Baba, This Bitterness is Costing You More Than It is Costing Atiku

…An Open Letter to His Excellency, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, GCFR

By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B

Baba,

I did not believe it at first.

When His Excellency, Prof Olusola Eleka, drew my attention to the diatribes against Atiku Abubakar contained in your letter to Aremo Olusegun Osoba, I waved it off. I said it was manufactured. I said it carried the fingerprints of the Obidients, who have become the chief amplifiers of every heresy about Atiku, and who have learnt that the fastest way to travel a lie in this country is to hang a respected name on it.

Then I sat down and verified it. Line by line. And there it was, on your own letterhead, dated 23 July 2026, from No. 1, Ataba Close, Ibara Housing Estate, Abeokuta.

I confess I would have preferred the forgery.

Baba, why now?

The substance of Aremo Osoba’s account has been in the public domain since his memoir eight years ago. Eight years, Baba. In those eight years you have written books. You have granted interviews without number. You have summoned press conferences at Abeokuta at shorter notice than this.

You chose the eve of a presidential election year.

You chose the season when Atiku Abubakar is the candidate of the African Democratic Congress. And in a reply supposedly addressed to a Yoruba elder about an Alliance for Democracy quarrel, you found room for a bribery allegation, for a two track conspiracy, for a man who wanted power “by hook or by crook.”

Baba, we are not children. A letter to Osoba does not need Atiku in it. That Atiku is in it at all tells us who the letter was really written for.

The man who refused to run against you

Let us begin where your letter refuses to begin.

When Abacha died and the transition reopened, a newspaper asked Atiku Abubakar, then a former presidential aspirant under SDP, whether he would run for the office. He said no. He said as a northerner he was not qualified to run because he was bound by the decision to zone the presidency to the southern part of the country. He said Adamawa needed a man of his stature to harness its resources, and that in any case he believed you were the best man to preside over Nigeria’s affairs at such a critical period. He told that newspaper it would be futile to elect a novice as President, and that this was why they were supporting Obasanjo.

Baba, mark the sequence.

Before he ever became your deputy, when nothing had been promised to him, when the field was open and his own political tendency controlled a substantial number of delegates, Atiku Abubakar chose not to pursue a presidential ambition he could legitimately have pursued. Instead, he threw his weight behind your candidacy and helped rally support for you.

Years later, in 2003, many of the governors and political leaders who were in those meetings have since testified that, despite mounting pressure on him to challenge you, Atiku again declined to contest. Rather than undermine your presidency, he devoted his energy to securing your re-election.

That is the sequence. Yet your letter now portrays the same man as though he had been scheming against you from the very beginning.

The office he never opened

Baba, the charge in your letter is that from his first day as Vice President, Atiku Abubakar was raising campaigners for his own presidency. Let us take it seriously, because it is the load-bearing beam of everything else you have written.

You were told things. That much is clear from your own letter, where you tell us your Chief of Staff noted, recorded and reported. You were told about structures. You were told about offices. You were told about men moving about Abuja on his behalf.

And whatever you were told, Baba, consider what you already knew.

You knew that when the field was open and nothing had been promised to anyone, Atiku Abubakar publicly declined to run and pointed the country at you.

In 2003, you knew he had the delegates. The governors were with him. He had assembled them, supported them, transported them, and kept them together in Abuja, Kaduna, and Bauchi.

But think back to Jos in February 1999. Any man who could deliver that convention to you could just as easily have delivered it to himself. Instead, he chose to deliver it to you.

You knew he had just won the governorship of Adamawa State, yet he surrendered that mandate to serve as your Vice President, fully aware that the office was widely regarded as little more than a spare tyre. From the very beginning, he even instructed his own staff to do nothing that might create the impression that he was overshadowing you.

Baba, a man who truly wanted the presidency in 1999 had every opportunity to pursue it. Instead, he handed that opportunity to you, accepted an office with little constitutional power, and then, in 2003, made the same choice again by standing firmly behind your re-election rather than challenging you.

So when men came to you afterwards with stories, the question was never whether the story was exciting. It was whether it was truer than everything you had watched with your own eyes for the preceding twelve months. You chose the story.

And you have gone on choosing it for twenty seven years, through a probe that produced no conviction, through a disqualification that the Supreme Court overturned, through books and interviews, and now through a letter to an old Yoruba friend that had no business carrying his name at all.

At some point, Baba, a man must ask himself whether he believes a thing because it is true, or because he needs it to be true.

What the record actually says

I write about Atiku Abubakar almost daily. I have shared many of those articles with you on your Whatsapp line, and you have on occasions picked up the telephone to call me. So you know I do not write from the gallery. Let me place the record beside your letter and let Nigerians judge.

*You had no money.* When you came out of Abacha’s dungeon after three years and three months, your businesses were failing and you were in debt. It is documented that Atiku brought his old friend from Apapa Ports, Oyewole Fashawe, to work with him sourcing quick returning businesses so that the personal needs of the presidential candidate could be met. Baba, somebody was thinking about your household while you were thinking about the presidency.

*You had no party until men built one and handed it to you.* At the Abuja fundraiser, Atiku personally donated one hundred million naira to the PDP and offered to pay the rent of the party’s national secretariat for two years. He funded the initial expenses of committees. He gave money and gifts to members who could not afford to attend meetings. When Chief Sunday Afolabi, a former deputy governor, was found boarding a commercial bus at Ojota to Ibadan, Atiku bought him a car. This was a man who was not then seeking any national office.

*You were not the automatic choice.* The PDM was divided between your candidacy and that of Chief Richard Akinjide. Atiku argued strongly in your favour. His case, as recorded and available to anyone who cares to read, was that you were respected internationally, that you voluntarily handed over power in 1979, and that the military would always trust you as one of their own.

A contact team was thereafter constituted, comprising Atiku Abubakar, Lawal Kaita, Ango Abdullahi and Titi Ajanaku, and was mandated to draft you into the presidential race on the PDP platform.

*You refused, and they came for you anyway.* The team went to your Ota Farm to invite you formally. You declined to be dragged into partisan politics. It took the PDM, plus Babangida, plus Gusau, plus serving and retired military officers, before you finally joined the PDP in late October 1998 and declared on 2 November.

Baba, in your letter you tell Aremo Osoba that you consulted, you sounded, you decided, you joined. You give the impression of a man who walked into history on his own two legs. The record says you were carried.

*The North was against you.* In January 1999, Adamu Ciroma, Sunday Awoniyi and Mahmoud Tukur announced for Alex Ekwueme. Awoniyi, who had known you for three decades, told a newspaper that you were incapable of trusting anyone or of being loyal to anyone except yourself, that you were unforgiving and vindictive, and that you were over-rated. Those are not my words, Baba. That is a Northern elder speaking in 1999. Twenty seven years later, your letter reads like his footnote.

Who repaired that flank? Atiku went to Kaduna and convened the PDP governors elect of the North and the younger politicians of the region, and they pledged for you. Onyeama Ugochukwu, who ran your campaign publicity, remembered it as the turning point. He said they used to call Atiku the bulldozer, that he was not afraid of risk, that he would clear the obstacles.

*He staffed your campaign.* Yomi Edu on finance. Babalola Borishade as strategist. Haroun Adamu on research. Iyorchia Ayu as coordinator, who in turn brought Jerry Gana. And when he brought Chief Tony Anenih for the South South, you refused him to his face. “Abacha man, I don’t want you.” Atiku pleaded with you. He said we need him, he can do what we cannot do, he will deliver. You relented. Baba, you have spent twenty seven years complaining about a tree you were begged to plant.

That, incidentally, is the answer to those who ask what Atiku contributed to your government. He did not merely raise money. He found the men. He recruited them, argued for them, placed them, and most of them served you creditably. The performance indicators your admirers still cite today were delivered in significant part by a bench that Atiku Abubakar assembled.

*He defended your name in public.* In November 1998, when the one hundred and thirty million naira donation controversy broke and Nigerians were saying you were buying the PDP ticket, it was Atiku who went to the press and said the money was not yours, that friends including himself had contributed it. He absorbed that embarrassment so that you would not have to.

*He held you up when you wanted to quit.* Several times you wanted to give up. When Champion reported that Ekwueme had raised three billion naira, you were troubled. When you were told the secretariat had ruled out a direct primary at Jos, you were depressed. You sat in Ahmadu Kurfi’s house brooding and refusing to go further, and it took Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and others to lift your spirit.

*He delivered Jos.* At the convention of 14 and 15 February 1999, Atiku and his PDM colleagues mobilised the PDP governors elect to give their delegates to you. That is how you won. Not by consultation. By organisation.

*And then he gave up his own mandate for you.* Before the December 1998 governorship election, on a flight from Abuja to Kano, you cleared everybody off that aircraft except Atiku and told him you were not a politician, that they had brought you into this, and that he would have to join you on the ticket. He told you his ambition was to govern Adamawa, but that if his services were needed at the national level he would not refuse. He had just won that state. He surrendered it. He was accused at home of betraying the mandate of the people who elected him, and he carried that accusation for your sake.

*History Cannot Be Erased*

Baba, be honest enough to tell the truth. Purge yourself of unnecessary hatred. Atiku Abubakar was an organiser, financier, strategist, negotiator, and coalition builder whose contributions were instrumental to your emergence as President in 1999. Stop the smear campaign against a man whose role in your political journey is well documented. History cannot be rewritten. The most respected Ebora Owu should be remembered for speaking the truth, not attempting to erase it.

*And before all of it, he tried to save your life.* In 1995, Atiku Abubakar went to your farm to warn you that Abacha’s security agents were coming for you over the alleged coup plot. Before the presidency. Before the PDP. Before there was anything in it for him.

Baba, is this the biography of a man who was plotting against you from the first day?

On what you actually allege

Now weigh what you have offered against him.

You say money changed hands in his office on a Friday. You produce no receipt, no document, no name beyond the dead. Ghali Na’Abba died in 2023 and cannot answer you.

You say it was all noted, recorded and reported by your Chief of Staff, Major General Abdullahi Mohammed (Rtd.), a professional intelligence officer. Twenty-four years on, you have never produced that record. Baba, you accuse Aremo Olusegun Osoba of making a presentation you describe as far-fetched and full of omissions, yet you ask Nigerians to convict a man on the strength of a file that no one has ever seen.

*The Dead Cannot Testify*

Baba, with all due respect, I hope you will pardon me for this Yoruba proverb. Mi ò tó ń pa òwe níwájú yín.
Yorùbá ní, “Tí ènìyàn bá fẹ́ parọ́, á ní ẹlẹ́rìí òun wà ní ọ̀run.” (The Yoruba say that when a person wants to tell a lie, he claims that his witnesses are in heaven, that is, those who could confirm or contradict his story are no longer alive.)

You mentioned Ghali Umar Na’Abba, but he is no longer alive. He passed away on 27 December 2023.

You also mentioned your Chief of Staff, Major General Abdullahi Mohammed (Rtd.), yet he too is no longer alive, having passed away on 5 November 2025.

Baba, if these men truly documented everything as you claim, why was that record never made public while they were alive?

Twenty-four years later, Nigerians are still waiting to see the evidence. Assertions, no matter who makes them, cannot take the place of verifiable facts. History deserves proof, not merely recollections.

You say there was a two track plan with Alex Ekwueme. Baba, Ekwueme contested against you at Jos and lost, and Atiku campaigned for your ticket. The two men were on opposite sides of that primary. The arithmetic does not close.

And you already tested these allegations

Unfortunately, the person you claimed reported this matter to you, Alhaji Rafiu Babatunde Tinubu, is no longer alive. He passed away on September 4, 2019. Ironically, Chief Olusegun Osoba’s memoir, Battlelines: Adventures in Journalism and Politics, in which he recounted his own version of these events, was published in July 2019, just weeks before Alhaji Rafiu Babatunde Tinubu died.

One is therefore compelled to ask: why did you wait until 2026—after both the publication of Osoba’s book and the death of the man you now cite as your witness—to publicly attribute to him the claim that the figures in one of the 2003 South-West governorship elections had been “successfully and murderously changed”?

Sadly, Alhaji Rafiu Babatunde Tinubu is no longer here to confirm, clarify, or dispute the account you have attributed to him. Indeed, many of the individuals you have relied upon as witnesses to support these serious claims are no longer alive to verify or challenge your version of events.

That naturally raises a question: why have these allegations and the testimony you now attribute to deceased individuals surfaced only after they are no longer here to speak for themselves?

Baba, your letter also seeks to suggest that Atiku Abubakar deceived the AD governors. Yet you identify no meeting, no document, no witness, and no undertaking by which he guaranteed that the PDP would not contest the 2003 governorship elections.

Even if, without conceding, one assumes such an assurance was given and the AD governors relaxed because of it, who was the beneficiary? It was not Atiku Abubakar. The beneficiary was you. The PDP’s victory across the South-West strengthened your presidency and secured your re-election. If there was a political dividend, it accrued to you, not to your Vice President.

*Baba, this is the part that undoes you.*

You did not merely allege. You deployed the machinery of the Federal Republic against Atiku Abubakar. You probed him. You set your agencies on him. You built a case to keep him off the ballot in 2007, and the Supreme Court of Nigeria threw it out and restored his name.

And after all of it, there was no conviction. There was no judgment. There was nothing.

When the institutions of state failed to produce the verdict you wanted, you took the allegations into your books, where no defendant may cross examine and no judge may rule. Those pages have since become the standard armoury of every idle man on the internet who wishes to say something wounding about Atiku Abubakar without having to prove it.

Baba, when a man has been investigated by the full weight of the state and nothing is found, the honourable course is to say so. The dishonourable course is to keep repeating the charge in places where it cannot be tested.

Atiku’s silence, and what it cost him

And through all of it, what has Atiku Abubakar said about you?

Almost nothing.

You have called him names in print that most men would not survive. You have questioned his integrity, his motives, his fitness, his character. Nigerians waited for the reply. Some of us, I confess, wanted the reply. There is enough material.

It never came. Not once has he answered you in your own coin. Not out of weakness, and not because he lacked the facts, but out of respect for what the two of you once were to one another, and out of an understanding that a man does not repay eight years of partnership with a public brawl.

He has endured your attacks in silence for years. That silence has come at a great cost. It has allowed an entire generation of young Nigerians to grow up hearing only your version of events because they were never presented with another side of the story. Yet, he has still chosen not to respond to you.

That is precisely why The Narrative Force has stepped in, to fill that vacuum by challenging falsehoods, correcting distortions, and countering narratives that seek to unfairly damage Atiku Abubakar’s reputation.

Baba, in the accounting that matters, which of you has behaved better?

The real wound

Chief Obasanjo, with profound respect for your age and experience, let us speak candidly. There comes a time in life when truth must matter more than pretence.

This is not about 2003. This is not about Aremo Osoba. This is about 2006.

You wanted a third term. The Constitution of the Federal Republic did not provide for it. And rather than accept that, an attempt was made to buy the amendment. Senators of the Federal Republic have since said publicly, by name and on the record, what was offered. Bala Ibn Na’Allah has said he refused fifty million naira. Adolphus Wabara has spoken of what was brought to him. Olusola Adeyeye has said the figure discussed was fifty million and was later raised. Members of the House of Representatives have repeated the same figures in public for two decades. Not one of them has ever been sued.

The National Assembly refused it in May 2006. The Nigerian people refused it. The Constitution held.

And Atiku Abubakar stood where you could see him while it was failing.

Baba, I will grant you this without argument: that was painful. To be that close, to have spent that much, to have the whole apparatus of the presidency behind you, and to be stopped by your own deputy, is a humiliation few men could swallow. I do not pretend otherwise.

But Baba, the man who stopped you saved you and saved democracy.

Had that amendment passed, you would not today be an elder statesman writing letters from Abeokuta. You would be another African president who could not find the door, sitting somewhere in the company of the men you have spent your retirement lecturing. Your library would be a monument to a man who broke his own constitution. Everything you now enjoy, the stature, the mediation missions, the moral authority you exercise across this continent, exists because Atiku Abubakar would not let you have what you wanted in 2006.

You have spent twenty years punishing a man for saving your name and saving democracy.

Baba, you know these stories better than I do

You are a Christian and a reader of Scripture. Let me borrow four faces from the Book, and let me ask you honestly which of them you are wearing.

*Saul and David.* David came to Saul’s court and served him. He played the harp when the dark moods came upon the king and calmed him. He fought the giant that Saul’s whole army would not face. He led Saul’s armies and won Saul’s wars, and the kingdom was steadier for him. And Saul’s answer to all of it was a spear, and then another spear, and then years of hunting the young man across the wilderness.

Twice David had him. In the cave at Engedi, and again in the camp at Hachilah, David stood over a sleeping king and would not lift his hand. On both occasions Saul wept, called David his son, and confessed that David was the more righteous of the two.

And then, Baba, he went back to hunting him.

That is the pattern. That is exactly the pattern. In 2019 you stood before Nigeria and told us that Atiku Abubakar was the man fit to lead this country. You wept your Saul’s tears. You called him your son. And now, seven years later, the spear is back in your hand.

*Haman.* Here was a man who had everything. Wealth, rank, the ear of the king, the second seat in the empire. He gathered his friends and recited his fortunes to them, and then he said the sentence that ruined him: all of this avails me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate.

Baba, you have the library. You have the farm. You have the honours of half the world. You have outlived nearly everyone who ever wronged you. And still, so long as Atiku Abubakar is standing anywhere in your line of sight, none of it seems to avail you anything.

You know how that story ends. Haman was not destroyed by Mordecai. He was destroyed by the gallows he built for Mordecai.

*The unforgiving servant.* A man was forgiven a debt he could never in ten lifetimes have repaid. He walked out of that mercy, found a fellow servant who owed him something trivial, seized him by the throat and had him thrown into prison.

Baba, you were forgiven much. You walked out of a condemned cell. Men came to your farm and begged you to accept a presidency you had no money to pursue. And of all the people who owe you a reckoning in this life, you have chosen to seize by the throat the one who paid your way there.

*Jonah.* He sat down outside the city, east of Nineveh, and nursed his grievance in the heat, and the question that came to him is the one I now put to you.

Do you do well to be angry?

What I am asking of you

I hold you in high regard. I have called you a child of destiny and I meant it. Few men survive an Abacha dungeon. Fewer still walk out of a condemned cell into Aso Rock. Whatever else is said of you, God kept you for something, and I have never been ashamed to say so in print.

That is precisely why this pains me.

Baba, you are ninety years old. You have the library at Abeokuta. You have the farm. You have the ear of presidents across this continent. You have everything a man could ask of God at the end of a long life.

Must you also have this?

Will you carry this bitterness to the grave?

The Scripture you quote so freely is not ambiguous on the subject. You cannot ask God for a forgiveness that you refuse to extend. You close your letter to Aremo Osoba by telling him that politics may end but relationships live till life’s end, and that there is no end to humility and thanksgiving. Baba, read your own final paragraph again, then read what you wrote about Atiku Abubakar four paragraphs earlier, and tell Nigerians whether the same hand wrote both.

And permit me one last observation, offered without triumph.

Nothing you write will stop this. Not a letter to Osoba. Not the next one. Not the interview after that. The Nigerian who is deciding how to vote in January is thinking about the price of rice, the road to his village, the school fees he cannot pay and the men with rifles on the highway. He is not thinking about a Friday afternoon in 2002.

Atiku Abubakar will be President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Your bitterness cannot stop it. It never could.

But it can still cost you the last thing you have left, which is the good name you have spent ninety years building.

Baba, put it down. Let it go. Do it for your own sake, and for the God you will soon stand before.

With enduring respect,

Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force and the Aare Atayese of Odo Oro Ekiti