TWO MEN, ONE DISGRACE: HOW BAYO ONANUGA PICKED A FIGHT WITH AREGBESOLA AND HANDED ADC A WEAPON
By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
There is a Yoruba proverb: Ẹni tó ń sọ pé ìgbín ò ni’irora, ìgbín náà ń gbọ́ — the one who claims the snail feels no pain, that same snail is listening. And today, Nigeria is listening. Not just to Bayo Onanuga. Nigeria is listening to what Bayo Onanuga used to say before the salary landed.
There are two Bayo Onanugas.
There is the journalist who in April 1992, alongside colleagues Seye Kehinde, Dapo Olorunyomi, Babafemi Ojudu, Kunle Ajibade, Sani Kabir, and Idowu Obasa, resigned from African Concord magazine rather than apologise to Ibrahim Babangida over the cover story “Has IBB Given Up?” Their publisher, MKO Abiola, demanded the apology. Onanuga’s response, in his own recorded words, was: “When my boss said I should apologise, I said no, there’s no point in apologising. I’ll rather just go.”
He went. His colleagues went with him.
Together they founded TheNEWS magazine in 1993 and waged guerrilla journalism against military dictatorship from borrowed offices. One of those colleagues, Kunle Ajibade, later went to prison under Abacha rather than stop reporting the truth. Another, Dapo Olorunyomi, founded Premium Times. Another, Babafemi Ojudu, went to the Senate.
These were the men Onanuga once called his brothers. This was the standard he once kept.
He was also the editor who won the Lord Astor Award for Courage and Commitment to Press Freedom from the Commonwealth Press Union in 1994. The mentor who told young reporters: “Speak the fact. The truth will always overcome lies.”
That Bayo Onanuga was a man Nigeria respected.
Then there is the Bayo Onanuga of now, sitting in Aso Rock’s media suite typing “food prices crashing” while a mother in Karu Market counts coins she does not have, for a bag of rice she cannot afford, for children who will go to bed hungry tonight.
The distance between those two men is not political evolution. It is a government paycheck.
THE TITLE THAT CONFESSES
Only a man working for a government with a $460,000 drug-money forfeiture judgment hanging over its principal, a Chicago federal court record that has never been expunged, and a certificate saga that has defied every court order demanding resolution would choose to title his article: “YOU BE THIEF. I NO BE THIEF.”
Here is what makes this the most catastrophic act of self-indictment in recent Nigerian political commentary. Onanuga has already told us, in his own words, what his principal did.
On 26 March 2023, Onanuga publicly described his principal’s history in Chicago as a “drug business” and argued it was “over ten years ago” and therefore could not challenge his electoral victory. His defence was not denial. It was not innocence. It was statute of limitations.
When Nigerians kept the hashtag #TinubuTheDrugDealer alive, Onanuga called Nigerian citizens “sons of bitches” and threatened them with, in his own tweeted words, “the wrath of law and God.”
The Presidential Spokesman publicly confirmed his principal’s drug business with his own framing. Then titled his article: “YOU BE THIEF. I NO BE THIEF.”
There is a word for this in every language spoken in Nigeria. The Onanuga who in 1992 said “I’ll rather just go” than print a lie for power understood that word and refused to print its opposite.
That man is gone. What remains types from Aso Rock and calls it commentary.
WHEN A BRAVE MAN SPEAKS, FRIGHTENED MEN SHOUT
Let us deal with the attack on Rauf Aregbesola clinically and lethally.
Onanuga says Aregbesola’s Osun years were characterised by “unmitigated hardship” and that the state received negative federal allocation. On that last point, Onanuga has accidentally told the truth and that truth destroys his own argument.
Osun under Aregbesola received negative federal allocation. The federal government was deducting loan repayments directly from Osun’s monthly allocation at source, leaving the state with a negative net figure. Osun was being strangled by the centre while being asked to fund a full state apparatus on vapour.
Which party controlled the federal treasury during those years of Osun’s fiscal strangulation? Let Onanuga answer that before writing another word about Aregbesola’s salary record.
To govern a state being actively defunded by the federal centre, maintain infrastructure, pay even a fraction of salaries, and keep the machinery of government functional is not failure. It is survival under conditions designed to cause collapse. Those conditions were created by a federal government whose political descendants now employ Bayo Onanuga to attack the very victim of their own sabotage.
And what did Aregbesola build under those impossible conditions?
He constructed approximately 170 new schools, completing 3,000-capacity model schools so impressive that President Buhari travelled to Osogbo in September 2016 to commission one. The federal government and other states sent delegations to study his school feeding programme.
He created 20,000 jobs within his first 100 days, completed five bridges in a state that had none before his election, launched the Opon-Imo tablet distributed free to public school students, and constructed roads across hundreds of kilometres of a state the centre was simultaneously strangling.
A man who built schools and bridges while his monthly allocation was being confiscated at source is not a governor who failed. He is a governor who built with borrowed air.
Now compare.
Bola Tinubu controls the full apparatus of Nigeria’s revenue: NNPC proceeds, VAT, customs, the entire federation account, the CBN, FIRS and everything Aregbesola never had. Every lever. Every valve. Every pipe.
And under his watch: a bag of rice costs ₦85,000. The naira has lost over 70 per cent of its value. Inflation peaked at 34.80 per cent in December 2024 under the NBS’s own previous methodology. Food inflation hit nearly 40 per cent. Over 133 million Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty by the government’s own NBS data.
Onanuga compares a governor strangled by negative federal allocation to a president with unlimited resource control and declares the governor failed while the president succeeds. This is not analysis. It is the logic of a man paid to reach a predetermined conclusion regardless of evidence.
On salaries: the national minimum wage today is ₦70,000, approximately $43 per month. In real purchasing power, a Nigerian worker on the new minimum wage is poorer than at any point in living memory.
Paying 100 per cent of a salary worth 30 per cent of what it used to be is not an achievement. It is a conjuring trick performed on a hungry audience.
On Oyetola: Onanuga claims he worked hard to “clean up much of the mess left behind.” Oyetola was Aregbesola’s own Chief of Staff, his most trusted political son, and his handpicked successor. He did not inherit an adversary’s wreckage.
He inherited the groundwork of the man who built the platform on which he ran. Onanuga cannot praise the successor and condemn the predecessor who built everything the successor stood upon.
On pensioners: if a pensioner dying in Osun in 2015 is Aregbesola’s eternal infamy, what are the pensioners of the Nigerian Railway Corporation, Nigeria Airways, and the Armed Forces dying across Nigeria in 2024 and 2025? Onanuga has no chapter for them. Not a paragraph. Not a sentence. Because they are not useful to today’s assignment.
On Kuje: Onanuga cites the prison break as evidence of ministerial failure. On the night of 5 July 2022, ISWAP terrorists mounted a coordinated armed assault with explosives. Sixty-five military and security personnel were present. They were not absent. They were overrun by a military-grade terrorist operation.
Aregbesola told the House of Representatives committee directly that correctional facilities were designed to prevent internal disturbances, not to withstand coordinated explosive assaults from one of the most dangerous terrorist organisations in West Africa. No prison in the world is built as a fortress against ISWAP.
The question Onanuga refuses to ask is why ISWAP was sufficiently organised and emboldened to attack a facility 25 miles from Nigeria’s capital. That answer indicts not Aregbesola but the administration whose security failures created the conditions for that emboldening.
On passports: the crisis Onanuga cites had three structural roots he deliberately omits. The foreign passport producer, Irish Technologies, was owed millions of dollars in unpaid debts by the federal government and could not access forex to produce booklets. The infrastructure was chronically underfunded across administrations predating Aregbesola.
And the demand driving the crisis was the Japa Syndrome — the mass emigration of young Nigerians fleeing economic conditions that began before Aregbesola left office and accelerated catastrophically under the administration Onanuga now defends. By September 2023, Aregbesola’s own successor had inherited over 204,000 unprocessed passport applications. His own successor’s daughter waited six months for a passport.
The passport crisis did not end when Aregbesola left. It worsened. Because the desperation powering it was produced by the government Onanuga types press releases for every morning.
THE INFLATION ILLUSION
Onanuga claims inflation has been “reduced to less than 15 per cent, with food prices crashing.” Let us be precise about where this number came from.
In February 2025, the NBS changed its CPI base year from 2009 to 2024. Overnight, Nigeria’s headline inflation dropped from 34.80 per cent to 24.48 per cent, over ten percentage points, without a single price actually falling. Nigerian economists documented this as the most dramatic single-country CPI rebasing drop ever recorded. The NISER research institute noted pointedly that the scale of Nigeria’s reduction “raises concerns” about whether the adjustment reflects actual consumer experience.
Under this rebased methodology, headline inflation is currently 15.06 per cent. Onanuga calls this “less than 15 per cent,” rounding down the NBS’s own number while omitting that the 12-month average for the period ending February 2026 stands at 21.03 per cent.
Under the old methodology, December 2025 inflation would have been 31.2 per cent. The NBS itself acknowledged this.
The government changed the ruler. The room did not get smaller.
Food prices “crashing”? Prices are still 34 per cent higher in absolute terms than before the reforms began. What has slowed is the rate of new price increases, not the prices themselves.
The woman in Karu Market is not comforted by the knowledge that the statistical rate at which her suffering is worsening has decelerated.
The man who in 1992 walked out of African Concord rather than falsify a story about Babangida is now presenting a rebased statistical figure as economic achievement, while omitting the 12-month average, the old-methodology figure, and the absolute price levels every Nigerian lives with every single day.
Babangida had guns. Tinubu pays a salary. And the salary, it appears, commands a higher submission than the bayonet ever did.
“ORCHESTRATED REPORTS”: THE SENTENCE THAT MUST FOLLOW HIM FOREVER
Onanuga describes “orchestrated reports of terrorist attacks” as though the widows of Plateau State are actresses and the displaced communities of Zamfara are extras in an opposition film production.
This is the same man who in April 1992 walked out of African Concord alongside six colleagues rather than apologise to a military dictator for publishing the truth. He understood then that power lies about violence to protect itself.
Thirty years later, he is the lie.
If the reports are orchestrated, Bayo, produce the orchestra. Name the conductor. Tell the mother in Jos whose husband was slaughtered which opposition figure paid her to mourn.
We are waiting.
THE SPV THAT SWALLOWED ITSELF
Onanuga calls the ADC “an SPV.” SPV, in Nigerian political economy, is most famously associated with the off-balance-sheet financing structures through which Lagos State’s accounts were managed during a certain governorship. It does not conjure the ADC in the mind of any informed Nigerian. It conjures something much closer to Onanuga’s employer.
The man threw a boomerang and forgot which direction he was standing.
The ADC is a registered party with a national structure affirmed by Nigerian courts, a growing coalition across every geopolitical zone, and an expanding assembly of Nigerians who have decided this administration’s tenure must end in 2027.
That Aregbesola, a former governor and a former minister, has joined this platform is not desperation. It is evidence of the coalition’s gravitational pull on the politically serious.
When a government resorts to mockery instead of policy comparison, it is because the policy argument is already lost.
The ADC goes into 2027 with a simple and powerful offer to Nigerians: a government that will restore the purchasing power of wages, rebuild security architecture that protects farmers and communities rather than explaining away their deaths, and return Nigeria to a federation where states are funded to govern rather than starved to submit.
These are not slogans. They are the direct inverse of every failure this article has documented. Nigeria does not need to be convinced that the status quo has failed. Nigeria needs to be shown the door.
The ADC is the door.
THE CORN ON THE DANCER’S HEAD
The Yoruba say: Ìgbà tí agbe bá ń jó, àgbàdo tí ó gbé lé orí tì ì í mọ̀ pé àgbàdo náà ń jókòó — when the agbe dances, it does not know that the corn it placed on its own head is sitting there. Onanuga dances. The corn is visible to everyone but him.
The corn is this: every fabricated statistic set against the journalist who once refused to fabricate. Every “orchestrated” insult to the bereaved set against the editor who once walked out of African Concord rather than soften a truth for power. Every confirmation of his principal’s drug business set against the title he chose today.
In April 1992, Bayo Onanuga told his publisher at African Concord: “I’ll rather just go” and walked out alongside six colleagues to protect a story. They published from the shadows while a military regime printed fake editions of their magazine to discredit them.
One of those colleagues went to prison. Another built Premium Times. Another went to the Senate.
In 2026, Onanuga stays. In Aso Rock. With a title. With a salary. Defending a government.
The men he once walked out with are watching. The profession he once bled for is watching. Nigeria is watching.
The only difference between 1992 and 2026 is that this time, nobody had to hold a gun to his head.
The ADC is not an SPV. It is a verdict. And Bayo Onanuga, for all his noise and statistical sleight of hand, cannot outrun it.
The snail feels the pain. The snail is listening. And come 2027, the snail votes.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
14 April 2026
