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Category: Idowu Akinlotan

2027: exhuming Goodluck Jonathan again

In April 2022, shortly before political parties began their nomination battles for the 2023 presidential election, a group of supporters visited former president Goodluck Jonathan at his Abuja residence to pressure him to throw his hat in the ring. He was characteristically evasive. His response was a model in both brevity and caution. “Yes you are calling me to come and declare for the next election, I cannot tell you I’m declaring,” he had said soothingly. “The political process is ongoing. Just watch out. The key role you must play is that Nigeria must get somebody that will carry young people along.” Presumably he was that somebody who knew how to galvanise the youth. Months before the parties organise the next nominations for the 2027 presidential election, Dr Jonathan has once more come under pressure to enter the race. Dispensing with the lessons of the 2022 experience, the former president has again adopted his cautious and evasive approach.

This time, he is not facing any hurdle that he didn’t face in 2022. There is still the legal conundrum inserted in the constitution in 2019 forbidding any president who had previously taken oath of office twice from running for the presidency. Responding to the lacuna that arose from the death in office of ex-president Umaru Yar’Adua in 2010, the National Assembly amended the constitution to remove any ambiguity regarding qualification for the presidency. In 2019, the amendment, contained in Section 137(3), came into effect, and it pointedly precludes anyone who completed the term of a previous president and had won another term in office from staking a claim for the office. The lawmakers reasoned that a breach would violate the immutable constitutional provision that no president shall serve more than eight years in office. It is not clear by what legal sleight of hand anyone can still read ambiguity into that amendment or waffle about whether it can be applied retroactively or not.

In 2022, former vice president Atiku Abubakar and other crowds of ambitious aspirants from the southern part of the country helped banish the possibility of Dr Jonathan entering the contest. And so it was that the once exuberant former president suddenly became grimfaced and deflated. Had he calmly considered the circumstances of the race he was being beguiled into, he would have seen that it was a bridge too far. But strangely, he let himself be seduced by the prospect of returning to familiar haunts he had grown to love, a presidency so powerful and immense, but an office he felt somewhat humiliated out of in 2015. He was not alone in displaying that unnatural desire. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo reportedly did not want to relinquish power in 1979, but was coaxed by his fellow generals. He never stopped longing for the office, and when the opportunity came again in 1999, though he at first dissembled, he took it with both hands. In November 2010, Alhaji Atiku became the consensus candidate of the Malam Adamu Ciroma-led Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPFL) in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s presidential primary slated for January 2011. He had defeated Ibrahim Babangida, former military head of state who had ruled for eight years, but still panted after the office more than a decade after he was shooed out.

Sources within the PDP confirm that Dr Jonathan is being pressured to contest the 2027 presidency on the party’s platform. Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed, who was for almost five years Dr Jonathan’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, is believed to be the leading exponent of the Jonathan candidature. He has privately conceded that the legal conundrum barring the former president from contesting could be successfully tackled, and that since Dr Jonathan would then not be entitled to run for a second term should he win, it would pave the way for the return of another northerner, presumably his good self, to take a shot at the presidency. His permutations may be neat, but they are infantile. There are many more leading PDP members lining up behind a Jonathan candidacy, believing that he would stand a better chance than anyone else, including Peter Obi, former Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, of winning. It is not known how reassuring it is to Dr Jonathan that the same party is in some perverse way grooming an alternative in Mr Obi.

The PDP may wish to exhume Dr Jonathan who cold-shouldered the party after 2015 because he felt betrayed by party bosses, or groom Mr Obi who also abandoned them when he thought they were hostile to his ambition, but in reality they may simply be acknowledging how difficult it is to find a suitable presidential candidate with which to beat the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate in 2027. It is also feared that the North and some elements in the PDP may in fact be exhibiting their extreme antipathy towards President Tinubu in particular. Stories of the seductions they have inspired fill the media. But, from all indications, the stories will fizzle out in the coming months, for the forces against them are overwhelming, if not insurmountable. It is true that outside Dr Jonathan and Mr Obi, they do not have anyone of enough heft to champion their cause and put them in battle formation, but to linger too long on the implausible and chimerical candidature of the two runaway politicians is to further deplete their chances and prolong their anguish.

Both Dr Jonathan and Mr Obi are irritatingly cautious politicians, the kind of caution that encapsulates indecisions and hesitations. They are currently perched on the horns of a dilemma and will not throw their hats in the ring without firm assurances of getting the presidential ticket. Yet, no one in the PDP will give that assurance. More unnervingly, no one in the PDP, not even their brightest legal minds, can give them the assurance that the legal conundrums the courted aspirants face can be resolved in their favour. For all his tentativeness, Dr Jonathan fears that Section 137(3) cannot by any conceivable legal interpretation be stretched to accommodate his ambition. His wife, Dame Patience, a more resolute person than he, thinks the family honour should be redeemed by supporting someone else for the contest. Since leaving the throne, both she and her husband have looked far better and rosier than when they held the reins of power and were subjected to the worst kind of vilifications Dr Jonathan himself thought was unequalled in Africa. In addition, the former president’s aides will be secretly appalled that their principal still harbours any thought of returning to the hot seat.

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It is expected that the former president will soon announce his disinterest in the race. Regardless of the allure of office, and notwithstanding his suspicious incapacity for deep reflection, he is thought to understand that he is being courted to be cynically deployed to divide the South and pave the way for a northern victory at the poll. He is also thought to understand that they are courting him not because they respect and love him or appreciate his record in office, but because they hope to use him for their own base calculations to reinforce their long-held belief in the superiority and dominance of the North over the South: that they can enthrone and dethrone at will, and that any southerner in office must labour or function under the weight of northern suzerainty and southern vassalage. Dr Jonathan has not given the impression of retaining a tight circle of advisers capable of disaggregating Nigeria’s complex political dynamics and availing him the best options for his considerations. However, he has proved at key moments in his life a capacity for identifying and listening to his best instincts. Those instincts served him well in 2015 when he lost the election and conceded it despite being egged on by his supporters to foment trouble.

This time, with regard to the 2027 race, he faces far less challenging conundrums than the opposition and election that took him out in 2015. He will see the constitutional impediments to the 2027 race as insurmountable, and the PDP so wracked by internal conflict as to be able to present a formidable force against the enemy. He will also see whatever guarantees they give him concerning the nomination as insufficient to bank on, especially in a party which years of internal dissensions had weakened and disoriented. And finally, he will see the political ramparts and moats upon which the party hopes to erect its defences against the APC as too weak to withstand the ruling party’s cannons, indeed far weaker than the battlements that failed him in 2015. Should he attempt to contest and be given the ticket, he will sense his vulnerability 12 years after he left office much keener than when he ruled supreme and his word was nearly indisputably law. Mr Obi fights common sense and will return to his Labour Party recently retaken from the Julius Abure faction; Dr Jonathan is much calmer, sturdier, and less given to presumptions and oversimplifications. It may take him a little longer to arrange his logic well, but in the end, he will likely resist the witches of Endor bent on summoning his spirit for an ignoble cause.

August 17, 2025
El-Rufai’s politics starts to unravel

Even for a politician as unprincipled and iconoclastic as former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, recanting his damning characterisation of former vice president Atiku Abubakar as a corrupt and shifty leader can be self-immolating. He may have left the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in a huff, and jumped into the turbulent Social Democratic Party (SDP) void without scruples, and may now be perching half-heartedly on the litigation-afflicted African Democratic Congress (ADC), but in the end he is no fool when it comes to his private interest and political survival. Though naturally defiant on nearly all things, he seems uncharacteristically reticent over his SDP misadventure, a blind alley he cannot apply his inventiveness to cure. That he is at present nervous about his place and role in the ADC is probably the result of the caution instilled in him by his many misadventures in recent months. He will, therefore, stay in the newly adopted old and overworn party with the hope that, firstly, the party will successfully navigate its legal labyrinth, and secondly that he and a few other regicidal Young Turks in the party can unhorse the old guard represented by Alhaji Atiku, and forge a new direction in which he will play a central role.

Former Osun State governor Rauf Aregbesola has of course blithely gone off on a tangent, preaching to and soliciting the disgruntled in the Southwest, but in the foreseeable future, if circumstances permit, Mallam el-Rufai will supplant the Ogbeni and attempt to be the public and discourteous face of the ADC. He will not only remain as voluble as he is truculent, he will also posture as the battering ram of the party, but without the unflinching commitment he often gave his previous conquests. In recent weeks, rather than speak unequivocally about the ADC, he has often spoken about how the coalition would displace the ruling APC. He is deliberate. He picks his words carefully because he knows he is not yet an ADC member. What is even more striking is that he has been exceedingly careful about putting all his eggs in the Atiku basket. More and more, it appears, he is unable to live with the contradictions of helping to promote the ambition of the considerably flawed former vice president whom he had excoriated in the past in words that cause everyone to wince. Much worse, Mallam el-Rufai is also slowly beginning to realise that the country’s mood is decidedly against a northern candidate in the 2027 presidential poll. That realisation not only liberates him from his sense of duty to Alhaji Atiku, it also tantalises his ambition to be a potential running mate to a southern candidate. Later, but without great reflection, he will resolve that dilemma by settling for either Peter Obi who many people falsely think has a mythical six million plus ‘captive’ votes from the 2023 election or Rotimi Amaechi whose only acquisition so far is his inflated ego. The ADC’s legal and administrative ordeal is, however, not over. In fact, whatever analysis anyone does for now will be unreliable.

Mallam el-Rufai has prematurely started to permute his chances in the 2027 polls. To carry out that abstraction, however, he must resolve two disturbing issues plaguing his ambition. One, he must determine just how far he should flaunt his messianic ego, with its accompanying megalomaniacal rhetoric of sentencing Nigeria to a choice between supporting him and voting for his amorphous party or risking the death and destruction that he prophesied must follow embracing the APC. Two Fridays ago, his son, Bashir, posted on X (Twitter) the need to make the same baleful choices his dad grimly predicted, insisting that some politicians must ‘die’ if the country is to become great. On August 1, he had posted: “Nigeria can become great again. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on context) a few certain people have to kpai (die) to achieve this dream.” Mallam el-Rufai has no interest in reining in his son. He is himself a leading advocate of doom and destruction, of things getting much worse before they get better, of riding the four horses of the apocalypse. Last week, newspapers helped him inundate their front pages with his inciting rhetoric of disaster. He had described the APC as ‘dangerous to Nigeria’s future’, and that if the ruling party was re-elected, Nigerian unity would be destroyed. And for him personally, he bellowed, the next presidential election “is not just an election, it is also the fight of our lives.”

Mallam el-Rufai is undoubtedly a bitter, divisive and acrimonious politician. He lives by incitement, that is, when he is not nurturing or validating ethnic exceptionalism. Ethically unmoored, he brings chaos and disorder to every group he joins, especially when he is denied vantage position. One prediction can, however, be safely ventured, that he will not be on any ticket in the next poll. No candidate will risk it. He is detested by most northern minority groups, deplored by nearly all Nigerian Christians, and sneered at by most political leaders for his irreverence and disloyalty. Not only will he not be on any ticket, any party where he is given prominence will be shunned. By now, Alhaji Atiku must have suspected that the former governor is double-dealing, and is ambiguous towards an Atiku candidature. After spending the early years of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration skewering the former vice president, the former governor may finally stand for something by staying true to his conclusions about Alhaji Atiku. The ADC is for now all about the Atiku ambition, but it is unclear the Young Turks in the party will stand for political antiquity. Expect a titanic battle.

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In November 2016, Mallam el-Rufai had issued an eight-point rebuttal of Alhaji Atiku’s remark that the former Kaduna governor offered him Transcorp Hilton shares. He did not have anything to do with Transcorp, the former governor said, let alone offer anybody shares. Then he unleashed a flurry of invectives at the former vice president, accusing him of being unable to explain his shenanigans in “the Ericsson manoeuvre, in the Abuja water treatment plant contract, and his obsession with marabouts and their assurances of the political big prize. He might also consider a full reckoning for what he and his acolytes did with public funds in the PTDF imbroglio, rather than indulging the usual bold face of the Nigerian big-man.” As if that was not blistering enough, Mallam el-Rufai proceeded to ridicule the former vice president, saying: “Everyone is entitled to rehabilitation, but that often requires coming clean with the people. Can Alhaji Atiku explain the findings in the report of the United States Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations which detailed a pattern of wire transfers of more than USD 40m from offshore companies like Siemens into bank accounts controlled by him and one of his wives? The report detailing the US Senate findings is online, as one of four case histories of foreign corruption in the USA. Alhaji Atiku should tell a better tale of why he is avoiding America. Someone as obsessed by Nigeria’s presidency as he is, should clear up such matters conclusively.”

There are many statements a politician can walk back, but these ones about Alhaji Atiku will be extremely difficult to pretend were never made. They are as damaging about the target as they are revelatory of the malevolence of the speaker. Despite being servile and groveling, Mallam el-Rufai knows full well that there is no way he can explain away his damning character portrait of the former vice president. It has indeed needed the former vice president’s defection to the ADC, not to talk of his past miscalculations and abortive presidential races, to cement his status as a political cadaver. But in embalming Alhaji Atiku, Mallam el-Rufai, the mortician, has painted himself as an unprincipled and dysfunctional man whose politics is finally unravelling.

August 10, 2025
Trump diminishes US democracy

While the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) (of Nigeria) repeatedly publishes jobs and inflation data believed to be sometimes unflattering to the President Tinubu administration, and the statistician-general has kept his job, President Trump, though presiding over an advanced democracy, has been apoplectic over adverse jobs data and has lashed out at the heads of the agencies managing the country’s data bureaux. Just last week, Mr Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, over the publication of the July jobs statistics which showed that the economy added only 73,000 jobs, far below expectations. To add insult to injury, the bureau also revised downward the data for April and May. Given the bureau’s set up, it is of course impossible for the head of the agency to rig the figures as Mr Trump has alleged, or sex it up should he desire, but he has never allowed facts or truth to restrain him from his volcanic and infantile eruptions.

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Mr Trump has serially broken the mould in American politics in ways no elected Nigerian leader has dared. Yet, because of a few years of fundamental reforms of the Nigerian economy, and especially following the painful consequences of structurally reengineering the economy to compensate for decades of extravagance, excesses, and mismanagement, many vocal Nigerians and their equally deliberately obtuse political leaders continue to de-market Nigeria, even report Nigerian leaders to advance democracies now showing themselves to have feet of clay, and inciting the famished populace into a revolutionary frenzy through demagoguery and outright mendacities. Nigeria may not have achieved utopia, but it has made steady progress towards economic revitalisation and democratic sophistication. If US democracy under Mr Trump can become so vulnerable after more than two centuries of its establishment, it should encourage Nigerians to persevere and trust that their own progress is not a fluke.

August 10, 2025
Nigeria fights its destiny

There are no reliable statistics or academic studies known to this columnist that give an authoritative figure of the population of atheists in Nigeria. What is known and widely accepted, however, is that Nigeria is a deeply religious country, at least nominally. The implication is that they at least have a general and probably superficial understanding of the concept of a country’s manifest destiny. Decades ago, particularly after the countercoup of July 1966, and especially after the 1967-1970 civil war, the conventional political wisdom was that the North could monopolise power if they wished, or graciously permit someone else to occupy that seat while they led him by the nose. The late MKO Abiola bucked that trend, and with it, bucked a second consequential trend, to wit, Nigeria’s conventional religious wisdom. Until 1993, the understanding was that no same-faith ticket could ever win the presidency. It not only happened in 1993, it was repeated in 2023.

Twice in two decades, Nigeria has, therefore, been gifted the opportunity of a new destiny, one devoid of bitter and divisive religious influences in its politics, and also devoid of significant and malignant influences in its ethno-regional relations. But twice within the same two decades Nigerians snatched defeat from the jaws of victory: former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida, citing extenuating security and military circumstances, annulled the very successful 1993 election and has continued to defend the profanity; and failing to understand heaven’s intervention in Nigerian affairs, a coterie of political, media, and regional conspirators has taken oath to neutralise the second chance the 2023 political reset has offered. It was unclear former president Muhammadu Buhari understood the spiritual dynamics at play in the last elections, hence his dithering and the inexplicable gesture in the direction of a northern candidate. But heaven forcefully intervened against the run of play, against months of ridicule of the Bola Tinubu candidature, and against the disgraceful clamour for a coup d’etat after the election was decided.

Shortly before the advent of the Fourth Republic, and by a brilliant stroke of serendipity, Nigerians had devised an informal political formula capable of generating some measure of stability for the country and its people. That formula was and remains embedded in the principle of rotating the presidency between the North and the South. Heedlessly, some leading members of the political elite have, however, scorned the formula, and continued to demonstrate insensitivity, if not total callousness, to what destiny is gifting them. Consequently, once again, the country’s politics is in danger of being rebooted to the past era when malignant religious and regional influences were not only tolerated but also promoted. Recognising that the South occupies the presidency at the moment, a few presidential aspirants for the next poll make half-hearted concessions to the new political realities by swearing to do just one term, but it is not clear by what ingenious arithmetic those of them who come from the North could make the same promise.

From all indications, however, the coalition of political forces determined to abridge or abrogate the progress made so far looks set to fail. It is tragic that former president Olusegun Obasanjo did not understand the spiritual dimension of the 1993 and 2023 presidential elections; it is disturbing that ex-president Buhari did not also understand it; and worse, even ignoring boastful politicians who covet the presidency from all corners of the country, it is also mystifying that the media have shown dereliction in understanding the complex dynamics that conduce to Nigeria’s prosperity and long-term stability. As the piece below on US president Donald Trump shows, Nigeria has indeed made significant economic and democratic leaps despite vicious attacks by opposition and centrifugal forces in contrast to Mr Trump’s persistent deflation of American democracy. Former president Buhari might have found his autocratic instincts sometimes irresistible, but he grew to treat the printed and verbal caricatures of him with unaccustomed lightheartedness.

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Ex-president Goodluck Jonathan was also heavily irritated by the verbal and published lacerations of his person and wife, but he stopped short of intimidating, silencing or destroying the opposition. President Tinubu has been even more shockingly liberal. Before his election, immediately after the election, and up till now, he has shrugged off the scurrilous attacks upon his person, style, and policies. The attacks have in fact been democratised and detribalised across regions, ethnicities and religions. In the US, Republicans are petrified of President Trump, and Democrats, Muslims, foreign dignitaries and heads of state, and immigrants dread him and his waspish tongue and erratic policies. He has pulverised his enemies, promoted racism, and decimated the opposition to the point of mocking their persons and even threatening to arrest his predecessors for treason. Nigeria has been a far better and a more predictable and pleasant place for foreigners, citizens and opposition/coalition forces to live, do business, and even pontificate sometimes misguidedly on arcane issues.

Nigerians do their country a huge disservice by letting their economic difficulties obscure and diminish the progress their country has made over the years. Plotting to undo that progress by making unwise recourse to ethnic and religious fault lines is not only dangerous, it is also suicidal. There are of course highly informed and perceptive politicians across regions and religions who understand the new dynamics of Nigerian politics, and have preached tolerance, accommodation, and patience. It is, however, not certain that they are not in the minority. But while they and their convictions represent the future direction of the country, there is still a significant number of Nigerians bent on encouraging prejudiced and shortsighted political leaders to hoodwink the ignorant majority in the poverty regions of the country. A great opportunity to reset Nigeria, perhaps incrementally but substantially, but the political coalition is unlikely to be impressed by the shape of things to come, or the expression of hope and enthusiasm in the midst of hunger and deprivation. To lose or endanger this opportunity because of petty hatred, ignorant economic analysis, and the denial and belittlement of the progress already made, will ultimately doom the country. It is a choice the country has to make in the next election. What option they embrace will determine whether the country will lose all the advantages that have accrued to the country since 1999 or gain and affirm the positive economic revolution about to take off.

August 10, 2025
ADC swimming against the tide

Of all the things driving the unstable African Democratic Congress (ADC), the most potent is the desire to dethrone President Bola Tinubu. Established in 2005, the fringe party has no state or local government under its control. It has only two members in the House of Representatives. In each of the presidential elections it participated in since 2007, including in 2019 when ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo adopted it for his Coalition for Nigeria Movement, it never got up to 100,000 votes. It consistently underperformed, lacked ideological clarity, and has had a perverse fondness for being prostituted. It is to this party that the Atiku Abubakar-led coalition has turned for refuge and succour. In preparation for the 2027 elections, particularly the presidential poll, the ADC’s new leaders hope to change their party’s permissiveness and trajectory. To provoke that change, however, they will have to do a character surgery on the party’s new helmsmen and purge the party itself of the lethargy that had debilitated it for about two decades.

The party lacks ambition. So, those who have taken it over are desperate and eager to inject it with a horse dose of ambition. They see the party as the last straw they must clutch at, and the next presidential poll as the very last they stand any chance of participating in and winning. Apart from Alhaji Atiku, other new ADC leaders are former senate president David Mark, former Osun State governor and Internal Affairs minister Rauf Aregbesola, former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, and former Rivers State governor Rotimi Amaechi, among many others. Former Anambra State governor and Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the 2023 poll continues his curious straddle, unsure whether to fully commit himself to a party he strongly doubts their bona fides. He is naïve to think they would be sincere enough to give him the presidential ticket. Former Ekiti State governor Kayode Fayemi continues to snap at the heels of the APC and the president in particular, but he has been reluctant to openly and hastily commit himself to the ADC. He wants to see which way the cat jumps before he commits political suicide.

These leaders, whether they are still in the closet or have openly committed themselves to the ADC cause, will do their utmost to ply the party with huge funds to make it competitive. They are scared of founding a new party and labouring to prime it for 2027. They are unsure they have the competence to run a hijacked party, and so they will do everything to prevent the adopted party from imploding. What might undo the party and probably cause it to unravel is, however, intrinsic to the personalities and character of the new leaders, not money. Most Nigerians already view the party as coalescing around the worldview and ambition of the former vice president. They are not wrong. Alhaji Atiku might have been unable to dominate the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for more than three election cycles, and whimsically for as long as he wished, but in the ADC, he is primus inter pares. The PDP is finding it hard to secure a southern candidate for the coming poll, for the ADC, it is much harder. But should the coalition defy Alhaji Atiku and secure the nomination for a southern candidate in alignment with conventional wisdom, they would find him a harder sell, for the party is unlikely to generate the momentum needed to drive the candidate to victory or aggregate a consortium of altruistic financiers and thinkers which that candidate would need to stand any chance of success.

The ADC’s dilemma is not helped by the person and character of Alhaji Atiku. He has shown over the decades that he looks after number one with unbridled fanaticism. He left the PDP because of his presidential ambition which he thought was being jeopardised by finicky and irresolute party leaders. He would be mystified to be asked to help build the ADC only to cede the nomination to a southern candidate. It is not in his character to surrender anything priceless for the common good. More importantly, for someone so fanatical about winning the presidency some day, it is strange that he has never really given a thought to the stabilising dynamics of preserving national unity through rotation or zoning of the presidency. Machiavellian through and through, he is in sum unconcerned about others, unconcerned about the stability of the country, and is inured to the feelings and patriotic actions of others, not to talk of having the capacity to adopt or promote lofty principles.

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But he is not the only exponent of realpolitik in the new party. Mallam el-Rufai and Mr Aregbesola are cut from the same cloth, and are the archetypal politicians: opinionated, conceited, and verbally violent. Both owe no loyalty to anyone or idea. The ADC acting chairman, Sen. Mark, has sometimes been cast as a hero of democracy on account of his involvement in finding a solution to the succession impasse that crippled the country in the closing days of the late President Musa Yar’Adua’s life. If he didn’t see any advantage for himself and those who surrounded him, he would have abandoned any pretext to patriotism as eagerly as he colluded to undermine the final moments of the former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida’s transition programme. He undermined the consummation of the said transition and helped in no small measure to derail MKO Abiola’s crowning after the 1993 presidential poll. The 77-year-old senator is no democrat; in fact, despite presiding over the Nigerian Senate for eight years from 2007, there was no time he said anything profound, or took inspiring step to fortify democracy.

Mr Amaechi does not necessarily bring up the rear in the ADC leaders’ display of lack of character. He nevertheless ranks fairly well for entirely the wrong reasons except in one area where he is incomparable. Some Nigerians think Mallam el-Rufai arrogant in part because he views politics through the prism of Fulani exceptionalism. Yes, he is irredeemably conceited, but he is no match for Mr Amaechi. The former Rivers governor has no unique gifts, whether rhetorical or intellectual, and he demonstrates no fidelity to truth; but he is proud, dismissive of others, and projects messianic propensity. Eight years as speaker of the state legislature, eight years as governor, and another eight years as Transportation minister have dulled his senses for comparison and proportion, and inculcated in him the delusion of grandeur. But like other ADC leaders, he does not know he is plagued by character deficit.

Overall, none of the ADC leaders can be pinned down to any philosophy or ideology, or any unique idea of Nigeria for that matter. Character in politics or leadership goes beyond the dictionary definition that equates it with “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.” It instead and more poignantly involves the possession of the “internal resources of strong moral compass, resilience and self-awareness”, and the “demonstration of integrity, responsibility, and commitment to ethical behavior” that ultimately manifest in great and lasting impact on the society. Two weeks ago, this column argued that the ADC had a long way to go to transform into a serious political party of any kind. If it managed to transcend its legal troubles, the piece said, a feat that might yet prove herculean, it would need political impresarios to turn the party into a full-fledged political organisation anchored on discernible and coherent ideological platform. It must, therefore, find a way to prove that it can build itself into a party inspired by the noble virtues of justice and equity, concluded the column.

A little more has become known of the party since that piece was published. A few political juggernauts previously sitting on the fence have thrown in their lot with the party; but so far, there has been no indication whatsoever of any of the new helmsmen being associated with noble or extraordinary ideas. Mallam el-Rufai is still embroiled in controversy in the SDP, which he threw into turmoil once he got into their midst; the surreptitious Kayode Fayemi, who is still expected to join the party, is still throwing darts at the president and the ruling party on the sidelines; and Mr Aregbesola has thrown himself into the thick of the street fighting he is used to in order to sow confusion and distrust in the Southwest.

If by some miracle the party acquires a measure of stability, and manages to attract an influx of stranded political souls, it will nevertheless still have to struggle to hold its centre together during electioneering as well as labour even more tediously to hold on to its converts as it tries to proselytise around the country selling political sure cures against hunger and northern and south-eastern marginalisation. The auguries are not good at all for the ADC. In the end, if the coalition leaders are not forced to take poison by going for a new party altogether, it will need tons of money to canonise the ADC and beguile the electorate. When the APC was on the back foot in 2015, it had the good fortune of crystallising its messages around the freshly varnished former president Buhari. The ADC does not boast of any such centralising figure, flawed or not, and may be unable to find one in the near term. But it has many makeshift magicians in its ranks who can perhaps conjure a few genetically modified rabbits from their worn hats.

August 3, 2025
Benjamin Kalu’s failed ‘Indigeneship’ Bill

Last Tuesday, House of Representatives deputy speaker, Benjamin Kalu, withdrew the Indigene Status by Birth Bill (HB.2057) sponsored by him and some six other lawmakers. He anchored the withdrawal on concerns raised by the public and intervention by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) which identified contradictions in the bill. It is unlikely the bill, popularly referred to as Indigeneship Bill, will ever be presented again. Not only was it not well thought out, in a country still contending with the vestiges of unitary system bequeathed Nigeria after the 1966 coup d’etat, it also attempted to take the bitterly controversial unitary system a notch higher. The controversy the bill stirred was so intense that some sceptics described it as a bill primarily designed for a hostile takeover of Lagos. Hon. Kalu did the sensible thing by withdrawing a thoroughly bad bill flexing notoriety.

The Bill had hoped to create a pathway for any Nigerian to claim indigene status of a state as long as he had resided in that state for 10 years and paid tax, or was born in that state, or had been married for five years to an indigene of that state. Had the bill sailed through, it would have amended Section 31 of the 1999 Constitution. The sponsors initially defended their action by suggesting that the bill hoped “to promote national unity, equity, and inclusiveness among all Nigerians, regardless of where they reside.” Even though it was not indicated, and no one voiced it, the bill probably drew inspiration from the political sociology of the United States. The sponsors were, however, guilty of tunnel vision. Nigeria’s turbulent history, including its long-lasting resistance to every effort to legislate and coerce unity, should have restrained the sponsors from their exuberance. The US is not a good example at all, and in any case, that country is now mired in ‘birther’ controversies and jousting with birth tourism. Indeed, rather than get more multicultural, the world appears to be relapsing into far-right nationalism.

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The Bill was irredeemable from the outset. From the First Republic to the Fourth, most Nigerians know that Nigeria’s founding paradigm was untenable. Everything ancestral and cultural about Nigeria violently wars against the bill. In addition, even if the bill had passed, it would not have created the utopia the sponsors dreamt. The problem assailing Nigerian unity is too deeply structural and cultural to yield to simplistic palliatives. Decades of military rule have merely worsened the crisis, and all panaceas, including the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme, have not made any dent on it. Indeed, whether intended or not, the bill would only have rewarded ethnic groups with proclivity for migration. Nigeria is already deeply embroiled in a contest of wills between indigenes and settlers in many cities and states, especially over economic and political rights, and so far there has been no lasting solution. To design a bill that legitimises and encourages those migrations is to ignore the tragic lessons of other countries.

Rather than derive inspiration from the US where longtime residence opens political doors – not even indigene status – Hon. Kalu should have studied why the social and political engineering of Yugoslavia failed, why Canada, Switzerland, and Belgium have struck a delicate ‘ethnic’ balance in their constitutions, why Russia and Ukraine are at war, and why Nigeria’s former colonial master, Britain, bequeathed a constitution that did not seek to obliterate Nigeria’s cultural dividing lines or create pathways for ambitious ethnic irredentists to the appropriation of other people’s ancestral lands. And since unfortunately the 1966 coup imposed a unitary system upon Nigeria through a half-baked political engineering supposedly designed to promote unity, the country has reeled from one existential and structural crisis to another. During the decolonisation process, Britain recognised that it was attempting to do the impossible by welding together vastly differing nations that were at different stages of civilisation. Most of them shared little in common. To defuse tension and address concerns, the colonisers built a number of safeguards into the Independence constitution. Since those safeguards were obliterated following presumptions that what Nigeria needed was more ‘unity’, the country has not known peace.

Hon. Kalu and his co-sponsors did not do their homework well. Like the 1966 coupists, they assumed that what Nigeria needed was more unity rather than structural equilibrium based on ethnic nationalities. They thought less about the fears of communities burdened by heavy migrations from obtruding cultures attempting to superimpose their ways of living on host communities, and aggressive groups not averse to supplanting or dominating their hosts. It was those fears Hon. Kalu overlooked that triggered the controversies around the ‘Indigeneship’ Bill. If the deputy speaker had done his homework well, he would have abandoned the fool’s errand he sent himself and applied his skills to more rewarding lawmaking. In the end, the bill had no redeeming virtue at all. He might have meant well, as his supporters said, and might have genuinely wanted to find a solution to the ethnic distrust and animosity seething below the surface. But he almost naively exacerbated the problem by adopting a one-dimensional approach probably influenced by his background to tackle a fundamental problem affecting the country’s superstructure.

History has shown that racial or ethnic nationalism follows cycles. Whenever it rears its head, it engenders chaos or, in extreme cases, war. Suggesting that ethnic animosity fully explains the resistance to migration, political miscegenation, or cultural dilution is counterfactual. Nationalism reared its head in World War II, and is again suffusing the politics of Eastern Europe and the United States. Nationalism undergirded and shaped Brexit, and at different times and different places had led to horrific genocides and pogroms. Rwanda, Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Belgian Congo (DRC) are typical examples. Nationalism is a volcano. If it is dormant today, there is no proof it cannot erupt on a hypothetical tomorrow. As many historians know, the story of humanity is one of migrations, supplantation, domination, and wars and genocides, sometimes interspersed with extraordinary but brief eras of development and discoveries. Few regions or continents have enjoyed centuries of unbroken peace and development.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Nigeria’s political titans engaged in recriminations over ethnic domination until a civil war broke out. Decades later, neither the anxieties that triggered war nor the political recriminations that fouled ethnic trust have abated. It was, therefore, bad timing, especially in the context of the tension generated by the 2023 polls, that Hon. Kalu sponsored a bill interpreted as a deliberate machination for ethnic domination. He should have been more sensitive. And in the light of stirrings in some parts of Southern and West Africa, where nationalism is on a gentle but steady and invidious rise, it is urgent to develop systems, structures and solutions that address the country’s national question rather than resort to knee-jerk legislative or political responses that deepen the country’s contradictions.

August 3, 2025
APC acquiring political depth

For the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the past one or two weeks have been the most exhilarating. In contrast, for the opposition parties, especially the coalition platform called the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the same period has been disconcerting. The opposition parties are snarled up in internal strife or bewildered by legal conundrums, and have begun to philosophise away their troubles and anxieties. The main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which had lived in denial for years, has started to accept the reality of their condition, particularly the defections they have suffered in the past few months. The APC is not just ecstatic about the troubles bedeviling the opposition, they are also keeping their powder dry, waiting for advantageous moments to spring lethal surprises.

But far beyond the tit for tat that has characterised its relationship with the opposition, the APC appears to be acquiring substantial political depth in terms of its internal organisation and external relations. In a 109-member Senate, they now have 70 seats after waves of defections saw them gain about 11 senators, just three seats shy of the mythical majority needed to railroad mandates, programmes, and agenda through the Senate. They are, however, unlikely to want to capitalise on that backdoor method to swell their ranks in the lower chamber because they appreciate the difficulty of achieving the same feat or having the same latitude. Last month, they had some 207 members in the House of Representatives, and 23 governors. The ruling party has largely bled the main opposition party to get the number they now boast of. With such commanding presence in the states and National Assembly, the APC has managed, admittedly by unorthodox methods, to acquire significant depth to confidently propose earthshaking legislations. If they are reluctant to do so, it will be because they are dissuaded by Nigeria’s ethnic and religious peculiarities.

Despite the unending bad press the ruling party still seems fated to attract, mainly because of the radical policies it is administering on the country in order to reset the economy, it probably has the highest number of technocrats in government than at any time in the country’s history. This has led them to courageously propound and defend policies in nearly all sectors of the economy, be they in education, health or tax sectors. It is likely that in the months ahead, they may shock the nation on law reforms. They are sufficiently strong in the legislature to drive these newfangled but effective and proactive policies. Even though the former APC national chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje, is a PhD holder, the new one, an engineering professor, is one notch higher. The deputy national secretary of the party, Abdulkarim Kana, is a Law professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Law, Nasarawa State University. He will doubtless bring his training to the job. The party now in fact has distinguished thinkers at the helm of their organisation. If they fail, it will not be because they cannot think or solve problems, it will be because of other failings, perhaps relating to character issues.

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The presidency is not exempted from the policy and organisational depth permeating the APC. The president and vice president are highly educated, with both possessing strong personalities that ordinarily make it tasking for them not to rub each other up the wrong way during policy debates and appointment considerations. There are speculations already that the relationship between the two may be a little awkward. That is expected of intellectuals. Hopefully they will find ways of managing their mutual awkwardness in the midst of political permutations in the gossip-ridden and ethnic-baiting corridors of power. With depth in the legislature, in the ruling party, and in the executive itself, the APC may be in a position to influence, if not dominate, Nigerian politics for decades to come. They may not always win elections, or form the government, but if they produce fewer charlatans than the other parties, they stand a good chance of overseeing politics in these parts for a long time and exporting their know-how to the rest of Africa.

In fact, here precisely is where the depth they are acquiring becomes useful. Eminent scholar and political scientist, Richard Sklar, once described the defunct Action Group (AG) of the Western Region as “the best organised, best financed, and most efficiently run political party in Nigeria.” If the APC desires that label and is ambitious and visionary enough, it could aspire to become the modern equivalent of what the AG was in the 1950s and 1960s. There is of course public misgiving regarding how the APC is run, with some critics accusing President Tinubu of dominating the party and moulding it after his own image. Great parties, however, seldom escape the imbuement of their foundational leader’s characteristics and worldview. And so, whether Obafemi Awolowo or Kwame Nkrumah, or Chinese presidents starting from Mao Zedong and later Deng Xiaoping, a party often reflects the image of its birth leader. This does not of course excuse irrational influences or tyrannical overreach. But given the depth the APC is beginning to develop, President Tinbu has the opportunity to be deliberate, futuristic, and methodical about configuring the ruling party.

The late ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, sadly, paid little attention to the party, preferring to run it ad hoc, and allowing small cabals to push and pull the party in different directions. President Tinubu should rather develop a new approach to running the APC, far better and more coherently than he did with the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). The PDP was eclectic and the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) chaotic and insular. This was why the PDP eventually came to grief when it mattered most, for the Fourth Republic’s foundational president, Olusegun Obasanjo, had no innate gift to found or run a party, let alone imbue it with anything noble or lasting. President Tinubu will be sorely tempted to exercise iron grip on the party; he should resist the temptation, despite the presence of many barracudas in the party who want to exploit and hijack it for short-term gains. He should be less paranoid about what former vice president Atiku Abubakar and others are doing in any other hijacked party, including the ADC and the now fractured Social Democratic Party (SDP). Alhaji Atiku does not found parties and lacks the temper to run them, for he specialises in pulling down structures than in building them.

There are already indications that the APC is beginning to be managed by administrators gifted with the depth and temper to run things. There are also indications that the party is becoming a fairly disciplined organisation capable of fighting and winning political battles. President Tinubu should have his eyes on the future in a way that Chief Obasanjo did not do with the PDP. Not only should the president encourage all the organs to function well, he should equally pay attention to the party’s internal democracy, a culture the APC has not so far shown the capacity to exude. The last few primaries the party conducted, including for the Lagos local government poll, were shambolic and disappointing. If the APC is to go into the next defining battle in the 2027 elections as a disciplined force, then the president must inescapably ensure that all the dross that soils its methods and image are removed. He must convince himself of what he wants and how best to achieve it. Above all, seeing that the party has begun to develop depth, it may be time he got the party to build and manage a leadership academy that would produce the next generation of Nigerian leaders. He can conceive it; and the APC has the wherewithal to execute it.

July 27, 2025
Civil societies inciting rebellion

The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has been consistent in its opposition to the government of the day, particularly right from the days of the Muhammadu Buhari administration. But much more than its consistency, it has also been hyperbolic. Virtually every statement its spokesmen issue has been tinged with hysterical denunciation of the administrations, with some of the statements bordering on incitement. Like any other civil society organisation, HURIWA has the constitutional right to advocate any cause intended to promote democracy and good and accountable governance. But to veer to incitement, knowingly or otherwise, is indefensible. Indeed, the organisation’s hysterical response to the long-standing culture of political defections is difficult to justify.

Last week, in their attempt to discourage defections, HURIWA attempted to correlate the migration of some lawmakers and even governors to the ruling party with a crime worthy of a coup d’etat. It is far-fetched, but the group’s national coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, managed to find corollaries to justify his inciting conclusions. “We are sounding a strong note of warning and a profound caution to Nigeria’s legislators to comply with the constitutional provisions on defections,” he began impatiently, “and stop the current political insanity represented by their unbridled cross-carpeting from their original parties into the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC).” He then added: “This anti-constitutional practice by the politicians constitute a dangerous threat to multiparty democracy, even as this politically sinister tendency of defecting from their parties to the ruling party could provide the needed motivation and elixir for coupists to attempt to torpedo democracy.”

Apart from the value judgements that surreptitiously filtered into the statement, it is not also clear whether Mr Onwubiko understood that he was also planting the seed of a forcible overthrow of the government, and by implication democracy, in the minds of ambitious coupists. Defections have been rife in Nigeria since ages, the Fourth Republic not excluded. More importantly, the defections have in the past two decades and more not been unidirectional. So, how on earth could this set of ongoing defections lead both to a one-party state, not to talk of attract a coup d’etat? And just in case anyone thought Mr Onwubiko minced words, he repeated himself by condemning those he described as “these anti-constitutional and anti-democratic forces embedded in the National Assembly for flagrantly flouting the law with the hidden agenda to motivate ambitious people within the military to try to overthrow constitutional democracy.”

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Anyone or group can openly or secretly admire any political party or party leader, as Mr Onwubiko is obviously doing. And they also have the constitutional right to support or oppose anyone or view or position. But they do not have the right to incite the overthrow of constitutional order. Since its formation in 2007, HURIWA has not been known for measured responses. If they are not strident today, they are apocalyptic tomorrow, and their reasoning and conclusions are sometimes excessive and illogical. More, they have found it difficult to resist being politically prejudiced. As a civil society group, nothing stops them from testing in court the defections that have drawn their ire. As a matter of fact, there are many civil and democratic options available to them, assuming they have not already made up their minds, as some CSOs have done in the past few years, to incite and insinuate the collapse of the democracy they insincerely claim to be promoting and defending.

July 27, 2025
Creation of states nonsensical, counterproductive

Last February, the Senate Committee on Constitution Review (CRC) indicated that they had received requests for the creation of 31 additional states and 18 more local government areas. Last week, Senate President Godswill Akpabio, however, announced that the requests for more states had grown to some 42. Whatever the number of states and LGs Nigerians are campaigning for, there is no doubt that all the six geopolitical zones are keen on the creation of more states and LGs which they see as the only way to engender inclusivity and development. Their developmental paradigms are, however, wrong. How they think fragmentation of states and local governments have positive correlation with development is hard to explain. But some Nigerians seem persuaded that a direct correlation exists between creation of states and development, and are unwilling to yield to any other paradigm, no matter how sensible.

The six zones are hopeful that some additional states and local governments will be created at the end of the constitution review. The review process may be laborious and serpentine, as the senate president argued last week in his response to unfounded speculations that some states had already been recommended for creation, or insurmountable, as everything appears to indicate, but Nigerians are hopeful that they will get their wish. No geopolitical zone wants to be left out, regardless of land size and population, while national lawmakers continue to stoke the campaign. But if Sen. Akpabio’s misgivings are anything to go by, he suggests that the proponents of creation of states are chasing a chimera. In the end, other parts of the constitution review may likely get more and faster attention than the exercise of creating more states and local governments.

Responding to media queries last week, former Works minister and ex-Lagos State Governor Babatunde Fashola told his interviewer it was constitutionally anomalous to talk of local government autonomy. He argued that since state Houses of Assembly still legislate for the LGs, it was contradictory to crave autonomy for them. Though the LG autonomy spoken about by the executive branch and sanctioned by the Supreme Court last year relates to the management of LG finances, and not their administration, it is difficult to draw a line between the two. But taken together, the creation of states campaign and the controversial LG autonomy project indicate that fundamentally, Nigerians exhibit a poor understanding of the dynamics of federalism. Even if more states and LGs are created, it will not solve the existential crisis the country has been immersed in since independence. Most of the states and local governments are unsustainable, and are unable to fund themselves. Unsustainable states exist because national earnings are pooled and distributed, thus enabling entitlement and inefficiency, and powering the needless campaigns to create many more.

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There will not be any controversy over LG autonomy if the LGs were generating their own funds and spending their own money. There will not be unrelenting campaigns for more states if no centralised arrangement exists to allocate funds for their sustenance. As long as the country’s political structure is misshapen, and states and LGs depend almost wholly on so-called federal allocations, a sense of entitlement will continue to fuel the campaign for creation of states, while creation of additional LGs will be considered an advantage to buoy up state revenue. State executive branch and LGs will also continue to battle for a larger share of the freebies allocated to their states.

Given the size of the Nigerian economy and its untenable political structure, the country is too balkanised to be run successfully under stifling and unitary arrangement. Not only is the country predisposed to gross inefficiency, it is also hamstrung by superfluous and retrogressive religious considerations as well as needless ethnic rivalry and unproductive competition. The problem of Nigeria is not the availability of resources or the skills needed to turn these endowments into wealth. If it is encumbered by mindless corruption, electoral chicaneries, poor allocation of resources, and all other issues that hobble or even retard progress, it is because the superstructure is hopelessly incapable of sustaining progress and stability. Hoping that additional states and LGs would help re-engineer and drive development is absolutely nonsensical. The constitution review exercise and legislature are barking up the wrong tree, and the entire country is simply putting off the evil day. President Tinubu will not touch the creation of more states and LGs with a long pole in the next two years. It is even doubtful whether after his reelection he would accede to the requests rather than restructure and rationalise a country that is at present so structurally disfigured and alienating that only few are committed to it.

July 27, 2025
Buhari eulogies and aftermath

In the next one or two weeks, the obituaries written on the late former president Muhammadu Buhari will dry up. It is in the nature of his life and administration that such compositions will have ephemeral value as his controversial image probably deserves. He died on July 13, was buried on July 15, and since then, for nearly one straight week, copious obituaries have been composed on his life and times, whether in or out of office. The obituaries have naturally been mixed, distributed almost evenly between those who eulogise him, some of them outrightly elegiac, such as the expanded Federal Executive Council confected on July 17, and those who dismiss his character and capacity in scathing and unsparing post-mortems. Given how polarising and unappeasable he was as a person and political and military leader, no one seems sure how heartfelt the eulogies are, whether they mirror reality or whether they are merely being politically correct. But as for the bilious post-mortems, no one needs to measure the amperage of the words to determine that they are unfeigned.

The surprise in all this is the genuineness of President Bola Tinubu’s grief over a man who in his eight years in office was conflicted about requiting the devotion and reverence shown him by the future president. Ex-president Buhari of course deserved a state burial, and President Tinubu dutifully and wholeheartedly gave him one, including composing a stirring lamentation for the departed. But how much of it was duty or heartfelt may never be known. Perhaps it depends on which part of the former president the sitting president decided to focus on. There was the President Buhari who never really idolised President Tinubu, and had taken extraordinary steps to preclude him from succession, including exorcising the ruling party of all his influences, and promoting a cocktail of policies designed to make the former Lagos governor’s ascension impossible. Those hurdles were orchestrated over eight years, and in particular, and with added severity, over the last two years before succession. The late president was not averse to being sponsored in every material particular by the Lagos politician, but he was loth to compensate his devoted associate.

But there was also the President Buhari who at the last moment, after the deluge of hostile and orchestrated policies had not barred the former Lagos governor from fighting for and winning the nominations battle, had sensibly got out of the way and declined to swing the presidential election one way or the other. President Tinubu had always said that all he needed was for the former president to observe strict neutrality, insisting that he was quite capable of dealing with his contenders, singly or collectively, be they the cantankerous and entitled former vice president Atiku Abubakar and the unprepossessing former Anambra governor Peter Obi. In the end, but indefensibly for a man who benefited so much from the former Lagos governor’s help in winning the 2015 election and the 2019 reelection, he decided to stay neutral. Neutrality may not indicate affection, but President Tinubu appears grateful that he did not have to battle an openly biased sitting president in addition to warding off attacks by fierce competitors, religious bodies, and even tactless and venomous Yoruba elite. However, it speaks to the essential Muhammadu Buhari that he never matched what he felt were the duties of others to him with the obligations he correspondingly owed them. How the eulogists of the expanded FEC, not to say his many faithful aides, glossed over this mainstay of his character is beyond comprehension. Did he perhaps reflect on this contradiction before he passed away peacefully in London? The story may never be told.

On balance, and as many obituarists catch their breath in order to carefully pen their thoughts on the departed, it does seem like former president Buhari has been successfully characterised as shallow, pedantic, simplistic, boyishly honest, bigoted, and a blight on Nigeria. How much of this characterisation is fair and accurate may be difficult to gauge in the short term. There are always two sides to a man: one good, the other bad, and no one personified both sides than the former president. At certain moments and to those close to him, he seemed incredibly thoughtful, benign, empathetic, and unrepentantly nationalistic. At other moments, given his befuddling public speeches on sore national and existential issues, he seemed the total embodiment of ethnic and religious exceptionalism, in fact a promoter of Fulani hegemony. The debate will continue for some time. But whether the jury will be hung is hard to tell, especially if the eulogists do not, as expected, observe a ceasefire.

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What appears indisputable about the late president’s life and leadership is that his limited education and exposure, particularly going by his disinclination to improve himself, conspired to render his projection of great principles and assimilation of a great sense of justice impossible. Presiding over a country of over 230 million people armed with a disparate sense of justice, an improper appreciation of the rule of law, a simplistic view of developmental economics, an impressionable understanding of the debilitating intrusion of religion in national politics, and inability to develop a penetrating vision of the future is bound to wreak havoc on any presidency. When he left office some two years ago, the lives of Nigerians were not altered in a positive and substantial way. He was in fact already mummifying in his retirement. Had his death not come a little quickly after he left office, though he always seemed quite older than his official age, he would have been confined to anonymity in a year or two more.

In the months ahead, Nigerian politics will have to contend with the vacuum the former president’s death has left. Because he did not create a systematic body of thought, and since the northern elite as a group was wearied by his intransigence and wary of his mass appeal, his captive and generally unquestioning followers will now be rudderless and up for grabs. This vacuum may explain the avalanche of eulogies by politically correct aides and analysts, not to talk of the reticence of the northern elite. It may also partly explain why President Tinubu has been careful to give the devil his due, idiomatically speaking so to say. It is not known whether the president foresaw that this day would come earlier than expected; but he must now fashion a way to get a huge slice of the charged Buhari crowd, regardless of how viciously the CPC component of the APC constitutes itself into a wrecking ball. But judging from how deliberately little the late president impacted the 2023 presidential poll in favour of the ruling party, the president must now take his destiny in his own hands to woo a region he had for over two years bent over backwards to mollify. He may surprisingly have more success in that endeavour than he believes possible, for there will now emerge a fierce competition for the soul of the region by northern political leaders determined to avert an even more catatonic Atiku hegemony.

July 20, 2025