_A son of Adamawa makes his case — and asks for a better argument_
*By Ahmad I. Sajoh, fnipr*
Let me begin with the disclosures, because a man who hides his interests forfeits the right to be believed. I am a son of Adamawa State. Atiku Abubakar is our own, and nothing I write here diminishes that.
He has carried our name into rooms most of us will never enter, and for a generation of us he was proof that the Fulani boy from Jada could stand anywhere in Nigeria without apology.
I have unquestioned respect for the former Vice President. I also had the privilege of serving in the same cabinet as his daughter, a woman I count as a dear sister and will count as a dear sister long after January 2027 has come and gone.
But affection is not a governing philosophy. Kinship is not a manifesto. And a ballot is not a greeting card. When I measure the two men now asking Nigerians for the highest office, I find that the former Vice President does not tick the boxes that matter most to me.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu does. Let me explain why, and let me do it on grounds that can be argued with, because that is the only kind of politics worth having.
First test: does he build people? There is one question I have come to trust above all others when judging a public man. Not what he has acquired. Not what he has said. Whom has he built? Consider the ledger.
When Olusegun Obasanjo cast Atiku out in 2006 and left him politically orphaned, it was Tinubu’s progressive platform that took him in and gave him a vehicle to contest the 2007 presidency.
When Nuhu Ribadu — my brother, and one of the most consequential public servants of our era — was hounded out of the EFCC, stripped of rank and driven into exile, it was Tinubu’s platform that brought him back into national reckoning and handed him a presidential ticket in 2011. Today he sits as National Security Adviser. Dignity restored.
When Muhammadu Buhari had won the North three times and could not cross the Niger, it was Tinubu who assembled the pan-Nigerian platform that finally made him President in 2015 — and produced a Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, from his own Lagos cabinet.
That is only the headline. Beneath it is a roll call that is genuinely difficult to complete in one sitting: a Vice President, a succession of Lagos governors — Fashola, Ambode, Sanwo-Olu — who have kept a megacity governable for twenty-seven unbroken years; Senate and House leaders; ministers; commissioners; a whole professional class of technocrats who entered public life through Bourdillon and now run institutions across the federation.
Now attempt the same exercise for the former Vice President. Name one person — one — mentored, raised and positioned by Atiku Abubakar who is consequential in Nigerian public life today on the strength of that mentorship.
I have asked this question in many rooms. I am still waiting for an answer that survives a second question. This is not a small matter.
A President governs through people. He cannot sign every memo, chair every committee, inspect every road.
The single most reliable predictor of how an administration will perform is the quality of the bench its principal has spent thirty years assembling. Tinubu has a bench. It is visible. You can name it, audit it, and hold it to account. That is a governing asset.
Tinubu builds men and women. Atiku builds businesses — which is honourable, but it is not the same thing, and Nigeria is not a business.
Second test: what did each man build that outlived him?
Permit me a personal recollection, because I was there.
When Tinubu set out to register a television station under the name Ghotel, some of us protested. Our objection was straightforward: a group we were associated with had handled the registration of Atiku’s Gotel two years earlier, and the mischievous “h” did not fool anybody. The protest was made.
The name was dropped. What emerged instead was Television Continental — TVC. Set the two side by side today. Gotel held a dual licence for both satellite and terrestrial broadcasting, a genuine advantage and a real head start.
Yet TVC News is now a national broadcaster with a continental footprint, a newsroom that sets agendas, and a place in the first tier of Nigerian media.
Gotel remains, with respect, a regional station. The head start was Atiku’s. The institution is Tinubu’s.
I raise this not to belittle a fellow Adamawa enterprise, but because it illustrates a pattern that repeats itself at every scale of these two careers. One man builds things that grow past him. The other builds things that depend on him.
Third test: consistency, or convenience?
Between 1999 and today, the former Vice President has travelled from the PDP to the Action Congress, back to the PDP, on to the APC, back again to the PDP, and now to the ADC — six movements, each one coinciding with the arithmetic of a presidential ticket rather than any discernible change of conviction.
Tinubu’s journey runs AD to AC to ACN to APC: one continuous progressive lineage, each successor party larger than the last, each one built rather than borrowed.
I do not say this to score a debating point. I say it because a party is the instrument through which a President governs, and a man who has never sustained one has never demonstrated that he can build the machinery his own promises require.
Fourth test: is the offer grounded in law, fact and practicability?
Here we arrive at the heart of it, and at the reason this article is written at all.
The former Vice President now pledges to restore petrol subsidy. This is the same man who, at the Lagos Business School in 2022, described subsidy as a fraud, reminded his audience that he had personally chaired the committee that removed the first and second phases, and promised to finish the job.
This is the man his own ideological allies call the father of subsidy removal and wholesale privatisation in the Fourth Republic.
He campaigned on deregulation in 2023. He is campaigning against it in 2026. There is nothing dishonourable in changing one’s mind. Circumstances change; evidence changes.
But a man who reverses himself owes Nigerians an explanation and, frankly, an apology. What we have received instead is a re-labelling: the promise is now a “targeted, capped” subsidy, transparently budgeted and independently audited.
Examine it against the law and it does not stand. The Atiku Economic Recovery Plan proposes allocating domestic crude to refineries at below-market prices.
The Petroleum Industry Act of 2021 makes NNPC Limited a commercial entity legally bound to sell its equity crude at market-reflective rates.
You cannot do the one without repealing the other, and no serious person believes a National Assembly would unpick the PIA in an administration’s first year.
Examine it against practicability and it fares worse. A capped pump price destroys the commercial incentive to haul fuel to Mubi, to Ganye, to Michika.
Product flows to Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt where margins are safe, and the rest of us return to the
black market and the jerrycan — the precise arrangement the North endured for thirty years.
Adamawa would not be a beneficiary of this policy. Adamawa would be its first casualty. This is not economics. It is populist rhetoric, and it should be named as such.
What the reform record actually shows. I will not insult anyone by pretending the last three years have been easy. They have not.
Households are still hurting. Food prices still wound. Over a hundred million Nigerians remain in multidimensional poverty, and insecurity still steals farming seasons across the North East.
Any supporter of this administration who will not say that plainly is not worth listening to. But the direction of travel matters, and it is measurable.
According to the Nigeria Revenue Service’s 2023-versus-2026 Economic Snapshot and NBS data: headline inflation has fallen from a peak of 34.8 per cent in December 2024 to about 15.9 per cent. External reserves have moved from an unencumbered $3.99 billion in May 2023 to over $50 billion, the highest in seventeen years.
Annual tax collections have risen from ₦12.3 trillion to ₦28.3 trillion — without a single new tax on the poor. The balance of payments has swung from a $3.34 billion deficit to surplus.
GDP grew 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, up from 2.74 per cent in 2023. FTSE Russell has restored Nigeria to its Frontier Market index. Dangote’s refinery is running at 650,000 barrels per day.
And for those of us in the states, the most under-reported fact of this administration: subsidy removal and exchange-rate unification have transformed what arrives in Yola every month from the Federation Account.
Atiku has spoken about restructuring and fiscal federalism for twenty years. Tinubu has quietly delivered more money and more autonomy to the subnationals than any restructuring conference ever did.
That is the argument. Reform is working slowly and painfully; reversal would be fast and catastrophic.
The campaign we deserve. We are now in the campaign season proper. The presidential election is on 16 January 2027. Both candidates signed the peace accord.
And what has dominated the first weeks? Lobbying firms in Washington. FBI and DEA files. Thirty-year-old allegations recycled on both sides at a reported cost of millions of dollars.
Nigerians are not eating those files.
Here are the questions I want put to every candidate, in public, on a debate stage, with follow-ups:
1. Security. Precisely how do you end mass abductions and farmer-herder killings? State police — yes or no, and with what funding formula?
2. Food. What gets a farmer in Numan back on his land, with inputs he can afford and a road to market?
3. Power. What is your number for grid capacity in four years, and how will you finance it?
4. Fiscal federalism. Which functions on the Exclusive List move to the states, and in what year?
5. Jobs. Six hundred thousand graduates a year. Where do they work?
6. Fuel. If you restore subsidy, what do you cut to pay for it, and what happens to the PIA?
Answer those, and let Nigerians judge. I have made my choice, and I have set out my reasons so that they can be tested rather than merely believed.
I would rather lose an argument about policy than win one about paperwork from 1993.
To my brothers and sisters in Adamawa who will disagree with me, and there will be many: disagree loudly, but disagree on the issues.
Our state has given this country a Vice President, a Secretary to the Government of the Federation, ministers, generals and scholars. We are more than capable of a serious conversation. Let us have one.
*Ahmad I. Sajoh, fnipr,* _is Head of Media and Publicity, Adamawa Progressive Elders Council (APEC)._
