By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There was a time Festus Keyamo stood at the gate of this Republic with a lantern in his hand. He came out of the chambers of Gani Fawehinmi. He stood in court for Beko Ransome-Kuti, for Frank Kokori and for Ken Saro-Wiwa. He watched the gate for the thieves, and the thieves feared him.
He still stands at the gate. He has only turned around. He no longer watches for the thieves. He watches for anyone who might catch them.
He did not lose his lantern. He sold the oil.
On Wednesday this gateman opened X and appointed himself the history teacher of young Nigerians. Atiku Abubakar had said a simple thing. Life has become expensive, and Nigerians live in fear. Keyamo did not answer it. He could not answer it. So he did what a cornered lawyer does when the facts are against his client. He changed the case file.
Ask him about the price of rice and he replies with an airline that died twenty two years ago. Ask him about kidnappers on our highways and he hands you a liquidation notice from September 2004. He was asked the time, and he told us about his grandfather’s clock.
So let us open his own file, since he is so fond of history.
THE MOST SHAMELESS SOMERSAULT IN OUR PUBLIC LIFE
In 1999 Festus Keyamo marched into the Lagos High Court. In Keyamo v Lagos State House of Assembly he dragged all 41 lawmakers before the judge. He demanded that the Chief Judge investigate Governor Bola Tinubu over his certificates. He told a magazine that Tinubu had almost destroyed tertiary education in Lagos.
Twenty three years later, the same Keyamo became spokesman for the same Tinubu’s presidential campaign.
When Nigerians reminded him, he announced that he had never sued Tinubu. That is a lawyer’s escape hatch. He did not stab the man, he only stabbed the men guarding him. No acrobat in any circus in the world has bent his spine that far backwards and lived to collect a ministry.
Consider the scale of it. The same mouth that asked a court to examine Tinubu’s certificates was later hired to tell Nigerians there was nothing to examine. The same pen that drafted the petition later drafted the praise. In any other country this would be a scandal. In Keyamo’s career it is a Tuesday.
THE DEAD MASTER HE DIGS UP FOR ERRANDS
When Keyamo needed a reason to campaign for Buhari, he dug up Gani Fawehinmi. Gani supported Buhari, he said, so he would support Buhari too.
But the same Gani accused Tinubu of forging certificates and went to court over it. Keyamo never quotes that Gani. He keeps his late master in a drawer and brings him out only when there is an errand to run. It is the most contemptible form of discipleship. He worships the master’s name and spends the master’s reputation.
Gani spent his life in detention cells so that power would answer to the people. His student now spends his days making sure power answers to nobody. If the dead could sue, Gani would have filed against him by now, and he would have won.
A disciple who exhumes his master only to run errands is not a disciple. He is a grave robber.
THE MAN WHO DOUBTED THE APC BEFORE HE DEIFIED IT
In January 2018, as director of strategic communications for Buhari’s re-election, Keyamo sat before a camera and wondered aloud whether anyone should think the APC was the best thing to happen to Nigeria. He admitted the party was formed to push out the PDP, and that it was never the whole answer.
Eight years later the same man speaks as if the APC came down from heaven on a golden chariot, and anyone who questions it is a liar misleading the young. Which Keyamo should the young believe? The one who doubted the party, or the one who now polishes its shoes? He has changed his conscience more often than an airline changes its crew.
THE UPRIGHT MOHICAN AND THE BETRAYED TABLE
In 2018 Keyamo called Buhari one of the very last upright Mohicans in Nigeria. By 2023 he was still in Buhari’s cabinet and still eating at Buhari’s table. At the same time he was speaking for a candidate who publicly attacked Buhari’s exchange rate and naira policy. Keyamo then joined in and suggested that the President he called upright had been wrongly advised.
He ate the meal, and then he held the plate while his new master spat in the pot.
That is loyalty in the Keyamo dictionary. It lasts exactly as long as the meal. When the food moves to another table, Keyamo moves with the food.
THE WANDERER WHO PREACHES AGAINST WANDERING
In February 2023 this same man called Yakubu Dogara a political prostitute, a wanderer and a back-stabber.
Read his record again, slowly. He prosecuted Tinubu, then praised Buhari as the last upright man. Then he served the candidate who mocked Buhari, and now he defends that candidate against all comers. This is the most breathtaking self-portrait ever painted by a man who believed he was describing someone else.
Dogara’s reply needed only one line. He was still waiting for Keyamo to win a councillorship election before they could be mates in politics.
DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE
Every master needs a man who will stand in front of the indefensible and call it noble. Keyamo has made a career of that post.
In 2022 Nigeria’s public universities were shut for eight months. Students sat at home and their parents wept. Keyamo was Minister of State for Labour, the very ministry charged with industrial peace. That same year he found the time and the energy to become spokesman for a presidential campaign. The children of the poor lost a year of their lives. The minister of labour gained a new job.
When Nigerians asked where his candidate was during the 2022 campaign, Keyamo did not answer. He mocked them. He told the country it had been the victim of mind games, and he hailed his principal as the master of the game. A citizen asking a fair question about a man seeking the highest office in the land was treated as a fool to be laughed at.
But the most indefensible thing Keyamo defends is not a strike or a silence. It is a file in Chicago.
AMERICA NOW KILLS FOR WHAT KEYAMO DEFENDS
Look at how America treats narcotics today.
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an order to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations. The State Department then listed eight of them, among them the Sinaloa cartel, the Jalisco New Generation cartel and Tren de Aragua. Anyone who helps such a group now faces terrorism charges, not drug charges.
America no longer sends a sheriff after the trade. It sends the navy. Since September 2025 the United States military has struck alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. By June 2026 it had disclosed 66 strikes and at least 196 people killed. Washington’s Secretary of War has told traffickers in plain words that if they keep moving deadly drugs, America will kill them.
That is how the most powerful nation on earth now regards narcotics money. It treats it as the fuel of terror.
Now return to Chicago. In 1993 the United States government went to the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to seize money held in Bola Tinubu’s name. The matter ended in a settlement, not a trial. The court’s decree records that 460,000 dollars in an account in his name represented proceeds of narcotics trafficking or funds involved in money laundering transactions, and it ordered the money forfeited to the United States.
That decree is not an opinion from the ADC. It is an American court record, certified by the clerk of that court.
This is the man Festus Keyamo defends. This is the principal in whose name he rises to expose Atiku before the young. The America that now sinks boats over narcotics holds the file in Chicago. And Keyamo wants a young Nigerian to look away from it and stare instead at an airline that closed in 2004.
A former crusader who once asked a court to examine this same man’s certificates now files press statements in his defence. The old Keyamo would have filed a motion. The new Keyamo bills his conscience by the hour.
It is the most unintelligent gamble of his entire career. He believes the young suffering people of this country cannot read a court document. He believes they cannot find Chicago on a map, or search a name on the phones they paid for with their last savings. He believes hunger has made them stupid.
He is wrong. Hunger has made them alert. The young read everything now, and they have read this.
The young do not need Keyamo’s history lesson. They have already downloaded the court file.
THE GATEMAN WHO SLEPT WHILE THE AEROPLANE LANDED
Even in his own ministry the gateman’s record is no better. In May 2023 Keyamo sat in the Buhari cabinet when a borrowed Ethiopian aircraft was paraded before Nigerians as our national carrier. The Senate and House aviation committees called the launch a fraud. The plane was back on its Addis Ababa to Mogadishu route within days.
The gateman did not shout. His outrage arrived three months later, after the cabinet was gone, after the danger had passed and after the new master had taken the chair. The EFCC has since filed charges against the minister who sat beside him.
That is the gateman’s method. He snores while the loot passes. Then he wakes up in time to arrest the passers-by.
So when this man lectures Atiku about aviation, remember his credentials. The Obasanjo and Atiku government buried an airline that had been dying since 1987, when IATA suspended it over 250 million dollars of debt. Keyamo’s government paraded a mannequin. One buried a corpse. The other dressed a borrowed body in our flag and called it a birth.
THE HISTORY HE DOES NOT WANT THE YOUNG TO READ
Keyamo wants the young to know history. Then let them know all of it.
A government inquiry found that corruption and mismanagement cost Nigeria Airways 180 million dollars between 1983 and 1999. That ledger opens in the year General Muhammadu Buhari seized power, the same Buhari whose 2019 campaign Keyamo spoke for. The minister set out to expose Atiku and has opened the file on his own former principal.
The workers’ pensions went unpaid under every government. Buhari approved half of their 45.3 billion naira fifteen years after the liquidation, in the season before the 2019 election. Now another cheque arrives, 36 billion naira, three months before the vote on 16 January 2027. The old airline workers have learnt the APC calendar. You are paid when the party needs votes.
The APC has governed since 2015. If those pensioners were still waiting in 2026, the mess sat in the APC’s own house for eleven years, with Keyamo at the cabinet table for most of them. A man does not get to clear his own compound and call it his neighbour’s rubbish.
And one more page. In 2007, three years after the liquidation, Bola Tinubu stood beside Atiku in the Action Congress, a party they founded together, and Atiku carried its presidential ticket. Tinubu lived through 2004 and knew everything Keyamo now threatens to reveal. He still stood on that platform. So either Keyamo’s principal was hoodwinked, or he looked at the same history and found nothing. Let the gateman tell the young which it was.
WE ARE READY FOR YOU, MR MINISTER
Festus Keyamo has promised to expose Atiku to the younger ones, who, he says, do not know history. Let him hear us clearly. We are ready for him.
Every lie he posts will meet a fact. Every half truth will meet the whole truth. Every innuendo will meet the record, with dates, names and documents. He will not find the young voters of this country waiting in an empty classroom for his lecture. He will find The Narrative Force standing at the door.
The young are not as ignorant as he hopes. They know the price of garri this morning, the cost of a passport and the fear on the highway. They do not need a minister to explain 2004. They are living 2026, and they know who wrote it.
You cannot mislead a generation that is already paying for your government’s mistakes.
THE HUNGRY MAN AT THE TABLE
So why is Festus Keyamo so loud? Why does a minister of aviation leave his airports to fight a presidential candidate on X?
The answer is the oldest one in politics. Watch a hungry man at a table. He does not argue about the cooking. He guards the plate. Every voice that speaks of change sounds to him like a hand reaching for his food.
Keyamo has eaten at every table that would set a place for him. He ate at Buhari’s table and praised the cook as the last upright Mohican. Then he moved to Tinubu’s table without wiping his mouth. He went from prosecuting the cook to licking the cook’s spoon.
Now he hears footsteps. He hears young Nigerians collecting their voter cards. He hears 16 January 2027 coming. He knows that if Atiku becomes President, the plate goes back to the people it was taken from. That is what frightens him. It is not history. It is appetite.
He is not defending a record. He is defending a meal.
So let him salivate, and let him post. We will answer every word with facts, every lie with the truth and every insult with the record. When the young voters reach the polling unit, they will know exactly who has been feeding, and who has been fed upon.
Gani gave him a lantern. He traded it for a plate. History will remember the lantern, and it will forget the plate.
Mr Minister, the gate you are guarding is about to open.
#Atiku2027 #ADC2027 #BolaMadeLifeExpensive
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
14 October 2026
