By Emameh Gabriel
At some point, criticising the government as opposition stops being a duty and becomes a habit you can’t control. That is exactly what the opposition in Nigeria is getting wrong. Atiku Abubakar has passed that point long ago. In October 2026 alone, the former Vice President has fired off a volley of attacks against President Bola Tinubu that ranges from the theatrical to the frankly childish, the “Egypt” metaphor, the “dull student” jibe, the demand for an apology, the conspiracy theories about Ebola, and the resurrection of EndSARS as a political cudgel. Taken individually, each is merely unbecoming. Taken together, they reveal a man whose style of politics has shrunk to the size of his frustration.
Tinubu, defending his fuel subsidy removal recently, invoked the biblical Exodus and suggested that calls to restore subsidies amounted to asking Moses to lead Nigerians back to Egypt. Atiku’s reply was instant and scorching: “Bola, you are the Egypt Nigerians are desperate to escape.” He mocked the President for hiding behind scripture, sneered that “a mother trying to feed her children cannot pay for food with a metaphor,” and declared that “at least Pharaoh knew he was holding people captive, but Tinubu just tells Moses stories.” It is a clever line. It is also pure performance. Nowhere in the statement was there a serious engagement with the economics of subsidy removal, the fiscal constraints, or the mechanics of the targeted support Atiku claims to favour. The metaphor was the only message he passed to the public.
Recently, when the government announced a thirty day fuel discount, Atiku accused Tinubu of copying his production subsidy proposal and reducing it to a “30-day gesture.” He compared the President to a “dull student who copied his classmate’s answer,” even copying the classmate’s name, and then demanded marks for original thinking. “You owe me an apology,” he said. Think about that for a moment. The former Vice President of Nigeria, a man who has contested six presidential elections, is demanding an apology over a policy resemblance. If Tinubu’s plan is indeed a pale imitation of Atiku’s, that is an argument for Atiku’s ideas, not grounds for aggrandizing his ego. But grievance is what Atiku trades in now.
The police pension file is where he still could not resist the petty jab. He has rightly highlighted the scandal of a retired Assistant Superintendent of Police subsisting on a N29,000 monthly pension, a retired Assistant Commissioner begging at a mosque in Abuja, and serving officers withdrawing from pension savings to feed their families. He has demanded that Tinubu act on the Police Exit Bill, sent to the President in March and still unsigned in October. These are serious, verifiable, damning facts. They deserved a serious, verifiable, damning case. Instead, Atiku closed with “Bola Tinubu should be ashamed that it has come to this.” The sneer was unnecessary. The substance was strong enough without it. But Atiku cannot help himself. He is pained, and the pain has a name. A man who entered the presidential race for the first time and defeated a veteran like him, that is not a small thing to carry. It is enough to give Atiku a heart attack.
The Ebola fund allegations are worse. Atiku has demanded a public audit of the N10 billion the government announced in June for Ebola preparedness, alleging that a confirmed case in Abuja exposed dangerous gaps, forty four close contacts left unmonitored, health workers without protective equipment, a nine-day delay between the patient seeking care and public confirmation. The audit demand is legitimate. But Atiku did not stop there. He insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the government might use the outbreak to suppress campaign rallies and voter participation. This is recklessness taken to another level. A public health crisis is not a prop for conspiracy theories, and a man who once held the second highest and sought to the highest office in the land should know better.
And then there is the insecurity issue, where Atiku has settled into comfortable, well-worn grooves. Atiku’s argument on security may sound reasonable enough. Tinubu, he said, cannot keep blaming Buhari. And look at Yar’Adua, not a military man, yet he got a grip on the problem. ‘The lives lost under his watch are not an argument about his predecessor,’ Atiku said. ‘They are an indictment of his own leadership.’
Fair enough. A President does own the security of his tenure. But to the best of my knowledge and most Nigerians, Tinubu has never blamed his predecessor. He took responsibility from his first day in office.
But Atiku’s use of Yar’Adua picks only the flattering side of the story. The 2009 amnesty for Niger Delta militants did bring a measure of calm, but the research is clear that it came without durable reintegration or any real answer to the region’s deeper problems. Some ex-militants preferred to stay on the monthly stipend rather than take lower paying work. Worse, young men watched others get paid for joining, and began buying weapons to form their own groups, just to qualify for the same amnesty. In other words, Yar’Adua’s legacy carried within it the seeds of the violence that followed.
On kidnapping and banditry, Atiku spoke as though the Yar’Adua years were a gold standard. But the forces that have metastasized across Nigeria in recent years did not begin with President Tinubu, and they will not be explained by one either. They are the product of a much longer institutional failure.
But the most revealing episode of Atiku’s pettiness came just this week, when he tried to weaponise the sixth anniversary of the EndSARS protests and the Lekki Toll Gate shooting. In a statement on X, Atiku demanded: “Six years after the Lekki shooting, Nigeria is still waiting for a clear answer to one devastating question: Who gave the order?” He then attacked Tinubu personally, dredging up remarks the President made in October 2020, when he was a private citizen, questioning the circumstances of the protesters who were shot. It was a calculated attempt to paint Tinubu as indifferent to the blood of young Nigerians.
The response from the Presidency was devastating, and it exposed exactly the kind of hypocrisy that defines Atiku’s brand of opposition. Dada Olusegun, Tinubu’s Special Assistant on Social Media, fired back with a simple, unanswerable question: why didn’t Atiku ask Buhari? The former Vice President visited Buhari in Daura on June 22, 2024, and again in Kaduna on April 11, 2025. Buhari was the President who was in office when the Lekki shooting occurred. Atiku had two face-to-face opportunities to demand answers from the man who was in charge then. He said nothing. Instead, he waited six years to lob the question at a man who was not even in government at the time.
“That it took you six years to ask these questions is a testament to your insincerity and desperation to become President. Nigerians are not fools; they know you do not care about them; you only care about your inordinate ambition”, Olusegun Dada said. The aide also reminded Atiku that Tinubu, as a private citizen in 2020, suffered personally during the protests, his Bourdillon residence in Lagos was nearly razed, and he and his household fled for safety. “Twisting the complex tragedy of 2020 to pin it on a man who was himself a primary financial and political victim of the fallout is uncharitable and mean-spirited,” Olusegun added. Atiku had no answer. Because there is no answer.
This is how Atiku operates.
The same weakness was on display in Keyamo’s recent broadside. The Minister of Aviation did not bother to rebut Atiku’s policy proposals; he went straight for the man. Atiku, Keyamo said, is “a pained and very bitter fellow” whose recent outbursts are symptoms of “agitated depression” stemming from his inability to accept that Tinubu achieved on his first attempt what Atiku has pursued for three decades. “The pain and bitterness stems from the fact that he feels President Bola Ahmed Tinubu finally outsmarted him politically to get the most coveted position of President and he can’t mentally deal with this fact,” Keyamo said. He urged those close to Atiku to “administer anti-depressants on him” and warned that the former Vice President is “petering into political oblivion”.
Keyamo’s diagnosis is brutal, but it is not wrong. The man who once stood a heartbeat away from the presidency now spends his days firing off social media statements, demanding apologies over policy resemblance, and resurrecting six-year-old tragedies to score points against a man he cannot beat at the the polls. It is not a dignified end to a long political career. It is a slow, public unravelling.
Keyamo went further, accusing Atiku of rank hypocrisy over the Nigeria Airways pension crisis. Atiku had complained about pensioners choosing between medicine and food. Keyamo reminded Nigerians that it was the Obasanjo-Atiku administration that liquidated Nigeria Airways in September 2004 and left its workers unpaid. “It’s only the younger ones who don’t know your history you can attempt to hoodwink, but we will expose you to them,” Keyamo said. The Tinubu administration, by contrast, had just approved and released ₦36 billion to settle those outstanding entitlements. Atiku, the man who now champions pensioners, was part of the government that created their suffering. The irony is almost too perfect.
Tinubu’s men have mostly responded with dismissals of their own. But the President himself has largely stayed silent, and one can see why. The more Atiku rants, the easier it becomes to portray him as a sore loser rather than a credible critic. Atiku is doing his opponent’s work for him.
Atiku’s pettiness knows no bounds. Unfortunately for him, neither does his capacity to waste his own best arguments, and to remind Nigerians, with every passing week, why they chose someone else. They chose President Tinubu over him over and over again.
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