By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Begin before any politician is named.
A woman lifts a basin of tomatoes onto her head at first light. The tomatoes cost her more than they did last year, and not because tomatoes changed. The lorry that brought them from Kano burned fuel she did not buy, on a road she did not build, past checkpoints she did not man, and every one of those costs sat down quietly inside the price she must now ask a customer who also has no money.
That is the whole Nigerian crisis in one basin. It is not abstract. It is arithmetic that lands on a human head.
The African Democratic Congress candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, has published twelve policy commitments for 2027. They are not a wish list. They are a working document, placed before Nigerians in advance of 16 January 2027, so that the people may examine the man and his intentions before they vote.
Read them that way and the twelve stop being politics. They become twelve doors, each one opening on a specific cost that is currently sitting on your head.
Each commitment is set out below in his own words, and then examined for what it does to an ordinary Nigerian life.
Every policy is finally a price. The only question is who pays it.
ONE. THE COST OF MOVING
Restore targeted petroleum subsidy to reduce transportation costs and the associated cost of living.
Targeted is the load bearing word, and his campaign has defined it. A subsidy that is capped, transparently budgeted, independently audited, and shifted away from importation and middlemen towards production and Nigerian refining, so that the benefit is measured in verifiable barrels rather than unverifiable claims.
He has said it categorically. Nigeria is rich enough to look after the welfare of its citizens.
Understand why this is the first door. Fuel is not one item in the market. Fuel is inside every item in the market. It is inside the keke fare, inside the yam, inside the bag of cement, inside the school run, inside the price of pounding a measure of pepper at the mill. Touch the cost of movement and you have touched everything a poor family buys in a week.
That is the difference between a policy that shows on television and a policy that shows in a kitchen.
TWO. THE GRADUATE WHO OWES BEFORE HE EARNS
Review NELFUND and consider debt forgiveness, on the principle that Nigerian students deserve scholarships and affordable access to education, not crippling debt.
Think about what a student loan actually does in a country with this unemployment. It converts a degree into a liability. A young man leaves school owing the Federal Government before he has been offered a single salary, and then joins a queue for jobs that do not exist.
A nation that lends money to its children to educate them, and then bills them for it, has quietly decided that education is a private luxury rather than a public investment.
Notice the principle in the second half of the sentence, because that is the real commitment. Scholarships and affordable access. The loan is treated as a symptom of an education system that stopped being funded, not as a product to be refined.
THREE. THE MONEY THAT NEVER REACHES YOUR WARD
Implement the Supreme Court judgment on Local Government autonomy, ensuring that funds due to local councils reach them directly and are used for grassroots development.
This is the least glamorous item on the list and possibly the most consequential.
Consider a community in Ikole, in Ekiti, where the primary health centre has a building, a signboard and no drugs. The money for those drugs was allocated. It was released. It simply never completed the journey. Between the federation account and that dispensary, it was intercepted, warehoused and renamed.
Read the wording again. Reach them directly, and are used for grassroots development. Two separate obligations. The first is about delivery and the second is about what happens after delivery, which is where most of the previous attempts quietly died.
Local government autonomy is not a constitutional abstraction. It is the difference between a signboard and a nurse with something in her hand.
FOUR. THE PORT THAT COULD BE THIRTY MINUTES AWAY
Revive and develop the Eastern maritime port corridor by restoring the operational capacity and competitiveness of the ports in Port Harcourt, Calabar and Warri, while advancing the development of the Uyo Deep Sea Port. This will ease the excessive pressure on the Lagos port corridor, reduce logistics costs, create jobs and strengthen internal trade and economic intercourse across Eastern Nigeria, the South-South and the Northern markets.
Follow one container. An importer in Aba brings in goods that land in Lagos, sit in a holding bay, crawl through Apapa, and are then trucked more than 600 kilometres east on a road that destroys the truck. Every naira of that detour is added to the price of the goods before the first customer in Ariaria touches them.
Now land the same container at Onne. The detour disappears. So does the portion of the price that the detour created.
This is how the South East, the South South and the North get cheaper goods without anybody announcing a price control. You do not legislate prices down. You engineer the cost out of the journey.
And read what it says about Lagos, because the mischief makers will misrepresent it. It eases the pressure on the Lagos corridor. Lagos is not being punished. Lagos is being relieved of traffic it was never built to carry, which is also the fastest way to make Lagos itself work.
FIVE. THE BORDER THAT FEEDS TWO COUNTRIES
Reopen Nigeria’s land borders to revive legal cross-border businesses, support legitimate traders and facilitate regional commerce.
In the border towns of Sokoto, Katsina and Kebbi, trade across that line is not smuggling. It is family, and it is centuries older than the line. A Hausa trader in Illela sells to customers in Birnin Konni who have been his customers since his father’s time.
Close that border and you do not stop the smuggler, who has other routes and other friends. You stop the woman with a headpan. You criminalise the honest and professionalise the criminal, then you wonder why the price of rice did not fall.
Note the three words that govern the sentence. Legal. Legitimate. Commerce. The gate opens for the trader who declares, pays duty and keeps records. It does not open for the man who was thriving all along while the gate was shut.
SIX. PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE
Review the electricity sector and reform the current tariff classification structure to end discriminatory billing and make electricity more affordable.
Picture an Ebira welder in Okene. He is billed in a band that promises a quality of supply he does not receive, for hours of power he never got, on an estimate nobody metered. He passes the cost to a customer building a gate. The gate becomes expensive. The customer postpones the gate. The welder’s apprentice is sent home.
Discriminatory billing is the exact phrase, and it is the right one. A classification system that sorts Nigerians into bands and then charges them for supply that never arrived is not a tariff. It is a levy on a promise.
SEVEN. CAPITAL FOR THE YOUNG AND FOR WOMEN
Empower young people and women through a proposed $10 billion startup and entrepreneurship financing programme, alongside greater inclusion in government appointments and economic opportunities.
Nigeria does not have an idea shortage. Go to any campus, any tech hub, any market in Onitsha, and you will find people whose plans are complete and whose capital is nil. What Nigeria has is a financing desert, in which the young are asked to produce collateral they were never in a position to accumulate.
$10 billion does not create talent. It stops existing talent from expiring unused.
And notice that the commitment has two halves. Money, and then appointments. Capital without a seat at the table produces a generation that is funded but still unrepresented. Both constituencies named here carry the largest share of the suffering and the smallest share of the appointments.
EIGHT. THE RIGHT TO SLEEP
Strengthen national security by recruiting additional security personnel, improving their welfare, combating corruption within the security architecture, deploying modern intelligence and field technology, mustering the political will to fight insurgency, banditry and high crimes as well as deepening cooperation with neighbouring countries.
Read the third item on that list again. Combating corruption within the security architecture. Very few politicians will say that sentence out loud, because it is the sentence that has the most enemies inside the system.
Then read the fifth. Mustering the political will. That is an admission that the deficiency has never been mainly about equipment. The men and the hardware have been voted for repeatedly. What has been missing sits above them.
He is entitled to speak on the first item. Under the administration in which he served as Vice President, the police strength was taken from about 120,000 officers to over 300,000. That is not a manifesto line. That is a completed recruitment.
A Tiv farmer in Guma does not need a seminar on security architecture. He needs to be able to sleep in his own house and reach his own farm in the morning.
NINE. BACK TO THE FARM
Return Nigerians to their farms by improving security and reducing production costs, while revitalising agriculture and expanding access to finance and other interventions for farmers and entrepreneurs.
Here the doors connect, and this is the part most commentary misses. The commitment itself names the connection. Improving security and reducing production costs are written into the farming policy, because they are the farming policy.
Point 9 is impossible without point 8. A farmer will not plant where he may be kidnapped. Point 9 is expensive without point 1, because diesel drives the pump, the tractor and the lorry. Point 9 is wasted without point 4, because harvest that cannot move cheaply rots in the open.
Food prices are not a moral failing of traders. They are the sum of insecurity, fuel and logistics. Attack the three and the price falls without a single soldier being posted to a market to enforce it.
TEN. HEALTHCARE YOU CAN ACTUALLY REACH
Overhaul the healthcare sector through institutional reforms, expanding access to quality and affordable basic healthcare, while addressing shortages, remuneration and welfare of healthcare professionals.
Nigeria is currently training doctors and nurses at public cost and then exporting them, because remuneration and conditions at home cannot hold them. We carry the cost of the training. Other health systems collect the benefit.
Which is why the commitment puts shortages, remuneration and welfare in the same clause. They are the same problem stated three times. The shortage is not a mystery and it does not require a study. It requires a wage, a working theatre and a reason to stay.
Fix the welfare of the professional and you have fixed the availability of the care.
ELEVEN. POWER THAT LIVES NEARER TO THE PEOPLE
Devolve powers to subnational governments by restructuring the Exclusive and Concurrent Legislative Lists, giving states and local governments greater responsibility and capacity while creating a smart, compact, lean and efficient Federal Government focused on matters that genuinely require national coordination.
This is the oldest and most consistent conviction in his public life, and it is the one that makes the other eleven durable.
A country in which the centre must approve everything will always move at the speed of the centre. Restructure the lists and a state can develop its resources, run its own affairs and compete. Competition between federating units is how a federation improves. Uniform helplessness is how it stagnates.
The first republic managed this. It was not a foreign experiment. It was Nigeria’s own practice before centralisation replaced it.
TWELVE. THE REPORT THAT HAS BEEN GATHERING DUST SINCE 2012
Implement the Oronsaye Report to eliminate waste, duplication and institutional overlap, reduce opportunities for corruption, rationalise government agencies and improve efficiency, performance and service delivery across the public service.
Here is what that report actually found. A committee chaired by Stephen Oronsaye, a former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, counted 541 federal parastatals, commissions and agencies. It recommended that the 263 statutory agencies be reduced to 161, that 38 be abolished outright, that 52 be merged and that 14 be returned to being ordinary departments inside ministries. On the committee’s own projection, implementation would have saved the country over 862 billion naira between 2012 and 2015.
That was 2012. It has since been reviewed, white papered, re announced and left exactly where it was found.
And the bureaucracy did not stand still while the report gathered dust. Where the committee counted 541 bodies and asked that the number be cut, a check against the Federal Civil Service listing puts the count today at more than 1,300.
That count, however, only covers the agencies that actually exist.
In 2026 the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission uncovered a body calling itself the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council. The commission found no law behind it, no executive order, no recognised instrument of any kind establishing it as a federal agency.
It nevertheless had an office inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja. It had bank accounts. It ran a website on the government’s own .gov.ng domain. It obtained approval to recruit more than 300 staff at a time when public service recruitment was frozen. And it carried an allocation of 1.3 billion naira in the 2026 Appropriation Act.
Read that last one twice. A body that did not legally exist was voted public money in the budget of the Federation.
The same investigation then found a second, the National Brands Development and Made in Nigeria Special Project Office, allegedly operating from inside the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation itself. Two further connected shells were identified. Three permanent secretaries were suspended. The commission’s interim report of 6 August 2026 recommended action against 13 officials.
Then the House of Representatives ad hoc committee examined the matter and reported 12 more fake agencies, along with 58 suspicious bank accounts linked to the man who had presented himself as director general of the first one.
Sixteen, on the two bodies’ own counts. Prosecutions are proceeding and the men accused deny the allegations, so the courts will decide what happened and who is answerable.
But the structural finding is already made, and no verdict will alter it. The federal machine had grown so large and so unaudited that entities with no legal existence could sit inside its buildings, open its accounts, wear its domain name and appear in its budget, and nobody noticed.
That is not a scandal about four men or sixteen letterheads. It is the strongest argument for point 12 that anybody could have written. You cannot police 1,300 bodies. A government that does not know what it owns cannot know what it is being robbed of.
Understand what an agency is when it is empty of purpose. It is a chairman. It is a board. It is a fleet of vehicles, a rented headquarters, a delegation, an allowance, a procurement line and a payroll, all drawing from the same purse that could not find drugs for the health centre in point 3, or a salary competitive enough to keep the doctor in point 10, or capital for the young woman in point 7.
The money for the twelve points is not hiding in a foreign vault. A substantial part of it is sitting in duplicated offices doing work another office is already doing.
This is why point 11 and point 12 are one argument and not two. Point 11 removes from the centre the responsibilities that do not belong to it. Point 12 removes from the centre the machinery it built to pretend it was discharging them. Devolution without rationalisation just leaves the empty structures standing. Rationalisation without devolution simply starves the states of powers they were never given.
Do both, and you have a federal government that is smaller, cheaper, faster and doing fewer things properly.
Announcing a reform is not implementing it. Fourteen years of announcements produced more agencies, not fewer.
THE MAN WRITES THESE HIMSELF
One thing about this document deserves to be said plainly, because it is the part nobody can manufacture.
Atiku Abubakar works his policies out himself before he brings them to anybody. They do not arrive on his desk finished, prepared by consultants, to be read aloud to a hall and forgotten by the following week. They begin with him, they are argued through with him, and by the time they are published he has already made every one of the trade offs they contain.
You can test this without taking anybody’s word for it. Sit him down anywhere, in any studio, in any language, with or without notes, and ask him about the tariff bands, about the eastern corridor, about the difference between a subsidy on importation and a subsidy on production. He will take the question apart. He will give you the mechanism, the cost and the sequence.
That is not a briefing note being recited. You cannot memorise your way into that kind of answer. A man either did the thinking or he did not, and it shows the moment he is taken off the prepared text.
It is also why his documents keep arriving before the vote rather than after it. A candidate who commissioned his ideas from other people has every reason to stay vague until the mandate is safely collected. A candidate who built them has the opposite instinct. He wants them examined, because examination is where they win.
A man who writes his own plan can be questioned on any line of it. A man who was handed one can only repeat it.
WHAT THE TWELVE POINTS ADD UP TO
Take the doors separately and each is a policy. Take them together and they are a single argument.
The argument is that the Nigerian cost of living is not weather. It is not fate and it is not a curse. It is a constructed cost, assembled item by item out of decisions about fuel, ports, borders, tariffs, security and where power sits, and what has been constructed by decisions can be dismantled by decisions.
That is the claim. It is published, it is dated, and it is available for examination 124 days before the ballot.
There is a record behind it. Between 1999 and 2007, in an administration in which the author of this agenda served as Vice President and chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation under the Constitution and the Public Enterprises Act, the economy moved from $58 billion to $270 billion, telecommunications was opened from fewer than 500,000 lines through the 2001 GSM auction, the banks were consolidated, and the Paris Club debt was settled and exited.
Men are entitled to be judged on what they have already done with the same brief.
A working document you may examine and reject is not the same thing as a decree you must survive.
So examine it. Take the basin of tomatoes and hold it against the twelve points. Take the electricity bill, the school fee, the fare, the hospital card and the empty farm, and hold each one against the door that opens on it.
Then on 16 January 2027, decide.
Rescue. Revive. Restore.
A Nigeria that works. Restoring hope. Building a future.
Ìgbà díẹ̀ ló kù. Lokaci kaɗan ne ya rage. Obere oge ka ọ fọdụrụ.
124 days.
#Atiku2027 #ADC #TheNarrativeForce #InformedInspiredInvolved
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
15 September 2026
