The presidency has strongly criticised former Vice President Atiku Abubakar for alleging that Nigeria is sliding into dictatorship under President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public Communication, Sunday Dare, issued the response on Wednesday, dismissing Atiku’s claims as baseless and describing them as a distortion of Nigeria’s democratic reality.
Atiku had earlier attacked the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and Tinubu’s government during the launch of The Loyalist, a book authored by ADC National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi. He described the current administration as the worst he had witnessed in nearly four decades of political engagement.
Reacting, Dare accused Atiku of failing to distinguish between democracy and military rule: “For a man who once occupied the office of Vice President under a constitutional democracy, Atiku Abubakar’s persistent inability, or refusal, to distinguish between democratic governance and military dictatorship is no longer ironic; it is alarming.”
He added that Atiku’s remarks amounted to “a willful distortion of history and further slide into senile dementia,” stressing that such claims insult the memory of Nigerians who suffered under military regimes.
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Dare argued that Atiku’s narrative collapses under scrutiny, pointing out that he enjoys full democratic freedoms: “In the same republic he brands tyrannical, he moves freely, convenes political meetings at will, grants interviews, and attacks the President daily under full constitutional protection. These are liberties military regimes extinguished without hesitation.”
The presidential aide further described Atiku as a “serial electoral loser” who has perfected the art of grievance after every election defeat. “By equating the economic adjustments of the Renewed Hope reforms with military repression, he exposes the truth: his only ideology is unfulfilled ambition. If he cannot rule, he would rather delegitimize the democracy that rejected him,” Dare said.
He warned that Atiku’s rhetoric was reckless and corrosive: “To argue that a ballot-produced government is worse than one imposed by bullets insults the legacy of June 12 and flirts dangerously with democratic sabotage.”
Concluding, Dare dismissed Atiku’s relevance, describing him as “less an elder statesman than a cautionary tale… Having exhausted ideas and credibility, he has descended into inflammatory exaggeration, hoping chaos might succeed where voters have repeatedly said no.”
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