Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar has done it again. No, not contesting elections —that part is old news, but declaring that he will contest.
If politics had a Guinness World Record category for “Most Repeated Declarations of Interest,” Atiku would surely be the man to beat.
Over the weekend, at an African Democratic Congress (ADC) event, Prof. Ola Olateju of Achievers University represented Atiku who is in Dubai.
In what should have been a routine outing, Olateju told the audience that Atiku was “not desperate to be president” and was “more concerned with fixing Nigeria than chasing power.”
Harmless words, perhaps. But in politics, tone is everything. To Atiku’s critics, it sounded like a coded concession speech and to his supporters, it was a red flag that the Atiku might be retreating from the race.
And so, on Monday, Atiku re-declared. From his Dubai holiday home, he wasted no time in clarifying that he is absolutely running in 2027.
Nigeria, he said, is in the “intensive care unit” and needs rescuing. And, in case anyone was still confused, he made it clear: “I will run.”
Now, some people will ask, why all this drama? The answer is that Atiku cannot afford to lose even a fraction of the fragile political capital he has cobbled together.
After decades in the game, he knows that supporters are like delicate china which are easy to break, hard to fix.
If he allowed Olateju’s comments to stand, he risked undoing months of effort spent forging alliances, whispering promises, and polishing his “elder statesman” brand.
In Nigerian politics, hesitation is fatal. The moment you look unsure, your loyalists scatter faster than okada riders at the sight of task force.
That is why Atiku’s swift correction was not just about semantics; it was about survival. He has fought too many battles to let one careless sentence from a stand-in spokesperson send the wrong message.
At this stage in Atiku’s political movement he cannot afford any holes.
But beyond the comedy of constant declarations lies a more serious truth. Atiku’s reassertion of his ambition underscores just how high the stakes are in 2027.
He is now part of a broader opposition coalition involving figures like Peter Obi and Nasir El-Rufai, all united by one mission: unseating Bola Ahmed Tinubu. That project requires clarity, confidence, and consistency. A candidate who seems ambivalent about running is a liability, not a leader.
Still, there is an irony in all of this. Atiku insists he wants to fix Nigeria, but to do so, he must first fix the messaging within his own camp.
If every representative he sends out has to be publicly corrected, Nigerians will start to wonder whether the bigger problem is not desperation but disorganization. For a man who has run five times already, surely there should be no ambiguity about his intentions by now.
In the end, Atiku’s re-declaration is both a reminder and a metaphor. A reminder that he is still very much in the race, and a metaphor for Nigeria’s political class – forever circling, forever recycling, forever declaring.
Nigerians may chuckle at the drama, but they will also be asking hard questions: What new vision does Atiku offer? How will he rescue a country in “intensive care” when his own political machinery sometimes appears in need of urgent resuscitation?
