By Sunday Dare
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.
