By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
The Yoruba have a word for a certain kind of man. Alátẹnujẹ. The one who eats from his mouth. His tongue is his farm, his shop and his salary. He plants nothing, builds nothing, carries nothing. He only talks, and he talks for whoever is feeding him that season.
Otunba Segun Showunmi is Alátẹnujẹ in its purest form.
On Thursday in Abuja, before a room of editors, this Alátẹnujẹ issued a threat. If Atiku Abubakar comes after him, he said, he knows where the skeletons are buried.
So hear us clearly, Otunba. We are ready for you. Not tomorrow. Today. Bring everything. Bring the file, the folder, the flash drive and the exercise book. Empty your pockets on the table in front of the cameras. The Narrative Force is waiting, and we have been reading your own words all morning.
THE GRAMMAR OF A COWARD
Look at how he framed it. Not “here is the evidence”. Not “I will publish on Monday”. Only this: if Atiku comes after me.
That is not the language of a patriot. It is the language of a man negotiating his own safety. A citizen who knows of real wrongdoing by a man seeking the presidency carries it to the EFCC, to the police, to the courts, to the nation. He does not fold it into his pocket like a pawn ticket and wait to redeem it the day he feels threatened.
Truth that waits for provocation is not truth. It is ransom.
The plain word for what he did in that room is blackmail. And blackmail is the weapon of a man who has nothing to sell but fear.
The EFCC is in Abuja. The courts are in Abuja. The editors were in front of him with their notebooks open. He had the whole Nigerian press in one room and delivered nothing but noise. That is the Alátẹnujẹ trade: all mouth, no merchandise.
THE TRAP HE BUILT FOR HIMSELF
Showunmi was Atiku’s spokesman through the last presidential campaign. Day after day, he stood before the cameras and swore to Nigerians that Atiku was fit to lead them.
So which is it, Otunba?
Either he knew of these “skeletons” then, and lied to every Nigerian who listened to him, every single day he was paid to speak. Or there are no skeletons at all, and he is lying now to please his new table.
There is no third door. Whichever one he walks through, he comes out a liar. The only question left is which lie he wants to be remembered for.
And Tinubu’s men should take careful note. A spokesman who turns on the principal he once spoke for has just published his price list. What he threatens Atiku with today, he will threaten Tinubu with the morning his chair is pulled away. Alátẹnujẹ has no loyalty. He has only an appetite. The Villa should count its spoons.
HE SWORE BY GOD
On Arise Television, asked whether he might support Tinubu in 2027, Showunmi swore that if he ever did, “by God and everything that is in me, I’ll leave and join his party.” He sneered at the nonsense of sitting in one party while working for another.
Today he sits on the Communication and Strategy Committee of the APC Presidential Campaign Council and calls himself a card-carrying member of the PDP.
He called God as his witness. Then he did the exact nonsense he swore against, with the cameras still warm. A man who will trample an oath sworn in the name of God before the whole nation will not hesitate to invent a secret. If his oath is worthless, his “skeletons” are worth even less.
THE MAN WHO CLOSED HIS EYES
In January 2024, Showunmi asked whether anyone expected him to fight Tinubu harder than he already had. He said he had known Tinubu since 1993 “by name and by voice”, and that for his party’s sake he was closing his eyes to everything.
Closing his eyes to everything. Those were his words, not ours.
In November 2024 he launched The Alternative, a coalition he said would rescue Nigeria’s democracy from the APC. He toured the North, stood in Katsina, and warned that Tinubu’s acceptability there was doubtful and that those boasting without research would be shocked. He predicted Atiku would take the ADC ticket, called him fully committed to the race, and declared the North, rural and urban, deeply aggrieved.
Has the North become less aggrieved since Katsina? Has the price of a bag of rice fallen? Has a single kidnapped villager come home because Showunmi changed his mind? No. Nothing in Nigeria moved between Katsina and Abuja except Segun Showunmi’s plate.
Now the man who knew Tinubu “by name and by voice” for over thirty years calls him “a thousand times wiser” than everyone on the ballot. When a man tells you he has closed his eyes to everything, believe him. A blind guide is still blind, whichever master holds his hand.
HE CALLS YOU UNEDUCATED
Now hear the worst of it, suffering Nigerians. Showunmi says only uneducated Nigerians would complain about the removal of fuel subsidy.
That is what he thinks of you.
The okada rider in Onitsha who now pours half his day’s takings into his tank: uneducated, says Showunmi. The Tiv farmer in Benue whose yams rot because transport to market costs more than the harvest: uneducated. The Hausa trader in Kano whose shop has gone quiet since customers stopped coming: uneducated. The teacher in Ado Ekiti whose salary dies at the filling station before the month is half gone: uneducated.
They are not uneducated, Otunba. They are hungry. And hunger is the most educated professor in this republic. It has taught every lesson your new masters refuse to learn.
In the same breath he defended his principal’s plan to skip rallies, saying Tinubu needs no further physical engagement to win. So the candidate will not come to the people, and his Alátẹnujẹ insults the people who cannot reach him. That is the whole APC 2027 campaign in two sentences: stay away from them, and abuse them from a distance.
READ THE BOOK BEFORE YOU QUOTE IT
In Abeokuta, Showunmi said Atiku’s subsidy plans would drag Nigeria back to Egypt, and called Atiku inordinately ambitious.
He quotes a book he has clearly not read. When Israel cried in the wilderness for the fleshpots of Egypt, it was hunger that made them cry. And heaven answered them not with a lecture, not with mockery of their schooling, but with manna. Moses did not call the starving uneducated. He fed them.
Tinubu marched Nigerians into a wilderness and fed them sermons on patience. Atiku has put his working plan before the people: support that is targeted, capped, budgeted and independently audited, aimed at Nigerian production rather than importation, and the recovery of savings that never reached the people who paid for them in tears. That is not Egypt. That is manna with an audit trail.
And inordinate ambition? In three years, this Alátẹnujẹ has been the opposition’s spokesman, the PDP’s self-appointed reformer, the convener of a coalition to remove Tinubu, and now Tinubu’s hired voice. His ambition has bought from every stall in the market and paid no stallholder twice. He is the last man in Nigeria entitled to say the word “ambition” aloud.
AN ECHO FOR HIRE
Segun Showunmi has never had a voice. He has only had employers. Atiku one season. PDP reform the next. The Alternative after that. Tinubu today. Tomorrow, whoever sets the next table.
That is not a voice. It is an echo. An echo has no conviction of its own; it repeats whatever was last shouted into the hollow, and it falls silent the moment the shouting stops.
So we say to him once more, plainly: we are ready for you, Alátẹnujẹ. Bring your skeletons. Bring your cupboard. Bring your oath that God has already heard you break. The Narrative Force will meet you on every platform, in every studio and in every comment section, and we will meet you with your own words.
On 16 January 2027, Nigerians will not be listening to echoes. They will be listening to their empty pots, their children’s unpaid school fees and their dead shops. That voice no blackmailer can silence and no campaign council can buy.
93 days. Open the cupboard, Otunba, or shut your mouth.
#Atiku2027 #ADC2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
16 October 2026
