Tuesday April 07, 2026

Atiku has hired a US lobbying firm for $1.2 million to fight a Nigerian election in American policy circles

When Nigerians vote in 2027, the contest will have been running in Washington DC for at least a year before the first ballot is cast.

Documents filed with the United States Department of Justice show that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar signed a 12-month, $1.2 million agreement with Von Batten-Montague-York, a Washington-based lobbying firm. The contract was signed in March 2026 and registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act on April 1. At current exchange rates, $1.2 million is roughly N1.9 billion.

The firm's stated job is to shape Atiku's image in US policy circles and arrange meetings with members of Congress and executive branch officials. It will also, directly from the filing, "counterbalance" the Nigerian government's own lobbying narratives in Washington.

That last part is worth staying with. The Nigerian government has its own Washington lobbying operation. Atiku has now hired a firm to counter it. Which means the 2027 presidential election is not just being fought in town halls and radio stations and campaign convoys across Nigeria. It's being fought in DC briefings, congressional staff meetings, and policy documents that most Nigerians will never see.

The firm went public on its X account on April 2. It announced it would engage the Trump administration and members of Congress over INEC's decision to derecognise the ADC leadership factions aligned with Atiku and other opposition figures. The filing describes the engagement as covering "democratic governance, regional stability, economic development, and bilateral relations." That's the diplomatic language. What it means is that Atiku's people want the US government paying attention to how Nigeria's opposition is being treated, and they're paying to make that happen.

Here's what this reveals about how Nigerian politics actually works at the top. For a political candidate who has contested and lost the presidency multiple times, international legitimacy is not decoration. It is a strategic resource. If the 2027 election produces a disputed result, preparation for that possibility is rational given Nigeria's track record. Having already cultivated US policy relationships and established a counter-narrative to the government's own Washington story is not a cosmetic exercise. It is groundwork.

The mechanism is the Foreign Agents Registration Act itself. FARA requires anyone acting on behalf of a foreign principal to disclose that work to the US government. Atiku's lobbying becomes public record precisely because American law mandates transparency about foreign political influence operations on American soil. Nigeria has no equivalent requirement. Nigerians learn about this because the US DOJ published it.

There's an uncomfortable thing in this picture. The voter Atiku is positioning to represent doesn't have a seat at those DC tables. The N1.9 billion being spent on Washington reputation management is not available to pay the resident doctors who walked out of Nigerian public hospitals this morning. Both facts are true at the same time.