By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Àgbà kì í wà lọ́jà kí orí ọmọ tuntun wọ́. An elder does not sit in the market and watch a newborn’s head get twisted.
The elders of the South West are in the market. They have read the Sunday PUNCH report on the “marginalisation” of the ADC in this zone. They have watched a few men try to twist the head of a campaign that is only beginning to stand up. And they will not stay silent.
Read the report twice. The first time it reads like an indictment. The second time you see what it is: a rumour wearing a tie. Every charge in it is anonymous. Every person who agreed to be named rejected the charge. That is not a crisis in the ADC. It is a handful of men who lack the courage to speak in the open, borrowing a newspaper’s front page to say it for them.
FIVE ACCUSERS, NOT ONE FACE
Count them. “One of the governorship candidates.” “An ADC leader.” “A party official.” “Some ADC insiders.” “An ADC House of Assembly candidate in Ekiti.”
Five accusers, and not one face. Five complaints, and not one signature.
Now count those who gave their names. The Lagos State Chairman, George Ashiru, said there has been no sidelining. The Osun State chapter, through its Publicity Secretary, Oluwaseun Abosede, said there is no rancour and that the party is following a deliberate roadmap. Atiku’s Director of Strategic Communication, Dr Phrank Shaibu, called the claim untrue and described it as opposition conjecture.
The only complainant who gave his name, Adewole Ijaogbomo, did not accuse Atiku at all. His quarrel was with “some individuals” in Lagos whom he suspects of positioning themselves around campaign funds. He even said Atiku “doesn’t want to offend anybody.” When the prosecution’s only named witness testifies to the good character of the accused, the case is over before it has begun.
In the daylight, the party stands with Atiku. In the shadows, a few voices stand against him. Nigerians have learnt to trust the daylight.
A charge that will not sign its name is not a grievance. It is a gamble.
YOU CANNOT BE LOCKED OUT OF A HOUSE THAT HAS NOT BEEN BUILT
The whole story stands on one false foundation: that Atiku has shut the party out of his campaign structure in the South West.
But the report itself admits that the structure does not yet exist. State coordinators have not been announced. State campaign councils have not been constituted or inaugurated. Nobody can be locked out of a house that has not been built.
The accusers also confuse two different institutions. A party executive is not a campaign council. The party owns the platform; the candidate leads the campaign; the campaign council is the strategy engine that drives him to victory. Ashiru said it plainly: its members need not be party executives, and the party’s role is to support it. Demanding that every party officer be written into the campaign team is not party supremacy. It is a request for a seat at a table they do not understand.
And the story undermines itself. It reports that on 5 September, the day after the Ibadan meeting, Atiku met South West ADC leaders virtually, reaffirmed his loyalty to the party, and asked each state to submit 5 party members for appointment to his campaign committee. Then on 17 September the South West state chairmen sat with him in Abuja.
Two meetings in two weeks. Names requested from the party itself. If that is marginalisation, what does engagement look like? The real complaint is not that the party was ignored. It is that the appointments have not yet arrived on the accusers’ timetable.
THE TRANSPORT FARE THAT TOLD THE WHOLE STORY
Every rumour carries one line that gives the game away. In this one it is about transport fare.
A “party official” complained that state chairmen travelled to Abuja to meet their presidential candidate and he did not pay their fares. Read that again. Men who claim to defend the dignity of the party are complaining that the candidate did not hand them money at the door.
State chairmen are officers of the party, and their chapters fund their work. The era when one man carried every financial burden of a political party, down to the fares of its officials, belongs to the moneybag politics Nigerians are trying to bury. Ashiru named it exactly when he spoke of people “so focused on money coming from the presidential candidates.”
Watch how the accusers shift their ground. When Atiku keeps his long-standing allies, they say he is ignoring the party. When he refuses to pay their fares, they say he is starving the party. The constant thread is not the welfare of the ADC. It is access to the candidate’s purse.
Then there is the sneer that Atiku is “just targeting his 25 per cent in the region.” Twenty five per cent is the constitutional floor in two thirds of the states, not the ceiling of a serious man’s ambition. This is the candidate who won Osun in 2023. He is the only Northern candidate in a race where the South West vote is split among Southern contenders. He is not aiming for the floor. He is coming for the house.
Atiku is not trying to survive the South West. He is coming to win it.
ATIKU DOES NOT RENT LOYALTY
The accusers’ deepest complaint is that Atiku works with his friends. Let them hear the answer clearly.
Atiku Abubakar does not rent loyalty. He earns it, and he keeps it. Many of the men and women around him walked with him through dictatorship, exile, betrayal and three decades of storms. He has never left a friend by the roadside to buy a stranger’s applause.
A man who would abandon his friends to please you today would abandon you tomorrow to please someone else. Loyalty is not a weakness in a leader. It is the only guarantee the people have that he will not desert them when power arrives.
A man who discards his friends to please his critics will discard you next.
WE KNOW THE EKITI VOICE
One of the anonymous accusers needs no mask in Ekiti. The report quotes “an ADC House of Assembly candidate in Ekiti” calling the South West ADC dull and claiming “only his friends” are involved in Atiku’s campaign.
We name him, and we name him for a reason. Ekiti State has 26 State Assembly constituencies, and the ADC has a candidate in every one of them. An anonymous jibe from “an ADC House of Assembly candidate in Ekiti” points a finger at all 26. It must not be allowed to stain the 25 who have done nothing but carry Atiku’s message from ward to ward, from market to market, from church to mosque.
Ekiti needs no detective. Only one ADC House of Assembly candidate in Ekiti State has made a habit of attacking our presidential candidate on air. That man is Hon. Gboyega Aribisogan.
He resigned as Ekiti State ADC Publicity Secretary to chase a House of Assembly ticket. Hon. Gbenga Oloninla now holds that office. Yet Hon. Aribisogan still goes on Fresh FM presenting himself as the party’s Publicity Secretary, and uses that borrowed title to cast aspersions on Atiku Abubakar. A man who speaks in the name of an office he has given up has no standing to lecture anyone about respecting party structure.
The other 25 deserve to be seen for what they are. Ekiti’s governorship election is already behind us, so on 6 February 2027 our State Assembly candidates will face the voters with no governorship candidate standing above them on the ticket. In that contest they are, in every practical sense, political orphans. The one great hope in sight is the emergence of Atiku Abubakar as President on 16 January. His victory is the wave that will carry them into the Assembly, and they know it. That is why they are working day and night to take his message to every voter in their constituencies.
Which makes the conduct of one man all the more baffling. An ADC State Assembly candidate in Ekiti who works against Atiku is sawing off the branch on which he and 25 colleagues are sitting.
The party in Ekiti did not send him. The Ekiti campaign is not dull. It has a Coordinator in Prof. Olusola Eleka and a Deputy Coordinator in Chief Hon. Segun Akinwunmi, its doors are open to anyone who comes in to make it more inclusive, and it is at work. What is dull is the ambition of people who want to control the funds for Atiku’s election and hold his fate in the South West at their mercy, and who go on radio to complain when he will not let them.
Twenty five are carrying the message. One is carrying a grudge. Ekiti knows the difference.
LESS THAN 10 PER CENT CANNOT HOLD A PARTY HOSTAGE
The people behind this campaign are not the ADC in the South West. They are not 10 per cent of its members, its leaders or its voters. They are a few aggrieved office seekers who were loud in an Ibadan meeting room and silent when asked to give their names.
A group that small cannot blackmail a presidential candidate into submission, and it will not intimidate this one. Atiku stood with June 12 when standing cost lives. He faced Abacha’s guns and the loneliness of exile. He will not be pushed around by men who sulk about transport fare and feed their sulking to the press.
The real ADC in the South West is the ward member who walks to meetings on her own money, the woman leader in Osogbo, the youth mobiliser in Abeokuta, the artisan in Ado Ekiti, and the trader in Ibadan who has watched the price of everything multiply. They are not asking Atiku for money. They are asking for rescue, and they are organising to deliver it.
A party is not held hostage by the noise of a few. It is carried by the quiet resolve of many.
THE CANDIDATE CHOOSES HIS TEAM
Every presidential candidate in every democracy chooses the people who will run his campaign. That right is not a favour granted by a secretariat. It comes with the burden only the candidate carries: his name is on the ballot, and the verdict on 16 January 2027 will be his.
Atiku has exercised that right openly and within the party. The Presidential Campaign Council was announced on 25 September through the party. The party leadership in the zone has met him in person and online, and the states were asked for nominees. That is a candidate working with the party leadership, not around it.
Asking him to push aside allies who stood with him through every storm so that a few aggrieved voices can feel important is not loyalty to the party. It is jealousy, and jealousy has never won an election.
A CALL TO EVERY LOVER OF ATIKU IN THE SOUTH WEST
Having said all that, let me now speak to the family.
To every lover of Atiku Abubakar in Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti: this is not the season for camps. It is the season for one column, marching in one direction, towards one date.
We came into this coalition from many houses. Some of us came from the old PDP, a few from the APC, a few from the SDP, some from the movements, and some from nowhere but our own convictions. We have different histories, but we have one candidate. Whatever divided us before the ward primaries ended there. What unites us now is larger than any office, any committee list or any meeting room.
To the party executives: you are the backbone of this campaign, and nobody can take that from you. To the support groups and movements: you are its voice and its legs. To the women who organise the markets and the youth who own the timelines: you are its pulse. None of us wins alone. Every one of us loses if we turn on each other.
UNITY OF PURPOSE: LEADERS, CLOSE RANKS
Unity of purpose is not uniformity of opinion. We will not always agree on who should coordinate a ward or whose name should come first on a list. But we must agree on the one thing that matters: on 16 January 2027, Atiku Abubakar must be elected President, and the South West must be counted among the zones that put him there.
This call goes first to the leaders, because followers look at leaders. To our governorship, senatorial, House of Representatives and State Assembly candidates, our party officers, our elders and the founders of our movements: the ward is watching you. When leaders quarrel, the wards quarrel. When leaders close ranks, the wards close ranks.
There is simple arithmetic in this too. Every ADC candidate on the ballot on 6 February 2027 should know that the road to that ballot passes through 16 January. A strong presidential vote is the tide that lifts every boat in the party. Nobody who works against the candidate at the top of the ticket is protecting his own seat. He is drilling a hole in the boat he is sitting in.
This morning Hon. Aliyu Bello, Co-Leader of The Narrative Force and Senior Special Assistant to Atiku on Community Engagement, gave counsel every leader in this zone should take to heart. Let us find solutions that unite us, he said, and let this election season be a time for tolerance, patience and understanding with one another.
Solutions that unite are not hard to find when the will is there. Let every grievance travel through the party and the campaign, and let those channels answer quickly and fairly. Let the leaders of every stream in each state share one platform, one ward plan and one polling unit roster. Let our rallies show rivals standing side by side. And let every leader resolve that his voice in the media will promote Atiku and the ADC, never wound a fellow member.
Tolerance means accepting that a coalition is a gathering of people who disagree on many things and agree on the one thing that matters. Patience means trusting that the state campaign councils will be constituted; not every name can sit on every list, but every hand can win a polling unit. Understanding means hearing a brother’s complaint before answering it, and answering it inside the house.
When leaders close ranks, the wards close ranks. When leaders quarrel, the opposition celebrates.
Every grievance leaked anonymously to the press is a gift wrapped for the opposition. Every hour spent fighting over who sits closest to the candidate is an hour stolen from the polling units where this election will be won.
To those who feel unheard, the door is open. Bring your names, bring your wards, bring your structures. There are 77 days left, thousands of polling units to cover, and millions of suffering people who need to hear that rescue is on the ballot. No one who truly wants to work for Atiku will be left without work.
Let Ekiti stand with Osun. Let Ondo stand with Ogun. Let Oyo stand with Lagos. Let the South West show Nigeria that the zone that gave the nation Awolowo’s discipline and June 12’s courage can close ranks behind the one candidate who stood with it when standing was dangerous.
We came from many houses. We now live in one. Let no one burn it down from inside.
THE SOUTH WEST IS FOR ATIKU
The South West knows Atiku Abubakar. It knows the man who stood with June 12 when others ran for cover. It knows the Vice President who sat at the centre of the 1999 to 2007 economy, when Nigeria’s GDP rose from $58 billion to $270 billion. It knows the Northern leader who has spent his career building bridges to the West rather than walls against it.
And the South West knows its own pain: the hunger in Ibadan’s markets, the empty pockets in Akure, the idle graduates in Ado Ekiti, the mothers in Abeokuta doing arithmetic that never balances. It is not waiting for a transport refund to decide its future. It is waiting for 16 January 2027.
So let the anonymous chorus keep singing. The party will keep building. The candidate will keep campaigning. And the people of the South West, who have never handed their conscience to a sulking minority, will speak with one voice in their wards and polling units.
The whisper was in a newspaper. The answer will be in the ballot box.
The South West is for Atiku. 77 days. Count them, and count us.
#SouthWestForAtiku #Atiku2027 #ADCIsOneFamily #RescueNigeria #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
1 November 2026
