The Crest

Category: Guest Columnist

  • They Must Know There Will Be Consequences, By Dare Babarinsa, CON

    They Must Know There Will Be Consequences, By Dare Babarinsa, CON

    Chief Dare Babarinsa
    Chief Dare Babarinsa

    We don’t know how many more hostages are still alive among those kidnapped near Ogbomosho a few weeks ago. One teacher, Adesiyan Adegboye, was killed. He was buried in Ogbomosho on Friday, May 22. It is raining across Nigeria. The soil is wet and slippery, and about 30 children and adults are still in the care of the kidnappers, sleeping in the forest among some of the most dangerous people in the world. They are citizens of a free and independent Federal Republic of Nigeria. The kidnappers had raided three schools in the Ahoro-Esinle/Yawota axis of Ogbomosho on Friday, May 15, and captured their victims. Then they killed Adegboye, the mathematics teacher. A few days later, they descended on the old Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria, CRIN, Abanla, near Ibadan, and seized two officials. Earlier this month, bandits also attacked the office of the National Park at Oloka village, killing five Forest Guard officers.
    In recent months and weeks, bandits and terrorists have left their marks in Kwara, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo, Osun, and Ogun States. The criminals are testing our resolve and capacity to defend the land of our ancestors. They are testing the ability of President Bola Tinubu to defend the land as the Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces. Terrorists who have operated in the North for many years are drawing a line in the sand and daring our leaders to cross it.
    Politics is in the air, and the annual Muslim festival, Eid al-Fitr, will be celebrated next week. The kidnappers would soon ask for money, which they expect the grieving families to pay. To show that they mean business, they posted online the killing of Adegboye.
    We are dealing with the children of evil. Engineer Oluseyi Makinde, the Governor of Oyo State, would now know the meaning of sleeplessness in dealing with this horror. This is a tragedy that has been foretold many years ago. Let the governors of the South-West states act in unison with the governments of Kogi and Kwara to secure the West. It is not going to work to rely mainly on the efforts of the Nigerian Police and the military. The solution is largely with our people and not with Abuja. We must act. The police and the military would do their best. But their command centre is in Abuja, far from the theatre of action. To rely mainly on the efforts of the Federal defence system is to delude ourselves and live in a fool’s paradise. We should not wait until they turn Oyo State into another Benue State or Taraba with Internally Displaced Persons, IDP, camps.
    Governor Makinde said the Oyo State government has already paid for a patrol plane that would help with security in the state. The impression he gave is that Oyo State is going solo in protecting its citizens against this new kind of security threat. I want to remind His Excellency that Oyo State is part of the South-West and it cannot treat its security issue in isolation. This is a threat that cannot be confined to a state border. It requires collective action. Geography does not permit any state to act alone. Oyo, Ogun, and Lagos share borders with the Benin Republic. Oyo, Osun, and Ekiti share borders with Kwara State. Ekiti and Ondo share borders with Kogi State. Therefore, no state can quarantine its kidnappers and terrorists and deal with them in isolation. It is impossible.
    Indeed, the rain has been beating us for a long time. In October 2000, there was a clash between some Fulani herdsmen and Yoruba farmers in the Oke-Ogun area of Oyo State during which some people were killed. Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, the former military dictator, led a delegation of the Arewa Consultative Forum to Governor Lam Adesina in Ibadan, accusing him of aiding the Yoruba, whom he said had an upper hand in the clash with the Fulani. Imagine the flip side of this event: a group of Yoruba farmers going to Sokoto to fight Fulani herdsmen and then the leader of Afenifere, Chief Reuben Fasoranti, leading a delegation of Yoruba leaders to the governor of Sokoto State, accusing him of bias! That happened to us in the year 2000! The issue was later settled, and the dead were buried. But the problem remains alive.
    The late Professor Akin Mabogunje, Nigeria’s pre-eminent geographer, advised then that there were too many unmapped spaces in Nigeria. He said every state government should know who is occupying, or has ownership of, every piece of land within its territory. Baba Mabogunje was very passionate about this, saying it would allow each state to have access to higher internally generated revenue. The governors, including Governor Adesina, have copies of the paper. I don’t know whether anyone has read the paper or taken action about it. Today, all former elected governors of Oyo State, except our Baba, Kabiyesi Rashidi Ladoja, the Olubadan, are dead. Governor Makinde should consult him. He would know what solutions have been hidden in the files and in the memories of past leaders.
    In this modern era of biotech and the internet, how can the government claim it does not have data on who is living on its land? How can there be no database on the army of okada riders, cattle rearers, and sundry merchants of mayhem in Yorubaland? Not all members of these people are involved in crimes, but we need to get the statistics and identify the genuine citizens from those with criminal intent and record. We must not allow some elements to abuse and undermine the traditional hospitality of the Yoruba people. We must not allow these criminals to turn Yorubaland into their theatre of operation.
    It is a good thing that all the state governments have embraced the Amotekun regional security initiative. What is necessary now is for the states to create a central command for Amotekun so that information can be shared across borders and, when necessary, operations can be carried out across state boundaries. Criminals do not respect geographical boundaries. We should take steps to be ahead of them.
    The problem would not go away unless we make it clear that there will be consequences for kidnapping and violent crimes in Yorubaland. The consequences must be swift, sure, and severe. They may run, they may hide, but they will be hunted to the end of the earth and brought to justice. While Yorubaland should remain welcoming and hospitable to all non-Yoruba, we should make it unambiguous that those who make themselves odious to humanity will be dealt with decisively and without mercy. When they get to God’s Headquarters, they can ask for forgiveness! There are enough resources, especially in the traditional setting, to deal with these criminals hiding among us. It is time for the governors to take collective and immediate action.

    • Dare Babarinsa, CON, is the
      Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, Gaskia Media Limited
  • Nigeria’s Ass in the Lion’s Skin, By Lasisi Olagunju

    Nigeria’s Ass in the Lion’s Skin, By Lasisi Olagunju

    “Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” — Aristotle.

    The Ass in the Lion’s Skin is Aesop’s story of a donkey who finds a lion’s skin abandoned in the forest. He wears it and begins to terrify other animals who mistake him for a lion. Delighted by the fear he inspires, the ass grows bold and starts roaming everywhere with counterfeit majesty. But one day, unable to contain himself, he brays. The sound betrays him instantly. The animals discover that beneath the lion’s appearance stood only a donkey. Soon, he becomes food for the real majesties of the forest.

    Moral: appearances and shortcuts cannot substitute for substance.

    At the top of this page, Aristotle urges society to honour teachers, but he attaches a condition to that honour: they must “educate well.” In that single adverb — “well” — lies the entire question of quality. If you teach, teach well. But how does one teach well after escaping the rigours that produce good teachers?

    Education minister, Tunji Alausa, some days ago announced that candidates seeking admission into Colleges of Education would no longer be required to sit the UTME. Under the new policy, applicants need only four SSCE credits; no competitive entrance examination. The only other requirement is registration with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). The decision marks a sharp departure from the previous system in which all tertiary institution candidates sat the UTME.

    I was reading Luther Sheeleigh Cressman’s ‘The Teacher: An Old Tradition and a New Obligation’, published in November 1930, and came across a striking description of the teacher in antiquity. The teacher, he wrote, was “the one who led the boy and in so doing led him to know what life expected of him.” He was the guide who passed down to the young the values of society and helped them make sense of the world around them.

    Now what makes a teacher?

    Not all who wear the masquerade’s mask are ancestors. The mask alone does not make the spirit; authenticity matters. A teacher who lacks knowledge of what he teaches, who teaches nonsense, is no teacher at all. Nigeria’s education policy has long produced such teachers. Now, it has embarked on a more ambitious journey: to manufacture the appearance of access while quietly weakening the substance of standards.

    I spoke with old and young friends teaching in universities and colleges of education. They all agree that teacher education is the bedrock of a nation’s overall development. “A nation cannot rise above the quality of its teachers,” one of them, an old schoolmate, lamented. He was right.

    A nation may celebrate rising admission figures and boast that barriers have been removed, but if the intellectual gatekeeping that guarantees quality is dismantled, the system eventually betrays itself, just as the donkey’s bray exposed him.

    Minimum JAMB admission scores are now 150 for universities, 100 for polytechnics and effectively zero for colleges of education. Some private universities are even pushing for 80. Their argument is that they would patch up the poverty of the intakes later. But what kind of system does that and still expects to stand?

    The Yoruba have a proverb: Iyawo bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀, ọmọ bẹ́ẹ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀ ni í bí fún ni — the wife you marry as “manage” will produce “manage” children. A marriage consummated in patchwork will produce patchwork offspring. Computer scientists call it “garbage in, garbage out.”

    The irony is painful. The teacher stands at the foundation of national progress and development. Every professional who preens in personal or collective success first passed through the hands of a teacher. To dilute the entry threshold into teacher education, therefore, is to tamper with the roots while hoping the branches will flourish.

    What, if I may ask, are the ultimate goals of this policy? To populate the colleges and produce more teachers without substance? The irony is painful: the Tinubu government’s mantra is ‘Renewed Hope.’ But what hope lies in a policy whose disaster is already predictable? Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, wrote in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: “When you can see the end of things even in their beginnings, there’s no more hope, unless you want to pretend, or forget, or get drunk or something.”

    But our husbands in power insist that these measures are necessary to save the system from collapse. The colleges, they say, must have students. They must destroy the system in other to save it.

    The whole scenario resembles a Yoruba tale explaining the monkey’s sunken eyes. Dissatisfied with the arrangement of her child’s eyes, monkey’s mother tried to adjust them. In the process, she pushed them too far inward into their sockets, and the deformity became permanent.

    That is often what we do with public policy here: in the name of reform, we destroy the very thing we claim to improve. It is the danger of misguided correction — an attempt to fix a problem that ends up worsening it irretrievably.

    By abolishing the UTME requirement for colleges that train teachers, and by lowering entry standards into education faculties in the universities, the government has effectively weakened the gate into the profession responsible for producing every other profession including the ‘golden’ ones.

    There is another Aesop fable that speaks directly to this logic. It is the story of the farmer whose hen laid golden eggs.

    Impatient with the slow but steady reward, the farmer concluded that if one golden egg came each day, then a treasure must surely be hidden inside the bird itself. In greed and foolish haste, he killed the hen, only to discover that it was no different from every other hen. In trying to get more, he destroyed the very source of his wealth.

    That is the tragedy of teacher education in Nigeria. In the desperation to fill classrooms, the country is destroying the very standards needed to produce competent teachers that will produce tomorrow’s wealth.

    Removing the entry gate to teacher training schools sends a troubling message: that teaching no longer requires rigorous intellectual preparation. Instead of attracting bright and committed young people into education, the government has confirmed an old social prejudice — that Colleges of Education are refuges for academic rejects. Rather than pull the system back from free fall, government may have pushed it further toward the cliff’s edge.

    The cliff is a hair’s breadth from disaster. A nation that weakens the process of producing teachers should not be surprised when ignorance multiplies in its classrooms and mediocrity parades itself as national leadership. Take a look at the quality of some of the persons in charge of your country. Who were their teachers? You would want to know.

    A very senior professor heard the minister, and, with a very heavy heart, fired a message to me: “You have the language… Please can you address this new policy (announced by the Minister of Education) of no entrance exam to study at the College of Education? Already, the quality of output is incredibly poor as only those who could not make the grades are being admitted to Education. Yet, these are the people that will be teaching in our schools. Please, what is wrong with us?

    “As vice chancellor, in my fourth year, I insisted that only those who applied for programmes in Education would be admitted to the university’s Faculty of Education and not those who failed to meet the grades in other courses. We cannot afford to afflict our children with people who only found themselves in Education because they could not make the grades elsewhere. It is worse now; they do not have to write any exam again to enter.”

    Leading me by the hand, the professor showed me statistics from the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). Between 2015 and 2019, JAMB statistics reveal the depth of the crisis confronting Nigeria’s Colleges of Education. In 2015, the institutions had a carrying capacity of 215,397 students, yet only 18,722 candidates applied, representing just 8.69 percent of available spaces. Admissions stood at 74,555, which was only 34.61 percent of approved quota.

    The pattern continued in 2016. Although the carrying capacity rose to 248,446, applications dropped to 18,365, amounting to only 7.39 percent of quota. Admissions also declined proportionately to 71,554, representing 28.80 percent of available spaces.

    In 2017, the carrying capacity expanded dramatically to 365,392. However, applications increased only marginally to 35,905, or 9.83 percent of quota, while admissions stood at 74,165, representing just 20.29 percent utilisation of capacity.

    The situation worsened in 2018. Out of a carrying capacity of 390,685, only 24,525 candidates applied, amounting to a mere 6.28 percent. Admissions dropped further to 59,366, representing only 15.19 percent of quota.

    By 2019, the carrying capacity had climbed to 403,225, yet applications remained critically low at 34,138, or 8.47 percent of approved spaces. Admissions rose slightly to 69,610, but this still accounted for only 17.26 percent of total capacity. Between 2019 and now, the figures have remained embarrassingly tragic.

    What we have above exposes a stark reality: Nigeria’s Colleges of Education are overwhelmingly under-subscribed. Who, with both eyes open, would invest money, years and a future in schools whose certificates command so little worth? At no point within the five-year period did applications reach even 10 percent of approved quota, while admissions never exceeded 35 percent of carrying capacity.

    My professor engaged me. He pointed to statistics on university undergraduates studying Education. The figures suggested that many admitted candidates were not originally interested in the discipline but were redirected into it simply because spaces existed there.

    We spoke and agonised over the situation.

    But what can we do? We may have wisdom, but we do not have power (àwa l’ó l’ogbón, a ò l’ágbára). Fuji musician, Ayinde Barrister, sang that more than forty years ago.
    My professor and I agree that those who want to read teacher education should actually have the highest scores in UTME with other loose ends tightened. But who would want to go through all the trouble and graduate into joblessness and poverty?

    There is a reason why some other courses are very competitive. We all know the reason: some assurance of good life after the rigours of school life. Teaching on the other hand is burdened by low prestige, by poor remuneration and absence of social respect. How many of today’s teachers teach out of choice? A society that recruits reluctant minds into teaching should not expect inspired learning in its schools. Reluctant teachers will teach to fail.

    Many candidates entering Colleges of Education today do so not out of passion but out of disappointment. They are often students who could not secure admission into more competitive programmes. Now, dismantling the little barrier of selection into the colleges won’t make the schools attractive to candidates of value.

    The teacher is the quiet manufacturer of civilisation. A nation desperate for greatness cannot, therefore, afford to lower the gate into the teaching profession. If it does, as we do, the consequence is predictable: Badly trained teachers turn out weak in the classroom; weak teachers inevitably produce weak pupils, and weak pupils eventually become weak professionals, and weak leaders who produce weak institutions. The crisis multiplies across spheres, sectors and, even generations.

    This is why the issue goes beyond education policy. It is about national survival.

    In Aesop’s story, the farmer believed he was solving a problem. He thought he was accelerating prosperity. Instead, he destroyed the source of it. Nigeria is making the same mistake in its approach to teacher education with its choice of convenient quantity over quality.

    An old teacher told me that “the temptation of governments everywhere is to pursue numbers: more admissions, more enrolment, more institutions, more certificates.” But, he said, education is not a factory for producing paper qualifications. It is the cultivation of minds. And cultivation requires standards.

    So, what do we do? What Nigeria needs is not the dilution of teacher training but the elevation of the teaching profession itself. Bright students will not aspire to become teachers unless the profession is respected, properly rewarded and intellectually competitive. No self-respecting person will rush to go to gateless Colleges of Education unless they cease being waiting rooms for rejected university candidates.
    What the government decided, and which the minister announced, was pure, painful irony: we complain daily about collapsing standards in our schools and we thought weakening the process of producing teachers is the solution. It is like diagnosing a sick person and poisoning their meal.

    Eyo Ita was Leader of Government Business, Eastern Region of Nigeria. Nnamdi Azikiwe took over from him as premier in 1954. In 1948, Ita wrote about what he called “the vanishing race” of teachers and “the paradox of the undervaluation of the teacher.” Few people, he said, regarded the teacher as a significant part of “the wealth of the nation” in the same way they valued minerals and cattle, capital and tools of production, and other “raw” materials of culture. Yet, he argued, the teacher is “the soul of the people, the conscience of the race, the guardian of the spirit, and the shaper of destiny.”

    Ita added that the teacher’s “shrine is so high and so far removed from the realistic world of flesh and blood, of yam and corn and clothes and shelter, that people usually forget about the teacher himself, except for brief moments.

    “If the Nigerian teacher would sharpen his skill and strengthen his economic power; his profession would become more respectable and enviable; his economic power and social position would prevent him from being treated as a mere sport or worthless tool of politicians.” He warned that failure to integrate the teacher into the flux of life had “deprived the earth of its salt.”

    Ita wrote those words 78 years ago. Twelve years later, Nigeria gained independence. Sixty-six years after independence, it is tragic that all the country can think of is to improve the teacher’s condition by debasing their work and diminishing them.

  • Osun, Kwara test Tinubu, APC Govs, By Lanre Adewole

    Osun, Kwara test Tinubu, APC Govs, By Lanre Adewole

    “In various ways, we might not have our way but we just have to work together because I know if it was left to me, I know where we will take governorship to, but it’s about consensus and I have to agree with everybody to say this is where we need to go”.
    That was the embattled outgoing Kwara governor and chairman of governors’ forum, Abdulraham Abdulrazaq, days back, literally mourning the reality he would not be able to foist a successor or even his party’s gubernatorial flagbearer on the rest of the state. He had an anointed. He anointed him. But he quickly realised the aura enveloping his anointing wouldn’t be enough to ascend the chosen to the throne. The man saw the “Mene Mene” handwriting on the wall and quickly backtracked. Now he says he would play by the popular will in his party though distressing news is still a daily staple from the state chapter of the ruling party. It would appear the outgoing governor who wants to retire to the senate (documentary evidence showed he purchased two senatorial forms for Kwara Central seat which should ordinarily disqualify him according to the Electoral Act but judiciary has a way of protecting his kind), isn’t stringing fealty to his teamwork rhetoric. Due process advocates tugging with him are also unrelenting. Kwara APC is fast resembling the kaka keku ma je sese (scattering everything to make it useful to no one) adage. Going by the insider details I have, it seems the roof would end up coming down on everyone, including Mr. President, who appears timid about his choice in the state unlike places like Lagos, Oyo, Ogun et al, where he “spoke” loud and clear. If you have used the membership proviso in the Electoral Act (by delaying the candidate “coronation” exercise till the expiration of the deadline to lawfully switch platforms) to tether aspirants who feel cheated back in the party, you may be trying to domesticate wild emotions. There would be no taming their fury when the despised eventually have the chance of hurting you and the party badly in the general election. When you hear a leader collected mobilization money for the general election and isn’t seen anywhere near the polling booth or he completely disappears from the neighborhood, it’s called payback time. My Ijesa people will say, the child of the deceased will dance as far as his bean cake sharing (ubi omo looku ba pin’kara de la jo de). The Yoruba will say bi ku ile o pani tode ole paniyan (enemies within are more brutal and lethal).
    It’s a similar scenario in Kwara’s boundary buddy; Osun, with a bent and a blueprint. Infact, I learnt Governor Abdulrasaq is seriously eyeing the Osun APC nomination style of coercion first (by questionably disqualify the rest of the field for the anointed) to weed out the unwanted, and then an armistice, to pacify the disgruntled. It worked, albeit acrimoniously, on December 13, 2025 to produce Bola Oyebamiji as the “consensus” candidate of the party for the August 15, 2026 outlier gubernatorial poll against incumbent PDP/Accord candidate, Jackson Adeleke. It may not work in the dishing out of the national and state assemblies tickets, though the leadership of the party in the state under Gboyega Oyetola, the marine minister, is hell-bent on another fait accompli “consensus/affirmation” journey, beginning from the weekend’s coronation of crown prince-defectors from the dismantled and mangled opposition; Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), known as the G5. Well, it is a truism that anyone will stick to what works; even a thief, to result-oriented methodologies. In a situation like this, the Yoruba adage about prawn thief and multiple thieveries will come in handy.
    But a sensible fellow would want to toe more of the path of not dusting crumbs sticking to the palms and fingers back into the porcelain from which white moinmoin (Yoruba delicacy known as ekuru) is eaten from. Of what use is forcing through a process that won’t ultimately deliver a desired end, except one is a megalomaniac, which in this case is just to be seen to be in control of the state chapter of the party. That would be a sad way to lead.
    The Yoruba will encourage more friends and less of enemies in the situation Osun APC has found itself after the chaotic gubernatorial nomination. I encourage this too because I have an idea what the inside looks like. If the party goes into the August poll this divided, it would be a crippling shellacking. A straw poll commissioned and sponsored by the backbone of the party (redacting identity for a purpose but if the numbers are contested, I will reveal the sponsor) returned a stunning and damning rebuke from the people. It was 83% (victory probability) Adeleke to 17% Oyebamiji of APC! I know this because I have been carried along.
    To Abuja, the August poll is a no-hopper for APC. But you hardly want to count a nine-toe feet in the presence of the owner! With scandalous defeat starring the party, Oyetola, in fairness, initiated a peace/power sharing deal, only that it seemed fidelity isn’t his thing. How do you agree a power sharing deal in the presence of the patriarch of the party, then instigate the notorious G5 to touch base with a highly-flammable torch, even before ink would dry on the Abuja Accord. And it was so convenient that four of the ticket-seeking quintet are from one senatorial district! Hopefully, the president won’t be asking Baba Akande to initiate another Adewole Commission of Inquiry when APC is soundly defeated again like it was in 2018 and 2022.
    There is no disputation that doing same thing same way, is pure, applied madness. But pray, what message is the President actually sending to faithful APC members who stayed the course all the years in opposition, painfully rebuilding the ruins left behind by his two anointed “boys” from Lagos, as governors, only for him to allegedly endorse PDP rejects (decampees) as APC sweethearts for NASS tickets. How do you commit the despised to another cycle of running the drenching rain and scorching sun, campaigning for a party which places practically no value on them?. Since you Tarka them now, expect them to Daboh you in August and 2027.
    But the President may not have much to lose. All indices have shown he is for Adeleke and the governor is for him. Well, two has evenly divided four, as they analyse “gege se gege” (how do I interpret this now?). Maybe “peki ko peki” will do. (Smiles).
    Let those who have the heart for wisdom, learn. Proverbs 9:9 says “teach a wise man wisdom, he will be wise still”.
    When President Tinubu’s lickspittles in the leadership of the federal legislature, with the ruling party in absolute majority, were busy tweaking the electoral rule to obviously disadvantage the opposition and give their party a haven ahead 2027, they certainly never reasoned that this season might come when the falcons will no longer harken to the falconers’ piping. By limiting nomination choices to direct and consensus, APC leaders, acting on the instruction of the President, with the turn of events now, definitely had candidate coronation, labelled as consensus, in mind. Of course, it has always been the preferred way of the President from his days as a dominant godfather, though he successfully fought against it when the Buhari gang was going to use it to edge both him and Southern Nigeria out of APC presidential ticket for the 2023 election which he went on to win. Why now abridging others’ political destinies? Even when Buhari as president openly demanded the consensus option for him to single-handedly anoint a likely successor which wasn’t going to be today’s president, Tinubu fought his predecessor’s agenda all the way and succeeded.
    While it is not wrong for the rest to queue behind the most popular aspirant, forcing the rest to toe predetermined paths they don’t want, will continue to breed internal enemies, especially now that the deadline for party membership switch, has expired.
    If you ask those in the built sector, they will tell you the quickest way to take a house down to its foundation is targeting the pillars, from the inside.
    Just like the rest of Nigeria is doing to the Ibos, Spain treating Catalonia and China, Taiwan, you are forcing ambition-fired, suspiciously-disqualified, unhappy aspirants to stay back in your party by ensuring candidate coronation is after party-crossing deadline. That is akin to what the Yoruba will describe as leaving a cobra on your roof and snoring. What you see, is what you get.
    By the close of deadline for the process, 101 applicants had shown up for APC’s 28 gubernatorial tickets for the states where the 2027 poll will take place. That should tell the President the governors, to whom he had publicly handed the leadership of the state chapters, are not as commanding in influence as he thought. Of the 31 governors of the party, only Babagana Zulum of Borno, succeeded with the consensus option, producing a solo aspirant for the party. Even the automatic ticket promised the second-term seekers amongst them, didn’t turn out as expected, especially for decampees like Hyacinth Alia of Benue, Caleb Muftwang of Plateau and predictably so, Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers. If any of the trio, particularly of the first two, ends up not making it, which isn’t unlikely especially the Alia fellow who is in a tug of war with his old benefactor, SGF George Akume, the temptation to say the eye has seen what it was looking for, the Yoruba way of saying “ja gin ni” (serves you right), will be irresistible.
    Other defecting governors like Adamawa and Taraba’s, who are rounding off their final term also have their hands full with multiple aspirants despite having their so-called anointed, and presidential backing to coronate them. Even for “home boys” like Nasarawa and Gombe governors, tough aspirants like Isa Pantami and a former IGP have made nonsense of the governors’ endorsements, by remaining in the race, threatening fire and brimstone.
    And these are the governors the president is banking on their influence to deliver him in 2027, going for them lo’ju pali (wholesale or in a record number)? How can those who can’t manage their state chapters deliver majority of the electorate to a president, especially one with very bad poll numbers? If party faithful would not trust them with the required maturity and integrity to drive a mini process, why should the larger electorate even cast a look at the presidential product they are hawking like gbogbo nise epa Ijebu (a cure-all Ijebu concoction).
    And need I remind, you rig where you are popular. It’s just like Amupitan’s INEC now trying to recreate the 2018 inconclusive nonsense on August 15 in Osun. What will follow is better imagined.
    Even in Lagos, Ogun and Oyo where the president had made open gubernatorial endorsements, the mad dash into the nomination process by those not having his go-ahead, will make one ponder the weight of presidential stamina in this election cycle. And to think his presidency is yet in the lame duck phase. With the door now firmly locked against testing their electoral worth elsewhere, APC will now have to deal with unhappy and possibly vengeance-driven dumped aspirants in their thousands. Hopefully the president’s fabled sagacity will get him out of this self-hauled hole before it is too late. But wait, what is my own sef!

     

    Sent from my iPhone

  • If you’re enjoying Tinubu’s policies raise your hand, By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

    If you’re enjoying Tinubu’s policies raise your hand, By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

    ARE there regular Nigerians who are enjoying the All Progressives Congress, APC, government since 2015, in particular, the version that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu invented when he became president in 2023?
    Some would raise their hands because they believe it is their duty to ensure that Tinubu does not look bad under any circumstance. They have sworn to it, they are dedicated to defending Tinubu.
    From the way some sound, they may be willing to put their lives on the line if that will ensure a Tinubu victory. They mean it.
    What has Tinubu done that impressed them so much that they cannot see the ruination that Tinubu’s presidency has imposed on Nigerians?
    They would go into drivels about how Tinubu’s policies saved Nigeria’s nationhood from annihilation. His great economic policies, his prudence, anti-corruption stance which has given us a better country than Tinubu met.
    Where are the evidence? High prices of foods and medication for everyone, add children. Unbearable cost of electricity while it is barely available. Fuel costs seven times what it cost when Muhammadu Buhari handed over to Tinubu weeks less than three years ago.
    Tinubu floated the Naira to a collapse that almost stripped it of its value. Businesses are collapsing, unemployment is on the rise. Tinubu and his supporters dismiss these as the words of critics. They want all Nigerians to become liars, minimising how much Tinubu has damaged Nigeria, and accepting it was not the fault of Tinubu.
    The country he inherited was badly damaged. Few are buying that excuse, not former President Olusegun Obasanjo who blamed Tinubu for many things, among them inability to do anything well in an administration known for its appetite for borrowing.
    Without any reasonable answers to these assertions, the likes of Minister of Works, the very powerful David Umahi retorted that those who did not like the opaque Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, which Obasanjo last year called a scam, should not use it when completed. Rather if it ever gets completed.
    Tinubu has always lived in the future. It serves him well. Thousands of Nigerians have died due to insecurity, his harsh economic policies. He has no words for the situations.
    He gives impressions that he is building a great future for Nigerians.
    Which Nigerians? The living or the dead? Without answers for the present, without a discernible past, Tinubu cligns heavily to the future when he believes we would have forgotten or would not be available to ask him to account.
    Tinubu has taken this drivel abroad. No longer able to spin stories about his achievements, principally leaving Nigeria debt-riddled, he now talks of the future.
    He told Africa CEO Forum in Rwanda, that he would do more work when re-elected. Isn’t that an admission of his failure.
    “I have to continue to reset and rethink and then challenge the intellectual curiosity. The philosophy I came with in governance is believing that the hallmark of a transformative leader is the ability to make decisions, do what you do at the time it ought to be done on behalf of the people.
    “If you miss that curve, you are not on the path to success, and that’s what I believe. First time, I took hard decisions, regardless of pain. Stop reading newspapers and commentary because I was going to get a big pushback, and I did,” according to Tinubu.
    The only thing he seemed to have said with clarity is that he stopped reading newspapers and commentary so that he would not see the criticisms.
    No need to wonder. Tinubu confessed to an international that he was insular. No need for a confession. They knew long ago.
    Let us note that Buhari, who many believed would be Nigeria’s worst leader, was enamoured of newspaper cartoons. One of his media minders said he could spend good time reading or looking at cartoons.
    “I was sitting on a hot burner, but we made the curve today,” Tinubu continued the rambling. “There is a very bright light at the end of the tunnel. The economy is stable. The Naira is stable and predictable. Planners can now do a reasonable budget. They can plan their lives well.”
    With Tinubu, we are in an endless tunnel of darkness. What was Tinubu saying? Those were his lines in Rwanda to attract investors.
    Words prove inadequate to address Tinubu’s destruction of Nigeria. The layers of lies his media spins are some of the best proofs about the emptiness of his dreams for Nigeria.
    Barely two months after the great news, by Team Tinubu: That Nigeria secured a £746m ($997m) financing agreement backed by UK Export Finance (UKEF) to completely modernise and repair the Apapa and Tin Can Island ports in Lagos, another great news from the global jamboree came from Rwanda.
    World-class port operator APM Terminals pledged a $600 million investment in Nigeria’s maritime sector. The Regional President, APM Terminals Africa-Europe, Igor van den Essen said the proposed investments will be deployed in Apapa port modernisation, logistics infrastructure, and long-term private-sector investment in Nigeria’s maritime sector.
    It is the same Apapa port(s). Many Nigerians, except Team Tinubu spinning these tales, are wondering why Tinubu is not interested in other ports in Nigeria.
    There are more worries about Apapa ports no matter how the stories are curated.
    On 18 May 2025, there were celebratory reports in the media that APM Terminals Apapa, in collaboration with the Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, had completed the rehabilitation of 970 metres of quay apron surface at the Apapa port, a critical infrastructure initiative aimed at improving operational safety, sustainability, and efficiency at Nigeria’s busiest container terminal.
    The reports continued that the Federal Government had approved the rehabilitation of Apapa and Tin Can ports as well as the upgrading of the eastern ports including Calabar, Warri, Onne, and Rivers Ports.
    It could be these “eastern ports” that the proposed $600m investment included as “Nigeria’s maritime sector”.
    More questions: Which parts of the Apapa and Tin Can Island ports will be modernised with the UK loan? What part would be left for APM’s $600m?
    Tinubu can be forgiven if he cannot remember that he had UK loan for the same ports just two months. A President who cannot remember that insecurity is claiming lives in his country, the Tinubu who cannot deliver on 5,000 he promised would secure Plateau can forget things.
    However, Tinubu knows when to appoint an Adviser on Homeland Security. Whatever the brief, the bandits are not impressed. They attacked a school in Oyo State on Friday, abducted some pupils, and shot a teacher who later died in hospital. Attacks are now frequent in Ekiti, Kwara States once “safe”.
    Regular attacks areas are no longer discussed – Benue, Borno, Plateau, Zamfara. The Commander-in-Chief is busy travelling, promising he will work hard, not even harder, in 2027.
    Amid the hunger, anger, people are passionately emitting promises of war, mayhem if Tinubu is not allowed a second term, after three years in which he keeps regurgitating inventors’ confidence in the same project.
    Whatever that has reduced the highly promoted Tinubu to foreign travels and specious speeches at home and abroad is unsustainable in another tenure.
    The mistake of 2023 should not be repeated. If Tinubu had achieved anything he should be using them in his campaigns instead of weakening the opposition in an entitled manner that suggests he will the only presidential candidate in 2027.

    Finally…
    UNSAFE anywhere. Over 100 children are in hospital in Ogun State from inhaling suspected poisonous gas. Will someone for once be held responsible for something?

    FORMER Nigerian Minister of Power, Saleh Mamman, was sentenced to 75 years in prison by the Federal High Court in Abuja on 13 May 2026 for stealing N33.8 billion meant for projects like the Mambilla Power facility. Have you wondered the type of system that permits an individual access to that load of money and the power to steal it?

    IT is beyond shame that priests of the Catholic Church would hire thugs, security agents to fight each other in the long drawn tussle over ownership of Tansian University in Anambra State. Each new episode of the fight worsens matters and drags the name of the Church in the mud. The Church’s attitude leans more towards indifference.

    ISIGUZO is a major commentator on minor issues

  • Governor Makinde and His 2027 Gamble, By Tunde Rahman

    Governor Makinde and His 2027 Gamble, By Tunde Rahman

    Gov. Seyi Makinde
    Gov. Seyi Makinde

    The race to the presidency in 2027 is getting more exciting. Last Thursday, May 14, 2026, at the ancient Mapo Hall in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, Governor Seyi Makinde formally threw his hat into the ring and organised a spectacle that could only have been funded by Oyo State taxpayers’ money.

    His declaration to contest for the topmost office in the forthcoming general election, however, is anything but surprising. Some political watchers had long sensed where he might be headed, given the somewhat convoluted politics that have seen him taking several seemingly contradictory and illegal steps. What was unknown and unclear was which platform the “outgoing landlord of Agodi Government House” would contest on. His Peoples Democratic Party is, after all, still enmeshed in crisis, wherein his camp holds a short end of the political stick.

    But let me state clearly from the outset that I disagree with renowned activist and politician Senator Shehu Sani’s claim that during the late President Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, many Northerners would not even dare to contest him, believing the region was entitled to its eight years in office. Sound and convincing as Senator Sani’s argument seems to be, apparently alluding to an attitude akin to that of a misguided child standing in and urinating inside a family pot he will drink from, I believe Governor Makinde is perfectly entitled to his decision and declaration to contest.

    President Bola Tinubu welcomes Governor Makinde’s decision. He will be waiting to square up against him on January 15, 2027, if the latter can muster the conviction and work his way down to the final political wire. His entry has now increased the number of contestants to six or so, namely President Tinubu, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, former Anambra State governor Peter Obi, former Minister of Transportation Rotimi Amaechi, Alhaji Mohammed Hayatudeen, Makinde and maybe former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Governor Makinde says he will run on the PDP-APM alliance platform – whatever that means. He is one of the leaders of the Turaki-led faction of the PDP, which is still hanging in the balance, as the court has yet to fully settle the leadership supremacy battle. Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed is also a member of the Allied People’s Movement.

    The Oyo State governor has been rather sanctimonious since he joined the race. At a rally he dubbed “Unity Mega Rally,” he called for national unity against what he christened “one-party rule,” saying claims that the opposition cannot unite are a miscalculation, apparently suggesting he could unite the opposition.

    While speaking at an All Opposition Summit he hosted in Ibadan on April 25, 2026, Makinde waxed reckless, desperate and dangerous, in a puerile attempt to hide behind a finger. He threatened fire and brimstone and openly called for violence, warning President Tinubu and the governing APC to remember that the “wild, wild West” of the First Republic started in Ibadan.

    Many analysts and commentators, including the deep and incisive Segun Ayobolu writing in his column “Illuminations” condemned Makinde for his misguided comparison, saying there is no basis to compare the present political situation in the country, where political parties and opposition politicians are freely assembling and canvassing their views and positions, to the wave of violence that engulfed the Western Region in 1964-65, which directly led to the collapse of the First Republic. That episode, caused by a toxic mix of intra-party betrayal in the Action Group and rigged elections, particularly the 1964 Federal Election and 1965 Western Regional Elections, was characterised by widespread electoral fraud, ballot box snatching, voter intimidation and violence perpetrated by members of the late Chief Ladoke Akintola’s NNDP-NPC Alliance. This angered the people and made them feel their votes didn’t count.

    The question of a disputed election in 2027 is far-fetched, as there is nothing to suggest that, except in the warped imagination of people like Governor Makinde.

    Makinde’s political inanities aside, many in the state concede that the Oyo State governor has done well in terms of providing infrastructure for the state. However, balancing politics with policy remains important. Mere grandstanding and posturing like a strongman can never be deemed a virtue.

    At their summit in Ibadan, the opposition politicians resolved to work towards fielding a single presidential candidate in 2027. How Makinde’s entry into the race will help that course is yet unclear.

    Governor Makinde is battling to foist his successor on the state in 2027 and, in the same breath, wants to be president.

    What are his chances? How far he can go in the race is a matter of conjecture, as he lacks a strong political base outside of Ibadan. He claims to be running on the PDP-APM alliance, yet his only support across the Niger, in the North, is perhaps his connection with Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed.

    I haven’t yet seen any politician burn political bridges as whimsically and recklessly as Makinde does. This is particularly exemplified in how he has ditched many allies who helped him into office, including Senator Hosea Agboola alias Alleluya, Chief Bisi Ilaka and Hon. Babs Oduyoye, his former Political Adviser. Another case in point is how his relationship with former Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike has gone sour, to the extent that the two are today at daggers drawn. In the run-up to the 2023 elections. Wike left Port Harcourt to come and root for Makinde’s re-election in Ibadan.

    As the timeless maxim instructs, to thyself be true. I think Governor Makinde knows too well that he is on a wild goose chase. He is only indulging himself. What he is engaging in is a mere political gamble. My worry for him is when all else is done, when all the chips are down, when the battle is lost and won, his reputation would have been badly damaged, his legacy, if any, rubbished, his influence and relevance gone, and his place in history and reckoning within the Yoruba race sullied.

    -Rahman is Senior Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Media and Special Duties

  • APC’s Politics of Consensus, By Lasisi Olagunju

    APC’s Politics of Consensus, By Lasisi Olagunju

    In a democracy, victory won through real elections brings enduring legitimacy. ‘On Your Mandate We Shall Stand’ was composed and sung for Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola because he submitted his ambition to a competitive process: he had a competent opponent, votes were cast, counted, and he won. The song, its defiance, and resilience followed that mandate because it was legitimate.

    Those who chant similar slogans today may find themselves clutching empty matchboxes tomorrow if they continue to sidestep competitive elections. A democratic seat secured through elite manipulation and backroom agreement cannot command enduring popular support, especially when those same elites decide to take it back.

    Nigeria today stands in the grip of what is called consensus politics; choosing candidates without the ‘trouble’ of voting. We are even scheming to elect a president next year without the inconvenience of election. Good luck to all of us.

    At the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, the Norman king, William the Conqueror, defeated King Harold II and went on to become King of England. Historians note that the victory set off sweeping changes across the British Isles. They say by force of arms, William took the crown and went on to remake the Church, the palace, and the culture of England. They say he did more than change the English crown; his victory remade the English language through a deep infusion of Norman/Latin forms. The consequence is that more than 60 percent of English words now carry Latin parentage.

    One such word is ‘consensus’, from the Latin ‘consentīre’—“to feel together”,
    “to agree,” “to be in harmony,” “to concur.”

    The rains started beating that word a long time ago. Language historians note that words which experienced long migration often shed their original sense of shared feeling and acquire more instrumental meanings. So it is with ‘consensus’ in today’s political usage.

    Somewhere along its long journey from Latin to modern political speech, ‘consensus’ lost its warmth. The distortion of the word and its meaning is no longer abstract. In our usage today, ‘consensus’ no longer suggests a meeting of minds; it often signals a decision already made; an outcome proclaimed from above and affirmed below. A word that once implied a genuine convergence of minds now describes an order from the throne, delivered through courtiers.

    The parties—especially the ruling APC—have stretched and inverted the meaning of the word. In APC’s political dictionary, “consensus” increasingly reads as the will of the president, not the outcome of deliberation.

    As we had it in Sani Abacha’s transition programme, we think any of today’s living parties that make it limping to the ballot in January 2027 should reach an ‘agreement’ and adopt one person as the consensus presidential candidate. That is how rich our imaginative thoughts are and how limitless our capacity for distortion of values is.

    Within both party and polity, the president now embodies what Aristide R. Zolberg calls “the chief executive who is also the supreme legislator (the chief elector), and the ultimate arbiter of conflict.” Because the president is what he has always been, photo ops are staged as proof of order, while his name, cast as the final authority in the APC’s doctrine of “consensus”, is invoked to sanctify outcomes.

    The APC set its neighbour’s hut on fire and rejoiced; now the blaze has caught its own roof. Across the states, the refrain is the same: the abuse of ‘consensus,’ with the president inserted into the process as decider-in-chief.

    Oyo State offers a very sharp illustration. Some APC leaders, on Friday, announced Senator Sharafadeen Alli as the party’s “consensus” governorship candidate, invoking the president’s name. Within hours, former minister, Adebayo Adelabu, pushed back, also invoking the same presidency, and declaring that he remained in the race as the president’s “son”. When two rival claims lean on the same authority, what is presented as consensus begins to look like a contest of endorsements, not agreement.

    Our fathers say the medicine must match the disease. Bí àrùn búburú bá wòlú, oògùn búburú la fi ńwò ó (When the affliction is severe, the remedy cannot be gentle). That may explain why the rhetoric of resistance has turned harsh. One does not need a keen ear to catch the crudity in what now issues from Oyo APC bigwigs. It is a stream of curses and abuse, imprecations without restraint. And one must ask: why?

    Beyond Oyo, across Nigeria, north to south, we hear cries of plots to impose “consensus” candidates. How do you use the words ‘imposition’ and ‘consensus’ in the same sentence? Imposition comes from above; the other grows from below. ‘Imposition’ is force without consent. ‘Consensus’ is agreement without force. The two opposites appearing as companions presents a contradiction, and politics is autological, a self-defining oxymoron. You will likely agree with my linguistic choice if you believe the popular (but etymologically false joke) that “politics” comes from ‘poly’ (many) and ‘tics’ (blood-sucking parasites).

    In Nasarawa, former Inspector-General of Police and APC governorship aspirant, Mohammed Adamu Abubakar, rejected any move towards “consensus,” insisting that only a direct primary could confer legitimacy. To him and others in the race, what is being dressed up as consensus is little more than unilateralism in softer language.

    In Ondo, there are subdued objections to what the party may decide on Ondo South senatorial ticket. Aspirants for the Ondo East/Ondo West federal constituency have raised similar alarms, accusing party leaders of plotting to impose a candidate under the convenient cover of consensus. Their warning is simple: once choice is managed from above, internal democracy is already compromised.

    In Yobe State, Senator Ibrahim Mohammed Bomai, Kashim Musa Tumsah, and Usman Alkali Baba—three APC governorship aspirants—have rejected the party’s endorsement of former Secretary to the State Government, Alhaji Baba Malam Wali, as its “consensus” candidate for the 2027 election.

    Bomai’s choice of words is telling. He described the “consensus” imposition as an affront to democratic principles. He warned against the steady replacement of popular choice with elite arrangement. No individual, he argued, regardless of past office or political influence, has the authority to determine the leadership of millions behind closed doors. Leadership, he insisted, must emerge through a process that is free, fair, and transparent—not one brokered in the name of “consensus.” Quoting him directly, he said: “We categorically reject this attempt to subvert due process. We reject the culture of imposition. We reject any scheme that undermines fairness, equity, and the democratic rights of our people.” Those words give voice to what dissatisfied but muted APC leaders and members in Kwara, Ogun and beyond are saying in uneasy, even fearful, silence.

    Lagos, for now, appears to be the exception. The emergence of Dr Obafemi Hamzat as the APC governorship candidate quietly followed a process that bore the marks of consultation rather than imposition. Hamzat combines the fine qualities of a gentleman with humble erudition. In a field without a formidable opposition, his path to final victory looks smooth. Congratulations may therefore be in order.

    Choice of candidates by consensus is good, cheap and safe if it comes with clean hands. Going far back into our beginning, we find that real consensus is not alien to the African political tradition. Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu (1931 – 2022), in his reflections on ‘Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics’, argues that decision-making in pre-colonial African societies was anchored in discussion and agreement rather than imposition.

    He draws, for instance, on the words of Zambia’s founding father, Kenneth Kaunda, who observed that “in our original societies, we operated by consensus. An issue was talked out in solemn conclave until such time as agreement could be achieved.” Similarly, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, in 1961, noted that “the African concept of democracy is similar to that of the ancient Greeks, from whose language the word ‘democracy’ originated. To the Greeks, democracy meant simply “government by discussion among equals.” The people discussed, and when they reached an agreement, the result was a “people’s decision.” In African society, he said, the traditional method of conducting affairs is “by free discussion… the elders sit under the big trees and talk until they agree.”

    Our politics has refused to benefit from that past of refined due process. There is no “people” in today’s decisions. And we expect today’s “consensus” arrangement to yield good governance. No. It will not. It can only produce a system that answers to kings, kingmakers, and the capos who guard their power.

    When a ruling party actively promotes “consensus” after weakening the opposition, it risks sliding toward a very bad form of authoritarianism. It also strips even its own members of the power to choose their candidates. As Kwasi Wiredu observed, both Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere defended systems that claimed consensus but, in practice, narrowed choice.

    The Yoruba, watching what has become of this democracy in the hands of its custodians, would say: when a wise man cooks yams in a mad fashion, the discerning take theirs with sticks. That is àbọ̀ ọ̀rọ̀—half a word—and for the wise, it is enough.

    What passes for consensus in Nigeria today therefore demands closer scrutiny. When outcomes are settled before conversations begin, when dissent is managed rather than engaged, and when unanimity is announced rather than negotiated, consensus ceases to be the product of dialogue; it becomes instead an instrument of control.

    “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” In politics, as William Shakespeare suggests, opposites often blur; good and evil do not always stand apart; they, in fact, reinforce each other. Bernard Crick, in ‘In Defence of Politics’ (1962), reminds us that politics thrives on contradiction, that it is “a creative compromise… a diverse unity.”

    All dictionaries insist that “consensus” and ‘coercion’ are not the same. Our politicians, however, behave as though they are—indeed, as though one can be made to pass for the other. Once coercion learns to speak the language of consensus, it no longer needs to persuade; it only needs to declare. And declarations are fast, sweet and cheap.

    But there are consequences.

    Someone said “every cheap choice is a lost chance at joy.” The quest for easy victory is behind the current ‘consensus’ frenzy. But it may be the death of this democracy.

    In Yoruba, some proverbs come as stories. Take this: “All the animals in the forest assembled and decided to make ìkokò (hyena) their asípa (secretary). Ikoko was happy to hear the news, but a short while later he burst into tears. Asked what the matter was, he replied that he was sad because he realised that perhaps they (his electors) might revisit the matter and reverse themselves.”

    Professor Oyekan Owomoyela, from whom I got the proverb, explains what it says: “even in times of good fortune one should be mindful of the possibility of reversal.”

    The moral is that those who donate victory cheaply through agreement can agree again to whimsically annul the victory without consequences.

  • 27 lives ÷ 10 minutes, By Lasisi Olagunju

    27 lives ÷ 10 minutes, By Lasisi Olagunju

    “They chased us away from our farms. We thought it would soon be over. Now, they have also chased us away from our homes, from our businesses. Can you see? Ehn. Can you see? Can you see? Houses locked. Nobody. Oro-Ago District, Oke Oyan, Kajola—everywhere. This is how they are deserted now. It is a very pathetic situation.”

    I heard the above in a five-minute, forty-six-second video —a save-our-soul message soaked in tears. An old university classmate sent it to me on Saturday night.

    Where I come from, every human experience has its bucket of proverbs. “Ẹmọ́ kú, ojú ọ̀pó dí; àfẹ̀rìmọ̀jò kú, ẹnu ìsà ń sọ̀fọ̀” (When the bush rat dies, its path is overtaken by weeds; when the striped ground mouse dies, its burrow mourns). If you are alive, your father’s compound is expected to be free of grass. These ones are not dead yet, but their parlours have stopped breathing. If I am allowed to say that the dead live, I would submit that, apart from stubborn goats manning the streets, lonely, grieving graves are the only other entities that remain in that Kwara community.

    What the narrator says in the video is what 90 percent of communities in the North, and more than 60 percent in the South, would say. Yet, we insist we have a country.

    Will that Kwara community, and others like it, agree that Nigeria is not finished?

    The narrator in the video continues his monologue:

    “If anybody had told us that we were going to witness what we are witnessing at the moment in Oroland, we would have said it was impossible. But… the situation we are in, in Oro-Ago District of Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State, is beyond us.

    “Insecurity in our domain, we must confess, is beyond our powers. This is our community. Deserted. Deserted. People have fled for their lives; left their properties, their farms, their businesses—everything. The whole community is deserted now. The whole district. The whole Oro-Ago District; even the suburbs—they are all deserted now.

    “A place that was alive, bustling with commercial and agricultural activities—see the whole community deserted now. See. People left their belongings. From here to Oke Owa, down to Irabon, that’s how you see houses closed. Can you see? Houses closed. Nobody. Every house that was a home has now been deserted. I think this is beyond us… beyond us…

    “And, as I am talking now, we even have some of our community members in the bush, kidnapped. We don’t know their situation. It is a very pathetic situation. It is sad—very saddening. We are worried; we are threatened in Oro-Ago District. Please, we are appealing to the Kwara State government, the federal government, and all who can to come to our aid. This is a situation which even our fathers and forefathers did not witness.

    “We are appealing to the government to please do the needful. You did in the past; you started it well. But one should have known that these people would come with a reprisal. This is a reprisal attack on us. Ehn. This is a reprisal attack. The whole community is deserted. If you see anybody here now, maybe he is a vigilante or a stranger who does not have anywhere to escape to…”

    Across our country, misfortune comes not lightly, but in overwhelming torrents. Shakespeare says so:
    “When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
    But in battalions.” — Hamlet (Act IV, Scene V).

    The playwright was probably here when he wrote those lines. For there is yet another disturbing video showing hundreds of villagers in Nasarawa State—including children, women, and the elderly—fleeing on foot, on motorcycles, and in overcrowded vehicles to escape fresh bandit attacks that have killed several and destroyed communities. Reports say homes were burned, families displaced, and survivors forced to trek long distances with no clear destination.

    Because it does not rain in Nigeria—it pours—yesterday in Benue, as villagers marked the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday, agents of death chose the day to kill and maim, leaving at least 17 people dead in Mbalom, Gwer East Local Government Area.

    The rain has not stopped.

    How much is a Nigerian life? I asked someone. The cynical respondent said he would have said a Nigerian life was priceless but, after watching and hearing the president at the Jos airport last Thursday, he now thinks human life in Nigeria is worth whatever value the leader places on it.

    In Angwan Rukuba, Jos, on Palm Sunday, terrorist gunmen killed 27 innocent persons. And, so, the president was in Jos to mourn with the bereaved, lament the deaths, and promise justice and care. But he arrived with a recast of his “where-are-the-cows” comment of July 2019, when he visited a bereaved Pa Fasoranti who had just lost his daughter to murderous cowmen.

    In Jos on Thursday, the president of Nigeria told grieving citizens who had lost loved ones to gunmen: “You have no light at the airport. I have to fly back within the next 10 minutes. To the victims, there’s nothing I can give you but a promise that this experience will not repeat itself.” What a promise! Òní l’ó mo, ìjà olè – ‘it will end today’ is a lazy man’s battle cry.

    Consider the Oro-Ago man’s cries for rescue; think about the ten-minute airport stopover of our president; then recall the rescue of an American soldier in Iran at about the same time as the Nigerian tragedy. Compare Tinubu’s eunuch promise with Donald Trump’s proud announcement of a rescue operation: “We got him,” Trump declared. “Over the past several hours, the United States military pulled off one of the most daring search-and-rescue operations in U.S. history.” He added, with striking confidence, that the airman was injured but “he will be just fine… We will never leave an American warfighter behind.” As toxic as Trump is, one could still feel leadership in what he ordered, what was done, and in how he spoke.

    Foundational leadership matters. If you build a shrine for excrement, you will worship flies. A Nigerian federal lawmaker from the North, in a viral video, laments what we lack and what America has: a working system of leadership. “The problem is failure of leadership. The country is going down. Everywhere, drums of war are sounding… Killings every day. What is the value of human life in Nigeria?” The senator asked in exasperation.

    The president has already given him an answer: twenty-seven human lives lost to terror are worth ten minutes of a consolation stopover. To get the value of one, simply do the arithmetic: divide 27 lives by 10 minutes—and you will arrive at the official exchange rate of human life in Nigeria.

  • Adelabu’s Power Lines as Laundry Lines, By Azu Ishiekwene

    Adelabu’s Power Lines as Laundry Lines, By Azu Ishiekwene

    Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu-disastrous performance
    Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu-disastrous performance

    In many parts of the country, the rains poured down earlier in the week, bringing much physical and psychological relief from the searing heat.

    The absence of electricity from public supply channels made it worse. Average daytime temperatures throughout March ranged from 33 degrees to 38 degrees centigrade in Lagos and Abuja, respectively.

    Nigeria’s public electricity grid must rank among the most intractable problems any developing country could face. There is hardly anything more constant than the announcement of grid collapse, which leaves businesses and homes seeking alternatives and incurring unplanned expenses while paying for electricity not supplied.

    What Candidate Tinubu promised

    During his 2023 campaign, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said that if he didn’t fix the problem, he shouldn’t be voted in for a second term. He must be regretting that statement now. Since the beginning of his administration in May 2023, there have been multiple grid collapses, with the highest number recorded in 2024 at 12. Even when incidents were fewer, sporadic outages have continued. The failure, on face value, is attributed to a mix of technical, structural and administrative weaknesses in the system. But there is more to it in the sense in which it is said: “The more you see, the less you understand.”

    So unreliable is the public electricity supply that the Presidential villa appropriated N10 billion in 2025, and an additional N7 billion in 2026 for the installation of a solar mini grid that will effectively disconnect Nigeria’s seat of power from the national grid, bedevilled by ageing transmission lines which collapse repeatedly from sabotage, poor maintenance, and frequency imbalances.

    The joke is on us

    Nigerians, ever ready to make a jest of their tragic maladies and long suffering, are beaten when it comes to power outages. They are shocked beyond humour. If the high-tension cables were not too high overhead, people in communities through which they run would not hesitate to hang their laundry on them – knowing from experience that the lines are just part of the landscape and are very likely to be without electricity.

    I have seen a video of a masquerade performing on a streetlight pole. Of course, the crowd applauded its invincibility; yet, both the crowd and the masquerade knew better. The lines had not been electrified for months and were unlikely to be for the spell of the circus.

    Hope was rekindled at the beginning of the Tinubu administration when news filtered through that the currently embattled former governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, had not only produced a blueprint, but was going to be given the assignment of sorting out Nigeria’s notorious electricity sector. I learnt reliably that, as part of his plan, El-Rufai was discussing a $10 billion investment agreement with the Saudis before he ran into rough weather.

    The coming of Adebayo

    That was how Adebayo Adelabu took the job – a job at which he has performed so disastrously, saying he failed would be an honour. But it’s not his fault – it’s the fault of the President who appointed him and the Senate that cleared him for a job that he was clearly incompetent to perform, either based on his record or based on any hope of redemption. He is brilliant, but the power sector is littered with the remains of brilliant people, among whom he is now a fossil.

    His better years were when he worked as an auditor at PWC. He was also the Executive Director/CFO at First Bank, and later a deputy governor at the Central Bank. He may not have been directly responsible for the misfortunes of these institutions at the time, but he doesn’t exactly smell of roses.

    In the normal course of things, his banking career should have been a yellow flag. Still, Nigeria being Nigeria, the quota system and political connections ensured that he defied gravity.

    Then, in 2023, Tinubu offered him the position of Minister of Power, after his failed attempt to become governor of Oyo State on the platform of the Accord Party. That only worsened our misery. Adelabu will be best remembered for splitting electricity consumers into parallel payment bands that do not necessarily reflect improved services.

    The thing is not that Adelabu failed at his job. It’s the lack of evidence that he tried. Mr Dan Kunle, an energy expert familiar with the history of that sector, told me that, “No one is saying a power minister should provide the resources to fix the sector from thin air. It’s for him to provide a solid framework that would create the right environment and attract sovereign intervention.”

    Adelabu, like many of his predecessors, is running the power ministry in 2026 with the 1950 operational manual of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN). Yet, even then, when the country had a population of about 50 million, the British knew that electricity was an economic good. To provide meaningful and sustainable service, they had to prioritise not just the key administrative centres but also areas that could pay. That was why, for example, coal was shipped from Enugu to the Ijora Power Station in Lagos.

    No roadmap

    Adelabu has no roadmap, or if he has one for a population four times what it was under ECN, it’s a roadmap to nowhere. The same old problems persist: gas shortages, moribund plants, infrastructure deficits, massive debts, and frequent grid collapses, limiting supply to about 4,000 MW despite a capacity of 13,000 MW.

    While Adelabu may wring his hands alongside Nigerians when the lights trip off, the sector has been drowning under the yoke of N6 trillion in debt as of late 2025, fuelled by non-cost-reflective tariffs and unpaid bills to both generating and distribution companies. Some of the problems predate Adelabu, but his incompetence has worsened them.

    Yet, he still has ambition. Not to redeem himself after his disastrous three years as minister, but to become the governor of Oyo State. Obviously, he believes the reward for poor performance is a higher office. He is so shameless, it means nothing to him that he holds the Olympic record for national grid collapse. It means nothing to him that Nigerian businesses are powered by Indian generators and their homes by Chinese solar panels.

    Examples from Africa

    Egypt, with a population of 110 million, has 100 percent universal electricity access, supported by a heavy reliance on gas (81 percent) and growing low-carbon sources like hydropower. This ensures a stable supply amid population pressures.

    South Africa serves 85-90 percent of its 62 million residents but faces severe shortages. Frequent load shedding persists due to Eskom’s debt, ageing infrastructure, and maintenance issues, despite high per-capita generation.

    Ghana reaches 88-89 percent coverage for 34 million people, with hydro and thermal power dominating. Urban areas enjoy near-99 percent access, while rural areas still have gaps and occasional outages.

    Kenya hits 76 percent for 56 million, excelling in urban (97 percent) and geothermal power. Rural expansion lags, though targets aim for full access by 2030.

    Compared to the countries above, only 57 percent of Nigerians are grid-connected, with outages occurring 85 percent of the time, and poor metering and corruption that sustain estimated billing and inefficiencies.

    After watching Adelabu perform so poorly over the last two years on the national stage, I was hoping he would go away quietly, under the shadow of the darkness he has fostered. But since he insists that he won’t leave quietly – or appears determined to stay on – I’m considering a self-appointed mission to drag him to Oyo State to see how he will turn their night into day.

     

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.

  • Nigeria, Iran and the next election, By Lasisi Olagunju

    Nigeria, Iran and the next election, By Lasisi Olagunju

    On August 2, 1100, England’s King William II went hunting in the New Forest in southern England. During the chase, an arrow shot at a stag by his companion, the Norman nobleman Walter Tirel struck an oak tree, ricocheted, and pierced the king’s chest. The king died right there. The spot where he fell is today marked by the Rufus Stone.

    History records the episode as an accident. Yet the story has endured for nearly a thousand years as a powerful illustration of unintended consequences. An arrow meant for a stag struck a king instead.

    And that is how events far away — sometimes aimed at something else entirely — end up wounding those who thought themselves safely out of range.

    It offers a lesson for anyone in Nigeria who thinks a crisis anywhere, especially the ongoing war in Iran, is too far away to hurt them here.

    The negation of a Yoruba proverb captures the inevitability of distant consequences: igi kìí dá l’óko k’ó pa ará ilé—a tree does not fall in the bush and kill the city dweller. Events rarely harm those who are truly untouched by them. But in an interconnected world defined by oil, the fall of a tree in the Gulf can shake the political ground in Abuja. The Yoruba also say the ceiling does not cave in and kill the wayfarer (Àjà kìí jìn kó pa èrò ònà). Again, this is working for Nigeria and Nigerians in the reverse.

    Donald Trump started the war in Iran because he wanted (wants) a new regime there which will be answerable to him. The war will miss its intended target if history remains a faithful mocker of all-powerful men like Donald Trump. It may even do worse: and, it is already doing it on a global scale. In Nigeria, hundreds of miles away from Iran, personal wellbeing is being upended; family finances are facing ruins because of petrol and its combustible price.

    Yet, it may get worse.

    A classic warning from the cockpit captures Nigeria’s moment: “We are about to enter a zone of turbulence. Please fasten your seat belts and remain seated.”

    The celts of thunder from the Middle East has reached every home. On Saturday, fuel queues returned to major cities in Nigeria. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited raised the pump price of petrol again—its second increase in four days. Iran is the culprit.

    The widening crisis around the Strait of Hormuz may seem distant from Nigeria’s politics, but history teaches that events in the Persian Gulf often echo loudly in oil-producing states. When tension grips the Gulf and the shipping lanes tremble, the first reaction of the global market is almost instinctive: the price of crude rises.

    And what I read is that global oil prices are rising. Brent and West Texas Intermediate climbed above $90 per barrel at the weekend. Ordinarily, Nigerians should celebrate this as good news, but because we are Nigerians, the development can only be celebrated with paradox and oxymoronic songs and dance steps. We sell yam and use the proceeds to buy pounded yam. We cannot profit from increased earnings from our labour tilling the land. NNPC read what I read of global oil price and its domestic petrol price moved from ₦960 to ₦967 per litre, and this was after an earlier jump from ₦875.

    The tremor is getting stronger as the Iranian crisis worsens, and lengthens. Reports said on Sunday that across the country, filling stations quickly adjusted their meters. In parts of Southern Nigeria, petrol now sells for about ₦1,080 per litre. Earlier in the week, the Dangote Refinery also raised its gantry price. The cause is the same: higher crude costs driven by war shrieks in the Middle East.

    Nigerians, like passengers in rough air, can only brace for rougher bumps ahead.

    With spiked petrol prices, homes grappling with sick finances may soon gasp for life as cost of living takes a bash. And that should not be seen as a thief in the night. For a country like Nigeria, whose public finances lean heavily on petroleum exports, and imports, the political consequences of a shift in the price of the economy’s oxygen can be profound. And I can safely make a prediction: Even with a struggling opposition, oil prices abroad may become hostile votes at home in Nigeria. Whether as windfall or hardship, the Iranian crisis may yet tinker (or tamper) with the ballot boxes of Nigeria’s 2027 election.

    I say so because where I come from, I grew up to know that afẹ́fẹ́ kìí fẹ́ kó má kan igi oko l’ára—the wind does not blow through the forest without touching the trees of the forest. And a strong wind that blows without ceasing will do more than touch the trees; it will break the branches of the strong and waste the fruits of the fruity.

    So, if regime change is Trump’s primary goal in Iran, his arrow may miss the stag and hit kings in all countries where petrol is the giver of life.

    I wrote last week that this war may be a long haul. It looks like I may be right. From a war of ego it is morphing into a war in defence of independence for Iran. Donald Trump has openly tied his offensive in Iran to regime change. In an interview with American news site, Axios, he suggested he should be involved in choosing Iran’s next leader. He said he wants “someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran.”

    Days after saying that, Trump doubled down. He loudly called on Iranians to overthrow their government, warning that the alternative is “absolutely guaranteed death.” On Truth Social, he declared that there will be no deal with Iran except “unconditional surrender.”

    The irony is striking. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to end the American habit of remaking other nations. He vowed to “break the cycle of regime change” and abandon the reckless interventions of the past. In 2019, he repeated the pledge, declaring that America’s era of “never-ending war, regime change, and nation-building” was over and that the U.S. military was not meant to be “the policeman of the world.” Now, the man has become the ultimate kingmaker, and Inspector General of the world, and he flaunts it. What is the definition of discordance if this is not it?

    In Venezuela, Trump abducted a president. In Iran, he killed the spiritual and political leader. After Venezuela and Iran, Trump has said he is “looking forward to a great change that will soon be coming to Cuba.” There was no diplomacy in his statement of objective: regime change. He said: “Cuba is at the end of the line. They’re very much at the end of the line. They have no money, they have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that’s been bad for a long time. Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was. It’ll have a great new life, but it’s in its last moments of life the way it is.”

    The world president has said what he wants from, and with Cuba, and he may get it. But can he succeed with Iran? If he succeeds with Iran, what will be the definition of that success? Will he not be transiting from the house of disease to the home of death? How about a harder anti-American hardliner succeeding today’s unyielding theocrats?

    What Trump’s current fixation risks illustrating is what sociologist Robert K. Merton famously described as the law of unintended consequences. Merton argued that political actions often produce outcomes their authors never anticipated. Literature in sociology reminds us that unintended consequences can be positive (unexpected benefits), negative (unplanned harm), or perverse (when an action makes the original problem worse). In Iran, the louder the external calls for regime change, the stronger the regime’s nationalist legitimacy may become. Trump has not benefited from the teachings of that law.

    The more one reads Iran’s contemporary political history, the clearer it becomes why America remains a hard sell to large sections of the Iranian public.

    It may be true that many Iranians see their regime as repressive, corrupt and unfeeling. Western television networks may keep showing crowds of Iranians cheering American and Israeli strikes against symbols of state power. But wars have their own logic. We have seen how the same conflict has produced a powerful backlash, especially after the mass killing of Iranian schoolgirls early in the fighting. Moments like that often awaken a deeper instinct: when a nation feels attacked from outside, even its fiercest internal critics may close ranks.

    Deeper still on the regime change rhetoric of Trump is the question: can a nation whose political identity was forged in resistance to foreign domination truly have its leadership determined from abroad? History suggests the answer may expose the futility of Trump’s objective.

    My point is that the US-Iran conflict is more structural and historical than religious. I cite an example. In 1962, the Iranian parliament passed a law granting law-breaking American expatriates living in Iran immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts. A young cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, (who later became Ayatollah Ruholah Khomeini) reacted with fury. The cleric said, by that law, “If any of them (Americans) commits a crime in Iran, they are immune. If an American servant or cook terrorises your source of religious authority in the middle of the bazaar, the Iranian police do not have the right to stop him. The Iranian courts cannot put him on trial or interrogate him. He should go to America where the masters would decide what to do. . . . We do not consider this government a government. These are traitors. They are traitors to the country.” Scholars J. S. Ismael and T. Y. Ismael, writing on ‘The Political Thought of Ayatollah Khomeini’ in June 1980, brought in the above lines and further observed that this confrontation helped transform clerical dissent into a wider nationalist resistance movement. It got worse such that by late 1970s, the outrage had matured into a powerful ideological narrative: that Iran must never again become subordinate to external powers. The reality of, and hatred for, American power already embedded in Iran’s political vocabulary crystalised into the action that birthed the 1979 revolution. I do not think that forty seven years after, historically proud Iranians would happily exchange the theocratic dictatorship of a home-bred Ayatollah for a contraption put together by an erratic, exploitative godfather reigning abroad.

    This should not be too blurry for me to see, and cannot be too complex, knotty, for me to untie; history explains it: Because the present Iranian state was built on the rejection of foreign domination—especially American domination—external attempts since 1979 to reshape Iran have often reinforced the regime’s founding narrative rather than weakened it. Trump’s present intervention may simply allow the regime in Iran to present and entrench itself as a defender of Iran’s sovereignty against the banditry of outside manipulation.

    In other words, Iran’s historical memory of humiliation means that Trump’s loud, lousy attempt to reshape the country in his own image may produce the opposite effect. A revolution born in resistance to foreign privilege rarely surrenders its autonomy to foreign proxies. The louder his calls for regime change, the stronger the regime’s ideological justification may become.

    Back to Nigeria and its share of this problem. Non-partisan political economists will warn that if the exchange of bombs in Iran escalates further and the Gulf’s energy arteries remain constrained, if global shipping disruptions deepen and freight costs surge, inflation at home will worsen even as oil prices climb. The paradox would be bitter: our nation earns more from crude while its citizens struggle with higher prices of food, transport and medicine.

    One article in the Financial Times yesterday said “oil market prepares for $100 a barrel as Middle East producers cut output.” Another published same day explained “why oil at $200 a barrel is no longer unthinkable.”

    Put the mathematics of the two together and the answer is simple: global economic — and possibly political — turmoil. I pity Nigeria, and the Mr Jones of its animal farm who still believes the farm is insulated from the storm.

    This is where politicians should worry. Elections are less than twelve months away. A hungry electorate can be costly to court — and even more expensive to buy. Keeping them is costlier still. Yet bribery does not always win. Robert C. Brooks’ The Nature of Political Corruption (1909) warned long ago about the limits and consequences of that path. Nigerian politicians, of course, are not strangers to Philip Nel’s provocative essay, ‘When Bribery Helps the Poor’. Their own takeaway from Nel, appears simpler: in Nigeria, bribery is “the only thing that works.” And indeed, on election day, it often does.

    So, the government will continue doing what it does best: ignoring spiralling prices of petrol, etc, advertising dubious statistics as proof of a good life. But elections are rarely decided by macroeconomic indicators; they are decided by how daily life feels to the voter.

    Still, politicians are incurable optimists. Even in violent turbulence, they insist the aircraft will land safely. Their counter-incantation in the storm comforts them: Ìjì kìí jà kó da omi inú àgbọn nù— no storm rages fiercely enough to spill the coconut water inside its shell.

    They insist that elections are not decided by how daily life feels to the voter. They ask: in our country, is election not ultimately a matter of cash? What money cannot buy, more money will. One day, it just won’t.

    That is why we say every action or inaction has consequences. Prebendal optimism has. What happened in the New Forest nine centuries ago reminds us that consequences rarely travel in straight lines. An arrow meant for a stag killed a king. In the same way, a war meant to reshape Iran may yet reshape politics in countries far beyond the Persian Gulf — and that includes Nigeria.

  • South West and the weight of “Alajobi” votes in 2027, By Lanre Adewole

    South West and the weight of “Alajobi” votes in 2027, By Lanre Adewole

     

     

    Lanre Adewole 's logo
    In 2023, of the 8,794,726 million votes that sent Mr. Bola Tinubu to Aso Rock presidential villa, only 2,279,407 million of them, representing just a little above 25% of the total, came from his South West stock.

    So last week, I had lengthy conversations with two Yoruba political lieutenants of Mr. President. One has always had reservations about his politics but still supported him firmly to win in 2023. The other, until the shocking discovery during the discussion, was smitten by the City Boy political charm. He adored, idolised and even lionised what he considered as unmatched political and administrative prowess of the President. Until last week, with him, the President could do no wrong.
    But both are now very disappointed and embittered with the President, with the one who used to cannonise him, being more truculent in his condemnation, especially of the seeming amoral reelection expansionist agenda of the President which is emptying all manner of opposition elements into the ruling party.
    The APC leader couldn’t understand his Leader (the President) working with all sorts in the opposition arena, especially governors, despite their (he and Tinubu’s) much-vaunted “progressive” resume and bonafides. He signaled his crushed enthusiasm in having to work with “strange bedfellows” the President had ported into the ruling party and the “progressive” fold, reminisced about the puritan progressivism of the Awo era and to a large extent the succeeding Ige’s, before concluding that the “rainbow” coalition now driving the re-election agenda of Mr. President, has shamed every modicum of elan, morality, integrity, honesty, decency and dignity in public service that defined the founding fathers of progressive politics. He equally accepted that a good portion of the still-breathing old brigade had also turned, disclosing that he was so pained recently he had to accost a renegade Awoist, in the departure lounge of life, to demand from him what he would tell his leaders like Awo, Ajasin, Ige et al, when he sees them in afterlife. Inside of me, I was like, he could bone (slang for ignore) them.
    Even my uncharacteristic cheer of an aspect of the local economy; the raw food sector, seen as gradually clawing out of the pit, would not lift his glum. In time past, he would have been the one calling my attention. So much for life curves.
    Expectedly, our dissection shifted to the emerging electoral map and the president’s pathway to re-election; which had got the other less-disappointed (because he had predicted the fumbling) leader worried, due to its contours in our separate conversation.
    Despite their misgivings, both, particularly the more-souring lieutenant projected that the presidential election would still be patterned after the “Omo eni o se idi bebere” (Yoruba wisecrack for identity politics) mentality for the expected front runners in the poll, which would translate to each leading candidate sweeping his geo-backyard. In essence, President Tinubu is projected to win the South West by a large margin, Peter Obi, sweeping his South East (despite almost all the zone’s governors now in APC) and Atiku Abubakar, doing very well in the North, especially North East and North West (again, despite most of the governors over there in APC). The North Central is inked as the battleground, where recent strategic federal appointments are expected to carry the incumbent to the finishing line.
    The more-bitter party chieftain, ironically, was more certain that the Obi phenom of 2023 which gave him Lagos, is an affliction that would not rise again in 2027. Despite his misgivings with his “leader”, the President, he is still holding that only a Yoruba “bastard” will dump Tinubu for Obi in Lagos and elsewhere in the South West in the next year election. We dissected Atiku’s chances in the South West too and he concluded there is no pathway to substantial ballot for him too in Yoruba land when the son of the soil who is also the incumbent, will be running. The less-enthusiastic leader too, held that Asiwaju would win the South West, but would not insert “very well” into his own permutation because “the Yoruba can be pragmatic”. He alluded to a lot of discontent among rank and file of the ruling party over the total hijack of state party structures by governors, especially in the course of the just-done party congresses, noting that no individual or group was allowed nationwide to purchase forms to contest for party leadership positions from ward to state level. According to him, each governor belonging to the party, was sold all the forms for party positions by the national headquarters of the ruling party, which couldn’t have been, without the express blessing of the president; as the national leader of the party. The governors, according to findings, distributed the forms to their chosen candidates for party positions, ending up with consensus arrangement everywhere, save for a state like Ondo which governor appears to be at odds with Abuja. This party leader thinks most of the scorned aspirants and their grieving supporters will likely stay back in the party and hurt its candidates, including the president in the general election.
    Ordinarily the unified stance of the duo on how the South West will vote next year, should be the reality of the current political season, which has been mainly what the Yoruba will describe as everybody carrying his/her own mother’s breast, without much assistance from the next-door neighbour. In reality, identity politics has largely defined the pre and post-independence politicking, with leading candidates sweeping their backyards, until now-late M.K.O Abiola showed up like an armada and swept his main opponent, equally now-late Bashir Tofa, off his North backyard, including his Kano base. But thanks to Babangida and his cohort, that popular mandate only received posthumous validation.
    Then came 1999 and the Yoruba race rejected its son, Okikiola Obasanjo who was evidently going to be president, having been massively backed by the North. But the Oduduwa race didn’t still tie the jigida on the waist of omolomo (someone outside of the zone). It heavily backed another of its own, considered the pick of the race. It was a case of trying to checkmate external imposition.
    Four years later, in 2003, the rejected son who became president, eventually found accommodation with his own, sweeping the South West on his way to massive re-election victory. This fits into the projection of the two disappointed political lieutenants of the president that his Yoruba base would be more welcoming next year than four years ago. Precedents support their stance.
    But can one say same of the current political and economic realities, among other factors that determine mass support or bloc voting?
    President’s supporters are always wont to point to the Obi windfall of 2023 in the South East, boasting a reenactment in the South West this election cycle. One of the disappointed associates of the president alluded to same. He promised that despite the anger of many against the President back home especially in Lagos, Obi would struggle to reach a 10 percent total vote milestone this time, let alone repeat the feat of electorally humbling Tinubu in his backyard. Something sounded sinister in the half-threat, half-mockery promise.
    From my reading, ceteris paribus, the President will still win the vast majority of South West votes despite his performance that has been panned across the geo-zone. In winning the presidency, he took four of the six states, losing Lagos to Obi’s Labour and Osun to Atiku’s PDP. It would have been 3-for-3 split with the opposition, but for Oyo’s Seyi Makinde who leaned into the alajobi (tribal) sentiment to hand Oyo, a PDP state to the then APC flagbearer. He saved Tinubu greater embarrassment after the Lagos humiliation. Now Makinde says he’s charting a different course next year.
    Coming a close second behind Tinubu’s losing numbers in Lagos, Makinde’s 449,884 effort against his party’s flagbearer, doubled, even in excess, Ekiti’s 201,494 in the making of the Tinubu presidency. The Oyo numbers also topped 100,000 in extra, compared to Ogun, Osun and even Ondo. Now that the man who led that effort is looking elsewhere, time will tell if the President’s men in the state where the governor is the most dominant political figure, despite recent jolts, can cover for his absence in their corner.
    The pragmatic one in my conversations is of the opinion that the Muslim/Muslim ticket downside which he believed hurt Tinubu in mostly Christian South West last time, would not be a factor in 2027 as the Nigerian leader had presumably demonstrated he belongs to everyone and belongs to no one. The zone is still retaining its six Christian governors just like in 2023 and the President’s wife has become a very visible foot soldier in propagating her husband’s all-faith inclusivity. Vice-President Kashim Shettima whose inclusion in the 2023 winning ticket worried Christians more, has also been relatively quiet in promoting the reelection agenda. The prognosis of the religion factor in the South West, this time, would appear to favour Mr. President.
    Then there is the spiraling economic downturn to consider. The Yoruba are hardly sentimental in their approach to governance evaluation. That is why many of the zone’s leaders including one of the two I spoke with, would joyfully tell you, “we do better in opposition”. But the zone has its son in the saddle now, who has to run on his poor governing record. Time will tell if the alajobi phenom will triumph demonstrable capability elsewhere or with someone else in the race.
    In 2003 when Obasanjo was seeking reelection, his administration had installed several institutions of governance, which have today, become sectoral pillars. His performance wasn’t the problem, it was North wanting its “power” back, making it easy for the Yoruba race, though not quick to tribal support, to rally behind him.
    Will Tinubu enjoy similar sentiment with less than stellar performance since the North is baying again? But the President’s men seem ready; at least in Lagos where they are aiming at a record four million votes, despite APC’s registered members standing at a little over 800,000 in a state of close to 30 million residents. We wait.
    End.

    Sent from my iPhone

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