Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Every morning, Facebook hands my own words back to me. It drags up what I wrote during the 2023 presidential election, sets it before my eyes once more, and I read it, and I laugh, though the laughter is bitter. We warned our people. We warned them plainly, and often, and early. They did not listen.
Let us be honest about what happened. Had the resolve to throw the All Progressives Congress out of power been truly overwhelming at the polls, no hand could have bent that election. A verdict delivered by millions cannot be quietly rewritten in the dark. Nigerians held in their palms the one thing that could have rescued this country, that small square of plastic, the permanent voter’s card, potent beyond its size. Cast for Atiku, it could have pulled this nation out of the misery the APC has poured upon it. It was not cast that way.
Today the condition of Nigeria refuses every neat name we try to give it. Across the country people cry out under the crushing weight of an APC government, and who can blame them.
Imagine, instead, that Atiku had prevailed. A man built for hard roads, with the will to break through walls that lesser men call impossible.
The APC’s pretence about the suffering of Nigerians is worse than failure, it is calculated. For a Tinubu led government wrapped in the APC shroud to feign concern, to pay lip service to a hardship it authored, is not politics. It is sacrilege.
You need no better proof than the President’s own meeting with the Catholic bishops. When the Bishops’ Conference sat with him only recently and laid the hunger, the insecurity and the hardship of ordinary Nigerians before him, he did not receive it as a man moved. By the account the bishops themselves carried to the public, he waved the anguish aside, telling them there was hunger in this land before he was born, and reportedly urging the clergy to go and feed the people if they truly believed them to be hungry. That is not the voice of a leader wrestling with a crisis. It is the voice of a government that has run out of answers and will no longer trouble itself to pretend.
Set that beside the man Nigeria was denied. Had Atiku been in the saddle, this country would have had a thinker and a builder at the helm, a developer of the national commonwealth, and our people would have looked up and rejoiced to see it. Instead we are handed indifference dressed as candour, a President whose reply to a hungry nation is that its hunger is older than he is.
Had Atiku emerged in that election, he would have set out to turn this long suffering land into a nation of the first rank, a place where life is intimately abundant. His presidency would have broken over Nigeria like a brighter and gentler sunrise, and bound our people closer in every good way. He was resolute, unshakeably so, that the lifting of poverty from the lives of ordinary Nigerians would sit at the very centre of his government. He came to put laughter back on our faces. Weigh that against the realities of our economy today, and the truth is plain. Nigeria needs Atiku for the effective leadership that gives our people a new lease of life.
These are unprecedented times. The socio economic helplessness the APC has fastened on Nigerians has left a people traumatised, and there is no gentler way to say it. What Nigerians are made to endure under this government is simply unpalatable.
Look at the Nigerian you pass on the street today. He may say nothing to you, and he does not need to. The unhappiness is written across his face.
This is not the bargain our people struck when they handed the APC power more than a decade ago, and returned them to office thereafter. Buhari took his eight years. Tinubu is now deep into his four. The pattern is unmistakable. The APC changed Nigerian lives for the worse in its first four years, raised that anguish to a new level in its second term, and in 2023 came back to renew the wound. Picture, then, what they would hand this country in 2027. May God not allow it.
In 2027, Nigerians will stand again at the fork in the road, and this time we choose with our eyes open. One path leads to a united Nigeria and a genuine hope of something better. The other is surrender, a slow descent into serfdom and ruin under the APC, nothing more than the extension of the wreckage they have already made. There is no neutral ground here. Every Nigerian must choose, freely and for himself, to drive the All Progressives Congress from power.
And the work begins now.
13 August 2026
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
