By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Somewhere in Nigeria this morning, a mother did the arithmetic of a single meal and came up short. A graduate refreshed a visa page instead of a job board. A trader watched a number on a price tag climb again, as if the naira in her hand were melting between her fingers.
We have been taught to call this normal. To shrug. To survive. To expect less of our country with each passing year until expecting nothing feels like wisdom.
Refuse it. The Nigeria that works is not a fairy tale someone invented to win your vote. It is a memory. We have lived in it before. And it is closer than the people profiting from your despair will ever admit.
So picture it with me, clearly and without apology. Because a people who can no longer imagine a better country will never summon the will to build one.
AN ECONOMY THAT REMEMBERS THE POOR
Picture a market where the conversation is about what to buy, not about what vanished out of reach since last week.
This is not borrowed from another country. It is our own history. Between 1999 and 2007, in an era Atiku Abubakar helped to shape, the economy climbed from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars. Businesses opened. The private sector breathed. The phone in your hand went from a rich man’s toy to a tool in millions of pockets.
Now hear the honest part, because you have earned honesty. Atiku believes in a competitive economy, and he will not pretend otherwise. But there is a world of difference between reform that is sequenced, explained and cushioned, and reform dropped on the poorest overnight with no shield and no mercy.
A market economy that forgets the market woman is not courage. It is abandonment wearing a bold face. The proof that the fairer road is real is not a theory in a manifesto. It happened here, within living memory, built by hands that are still willing to work.
WHY HIM, AND WHY NOW
They will tell you he has sought this before, and they will say it like an insult. Let them.
A man who has run a federal government, steered a national economy and spent decades inside the machinery of this country is not a gamble taken in the dark. We are living, right now, through the daily cost of leadership that learned on the job. We pay that tuition at the fuel station and the bureau de change every single morning.
In a season this dangerous, a tested hand is not a relic of the past. It is the thing the moment is screaming for.
Experience is only a weakness in good times. In hard times it is the difference between a country that is steered and a country that is merely driven into the wall.
POWER CLOSER TO THE PEOPLE
Picture a state that no longer travels to Abuja with a begging bowl to fix a road its own children walk to school on.
For years Atiku has pressed an idea this country keeps returning to. Bring power closer to the people who feel its absence. Let the federating units breathe, take charge of their own development, and answer directly to the citizens they serve.
Devolution is not the breaking of Nigeria. It is the strengthening of it. A nation governs best when government sits within arm’s reach of the governed, not locked away in one distant city deciding the fate of places it has never seen.
A FUTURE THAT KEEPS OUR CHILDREN HOME
Picture a graduate who spends the morning after their degree building something here, not queuing outside an embassy.
This is the wound that should keep us all awake. Not a statistic, but the silence at the dinner table where a brilliant son or daughter used to sit. We educate our best, then watch them leave, because we could not give them one good reason to stay. A country that exports its finest is a country eating its own future.
The cure is not a lecture about patriotism. It is giving the young something worth staying for. Real investment in their schooling and skills. An economy with room in it. The plain dignity of work. Keep them, and they will build the very nation they are now fleeing.
ONE NATION, FAIRLY SHARED
Picture a Nigeria where no region feels like a guest in its own house.
Atiku has spent a lifetime building bridges across this country’s many lines. The vision is not one section’s turn to rule over the rest. It is a federation where every part can see itself in the centre, where fairness is something felt rather than merely promised. A Nigeria fairly shared is a Nigeria worth holding together, and a country worth holding together is one we all have a reason to invest in.
THE DOOR IS NOT LOCKED
On 16 January 2027, the country will be handed a single question. Manage the decline, or choose to build again.
And there is something real to build with. A genuine safety net to carry the poorest through the hard work of reform. Real investment in the education the young are owed. Power and resources pushed back down to the states that know their own needs. These are not slogans. They are choices, and the only people who can make them are the millions who still believe this country can be more than its present pain.
So do not let anyone convince you the future is a closed door. It is not closed. It is simply waiting to be walked through, and the date it swings open is already on the calendar.
Stop surviving Nigeria. Let us go and build it.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
