Every Nigerian politician has a chapter of their record they would rather voters forget. For Atiku Abubakar, that chapter is not a rumour, a leaked memo or a courtroom allegation. It is a formal assignment he held for eight years, carried out in public, with his name at the top of the letterhead. As Vice President from 1999 to 2007, he chaired the National Council on Privatisation, the body handed the authority to sell off the assets the Nigerian state had spent three decades building. What happened during those years is the single strongest reason he should never again be trusted with the country’s patrimony.
The Job He Asked For
Privatisation was not, in principle, a scandal. Nigeria in 1999 owned a sprawling collection of loss-making enterprises that consumed public money and returned very little. A serious, transparent divestment programme could have been defensible. But privatisation done properly requires three things: honest valuation, open competitive bidding, and buyers with the capital and expertise to actually run what they buy. The programme Atiku presided over repeatedly failed all three tests, and it failed them in a direction that was never random. Assets moved, again and again, toward people who were politically connected rather than commercially qualified.
Ajaokuta: The Monument to How It Went Wrong
No single case captures the era better than the Ajaokuta Steel Complex. Nigeria had sunk an enormous sum of public money into a plant meant to anchor the country’s industrialisation. Under the concession arrangements of that period it was handed to a foreign operator, and instead of producing steel it produced litigation, arbitration and eventually a settlement that cost Nigeria further hundreds of millions of dollars to unwind. Decades later, Ajaokuta still does not roll steel. A country that imports the reinforcement bars for its own construction boom is paying, every single day, for decisions made in that period. Whatever the intent, the outcome is not in dispute.
Refineries, Reversed at the Door
In the final days of the administration in 2007, controlling stakes in the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries were sold to a consortium at a price that struck many observers as extraordinarily low for national strategic assets. The transaction was so contentious that the incoming government reversed it almost immediately, and even the buyers walked away and had their money returned. Consider what that sequence actually reveals. A privatisation programme was so poorly constructed that a successor administration looked at it, in the first weeks of taking office, and concluded that undoing it was the safer course. That is not a difference of economic philosophy. That is a verdict.
The Buyers Were Always the Same People
Follow the pattern across the era and a clear shape emerges. Hotels, aluminium, insurance, oil service assets, telecommunications infrastructure and manufacturing plants passed into the hands of a narrow circle of politically wired businessmen, retired officers and associates of the government of the day. In many cases the new owners stripped the assets, sold the land, sacked the workforce and abandoned the productive activity entirely. Nigeria did not create a competitive private sector out of the exercise. It created a class of rentiers who bought public property at friendly prices and monetised it without ever building anything. The Senate’s own later reviews of the privatisation programme found repeated procedural breaches and undervaluation, and that legislative record is a matter of public documentation, not opposition rhetoric.
The Workers Nobody Compensated
Behind every sold enterprise were Nigerians who had given their working lives to it. When plants were bought and stripped, those workers were discharged with severance packages that were promised and then delayed, disputed or never paid at all. Some of those men are now old, and some died waiting for entitlements calculated in a currency that has since lost most of its value. This is the part of the privatisation story that never appears in the economic debate, because it does not fit into a chart. It is also the part that ordinary Nigerians remember most clearly, because they watched it happen to a father, an uncle or a neighbour.
A Defence That Explains Nothing
Atiku’s answer has always been that he merely chaired a council, that decisions were collective, that his principal signed off, and that critics misunderstand reform. But he cannot have it both ways. When it suits the campaign, he presents himself as the architect of Nigeria’s economic liberalisation, the man with the private-sector instinct, the reformer who knows how to move assets into productive hands. If the credit belongs to him, so does the ledger. You do not get to claim authorship of the policy and disown its results in the same speech.
Why This Is the Disqualification
Nigeria in 2027 will face decisions about what remains: refineries, power assets, ports, rail concessions, gas infrastructure and vast tracts of public land. The next president will hold a pen over all of it. The question voters must ask is not whether Atiku Abubakar is experienced, because he plainly is. The question is what his experience consists of, and the honest answer is that the largest transfer of public wealth into private hands in Nigeria’s democratic history happened under his chairmanship and left the country poorer, less industrial and more dependent on imports than it was before. A man does not need to be convicted of anything for that record to be disqualifying. He simply needs to be judged by it.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
