By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Three years ago, Nigerians were handed a promise. They were told that pain was temporary, that sacrifice was necessary, that the dawn was coming. Three years on, the only thing that has reliably arrived is more darkness.
Not metaphorical darkness. Literal darkness. The kind that greets you at midnight and is still there at dawn, that spoils food, kills businesses, and reminds thirty million households every single evening that the government elected to serve them has failed them in the most basic obligation a state owes its people.
This is the Tinubu administration’s three-year report card. Not as written by its spokesmen. As written by the market.
The naira tells the story most honestly. It exchanged at 460 to the dollar when this administration assumed office. It cratered past 1,500. Not because of global forces alone, not because of inherited problems alone, but because of deliberate policy choices made by men insulated from the consequences of those choices by the thickness of government wallets.
Food inflation hit 40.53 per cent in February 2024. The family that fed itself on ten thousand naira in May 2023 needed fifteen thousand naira for the same meal twelve months later. That is not an economic indicator. That is a mother choosing which child eats today.
Meanwhile the presidential air fleet flew. The overseas medical trips continued. The wardrobe of power remained immaculate, pressed and funded and perfectly insulated from every hardship it had imposed on the nation below.
This is not governance. This is occupation.
The APC has now governed Nigeria for eleven consecutive years. Eleven years in which the party promised security and delivered Boko Haram’s expansion, banditry’s normalisation, and a kidnapping industry so entrenched that it has its own economics. Eleven years in which electricity generation collapsed rather than grew. Eleven years in which youth unemployment metastasised from a crisis into a permanent condition. Eleven years in which Nigeria’s educated middle class packed its bags and left in numbers that constitute not a brain drain but a brain haemorrhage.
What does the APC point to after eleven years? What monument has it erected to justify another four? Which road, which hospital, which stable institution, which strengthened democratic norm stands as evidence that this party deserves continued stewardship of Africa’s most populous nation?
The silence in response to that question is the most damning verdict of all.
The opposition coalition assembling around the African Democratic Congress does not ask Nigeria to take a leap of faith. It asks Nigeria to read.
Between 1999 and 2007, Nigeria’s GDP grew from 58 billion dollars to 270 billion dollars. Foreign reserves reached 43 billion dollars. The Paris Club debt, that generational burden fastened around the neck of every Nigerian taxpayer, was fully liquidated. Inflation was single-digit. The economy breathed and Nigerians felt it in their pockets, not merely in government press releases.
That record belongs to the candidate the ADC coalition is advancing. It is not a promise. It is a precedent. It is documented in World Bank data, IMF reports, and the living memory of every Nigerian adult who remembers what the naira bought in 2006.
The combined opposition vote in 2023 was 14.5 million. The winning vote was 8.8 million. The majority of Nigerians who voted did not vote for this administration. They were divided. They were outmanoeuvred. They will not make that mistake again.
Go to Kano. Go to Mushin. Go to Onitsha. Go to Ayedun Ekiti, where a teacher wakes before dawn to fetch water because the taps have not run in months, where the market women of that proud Ekiti town price their tomatoes in a currency that buys less every single week, where young men who passed their WAEC and their JAMB sit idle because the economy that should have absorbed them was squandered by men who will never know their names.
Go to Odo Oro Ekiti, where the ancient values of honour, community, and industry that earned that town its distinguished reputation have been mocked by a federal government that has delivered neither roads, nor light, nor opportunity to the people who live and toil there.
Ask the mother feeding her children once a day. Ask the graduate who has sent three hundred job applications into silence. Ask the farmer in Benue who cannot afford fertiliser. Ask the pensioner in Port Harcourt whose life savings have been devoured by inflation. The people of Ayedun Ekiti and Odo Oro Ekiti did not vote for poverty. No Nigerian did. Yet poverty is the one policy this administration has delivered without failure, without delay, and without apology.
The APC’s eleven years and Tinubu’s three have produced one achievement above all others: they have unified Nigerian suffering across ethnic lines, across geopolitical zones, across every division historically exploited to keep the poor voting against their own interests.
That unity is the opposition’s greatest asset going into 2027.
The verdict is already in. It was written not by opposition activists or political commentators but by the Nigerian people themselves, in the currency of their own suffering, across three unforgiving years of misgovernance.
The coalition is assembling. The arithmetic is unambiguous. The record is documented. The moment is now.
Now let the ballot confirm what the streets already know.
The Narrative Force
Advancing the New Nigeria
thenarrativeforce.org
