LET’s start with Mohammed Bello Doka’s failed attempt to diminish the work of Sunday Dare. Beyond the screaming headline, we saw a Bello Doka struggling to impress his paymasters by offering round tripping arguments. He stumbled throughout, sweating profusely in an effort to obfuscate the issues.
We have a Retort for Bello Doka.
There is a profound, almost tragic pathology that infects the twilight of a failed political career. When ambition outlives competence and vanity eclipses reason, desperation ceases to be a momentary lapse and metastasizes into a permanent state of being.
We are currently witnessing this morbid spectacle in real-time through the frantic, subterranean convulsions of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, his mercenary Washington lobbyist, Dr. Karl-Marx Edward Okeke-Von Batten, and their domestic megaphones, personified by opportunistic commentators like the fictitious or intellectually vacant Mohammed Bello Doka.
For months, these logic-challenged architects of political chicanery have sought to exhume a decades-old, dead-on-arrival, and thoroughly settled U.S. civil forfeiture matter from the early 1990s. Like political ghouls digging through the graveyard of American administrative archives, they hope to manufacture an artificial earthquake that might somehow rescue a perennial, moribund campaign.
It is an intellectual disgrace, a sordid exercise in mendacity, and an absolute waste of public attention. Yet, when subjected to the cold, unforgiving light of legal truth, historical fact, and infrastructural reality, their entire edifice of deceit collapses into dust.
*The Legal Phantasm: Exposing the Lie of the 1993 Chicago Matter*
To understand the sheer intellectual dishonesty of Atiku Abubakar and his handmaidens, one must confront the foundational falsehood upon which their entire narrative rests: the deliberate conflation of a civil administrative asset forfeiture with a criminal narcotics indictment.
Let facts speak where demagogues lie. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was never indicted, charged, arrested, or criminally implicated in any drug-trafficking or money-laundering offense by United States authorities—then or at any point in the three decades since.
The historical matter, frequently distorted by desperate political actors, was an in rem civil proceeding initiated in 1993 against a bank account holding $460,000. Under United States federal law, in rem actions are proceedings directed against property, not individuals. They require no criminal indictment, no beyond-reasonable-doubt jury verdict, and impose no criminal record upon account holders.
The absence of any criminal charge, indictment, or warrant then, during his tenure as a distinguished Senator of the Federal Republic, during his landmark eight-year tenure as Governor of Lagos State, or at any juncture in his stellar national leadership, stands as an unassailable testament to his complete exoneration.
American jurisprudence is exhaustive, rigorous, and notoriously unforgiving; had there been a shred of criminal culpability, no amount of political office or diplomatic protection could have shielded an individual from American federal prosecution.
Yet, Atiku’s camp—driven by a pathological desperation—insists on recycling a dead-on-arrival administrative footnote as though it were a fresh judicial hanging.
It is the hallmark of venal, perjurious, and intellectually bankrupt operatives who prefer to wallow in historical distortion because they possess nothing to offer the Nigerian electorate for the future.
The Hypocrisy of Foreign Lobbying: Atiku’s Washington Safari
Nothing exposes the hollow, demagogic hypocrisy of the Atiku camp quite like their hysterical screaming over foreign lobbying contracts. For weeks, Atiku’s attack dogs have hyperventilated over a $1.2 million retainer signed with Von Batten-Montague-York, L.C., desperately trying to frame it as a private crusade while hypocritically ignoring the sheer scale of hypocrisy defining their principal’s Washington safari.
Let us inspect the mirror they so desperately wish to avoid. Atiku Abubakar has spent decades treating Washington, D.C., as his political sanctuary, retaining successive armies of American lobbyists, consultants, and public relations fixers to launder his political image and secure validation he cannot win at home. The engagement of Dr. Karl-Marx Edward Okeke-Von Batten—a figure whose shifting legal names, matrimonial reinventions, his criminal records, having been jailed for 180 days as sexual pervert, and professional peregrinations speak volumes of a rootless mercenary existence—is a clinical demonstration of political bankruptcy.
When a politician rejects the sovereign judgment of Nigerian voters and instead runs to foreign soil, hiring legal guns-for-hire to dig up recycled administrative files, he is committing the ultimate affront to national sovereignty. Atiku and his minders are trapped in a terminal disconnect: they believe that American court filings can substitute for grassroots electoral affection. They are dead wrong. No amount of Washington lobbying, no amount of grey-market propaganda funded by desperate war chests, and no amount of paid social media hysteria can alter the verdict of the Nigerian ballot box.
*The Mouthpieces of Vanity: Doka and the Politics of Intellectual Vacuity*
Enter Mohammed Bello Doka and the chorus of opportunistic scribes who lend their pens to this sordid enterprise. Operating as a rent-seeking megaphone for a sinking political campaign, Doka’s recent diatribes represent the absolute nadir of public commentary—a pathetic, sycophantic wailing designed to manufacture a crisis where none exists.
These are creatures of mere surfaces, intellectual lightweights whose understanding of governance begins and ends with sensational headlines and toxic social media algorithms. They deploy a lexicon of manufactured outrage while remaining utterly blind to the structural realities of modern nation-building. To spend thousands of words obsessing over sealed 1990s civil documents while ignoring the sweeping, transformative economic and infrastructural renaissance taking place across Nigeria is a betrayal of patriotic duty.
Atiku Abubakar and his handlers are pathologically mendacious, specious, and grafting. Their entire political existence is an exercise in ruthless vanity—an unquenchable thirst for supreme power unmoored from any coherent ideological vision or developmental blueprint. They look at Nigeria not as a sacred commonwealth to be nurtured, but as a personal entitlement to be seized. And when reality frustrates their ambition, they resort to chicanery, gutter politics, and foreign mercenaries.
The Unassailable Reality: Tinubu’s Monumental Infrastructure Revolution
While Atiku Abubakar and his rented megaphones sit in air-conditioned rooms in Abuja or Washington, poring over FOIA requests and paying lobbyists to manufacture ghosts, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is busy doing what true statesmen do: building a nation out of concrete, steel, and unyielding political will.
You can search American court records until your fingers bleed, but you cannot make a newly constructed highway disappear.
You can manufacture a thousand digital rumors, but you cannot convince millions of motorists that a completed bridge does not exist. You can engage in all the Washington chicanery you desire, but you cannot wish away the monumental infrastructural transformation redefining Nigeria’s physical and economic landscape across all six geopolitical zones.
The Lagos–Calabar Coastal Highway: A transformational, multi-billion-naira engineering marvel stretching across the southern coastline, seamlessly connecting commercial hubs, boosting trade, tourism, and logistics, and opening unprecedented economic corridors. Major rehabilitated sections, including the Enugu–Lokpanta corridor, restoring lifeblood to the transportation arteries of the South-East and South-South. Also, there is a decisive federal action along the Eleme Junction–Ahoada and Port Harcourt–Onne axes, bringing permanent relief to long-suffering communities.
There are comprehensive reconstruction and expansion easing the movement of millions of citizens and goods daily in that axis, including vital infrastructural backbones reopening northern economic corridors, restoring commercial dynamism, and cementing regional integration. How about the Ibadan–Ife–Ilesha–Akure–Benin Highway? Construction works are advancing rapidly, forging an unbreakable industrial and agricultural link between the South-West and South-South.
This is not phantom governance. This is not political propaganda whispered in Washington hotel lobbies. This is concrete physical reality visible to every citizen with eyes to see. Infrastructure is the true architecture of modern statecraft; it connects farmers to markets, manufacturers to ports, and citizens to prosperity.
The Inevitable Verdict of 2027
As Nigeria marches steadily toward the 2027 general elections, the contrast could not be starker. On one side stands Atiku Abubakar and his coterie of desperate apologists—trading in whispers, recycling dead-on-arrival administrative trivia, groveling before foreign lobbyists, and praying for courtroom shortcuts because they know they cannot win a fair contest at the polls. On the other side stands President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, methodically executing a bold, comprehensive Renewed Hope agenda that is physically reshaping the republic.
Let the opposition howl. Let their hired guns type out their 1,500-word lamentations of drowning men. Let them clutch at the straws of 1993 civil forfeitures and hire every lobbyist money can buy. History will record their efforts not as a heroic crusade, but as the pathetic, final thrashings of an ambition gone hopelessly awry.
President Tinubu stands fully exonerated, fully focused, and fully vindicated by his monumental service to the fatherland. When the Nigerian people step into the voting booths in 2027, they will not judge their President by the malicious fabrications of Washington mercenaries or the sycophantic scribblings of domestic megaphones.
They will judge him by the roads they drive on, the bridges that span our rivers, the economic corridors opening up before them, and the unyielding dignity of a leader who builds rather than destroys.
Atiku Abubakar and his minders are running on empty. The tide has turned, reality has set in, and a resounding electoral rejection awaits them at the ballot box.
- Arch Murtala contributed this piece from Kano State.