By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Some men whistle in the dark because they are brave. Most whistle because they are terrified. Listen to the All Progressives Congress today and you will hear the loudest whistling in the history of Nigerian politics. It is not the music of a party marching to victory. It is the frantic noise of a party that has looked at the ground beneath its feet and seen it giving way.
When a ruling party has a record to sell, it sells the record. When it has nothing to sell, it sells figures. The APC has stopped selling the record.
THE MOST EXPENSIVE FICTION IN NIGERIA
With 78 days left to 16 January 2027, the APC has abandoned governance and taken up fortune telling.
At a press briefing in Ado Ekiti, the APC South West leadership, through its Zonal Chairman, Dr Isaac Kekemeke, read out its fantasy state by state: 570,000 votes from Ekiti, 1 million each from Ondo, Oyo and Ogun, 800,000 from Osun, and between 2 million and 2.5 million from Lagos. Total: 8 to 10 million votes for Tinubu from the South West alone.
The party’s Senate leadership followed with a plan to deliver at least 10 million South West votes. Then the national chairman of SWAGA outbid them all, announcing that Tinubu would win all 36 states.
Thirty six states. For a President who cannot fill a rally in half of them without importing the crowd. For a President whose own party candidates in the North, as you will soon see, are scraping his face off their posters.
This is no longer politics. It is fiction, and Nigerians are paying for the printing.
When a ruling party has a record to sell, it sells the record. When it has nothing to sell, it sells figures.
THE SENTENCE THAT DESTROYS THEM
Read this slowly, because one sentence finishes the APC’s arithmetic.
In 2023, in the entire Federal Republic of Nigeria, across 36 states and the FCT, Bola Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes.
The APC now says the South West alone will give him 10 million.
One region, six states, promising more votes than the whole country gave him in the election that made him President. If the South West could produce 10 million votes for Tinubu, where were those votes in 2023, when he was a fresh candidate, his own son, his own campaign, his own moment, with nothing yet on his record to defend? They were nowhere, because they do not exist.
That is not a projection. That is a hallucination with a letterhead.
THE GHOSTS OF EKITI, ONDO AND LAGOS
Now take the state figures one by one, because figures do not panic.
Ekiti gave Tinubu 201,494 votes in 2023. Kekemeke wants 570,000, nearly three times as many. Ondo gave him 369,924; he wants 1 million. Oyo gave him 449,884; he wants 1 million. Osun gave him 343,945; he wants 800,000. Ogun gave him 341,554; he wants 1 million.
And Lagos. Lagos, the fortress his political family has held since 1999. Lagos gave Tinubu 572,606 votes and then handed the state to another man. The APC now promises 2 million to 2.5 million there. Four times his tally, in a state he could not even win.
Add it all up. Tinubu’s whole South West harvest in 2023 was 2,279,407 votes. The entire South West, every voter, for every candidate, cast roughly 4.2 million votes. The APC is therefore promising its candidate more than double every vote the region cast for every candidate on the ballot.
Where will the extra millions come from? From the trader at Oja Oba whose capital has been eaten by rent and fuel? From the graduate in Bodija whose certificate now hangs on the wall like a funeral photograph? From the farmer in Ondo who dare not enter his own farm? From the mother in Oshodi who now buys rice in cups? Go and ask them for 10 million votes. They will tell you what they think of your projections.
A target is a work plan for the volunteer. A figure larger than the electorate, broadcast in October, is a script for the returning officer.
A PARTY THAT IS ALREADY BLEEDING
Here is what the APC will never put on its banners.
Under Buhari, the APC polled 15,424,921 votes in 2015 and 15,191,847 in 2019. Under Tinubu in 2023, it crashed to 8,794,726. In one election, with Tinubu at the top of the ticket, the APC lost about 6.4 million voters.
That collapse happened before the cost of food tripled. Before Nigerians began measuring garri by the cup. Before families sold land to pay ransoms. If 6.4 million Nigerians walked away from the APC before Tinubu had governed for a single day, how many have walked away after three years of what he has done to them?
And this is the party now promising to add millions. A man bleeding from both arms is promising to donate blood.
THE SOUTH HE NO LONGER OWNS
In 2023, the South West had one son of the soil on the ballot. In 2027 it has rivals. Seyi Makinde, a sitting South West governor, is on the ballot for the APM. Peter Obi is on the ballot for the NDC. Three Southern candidates will be carving up one Southern electorate.
You cannot cut a pie into three pieces and promise yourself a bigger slice than when you ate it alone. The APC knows this. That is precisely why it is shouting.
In the North, the opposite is happening. Atiku Abubakar is the only presidential candidate from the North. Every other major ticket is led by a Southerner. Where the South divides, the North consolidates. Even in 2023, with the full machinery of power behind him, Tinubu led Atiku in the North by only 354,284 votes, 5,587,757 to 5,233,473. That paper thin lead was built on a northern coalition that has since packed its bags.
The general who marched the North to Tinubu in 2023, Nasir El-Rufai, now sits as Deputy Chairman of the ADC Presidential Campaign Council. When the man who built your northern bridge crosses to the other side, the bridge is gone.
THE CONFESSIONS OF A FRIGHTENED CAMPAIGN
You do not need my word. The APC’s own statements are a confession.
Before its Kaduna rally had even held, the APC Presidential Campaign Council was already crying about a plot by Atiku and the ADC to discredit its campaign flag-off in Kaduna on 24 October 2026. In the same breath, the same council declared that Atiku and the ADC were incapable of winning any election.
Which is it? A man who cannot win does not frighten you into issuing alarms. Nobody posts armed guards at the gate of an empty house. You raise the alarm only when you hear footsteps.
And why Kaduna? Of all the places to open a re-election campaign, the ruling party ran to the heart of the North. That is not strategy. That is a confession that the 2027 election will be decided in the North, where the APC is haemorrhaging and where only one candidate is a son of the soil.
Then there is the candidate who will not campaign. Tinubu has said he may miss campaign rallies because Nigeria needs his attention, while governors, ministers and political allies are dispatched to beg votes on his behalf. Atiku’s answer cut to the bone: he made the promises, he took the decisions, he must face the questions.
Meanwhile the ADC has declared that Atiku is fit and ready to campaign across all 36 states and the FCT. One man walks into the market square. The other sends errand boys to explain why he cannot come.
One man is going to the people. The other is hiding behind governors.
THE FACE THEY ARE SCRAPING OFF THE POSTERS
Now look at the posters, because posters do not lie.
In 2023, APC candidates across the North fought for space beside Tinubu’s face. In 2027, in Katsina, Tinubu’s own Special Adviser on Political Matters, Ibrahim Kabir Masari, has had to scold his party’s candidates for leaving the President’s photograph off their campaign materials.
Sit with that. A politician will put a camel on his poster if he believes the camel will bring him votes. When APC candidates quietly remove the face of their own President, they are not being disloyal. They are reporting what their wards have already told them. Tinubu’s face has become a liability in the very North the APC is claiming to sweep.
Masari’s own explanation completes the confession. At a gathering in support of the President’s re-election, he suggested that Tinubu’s only fault in the eyes of some Northerners was that he was not Hausa or from the North.
So the President’s adviser admits the North is turning away, then reaches for the tribal card to explain it. It collapses at the first figure. In 2023 this same North gave Tinubu 5,587,757 votes. He was not Hausa then either. The North did not discover his ethnicity in 2026. What the North discovered was the price of food, the graves of the kidnapped, the villages emptied by bandits and the farms nobody can reach. The North is not judging his tribe. The North is judging his record, and the verdict is in.
When a party’s own candidates are hiding its President’s face, the campaign is already over in their wards.
GOVERNORS DO NOT OWN THE VOTES
The APC’s last refuge is its boast about governors. Let us remember 2023. Atiku won Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Yobe and Gombe, five states where sitting APC governors threw the full weight of incumbency behind Tinubu. And Tinubu lost Lagos with an APC governor sitting in Alausa.
Governors do not own the votes. The masses do. And the masses have spent three years paying for this government’s experiments with their stomachs, their savings and, in too many homes, their children. On 16 January 2027 they will not vote for a governor’s convoy. They will vote for the next meal.
WHY ATIKU, AND WHY NOW
The APC’s panic is real, but Atiku’s candidacy does not rest on anyone’s failure. It rests on what he has done and what he has committed to do.
He sat at the centre of an administration that grew Nigeria’s GDP from $58 billion in 1999 to $270 billion in 2007. He chaired the National Economic Council and the National Council on Privatisation by law, not by favour. He has spent a lifetime preaching the restructuring of this federation, empowering the states to compete and attain their full potential. He has placed his committed plans before Nigerians in advance, for them to examine and own, and he has named welfare and security as the first two duties of his government.
One man is campaigning on a record of building. The other is campaigning on invented numbers. Nigerians can tell the difference.
WHAT THEIR PANIC MEANS FOR YOU
Now hear me well, because this is where the fight is won or lost.
A party that announces impossible figures is not only deceiving itself. It is preparing the public mind. When a man tells you in October that a region which cast 4.2 million votes will give his candidate 10 million, he may be planning to produce those figures in January, with or without voters. Panic breeds desperation, and desperation breeds vote buying, intimidation and padded result sheets.
Our answer is not violence. Our answer is volume and vigilance.
Collect your PVC if you have not. Know your polling unit. Bring your household, your street, your church, your mosque, your market association. Our work is not to announce figures. Our work is to fill every polling unit in this federation and guard every vote cast in it. Stay at your polling unit until the result is announced and the EC8A is signed. Photograph it. Watch it go up. A vote that is cast and guarded cannot be stolen, and a result sheet watched by a hundred eyes cannot be padded.
Let them keep their phantom millions. We will keep our count.
THE RECKONING THEY CAN ALREADY SEE
History is merciless to men who mistake noise for strength. Nigeria has seen rulers who believed they were untouchable, who counted votes that were never cast and celebrated victories that never came. The people retired every one of them.
The APC can already see its reckoning. That is why it is shouting. That is why it is inventing millions. That is why it is raising alarms about rallies that had not yet held and opponents it swears cannot win. That is why its own candidates are hiding its President’s face.
The tide has turned. The North is consolidating. The South is divided. The masses are angry, organised and watching. Atiku is winning, and nobody knows it better than the men reading out phantom figures at press briefings.
78 days. Get your PVC. Guard your vote. Bring your neighbour.
#Atiku2027 #ADC #AtikuIsComing #16January2027 #GuardYourVote
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
31 October 2026
