$1.2m lobbyist: You can’t drag Nigeria into destruction – Presidency hits Atiku

President Bola Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Media and Public Communication, Sunday Dare, has said Nigerians demand to know the report card of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar.

Dare made the remark while criticizing Atiku for hiring a United States, US, lobbyist with $1.2 million, in preparation for the 2027 elections.

In a statement he signed, Dare said the former vice president can’t take Nigeria down the path of self-destruction.

The statement reads partly: “Worse still, for a man who presumes to offer leadership to Africa’s most populous nation, his recent resort to grievance offshoring, outsourcing political warfare to Washington and reportedly paying $1.2 million to an American lobbying firm to peddle petitions against a sitting Nigerian President, stands as an affront to Nigeria’s sovereignty and a vote of no confidence in its democratic institutions.

“It is also a stinging slight, an implicit condescension directed at generations of Nigerian journalists, policy analysts, academics, and public intellectuals who have spent decades analysing, critiquing, and carrying the burden of the nation’s democratic evolution.

“The Atiku Abubakar of today cuts a pitiable figure, a grotesque portrait of what a politician becomes when ambition overwhelms judgment and every political faculty becomes programmed for self-destruction.

“No, Atiku cannot take Nigeria down that path with him. He must travel it alone. But first, Nigerians deserve Atiku Abubakar’s report card. Charity, they say, begins at home, not in Washington.

“Nigerians deserve to know whether the Atiku Abubakar who has long presented himself as a democrat is, in reality, a politician of many colours. He has erected for himself a throne built simultaneously on sand and bayonets. It is time to explode the bayonets.”