By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Hear the verdict before you hear the argument, because the argument only proves what the verdict already knows.
A united North is Tinubu’s eviction notice. A South West that breaks from blind loyalty is the lock changed behind him. A South South that supports Atiku seals his eviction.
That is not a slogan. That is an arithmetic, a strategy, and a sentence, all in three lines. And I bring it to you as the last person you would expect to carry it.
They expect me to clap. By blood, by region, by the name I bear and the title I hold, I am supposed to stand with my people and applaud the son Lagos gave to the nation. And it is from inside his own house that I rise to say the thing they pay good money to keep buried: this man has wounded Nigeria, he has savaged the North beyond all others, and these hands will not move to clap for him. I have come instead to help change the locks.
Understand why that should stop you where you stand. When a Northerner says Tinubu ruined the North, the palace sweeps it aside as the bitterness of the losing side. But I am not a Northerner. I am of his tongue, his region, his kin, and I am telling you the wound is real. That testimony they cannot bury under the word tribalism. That is why I give it. That is why it frightens them.
A man’s own household is the last place he expects the truth, and the first place he cannot deny it.
So let us be honest where honesty cuts deepest. No serious person pretends the rotten subsidy cabal could have lived forever. The crime of this government was never that it touched the subsidy. The crime was how. It tore the prop away in a single night, with no buffer beneath the fall, no palliative made ready, no cushion laid for the farming North that lives and dies by the price of transport. A surgeon may have to cut. Only a butcher cuts without anaesthesia and calls the screaming a reform. Tinubu cut like a butcher. The whole nation screamed. The North screamed loudest.
And do not swallow the lie that the South West was spared. I live here. I watch my own people count their naira at the stall and carry home a lighter bag than the week before. The fuel that crippled Kano crippled Ibadan. The fare that broke Maiduguri broke Lagos. They tell us the South feasts while the North starves, and they tell it for one purpose only, to keep us divided, suspicious, and asleep. We are not feasting. We bleed with you. We have only learned to bleed quietly.
The naira repeated the wound. A currency can be freed without being flung off a cliff. This government floated it with nothing to steady it and nothing to hold it, then stood by as it dissolved into a shadow, taking the savings of ordinary families in Ekiti as surely as in Adamawa. Now they wave a falling inflation figure like a trophy. Be not deceived by their arithmetic. A slower climb is not a descent. The bag of rice that doubled has not halved back, and food and transport are rising again even as they boast. To pile a smaller percentage on top of an already doubled price and call it relief is to tell a bleeding man he should be grateful the bleeding has merely slowed. And through it all the old terror never left. The bandits still ride into Zamfara and Katsina. The kidnappers still harvest schoolchildren like a season’s crop. The Lake Chad country still trembles. They swore to end the siege. They handed the North its continuation and demanded thanks.
Now look at the house, and the eviction explains itself.
The landlord sits in Bourdillon and governs as though the federation were an estate to be milked. He will point to Kashim Shettima and cry, behold, a Northerner stands beside me. Then ask the only question that matters. Which chair? The principal’s chair, where the policy is forged, or the deputy’s chair, where the coat is merely carried? Shettima sits in the second. The lash that fell on the North was never drafted at his desk. He absorbs the region’s fury and hands the master’s policy back to Northern ears in a Northern accent. That is not power. That is decoration. The North was given no partner in this government, only an alibi for it. And an alibi cannot save a man once the keys begin to turn.
So let the keys turn, three of them, in their order, for no single one of them turns the bolt alone.
The first is the North, and the North is the notice. This is the giant that bled the most, the largest single vote bloc in the federation, the mass without which no eviction in this country has ever carried. Against the ornament who merely holds the coat stands Atiku Abubakar of Adamawa, a wounded son of a wounded region, who seeks not the deputy’s chair but the very seat where the lash is forged, so that he may break it across his knee. He warned, before the butchery, that reform without preparation would crush the poor. He was right, and the North paid for being ignored. But weight alone does not evict a landlord who still owns the floor beneath the tenant’s feet. The North brings the numbers. It cannot finish the matter by itself.
That is why the second key is the South West, and the South West is the lock. Here is where I plant my own feet, in his backyard, with my hands at my sides while the room applauds. They will call me a traitor to my race. Let them. The highest honour a Yoruba child can offer her people is the truth, even when the truth indicts our own son. Omoluabi was never silence before suffering. It is the courage to speak when speaking costs everything. We gave Nigeria this President. We, above all others, owe Nigeria the courage to correct the gift.
Now hear me plainly, for I will not sell you a fantasy. We will not take the South West from him, and we do not need to. His entire arithmetic of survival assumes this zone hands him a near-total bloc, ninety where he banks on ninety. He does not budget for a fight here. He budgets for a fortress. So we need only crack it. A South West that merely fractures, that gives him sixty where he counted on ninety, blows a hole in his sums that no other zone can mend. We do not evict him from his own backyard. We make the backyard refuse to pay what it owes him. The North serves the notice. The West denies him the floor he was standing on.
And still the door must be shut for good, which is the work of the third key, the South South, and the South South is the seal. Beside Atiku stands Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers, and let no one reduce him to the jersey he once wore. What matters is not that he was inside the machine but that he walked out of it and turned to testify against it. The man who could have stayed for comfort and chose exposure instead is more dangerous to the landlord than any stranger in the street, because his indictment is sworn, not shouted. The creeks that have fuelled this entire federation while their own waters were left to rot have every reason to close this door. Let the South South throw its weight to Atiku and the eviction passes beyond notice and beyond turned lock into a thing sealed, a verdict with no avenue of appeal.
And let no one ask, in bad faith, where the South East stands in all this, as though its silence in my arithmetic were a gap. It is no gap. I will not insult that zone by annexing a loyalty it has not offered. The South East is going to Peter Obi, and I say so plainly, because honesty is the only currency that buys belief. But a South East locked behind Obi is a South East locked against Tinubu, and that is the point. It will give the landlord nothing. It owes him nothing. While the three keys shut the door, the South East bars the window through which he would otherwise climb back in. Do not mistake this for the scattering I warned against. Within a single zone, division is fatal, and the North must never split itself between Atiku and another. But across the zones, a landlord shut out of the North, bled in the West, sealed in the South South and barred in the South East is not facing a scattered opposition. He is facing encirclement. That is a different thing entirely, and it is the thing he cannot survive.
The North brings the mass. The West denies him the floor. The South South removes his appeal. The South East bars his escape. Each closes a different door. Together they leave him nowhere to stand. And no court, no compromised card reader, no result rewritten in the dark hours opens what those hands have shut.
This is the whole secret of 2027, and it is why they labour so hard to keep these regions apart, whispering to each that its grievance is its own, that its neighbour is its rival, that nothing it does will count. It is a lie engineered for a single outcome, that a government which won only a plurality, rejected by most of the very ballots cast in that election, slips back through the gap of our division. Deny them the gap. Let the North gather its fist. Let the West withdraw the floor. Let the South South lend its weight. Let the South East hold its line. One encirclement, no exit.
So the question is no longer partisan, and it is no longer the North’s alone to carry. It is mine, here, in the heartland of his own people, refusing to clap while the room applauds. Will the giant that bled the most reward the government that bled it, simply because a Northerner was permitted to sit, ornamental and powerless, two steps behind the throne? Will my own South West keep delivering, unbroken, the very margin that keeps him standing? Will the South South keep feeding a house that starves it? Or will we, across every wounded region, for one decisive season, read the same verdict and deliver it as one?
The hand that bled you is on the ballot again, and it is begging for your applause. I am of that hand’s own region, and I say it to your face and to mine: do not give him your applause. Give him his eviction.
The wounded North has wept long enough. The watchful West has held its tongue too long. The bled South South has fed this house too long. In 2027, let every wounded region rise. Let them roar as one. And let the man in Bourdillon hear, above the noise of those still clapping, the sound of his own keys turning in a lock he can no longer open.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
18 June 2026
