Today is October 22nd, 2026, meaning that, in another 48 hours, President Tinubu of Nigeria will hit the ground campaigning at last. He has, otherwise, been missing in action in that theatre, leaving the task to a variant of wolf warriors such as FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike.
Wike is certainly a high scorer in theatricalities. That has its usefulness in a configuration such as Nigeria but this is a highly charged struggle for power requiring field commanders with capacity for higher level of abstraction. Although the entire Fourth Republic has had nothing much to offer in this regard compared to the IBB regime, for example, it has been particularly worse with this administration. Yet, it has implications because the logic of campaigning is the logic of high voltage rationalisation. It needs convincing sophistry. It needs people with that particular skill.
This is particularly so when the president himself lacks any entertaining grandiloquence and, instead, publicly confirms much of the very negative things attributed to him. Other than Engineer Babachir Lawal today, President Tinubu has no serious publicist in any serious audience now. Many of the sort of things Babachir says are, in context, positive for the president. A president who, for diverse reasons, is not popular, has no skills in sensitively representing himself and lacks credible publicists but gives people the impression that he is the candidate to beat is an invitation to crisis. That is because he must be reading Machiavelli upside down or taking speculative texts such as ‘the 48 laws of power’ out of context.
To do so when your opponents are an Atiku Abubakar and a Peter Obi in a country which has reeled under unspeakable misery for over three years is certainly to overstretch belief in magical ontology and brinkmanship too far.
Can Kaduna still change anything? Well, only God may be in the position to decide this now. That has to be so because it is not clear what a presidential apology can still achieve. In any case, up to a few days back, the president was still saying he has no regrets removing fuel subsidy. Obviously, the president’s strategy script is: don’t apologise, don’t retract on any policy line. Doing so will make you look weak and confused.
Even when a ‘Tinubu Must Go’ refrain is resonating around the country, meaning the collapse of the belief in certain quarters that this is Nigeria and no electoral infringement or false results will have any consequences? What manner of strategy and strategists could be this?
Intervention has always said it is regrettable that it has come to this for President Tinubu. He would have been Nigeria’s best president if he arrived Abuja with any iota of what we heard, including from his opponents such as Pat Utomi. And reinforced by the snippets from Engineer Babachir Lawal in many of his interviews since he fell out with Tinubu. Other than that, President Tinubu has a ‘constructivist’ tinge to his politics. The condition in Nigeria today requires that tinge of unorthodox dosages. Unfortunately, what everyone testifies to today about the Tinubu phenomena is a peculiar form of narcissism and venality in power unthought of previously, contradicting everything promising about astuteness in setting aside convention and orthodoxy.
While we observe him navigate the storms of his 3- year rule and a problematic hope to return to power for a Second term, political scientists, economists, psychologists and students of language game should busy themselves on how this president became this. Already, that debate has started. Engineer Babachir Lawal has offered a hypothesis. Many speakers spoke though briefly on this too at the presentation last Friday of From Renewed Hope to Despair: A Critical Examination of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Government by four academics at the Centre for Democratic Development, Research and Training (CEDDERT), Zaria.
It is necessary for the future, if there will be any future at this rate!
