0
0
There comes a moment in the life of every nation when euphemism becomes cowardice, when politeness becomes complicity, and when silence begins to look dangerously like consent.
Nigeria has arrived at that moment.
What the All Progressives Congress has offered this country since 2015 is not governance in any honourable sense of the word. It is not reform. It is not rescue.
It is not even the clumsy misfortune of an administration that meant well and stumbled.
No. What Nigerians have endured is the grim spectacle of a ruling party that came bearing banners of hope, only to enthrone hardship, deepen insecurity, disfigure economic stability, and normalise suffering on a scale too severe to be excused by propaganda.
The APC has mastered one poisonous craft: the repackaging of failure as vision.
It has sold pain as patriotism, marketed deprivation as reform, and demanded applause from a hungry people for policies that have made daily existence harsher, earnings weaker, businesses more fragile, and the future more uncertain.
In the strange moral universe of APC apologetics, the citizen is expected not merely to endure failure, but to celebrate it.
This is not leadership. It is organised national exhaustion.
Plato was right when he observed that the measure of a man lies in what he does with power.
And what has APC done with power?
It has converted public trust into public anguish. It has taken a nation rich in promise and forced it into the humiliating condition where citizens must endlessly adjust to avoidable pain, as though suffering were a civic obligation and hardship a badge of loyalty.
That is the true scandal of APC rule: not simply that things have gone wrong, but that wrong has been made to look normal.
The marketplace groans. The naira trembles. Families recalculate survival every morning.
Young people, armed with talent and ambition, confront walls instead of windows.
Insecurity continues to stalk communities with terrifying persistence. Productive sectors strain beneath policy inconsistency.
Public confidence has been battered by the repeated collision between official optimism and lived reality.
The nation is told that progress is being made, yet the ordinary Nigerian encounters a harsher arithmetic at the fuel station, in the market, in school fees, in hospital bills, and in the daily negotiation with fear and uncertainty.
That contradiction is the signature of APC governance: grand rhetoric above, grinding pain below.
Marcus Tullius Cicero warned against the emptiness of authority without wisdom.
Nothing better captures the tragedy of the present order.
For what Nigeria has too often witnessed is the performance of power without the discipline of competence; the noise of governance without the architecture of results; the swagger of command without the moral burden of responsibility.
Under APC, policy has too frequently resembled improvisation disguised as genius.
The consequences are written across the national landscape. Institutions have weakened under pressure. Social trust has thinned.
Hope, that priceless currency of nationhood, has suffered repeated devaluation.
Even where government speaks the language of reform, Nigerians have often felt the heavy hand of dislocation without the reassuring evidence of coherent relief.
It is one thing to ask citizens to make sacrifices for a better tomorrow. It is another to trap them in a permanent present of sacrifice while tomorrow keeps retreating into the distance.
That is why the APC era increasingly stands as a cautionary tale in democratic misrule: a period in which expectation was weaponised against the people, and slogans were made to do the work of substance.
Obafemi Awolowo reminds us that it is not the years in life that count, but the life in those years.
Yet what has APC added to the life of the ordinary Nigerian?
More strain. More anxiety. More uncertainty. More division.
More explanations for why the unacceptable must be accepted.
A government may survive electoral cycles by force of machinery, but no government escapes the verdict of lived experience.
And lived experience in Nigeria today is delivering a hard and unflattering judgement.
It is against this bleak and bruising background that the case for Alhaji Atiku Abubakar becomes not merely attractive, but necessary.
Atiku is not being presented as a decorative alternative, nor as a sentimental refuge for the politically nostalgic.
He stands as a serious national option because he brings to the table what this moment desperately requires.
Experience. Economic literacy. Administrative exposure. Political reach.
And a long-cultivated understanding of the complicated machinery of the Nigerian federation.
Nigeria does not need another experiment in arrogance. It needs competence.
It does not need another regime addicted to theatre. It needs leadership anchored in clarity.
It does not need another government that confuses defiance with strategy.
It needs a steady hand that understands that governance must ultimately be measured by whether the people can live, work, dream, invest, and breathe with greater dignity.
That is where Atiku’s enduring relevance lies.
He possesses both public and private sector exposure, an uncommon grasp of national economic possibilities, and a governing philosophy more attuned to production, investment, restructuring, inclusion, and practical problem-solving.
Far removed from the shallow pageantry to which Nigerians have too often been subjected.
He understands that a modern state cannot sermonise its way out of economic distress.
It must think, plan, coordinate, and execute.
Leadership is not magic. It is method.
And Atiku, whatever his detractors may say, has demonstrated over time that he understands the grammar of statecraft far better than those who have reduced governance to slogans, optics, and political acrobatics.
He represents a leadership temperament more inclined towards consultation than imposition.
More disposed to national accommodation than reckless triumphalism.
And more likely to treat economic recovery as a serious policy assignment rather than a public relations contest.
That matters profoundly in a fractured republic.
For Nigeria today does not merely require a president. It requires a stabiliser. A reconciler. A moderniser. A builder.
Someone with the mental range to understand that the Nigerian question is at once economic, constitutional, social, and moral.
Someone with the breadth to engage both the urgency of poverty and the necessity of structural reform.
Someone able to speak to investors without abandoning the poor, and able to speak to the poor without insulting intelligence.
Atiku fits that national necessity far more convincingly than the exhausted orthodoxy that APC continues to impose upon the country.
And this is where the African Democratic Congress assumes historic significance.
ADC is no longer to be dismissed as a peripheral platform in the margins of national politics.
It increasingly represents a meeting point for disillusionment, democratic aspiration, patriotic convergence, and the search for a credible governing alternative.
It is becoming a vessel through which Nigerians of different political histories can gather around one urgent objective: the rescue of the republic from the suffocating grip of recycled failure.
That is the deeper meaning of the moment.
This is bigger than party ritual. Bigger than old partisan habits. Bigger than inherited political resentments.
Nigeria is standing before a moral and democratic choice.
Either it continues down the punishing road of managed decline, where hardship is rationalised and national underperformance is endlessly renamed.
Or it summons the courage to break with the politics of calamity and embrace a more serious future.
The 2027 contest must therefore be understood not as an ordinary election, but as a referendum on endurance.
How much more of this shall Nigerians be asked to bear?
How much longer shall failure be painted in the colours of progress?
A nation cannot indefinitely live on excuses.
At some point, reality revolts against manipulation. At some point, the people begin to distinguish between genuine reform and theatrical cruelty.
At some point, even the most sophisticated propaganda loses its power before the brute evidence of empty wallets, shuttered businesses, frightened communities, and deferred dreams.
That point is drawing near.
And when history finally compels the reckoning, Nigerians must resist the seduction of familiarity.
They must refuse the argument that the very architects of national strain should be trusted to engineer national renewal.
No. A broken hand cannot draw a straight line.
The hour demands a deliberate alternative. It demands courage over habit, memory over manipulation, and vision over vanity.
It demands a leadership that understands the pain of the present, the complexity of the state, and the scale of the work ahead.
That is why the case for Atiku Abubakar is no longer merely political. It is patriotic.
That is why the rise of ADC matters.
Nigeria deserves more than survival disguised as governance.
Nigeria deserves more than suffering wrapped in official grammar.
Nigeria deserves more than a politics that injures the people and then lectures them on patience.
The republic deserves repair. The people deserve relief. The future deserves seriousness.
And history, when it calls, must find Nigerians ready to answer with clarity, courage, and conviction.
The time has come to turn away from the architects of ruin.
The time has come to rally around competence.
The time has come to choose restoration over exhaustion.
The time has come for Atiku.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director-General
The Narrative Force.
SB E-news.
Related posts:
About the Author
