Taiwo Popoola
The Special Assistant to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, has warned the Presidency that the coalition is a real threat that the All Progressives Congress, APC, can’t “laugh off.”
Shaibu noted that the APC is crumbling under its failure, adding that the party has no ideology.
He remarked in response to attacks by President Bola Tinubu’s spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, on former APC members who defected to the African Democratic Congress, like Rotimi Amaechi, Abubakar Malami, Rauf Aregbesola, Hadi Sirika, among others.
These former APC chieftains defected to the ADC yesterday during the unveiling of the party as the official platform for the coalition.
Reacting, Shaibu accused Onanuga of trying to distract Nigerians from the youth, stressing that his remark was “a political obituary laced with bitterness.”
In a statement on X, Shaibu wrote: “Your latest tirade, laced with bile and paranoia, is a tired attempt to spin the truth and distract Nigerians from the obvious. The APC is crumbling under the weight of its failures, and the emerging coalition is the first real threat you and your fellow propagandists can no longer laugh off.
Let’s put it. Your essay is not an analysis; it is a political obituary laced with bitterness. You mention the names like Amaechi, Aregbesola, Malami, and Oyegun, men whose footprints are etched in the very foundations of the APC. But now that they no longer genuflect before the emperor in Bourdillon, you reduce them to ‘disgruntled’ or ‘irrelevant’? You insult their intelligence, and by extension, yours.
You claim this coalition has no ideology. But let’s ask you, Mr. Onanuga, what ideology does the APC stand for today, apart from hunger, insecurity, fuel hikes, propaganda, and presidential absenteeism? Is it not under your beloved party that the naira became toilet paper, graduates became street hawkers, and citizens began fleeing their own country like refugees?
The truth is simple. You and your ilk are scared. Scared of unity. Scared of rising voices. Scared of a coalition too broad to smear and too determined to break. You know what’s coming, and like a man watching the tide roll in, you are screaming at the waves, hoping they turn back.
You warn about personal ambitions in the coalition, yet you ignore the fact that it was personal ambition that tore the soul out of your party. It was ego, raw, selfish, imperial ego, that fractured your ranks, chased away your brightest minds, and handed Nigeria to a cabal incapable of basic governance.
If anyone is desperate, Bayo, it is the APC and its talking heads, desperate to cling to a lie that the people have already rejected. This coalition didn’t form out of envy. It formed out of necessity, because Nigerians can no longer endure the pain your party inflicts daily.
You have made a career of defending the indefensible. But history is a brutal judge. And when the curtain falls, it will remember you not as a patriot, but as a chief apologist of Nigeria’s decline.
The time of reckoning is coming. The lies are ending. And no propaganda, no matter how well written, will stop the people from reclaiming their country.”
