ATIKU’S ECONOMIC CHALLENGE AND DARE’S RESPONSE: A NEW PHASE OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION?
9/22/20263 min read
Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar’s latest intervention on Nigeria’s cost of living, fuel prices and electricity subsidies has drawn a robust response from the Presidency, with Special Adviser on Media and Public Communications, Dr Sunday Dare, directly challenging the former Vice-President’s arguments.
Atiku, the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), used his 18 September press conference in Abuja to urge President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reduce the burden of rising energy and transport costs and reconsider aspects of the government’s economic approach. He also offered to make his policy framework available to the administration.
Dare’s response goes beyond the immediate economic debate, questioning Atiku’s political record, his reference to the President as “Bola”, and the issues surrounding the Mambilla power project.
For international readers watching Nigeria’s emerging 2027 political contest, the exchange provides an indication of how the Presidency and opposition are increasingly engaging one another publicly on policy, leadership and political credibility.
Dare’s intervention also places him more visibly in the Presidency’s communications response to opposition figures. Whether this represents a broader communications strategy will ultimately be determined by events, but his latest intervention is clearly part of an increasingly active political conversation ahead of 2027.
Below is Dr Sunday Dare’s full response:
ATIKU’S UNSOLICITED HOMEWORK
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar convened a press conference in Abuja and chose, once again, to address the President of the Federal Republic as “Bola.” He issued instructions. He dictated a truncated timetable. He presumed to tell a sitting President how governance should be run in the last months of a mandate already given by the Nigerian people.
That is not opposition. It is insolence.
To lecture a sitting President with the unbridled insolence of dropping his first name, petulantly barking instructions, and dictating how governance should be run within a truncated timeline is the height of political hubris. The office of Mr President is not a classroom, and Nigeria is not a rehearsal hall for a man still shopping for relevance.
It is election season. If Alhaji Atiku has a message for Nigerians, the proper place for it is the campaign trail—not a briefing room from which he talks down to the Head of State. His party must still prove that it has direction, coherence, and the capacity to speak to the country without manufacturing chaos on social media. Press statements that cannot explain basic political facts, and aides who mistake noise for narrative, do not constitute an alternative government. They constitute a distraction.
Nigerians do not need lectures on fiscal management from a political wanderer whose decades-long pursuit of the presidency has been defined by perpetual opportunism.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is doing the heavy, foundational lifting required to restructure an economy crippled by decades of structural inertia and subsidy haemorrhaging. That work is difficult. It is also necessary. Transient discomfort does not cancel the duty of reform, and it does not confer on any defeated candidate the right to issue decrees from the sidelines.
Atiku’s sudden conversion to the gospel of interventionism rings hollow.
This is a desperate strategy by a perennial seeker of power who weaponises transient national discomforts for electoral mileage. A man who once supervised a controversial season of privatisation now presents himself as the apostle of relief. The country has heard this sermon before. It has also seen the record.
Before he presumes to school this administration on how to run a nation, he must first answer the lingering, unpalatable questions of his past. The Mambilla matter is not a rumour invented by the internet. It is a public controversy that requires candour, not diversion. A politician who wants moral authority cannot wave away the past with a petrol-price talking point and expect the nation to salute.
Until those questions are answered, his grandstanding remains what it truly is—empty noise from a desperate politician whose time has long since passed.
Let him save his unsolicited blueprints for a mirror. Nigeria has looked past the Mambilla mirage, and it will not return to the Egypt of calculated economic pillaging.
Alhaji Atiku should go and campaign. If he has something to tell Nigerians, let him tell them as a candidate, not as an unappointed tutor to Mr President . Courtesy is not weakness. It is the minimum a republic asks of those who still seek its highest office.
Nigeria is being governed.
The election will come in its season. Between now and then, the work of the President will continue—undistracted by first-name familiarity, unsolicited homework, and the restless theatre of a man who has not yet made peace with yesterday.
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Atiku Abubakar Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu #PBAT #SundayDare Mr. Peter Obi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nigeria Sdp Bayelsa