNESS BOX
On 23 July 2026, in a letter responding to Chief Olusegun Osoba, Chief Obasanjo alleged that Atiku handed 5 million naira to the late Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Umar Na’Abba, to begin impeachment proceedings against him.
Rt Hon Ghali Na’Abba died in December 2023.
The allegation was not made in 2002, when it is said to have happened, and when the Speaker sat in the National Assembly and could have answered it in an afternoon. It was not made in the 8 years they served together, when a President who controlled the security services could have acted on it within a day. It was not made in the 19 years since, while Na’Abba lived, spoke publicly, granted interviews and remained a well known figure in Nigerian politics.
It was made nearly 3 years after the only witness who could refute it was buried, and less than 6 months before Nigerians go to the polls.
Atiku’s answer, issued through his office, was correct and it was final. The grave is not a witness box. It is a violation of everything African culture holds about the dead to conscript a man who cannot speak into a political fight he did not choose.
And the account has already been contradicted by the living. Atiku’s media adviser has cited Abubakar Bawa Bwari, who served as Chief Whip of the House in that period and sat in the room where these things were decided, as stating that Na’Abba never sought Obasanjo’s removal, and that Atiku’s role was the exact opposite of the one alleged. He went to the legislators as the President’s own emissary.
If there was evidence of a criminal act, Nigerians are entitled to the only question that matters. Why did a government that controlled the police, the courts and the anti corruption agencies do nothing about it for 8 years?
THE ENDORSEMENT THAT CONVICTS THE ACCUSER
Here the case closes itself.
Chief Obasanjo once swore that God would never forgive him if he supported Atiku Abubakar. Then, on 11 October 2018 at Abeokuta, before cameras and a national audience, he embraced Atiku, publicly forgave him, called him the president to be and told Nigerians he was the better man for the country.
Both statements cannot be true.
Either the corruption charge was never believed by the man making it, in which case he has spent decades slandering a citizen he knew to be innocent. Or he believed it, and endorsed a man he considered corrupt for the presidency of Nigeria, which would make him unfit to lecture anybody about anything ever again.
There is no third door. Chief Obasanjo has personally destroyed the credibility of his own accusation, and he did it in public, in his own town, of his own free will.
THE REAL WOUND
Nigerians know what this is actually about, and it is not money.
It is the Third Term. In 2006 an attempt was made to amend the Constitution of the Federal Republic to extend a presidency beyond the 2 terms the people had granted. It required the National Assembly. It required the political establishment. Above all it required the Vice President, whose weight in the North could have delivered it.
Atiku Abubakar refused. He put the Constitution of the Federal Republic above his own principal and above his own comfort, and he has been paying the invoice for that refusal in every election season since.
Strip the letters, the interviews and the memoirs down to the bone and this is what remains. A man is being called a thief by another man, for the crime of stopping him from stealing the Constitution.
Every allegation since 2006 has been an instrument of that grudge. That is why they arrive in election years, in letters addressed to third parties, in interviews timed to the campaign calendar, and never once in a courtroom where a document must be produced and a witness may be cross examined.
RESTRAINT IS NOT A STRATEGY
Something must now be said plainly, and it is said in defence of the man, not against him.
The greatest injury done to Atiku Abubakar in Nigerian public life has been done by his own silence.
For 20 years he has answered a campaign of defamation with dignity. He has declined to trade insult for insult. He has allowed allegations to run for weeks before a spokesman issued a measured paragraph. He has protected the standing of an older man who has extended him no such courtesy, in obedience to a code that our public life stopped rewarding a long time ago.
Maturity is a virtue between friends. It is not a strategy against an opponent who has resolved to destroy your name and has 19 years, a global platform and a printing press with which to do it.
Silence is not received as innocence in this country. It is received as confirmation. Every season a charge goes unanswered, a fresh generation of Nigerians inherits it as settled fact, until young men and women who were not born in 1999 recite as history a thing that was never proved anywhere on earth. That is what restraint has purchased. Not peace, but a lie with 2 decades of compound interest on it.
The only man in this quarrel who has never told what he knows is the man being called corrupt.
And let nobody twist that restraint into guilt. He did not keep quiet in the room. He objected in the room, on the record, in the minutes of the Federal Republic, at the only moment when an objection could still have stopped anything. What he declined to do afterwards was carry the argument into the marketplace. Registering your dissent where it counts and refusing to gossip about it for 19 years is not complicity. It is the opposite of it.
Let it be understood, and let it be understood clearly. Atiku Abubakar sat in that government for the whole 8 years. He sat in every session of the Council. He chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation. He was in the room for the appointments, the contracts, the approvals, the reversals and the arrangements that were never written down.
The account of the 4 portfolios and the bags in the last Council session is not the file. It is the corner of the first page of the file.
He has carried the rest of it for 19 years and told the country almost none of it, at enormous cost to himself, because he believed the office he once served deserved that protection even when its occupant did not.
That season is closing.
Atiku Abubakar is prepared to place those 8 years before Nigerians in full, with the names, the dates, the memoranda and the sequence of events exactly as they happened. Not as an insult, and not in a letter to a third party six months to an election, but as testimony a citizen is entitled to give about a government he served in.
The choice of whether that happens does not belong to him. It belongs to the man who keeps opening this subject.
Any accuser determined to continue should first consider a simple question. Of the 2 men in this quarrel, which one has actually been holding his tongue, and what exactly does he know?
WHAT THE ACCUSED ACTUALLY BUILT
Strip away the noise and look at the 8 years themselves, because the achievements everyone still credits to that administration were largely run from the office of the man now being defamed.
Under the Constitution of the Federal Republic, the National Economic Council is chaired by the Vice President. Atiku chaired it for 8 years. Under the Public Enterprises Act of 1999, the National Council on Privatisation is chaired by the Vice President, and the Bureau of Public Enterprises was reconstituted to report to that Council alone. Atiku chaired that too, for 8 years.
Read those 2 sentences again, because they are law, not opinion, and they settle the question of where the reform era of that administration was actually run from.
Out of those councils came the licensing that ended the era when a telephone was a luxury of the rich and put a handset in the hand of the market woman. Out of them came the pension reform that ended the humiliation of the retired Nigerian. Out of them came the privatisation programme conducted through open competitive bidding, transaction advisers and auditors, under a statute, not at anybody’s dinner table. The economy those years produced grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars by 2007.
And the men and women the country still names as that era’s brightest, the reform generation, largely came into public life through that office and worked under that chairmanship.
They have said so themselves. Nasir el Rufai, standing in public in February 2025 with Atiku beside him, said plainly that nobody gives Atiku the credit for economic policymaking under the Obasanjo administration, and that a great deal of what they did, they did under his leadership. He added the reason, and it is the reason this article exists. Nigerians remember only the negatives, and nobody writes the history down.
There is more, and it cuts directly across the charge now being thrown at him.
By his own account, given on his own authority, it was Atiku who chaired the body that put those who had taken public money to a single plain choice. Bring it back, or go and defend yourself in court. Enormous sums returned to the treasury on those terms, quietly, without a press conference, without a parade, and without one man collecting the applause for it.
Sit with that sentence for a moment before reading further.
The man now being marketed to Nigerians as the very face of corruption is the man who sat over the recovery of stolen public money. The man doing the marketing has never mentioned it in 19 years, not in a letter, not in a memoir, not in a single interview.
And the careful, phased approach to petroleum deregulation belongs to the same office. The adjustments of those 8 years were taken in measured steps, with the regulatory framework built to carry them, so that the economy absorbed each move as it came. That path was staged and sequenced, not detonated over the heads of a poor population by a man at a podium. It was the work of people who did the arithmetic first.
So let it be written down.
The councils that produced the achievements were chaired by Atiku Abubakar. The ministry that produced the bags was held by Olusegun Obasanjo. In 19 years of speeches, letters, memoirs and interviews, the second man has never once conceded the first sentence.
That is the ministerial record of the man who has never held the office of President. It sits beside the record of the man who held 4 portfolios at once and asked a Council to ratify 8 years of his own approvals in bags.
By Atiku’s own account, told publicly and never denied, he twice acted to save Obasanjo’s life in the Abacha years. Once by warning him to flee Ota ahead of arrest. Once by warning him, in detention, to refuse the needle that had already killed their leader Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. Obasanjo, in every retelling of his rescue from that period, thanks his foreign benefactors by name and by amount, down to the last dollar of the 150,000 that paid his children’s school fees. He has never once, in some 30 years, permitted the name Atiku Abubakar to appear anywhere in that story.
A man who cannot say thank you to the person who kept him alive is not a moral authority. He is a case study.
HISTORY IS ALREADY WRITING THIS DOWN
On 16 January 2027, Nigerians will make a decision, and the noise of a 20 year old grievance will not feed a single household.
But let the record be entered properly, the way one man once insisted his own dissent be entered.
In the last session of that Council, the bags came in, the memos were tabled, the ratification was demanded and the room complied. One member alone refused, was hissed at for it, and asked that his refusal be written down.
Nineteen years later, the man who did the hissing is still touring the world as Nigeria’s moral authority, and the man who said not approved is still being ordered to prove that he is clean.
That arrangement dies here.
The record is public. The ledger is open. The silence that shielded one of these men for 19 years is ending, and when it ends this country will finally hear the half of the story it was never permitted to hear.
Let both files be read side by side. One belongs to a man who invited the investigators into his own office and was found with nothing. The other belongs to a man who has spent 2 decades making certain that nobody ever looks.
Nigerians already know which of them is afraid of the reading.
#AtikuForNigeria2027
#TheNarrativeForce
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Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
8 September 2026
