Part 3 of 3 — APC Buried Its Own Father to Please the Fund
In 1985, a military head of state named Muhammadu Buhari looked at an IMF loan facility on offer to Nigeria, read the conditions attached to it — currency devaluation, subsidy removal, the familiar structural-adjustment menu — and refused it. That refusal became one of the defining episodes of his political identity, so central to how Nigerians understood “Buharism” that decades later, scholars would describe his entire political tradition as rooted in nationalist resistance to exactly the kind of Fund-prescribed devaluation Nigeria has now fully embraced. When the party he founded, the All Progressives Congress, went looking for a founding myth in 2015, it borrowed heavily from that man’s reputation as someone who would not let Washington dictate terms to Abuja.
Eleven years later, an APC government is floating the currency, has quietly rebuilt a fuel subsidy under new accounting names, and is managing an $11.6 billion annual debt-service bill on the advice of the very institution its founding father once turned away. Nigeria’s ruling party did not just abandon an economic position. It buried its own political father to do it, and it did not even attend the funeral — because in public, this administration insists it has done no such thing, that this was never about the IMF at all, only “reform.”
That is the hypocrisy at the center of this series’ final piece. Not simply that a politician changed his mind — politicians do that, and sometimes should. It is that the change was dressed up as sovereignty and courage when it was, by any honest reading, exactly the surrender the party’s own founding generation once refused to make.
The endorsement and the exodus, side by side
In July, the APC formally endorsed Bola Tinubu for a second term in 2027, with party leaders praising the very reforms this series has spent two installments unpacking — the subsidy removal, the currency float — as the foundation of an economic “reboot.” Reuters reported the endorsement without irony: a party asking Nigerians to reward it for the hardship documented in Part 2 of this series.
But watch who is leaving, not just who is cheering. Nasir el-Rufai, an APC founding figure and former Kaduna governor who served the party for the better part of two decades, has broken ranks entirely, joining the opposition ADC coalition and declaring flatly that Tinubu has plunged 30 million more Nigerians into poverty and has no realistic path to a first-round win in 2027. Whatever one makes of el-Rufai’s own record — and it is not spotless — a man who helped build this party and worked inside its machine for years is now among the loudest prophets of its coming defeat. That is not an opposition talking point. That is a structural crack.
Even groups with no formal political affiliation are issuing warnings dressed as ultimatums. Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, told Tinubu directly this year that if hunger, insecurity and poverty remain unaddressed, “a revolt against your administration through the ballot box is not merely a possibility; it is an impending reality.” When a president’s own ceremonial well-wishers start speaking in the language of electoral revolt, the palace should be listening. There is no evidence, three years in, that it is.
Borrowing its way to the ballot
Even as the administration insists it has resisted formal IMF indebtedness, it has not resisted debt itself. Earlier this year, Tinubu asked the National Assembly to approve a further $516 million external loan, on top of an already ballooning debt profile this series detailed in Part 1. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, no stranger to criticism of his own party’s fiscal record when it held power, called the request fiscally irresponsible given the hardship ordinary Nigerians are living through, and demanded transparency on repayment terms before any approval. Whatever one thinks of Atiku’s own political ambitions, the substance of the objection is hard to dismiss: a government that spends nearly half its expected 2026 revenue simply servicing existing debt is now asking to add more, in an election year, with the details kept largely out of public view.
This is the pattern this entire series has traced from a different angle each time: a government that will not call the subsidy a subsidy, will not call the debt binge a debt binge, and increasingly will not call an IMF-shaped policy programme what it is — because naming any of these things honestly would mean admitting what it has cost.
What accountability should actually look like before 2027
This newspaper is not going to tell you who to vote for in 2027. That is not our job, and any outlet that tells you otherwise while calling itself journalism is lying to you a second time. But we will tell you what to demand from every single person asking for your vote, regardless of party:
First, the forensic audit Dele Oye has already called for — a full, independent accounting of the ₦17.5 trillion NNPC says the federation owes it, so Nigerians can finally see whether “subsidy is gone” was ever true for a single day since May 2023. Second, full public disclosure of the terms of the $5 billion total return swap the IMF itself flagged as risky, including exactly what collateral is pledged and what happens to it if the naira moves against Nigeria. Third, an honest accounting — not a rebased one, an honest one — of what has actually happened to the wallets of the 140 million Nigerians the World Bank says are living in poverty, published alongside every future inflation report, not buried in a footnote. Fourth, a real timeline, with real numbers, for the cash-transfer and social-protection scale-up the IMF’s own directors say is now overdue, so that “palliative” stops being a word Nigerians associate with stampedes and mass graves rather than relief.
None of these demands require you to hate Bola Tinubu, or to love Atiku Abubakar, or to trust el-Rufai’s late conversion to opposition politics. They require only that you refuse to accept, from anyone, a government’s own preferred description of what it has done to your country. Every administration since 1999 — APC and PDP alike — has asked Nigerians to trust the numbers it chose to publish and ignore the ones it didn’t. Tinubu’s government did not invent that habit. It has simply had three unusually hard years in which to perfect it.
The choice this leaves you with
There is a version of the next eight months in which this series changes nothing — in which the numbers in Part 2 keep climbing quietly behind a stabilising currency, in which “reform” keeps meaning something different in Abuja than it means in the queue for a bag of rice, and in which 2027 becomes just another election decided by whoever controls the loudest microphone rather than the truest ledger.
There is another version, and it starts with something smaller than a revolution: a citizen who reads the NNPC’s own audited accounts instead of the press release about them; a voter who asks a candidate, on camera, to name the exact collateral behind a $5 billion swap; a community that remembers, next February or March, that the government which called itself sovereign borrowed $11.6 billion this year to prove it. Nigeria was not sold at gunpoint. It was sold, three years running, by people who could have chosen differently and did not. The only people who can make that choice differently now are the 140 million of you the World Bank counted this year — and the tens of millions more who are not yet poor, but are one bad harvest, one more currency wobble, one more unaudited trillion away from joining them.
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This concludes United Continental Post’s three-part investigative opinion series, “Sold: Nigeria’s Silent Surrender.” Political developments referenced — the APC’s 2027 endorsement of President Tinubu, Nasir el-Rufai’s departure from the party, Ohanaeze Ndigbo’s statement, and the $516 million loan request — are drawn from Reuters, AllAfrica, and contemporaneous Nigerian press reporting current as of publication. Historical material on the 1985 IMF loan episode reflects established Nigerian political history.
