By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a boy in Jada who does not know your name.
He is eleven years old. His father is dead. Nobody knows where his school fees will come from. Tonight he will eat once, if he eats at all. Tomorrow he will pass a hospital with no drugs in it and a checkpoint where the officer is not ashamed of what he collects. No big man in Abuja has ever called that boy’s name.
Sixty nine years ago, that boy was Atiku Abubakar.
Think about what I have just told you. The man the APC has been laughing at for ten years is the only man in this race who has actually lived the life that millions of Nigerians are living today. He was not born rich. He did not marry money. Nobody opened any door for him. He lost his father at eleven. He fed himself. He pushed himself through school. He built his first house before he was thirty, with his own hands and his own sweat.
And let us clear one thing now, because they whisper it in the dark and never say it in the open. Atiku Abubakar has never been convicted of any drug offence. He has never been found guilty of dealing in drugs or eating money from drugs. Not in Nigeria. Not anywhere. He has never been convicted of corruption. He has never been convicted of any crime at all, in any court, in any country, in a public life of more than forty years. What he built, he built by working.
That is not a campaign story. That is a warning to them.
Because a man who has been hungry does not need anybody to explain hunger to him. He does not need a consultant to tell him the price of a bag of rice. He has carried the bag home himself.
You cannot teach a man about the desert if he walked out of it barefoot.
NOW LET US COUNT
Let us leave fine words and go to figures, because talk without figures is just noise, and I do not sell noise.
February 2023. The man who won that election got about eight point eight million votes. But over ninety three million Nigerians were registered to vote. Read that again slowly. Fewer than one in four registered Nigerians even came out. And of those who came out, most of them voted against him.
That is not the country choosing a leader. That is a small crowd deciding for everybody else while the rest of us stayed at home.
So what have they done with the power we handed them? Ask the trader whose capital has finished. Ask the graduate riding okada in the rain. Ask the woman in Zamfara, in Benue, in Plateau, who now counts the days of the week by the last attack on her village. Ask the student who cannot go back to school. Ask the pensioner who queues for money that comes late and buys nothing when it finally comes.
So I ask the ruling party one simple question, and I ask it calmly. Where are your new votes coming from?
They will not answer. Their silence is the answer.
They did not win Nigeria in 2023. They won a quarter of it on the day the rest of us stayed at home. In 2027 the rest of us are coming out.
THE THING THAT SAVED THEM IS FINISHED
Here is the truth that keeps them awake at night.
They did not beat us in 2023. We beat ourselves. Two opposition candidates shared thirteen million votes between them, and handed the Presidency to a man who scored less than nine. That was not cleverness on their part. It was an accident, and they have been eating from that accident ever since.
The accident has now been repaired.
The African Democratic Congress is no longer just a party. It is the whole opposition living under one roof, and that roof went up in 2026. David Mark is there. Rauf Aregbesola is there, a man who knows how the ruling party is wired inside because he helped to wire it. Governors are there. Senators. Ward chairmen. Market women. Artisans. And the old CPC people who once delivered the North for another man have walked out of the APC in broad daylight and joined us.
And on 25 May 2026, that house made its choice in the open. No anointing. No deal in a hotel room. An open contest before the whole country. One point eight million votes for Atiku Abubakar, against five hundred thousand for the next man.
Standing with him is Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi. Adamawa and Rivers. North and South. One ticket that carries the whole map of Nigeria on its face and does not need to beg any part of this country for permission to exist.
THE RECORD THEY CANNOT BURN
They say he is old. They said the same about the man in Aso Rock, until saying it stopped being useful to them.
They say he has contested before. Buhari contested four times and they called it destiny. So refusing to give up is only a crime when the opposition does it.
But there is one thing they never mention, and they never mention it because the record will not let them.
Between 1999 and 2007, with Atiku Abubakar heading the National Economic Council and driving the reform work, Nigeria’s economy grew from fifty eight billion dollars to two hundred and seventy billion dollars. The telephone business was opened up, and the phone in your hand today came out of that decision. Nigeria’s debt was negotiated down and this country walked free of about thirty billion dollars we were owing. A whole generation of Nigerian businesses was born in those years.
Then comes their tired excuse. It was only oil money.
Was it?
Every government since independence has had oil money. Only one of them saved it. That was when the Excess Crude Account was built. And it was that savings account, together with the debt relief, that carried Nigeria safely through the world financial crash of 2008, while bigger countries were shaking and begging.
Anybody can spend a boom. Surviving the end of a boom is the real work.
Now look at what has been done with the oil money since then, and tell me again that the difference was luck.
And before you talk to me about character, remember what he was in uniform. A Customs officer whose own colleagues, men who had every reason to be jealous of him, still speak today about his honesty. A man who stood in the way when standing in the way was dangerous. Everything he built, he built here, in Nigeria, in his own name, employing Nigerians with his own money.
Now put that beside the record of the government we have today. Put it beside the matters on American court record from 1993 that this ruling party has never, in thirty years, explained to Nigerians.
Then look me in the face and tell me which of these two men is not fit to lead.
WHAT LANDSLIDE REALLY MEANS
Let us be clear, because clear thinking is what our opponents fear most.
A landslide is not shouting in a beer parlour. A landslide is four things happening on the same day. The government’s vote collapses. The opposition votes as one. The young and the hungry come out in large numbers. And the votes are protected from the polling unit all the way to the collation centre.
Three of those four are already done. The fourth one is your own work, and it is not optional.
Register. Collect your PVC. Take your polling unit as personally as you take your own surname. Vote early. Then stay there. Do not move. Watch the counting with your own two eyes. Take a photograph of the result sheet before you leave. Do not go home.
In 2023 our votes were not only outnumbered. In too many places our votes were simply left alone, like a small child sleeping in a house with the door open.
A vote you cast and abandon is a vote you have donated to the other side. Cast it, then guard it with your body.
ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DAYS
Today is 21 July 2026. One hundred and eighty days remain until Nigerians choose a President on 16 January 2027, and one hundred and ninety six days until the governorship election of 6 February.
One hundred and eighty days. Not one of them is spare. Not one of them belongs to you to waste.
So to our friends in the APC, to the cynics, to the people paid to laugh at us, we say this without bitterness and without apology. Keep laughing. Keep buying commentary by the yard. Keep telling Nigerians that a government presiding over this much hunger deserves a second helping. History has a very settled way of dealing with that kind of confidence.
And in January, when the returning officer stands before this nation and reads out the figures, we will not gloat. We will not need to.
We will simply watch your mouth move, slowly and painfully, around three words you swore for four years you would never say.
President Atiku Abubakar.
The boy from Jada is coming. Nobody called his name then. Everybody will call him Mr President now.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
21 July 2026
