By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Let us dispense with pleasantries. Nigeria is burning. Not metaphorically. Not rhetorically. Nigeria is burning in the most literal, visceral, measurable sense of that word, and the men who struck the match are still in Aso Rock, adjusting their agbadas and congratulating themselves on their audacity.
Under the current administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress, this nation has not merely stagnated. It has been systematically looted, deliberately misdirected, and cynically abandoned. The naira has been eviscerated. Petrol queues have returned to mock the poor. Electricity tariffs have been hiked with the brazenness of men who know they will never pay a utility bill in their lives. And through it all, the presidency offers Nigerians not solutions, but slogans.
This is not governance. This is performance. And Nigerians are no longer the willing audience.
The economy has not merely stagnated. It has been deliberately unravelled, and the men doing the unravelling are calling it reform.
When Tinubu assumed office in May 2023, his apologists told us to brace for short-term pain. They promised the suffering would be temporary. That the subsidy removal, the naira float, the cascading price shocks, all of it would resolve into prosperity within months. Two years on, Nigerians are still waiting. The pain, it turns out, is not a passage. It is the destination.
Inflation has remained stubbornly ruinous. Food prices have placed basic nutrition beyond the reach of millions. The National Communications Commission, with breathtaking insensitivity, sanctioned a 50 per cent increase in telecommunications tariffs, taxing the poor on the very lifeline that connects them to opportunity, to family, to hope. These are not policy missteps. They are choices. Deliberate, considered, comfortable choices made by people insulated from their consequences.
And what of the legislature? What of the distinguished senators and honourable members elected to check executive excess, to hold power to account, to be the voice of the voiceless? They have become, to their eternal shame, the amplifiers of power’s silence. The rubber stamps. The nodding gallery. History will not be kind to them, and neither should we.
THE COST OF SQUANDERED POSSIBILITY.
It is impossible to survey this devastation without asking the question that haunts every patriot with a long enough memory: what if?
What if, in February 2023, Nigerians had elected a president who understood economics not as a tool of personal enrichment, but as an instrument of national transformation? What if the man who walked into Aso Rock had been Atiku Abubakar, a man who served as Vice-President during the single most consequential period of Nigeria’s modern economic history, who oversaw the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector that unlocked hundreds of billions of naira in investment and connected tens of millions of Nigerians to the digital economy? What if?
This is not nostalgia. This is an audit. Between 1999 and 2007, Nigeria’s GDP nearly doubled. Foreign direct investment surged. The banking sector was reformed. The telecoms revolution was ignited. These were not accidents of geography or providence. They were the products of purposeful, visionary economic management, management in which Atiku Abubakar played a central and documented role. The record exists. It is verifiable. It stands in devastating contrast to what we endure today.
Atiku did not merely promise transformation. He delivered it. The telecoms revolution of the early 2000s was not fate. It was policy. His policy.
Compare that legacy to what we have today: a presidency defined by improvisation, a cabinet of loyalists over technocrats, and an economic philosophy that appears to consist chiefly of removing subsidies, floating the naira, and hoping that the market will do what political will cannot.
It will not. It never does. Not without leadership. Not without direction. Not without a government that serves the people rather than harvests them.
THE COLLABORATORS AND THE COMPLICIT.
There are those who would counsel patience. Who would tell us that change takes time, that governance is complex, that we must not expect miracles. They are, in the main, the same voices who told us in 2023 that this administration deserved a chance. Some of them were paid to tell us that. Some of them remain on payroll.
Let us name what they are: collaborators. Collaborators in the diminishment of Nigeria’s potential, in the suffering of Nigeria’s people, in the theft of Nigeria’s future. The sycophant who crafts press releases defending the indefensible is not a neutral actor. The political godfather who trades constituency votes for ministerial appointments is not serving democracy. The media personality who cheerleads for power while Nigerians queue for fuel and weep over school fees is not an honest broker.
They have made their choices. They must live with their choices. And when the accounting comes, as it always does, in history, in reputation, in the long judgement of posterity, they will find that no ministerial portfolio, no government contract, no proximity to power was worth the price they paid.
The collaborator does not merely enable bad governance. He makes it possible. He is the infrastructure of impunity.
It is precisely because the collaborators have held the field for so long that the field must now be taken from them. Not by complaint. Not by commentary. By organisation, by numbers, and by the irreversible arithmetic of a united ballot in 2027.
2027: THE MOMENT WE HAVE BEEN PREPARING FOR.
The horizon is not as distant as it appears. 2027 is not a date. It is a decision. A decision that every Nigerian who has stood in a queue, who has watched their salary dissolve in the acid of inflation, who has counted the cost of this government in their children’s futures and their parents’ medicines, every one of them will have the power to make.
The combined opposition forces that contested the 2023 election, the African Democratic Congress, the Peoples Democratic Party, and their allies, together polled more votes than the APC. This is not a minor statistical footnote. It is a structural fact about Nigerian democracy. The majority of Nigerians who voted did not vote for this government. They were divided. And division, in a first-past-the-post system, is a gift to the incumbent.
2027 must be different. The opposition must arrive at that election not as a collection of competing ambitions, but as a unified force with a single, credible, compelling candidate at its head. A candidate whose record speaks louder than his campaign. A candidate the world knows. A candidate Nigeria needs.
That candidate exists. His name requires no introduction in these pages. The movement to restore Nigeria has already begun. The Narrative Force is part of it. The Ekiti United For Atiku Movement is part of it. Thousands of voices across the federation, from ward coordinators in Kebbi to student activists in Enugu, are part of it.
This is not a bandwagon. This is a groundswell.
The question for 2027 is not whether Nigerians want change. They do. The question is whether they will be organised enough to achieve it.
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT. DO NOT WASTE IT.
History does not wait for the comfortable or the cautious. It is made by those who understand that the cost of silence is always greater than the cost of action. Change, real, durable, structural change, demands organised, sustained, unrelenting pressure from an informed and resolute citizenry. It is not given. It is taken.
This is your moment, Nigeria. Not tomorrow. Not after the next betrayal, the next devaluation, the next tariff hike. Now. Today. While the outrage is fresh and the memory of better possibilities has not yet been extinguished by exhaustion.
Register to vote. Carry your PVC as you would carry your life. Speak to your neighbour, your market trader, your Okada rider, your colleague in the civil service. Tell them that their vote is not a lottery ticket. It is a weapon. The only legitimate weapon a democracy places in every citizen’s hand, regardless of wealth, regardless of tribe, regardless of religion. Use it.
Do not be seduced by the cynicism of those who say it does not matter, that elections in Nigeria are decided before the ballots are counted. That cynicism is itself a political project. It is manufactured to suppress turnout, to pacify the angry, to protect the comfortable. Reject it with the contempt it deserves.
Join the movement. Build the coalition. Demand the unity. Hold the candidate to account. Hold the party to account. And when 2027 arrives, arrive at the polling unit in your millions, as one people with one purpose, and close the chapter on this era of waste.
Nigeria does not lack solutions. It lacks the political will to implement them. In 2027, we supply the will.
To the young Nigerian who has never voted because they saw no point: the point is your future, and it is being decided without you. To the professional who has been too busy or too cynical to participate: the leaders you tolerate are the leaders you deserve. To every Nigerian in the diaspora watching the slow-motion tragedy from abroad: your voice matters, your networks matter, your resources matter. The distance does not excuse the silence.
The hour is late. The damage is real. But Nigeria is not finished. It is not even close to finished. This nation has survived colonialism, civil war, military dictatorship and serial economic mismanagement. It will survive Bola Tinubu. And when it does, it will do so not in spite of its citizens, but because of them.
The reckoning is coming. Be part of it.
Rise. Resist. Reclaim.
Nigeria belongs to Nigerians. Govern yourselves accordingly.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General,
The Narrative Force
Aare Atayese of Odo Oro Ekiti
