SPECIAL REPORT
By The Atlantic Digest Politics Desk
ABUJA / ABEOKUTA — In the space of five days in July 2026, three of the most consequential figures of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic — former President Olusegun Obasanjo, former Ogun State Governor Aremo Olusegun Osoba, and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar — have traded some of the most explosive written exchanges in recent political memory, dragging a 23-year-old quarrel over the 2003 general elections squarely into the battle for the presidency in 2027.
What began as a dispute between two Yoruba elder statesmen over who betrayed whom in the South-West has ended with Atiku Abubakar, now the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), accusing his former boss of exploiting the memory of a dead man to shape the next election.
How It Started: Osoba Fires the First Shot
The current firestorm began not with Obasanjo, but with Osoba. In an article published in The Legal Observer on July 20, 2026, Osoba alleged that Obasanjo deceived Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors and Afenifere leaders during the political negotiations preceding the 2003 elections. The article carried a pointed title — “How Obasanjo Deceived Us in 2003” — and revived one of the most bitter memories in South-West political history: the year the AD, the party of the Yoruba political establishment, was swept out of five of its six states by Obasanjo’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
The background is well known to students of the Fourth Republic. In 1999, the AD controlled all six South-West states, while Obasanjo — himself a Yoruba son of Abeokuta — famously lost his home region even as he won the presidency. Ahead of 2003, Osoba and other Afenifere and AD leaders maintained that they agreed to support Obasanjo’s re-election under a gentleman’s agreement — an understanding, they say, that the President would in turn ensure their governorships were not seriously contested. When the votes were counted, five AD governors — Osoba in Ogun among them — had been defeated by PDP challengers. Only Bola Ahmed Tinubu survived in Lagos. The AD never recovered; the South-West’s political trajectory was permanently altered, and the sense of betrayal has festered in Afenifere circles ever since.
Obasanjo’s Reply: “I Deceived Nobody”
Obasanjo’s response was swift, lengthy and unsparing. In a letter dated July 23, 2026, titled “Reply to Your Inaccurate Posture: ‘How Obasanjo Deceived Us in 2003′”, Obasanjo described Osoba’s account as “farfetched” and riddled with inaccuracies, omissions and misconceptions. The letter was issued in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, on Thursday.
“I take strong and serious objection to your calling me a deceiver because I deceived nobody. I always presented my case and all issues as I had them and as I understood them, no matter whose ox is gored,” Obasanjo wrote. He defended his decision to invite the AD into what he described as a broad-based national government after the 1999 election, saying the move was intended to strengthen national unity rather than reflect political weakness, writing that bringing the PDP and AD together was “out of strength and for the unity and progress of the country”.
On the central charge, Obasanjo maintained that the defeat of five of the six AD governors in 2003 reflected the wishes of the electorate rather than manipulation by the Presidency, and dismissed Osoba’s claim that a delegation of AD governors and Afenifere leaders, led by the late Chief Ayo Adebanjo, met him at his Ota farm with proposals to resolve the political crisis before the election. He argued that, with the exception of Lagos State — where he referenced allegations surrounding the alteration of election figures — the outcomes in the South-West were genuine, and reiterated his opposition to ethnic politics: “I screamed and said Nigerian President must not be trivialised by tribalising it.”
How Atiku Was Dragged In: The ₦5 Million Allegation
It was in rebutting Osoba that Obasanjo turned his fire on a third party who had not, until that point, been part of the exchange: his own former deputy.
According to Obasanjo, the real arrangement in 2003 was that the AD governors would face no serious electoral opposition and, in return, would support Atiku’s presidential ambition in 2007. “You were all convinced of this anti-democratic plan and you all fell for it,” he alleged. In other words, in Obasanjo’s telling, if the AD governors were undone in 2003, it was not by presidential deceit but by their own alliance with an ambitious Vice President — an arrangement Obasanjo says he was never part of.
Then came the most incendiary claim. Obasanjo alleged that Atiku gave the late Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Umar Na’Abba, ₦5 million to begin moves to impeach him during his first term. “Na’Abba’s impeachment began at the presidency by the Vice-President, who on a Friday when I was out of the office, invited Na’Abba to his office and convinced him, as he had convinced himself and some others but of insignificant number, that I should have only one term as President,” Obasanjo claimed. He said the alleged meeting and payment were documented and reported to him by his Chief of Staff, whom he described as a professional intelligence officer, and added that he was not worried by the impeachment move because he believed there were no constitutional grounds for his removal. “The game continued to be played on with me treating it with contempt as I have committed no impeachable offence except my Vice-President who wanted to take over by hook or by crook,” he added.
Obasanjo further alleged that after the impeachment effort failed, Atiku adopted a “two-track approach” to secure the presidency — first, aligning with former Vice President Alex Ekwueme with the understanding that power would later be transferred to him, and second, persuading the six AD governors to avoid political competition in 2003 so they could support his presidential ambition in 2007.
Atiku denies all of these allegations, which have never been established in any court or official inquiry. Na’Abba, who died in December 2023, publicly maintained throughout his life that the 2002 impeachment threat against Obasanjo was driven by legislative grievances over executive conduct, not inducement.
“The Grave Is Not a Witness Box”: Atiku’s Counterattack
Atiku’s reply arrived on Friday, July 24, under a title that instantly entered the political lexicon. In a statement titled “The Grave Is Not a Witness Box,” issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku accused Obasanjo of making an allegation that the late Na’Abba can no longer confirm or deny, saying it was unfair and contrary to African values. The former Vice President described the accusation as not only reckless but fundamentally unfair to a man who is no longer alive to defend his name, invoking what he called the solemn African duty of speaking truthfully about the dead.
Atiku questioned why Obasanjo chose to make the allegation only after Na’Abba’s death, arguing that this denied Nigerians the opportunity to hear the other side of the story, and insisted the allegation lacked any judicial or official backing: “If there was indeed evidence of any criminal conduct as alleged, Nigerians are entitled to ask why no action was taken at the time by a government that wielded the full powers of the Nigerian state.”
Crucially, Atiku framed the entire episode as electoral strategy. “Coming at a time when the political landscape ahead of the 2027 general election is taking shape, the obvious objective is to besmirch my person and reputation and confer an undeserved political advantage on the former President’s kinsman. Nigerians, however, know better. They are too discerning to be distracted by stale allegations resurrected for political convenience,” the statement read. He challenged Obasanjo to declare his political preference publicly rather than rely on unverifiable allegations: “If former President Obasanjo has chosen to take a political position ahead of 2027, he should simply declare it and allow Nigerians to judge it on its merits, rather than attempting to influence public opinion through allegations that can no longer be tested because the principal witness is no longer alive.”
Atiku did not name the “kinsman” he believes Obasanjo is promoting, and Obasanjo has made no public endorsement of any candidate for 2027. The insinuation, however, was unmistakable in its intent: to cast the former President not as an elder statesman correcting the record, but as a partisan actor with a horse in the race.
No Love Lost: The Origins of the Obasanjo–Atiku Breakdown
To understand the venom in these exchanges, one must return to the original sin of the Obasanjo–Atiku relationship: the succession question.
The two men came to power together in 1999 as an arranged partnership — Obasanjo the ex-general acceptable to the departing military establishment, Atiku the Adamawa politician who commanded the formidable Peoples Democratic Movement network of the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. The alliance was transactional from the start, and it curdled during the first term. Obasanjo came to believe his deputy was scheming to limit him to a single term and take the presidency in 2003 — the very allegation he has now repeated in documentary detail. Atiku’s camp has always maintained that he in fact saved Obasanjo’s second-term nomination in 2003, marshalling PDP governors behind him when powerful forces in the party wanted the President dropped.
The rupture became total in the second term. The 2006 constitutional amendment battle — universally read as an attempt to secure Obasanjo a third term, though he has always denied authoring it — placed the two men in open warfare. Atiku publicly opposed tenure elongation; the Senate killed the amendment in May 2006. What followed was unprecedented: a sitting Vice President declared his seat vacant after defecting to the Action Congress, corruption findings arising from the Petroleum Technology Development Fund investigation deployed against him, and an attempt to strike his name from the 2007 presidential ballot. Atiku fought back through the courts and won a string of landmark judgments — affirming that a Vice President could not be removed by the President, and compelling INEC to restore his candidacy days before the 2007 election. Atiku alluded directly to this history on Friday: “Rather than surrender democratic principles on the altar of personal ambition, I defended the Constitution and successfully asserted my rights through the courts in a series of landmark legal victories against a sitting President. Those battles are now part of Nigeria’s democratic history. It is evident that the bitterness arising from that defining period has failed to leave former President Obasanjo.”
The two men have oscillated between hostility and tactical rapprochement ever since — Obasanjo famously disparaged Atiku’s fitness for office in his 2014 memoir, then reconciled with and endorsed him for the 2019 election, before relations cooled again. As recently as February 2025, Atiku led a delegation including former Governors Liyel Imoke and Aminu Tambuwal to meet Obasanjo at his hilltop residence in Abeokuta, amid opposition plans to strategise against the ruling APC for 2027. Seventeen months later, the détente is in ruins.
The 2027 Dimension: Why This Fight Matters Now
The timing of the exchange is anything but academic. Atiku is now the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, the vehicle of the opposition coalition assembled to challenge President Bola Tinubu’s re-election. The coalition itself remains unsettled: there has been speculation about a possible Peter Obi–Rabiu Kwankwaso ticket on the ADC platform as an alternative should that pairing fail to dislodge Atiku, who is considered the favourite for the ticket, while earlier coalition talks between the Obi and Atiku camps, including a London meeting involving emissaries led by former Kaduna Governor Nasir El-Rufai, ended inconclusively.
Against that backdrop, the effect of Obasanjo’s intervention is threefold. First, it re-injects the oldest and most damaging narrative about Atiku — the disloyal deputy who would take power “by hook or by crook” — into the national conversation at precisely the moment he is consolidating the opposition ticket. Second, it forces Atiku to relitigate the past when, by his own account, he would rather not be drawn into historical political disputes while the country contends with economic hardship, insecurity, unemployment and hunger. Third, it raises the question of Obasanjo’s own role in 2027. He remains, at 89, the Fourth Republic’s most consequential kingmaker-critic — his open letters helped define the 2015 and 2023 cycles — and Atiku’s demand that he “simply declare” his preference is a calculated attempt to strip the elder statesman of the cover of neutrality before he can deploy it.
For the ruling APC, the spectacle is a gift: the two most senior figures of the opposition’s historical bench publicly savaging one another. For the ADC coalition, it is a test of whether Atiku can absorb a character assault from the man Nigerians most associate with his years in power without ceding ground to rivals within his own tent. And for the South-West — where Osoba’s original grievance began — it reopens the question of whether the region’s political establishment can ever make common cause with either man.
The Unanswerable Questions
At the heart of this exchange lie claims that, by their nature, may never be resolved. Obasanjo says the ₦5 million payment to Na’Abba was “noted, recorded and reported” by his Chief of Staff — but no such record has ever been published, tested in court, or examined by any panel of inquiry. Atiku says the allegation is fabricated for political effect — but the man who could settle the matter is dead, as are several of the principal witnesses to the 2003 arrangements, including Chief Abraham Adesanya and Chief Ayo Adebanjo. Osoba insists a pact was made and broken; Obasanjo insists he “wasn’t part of your arrangement with Atiku”.
What is beyond dispute is this: a quarter-century after they entered power together, the wounds of the Obasanjo–Atiku partnership remain unhealed, and Nigeria’s road to 2027 will run directly through them. As Atiku’s statement put it, the grave is not a witness box. But in Nigerian politics, it seems, neither is silence an option.
— The Atlantic Digest. All allegations referenced in this report are attributed to the parties making them and remain unproven. Both former President Obasanjo’s claims against Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Chief Osoba’s claims against former President Obasanjo are denied by the persons accused.
