2027 Is Our Last Chance
Why we must mobilise for Nigeria to survive
Edition #3 of The Relevant Information
Nearly a decade ago, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), lost control of the Presidency and the National Assembly, when the All Progressives Congress (APC), won the 2015 general elections. That loss ended 16 years of the experiment of PDP rule, a loss that happened because Nigerians were frustrated at the government’s inability to tackle insecurity originating out of the Northeast in the form of the Boko Haram insurgency.
Because of how shaken we were as a people by the previously unheard of phenomenon of bombs going of in mosques and churches, and anti-government armed men seizing control of villages, towns and cities, we welcomed the APC’s victory, even if we didn’t vote or we are completely apolitical. People just wanted the madness to stop, and a measure of sanity and security to be restored.
The collapse of our army, bombs flying everywhere, and Boko Haram driving from Damasak in Borno all the way to Michika in Adamawa - a distance of over 300km- soon met allegations of fantastic corruption plaguing the Goodluck Jonathan, further\ increasing the sense of existential dread we felt.
Given General Muhammadu Buhari’s military background and carefully laundered reputation, plus his alliance with Bola Ahmed Tinubu, we thought that the APC would fix the insecurity problem, tackle corruption, and solve our underlying economic problems. These were widely held hopes even amongst those that didn’t vote for the APC or don’t vote at all.
We were all wrong.
The Buhari administration was an eight year unmitigated disaster, one that coasted along on massive borrowing, like a degenerate gambler borrowing from multiple payday loan apps, to fund his losing streak on Bet9ja or Baba Ijebu.
The insurgency in Borno was contained not because of the policies and directions of President Buhari and his political apparatus, but despite them.
The institutional capacities of the Nigerian Army, Air Force, the Defence Intelligence Agency, and the Defence Headquarters, were who came up with the plans, utilised the meagre resources allocated to them, and did the hardwork to contain the insurgency.
Despite their flaws, and Lord Knows they are plenty, the Armed Forces over the eight years of Buhari, gradually degraded and contained the ability of the insurgency to exploit gaps in our military posture to expand their operations.
This combined with the joint operations of the State Security Service and Military Intelligence to hunt down urban terror networks responsible for organising bomb attacks in cities outside the Northeast, plus work done on shutting down the insurgents’ external financial logistics by the EFCC, National Intelligence Agency, and even the efforts of folks like Hon Aliyu Gebi (former chairman of the House of Reps Committee on Internal Security, senior adviser to both of Buhari’s Ministers of Interior), ensured that the insurgency got starved of oxygen and was contained.
All of this happened despite the Buhari administration, not because of it.
Moreover, by the time the Buhari administration left office, armed conflict stopped being the preserve of the Northeast, and instead had spread across the Northwest, North Central, and Southeast. Thousands of people were displaced by bandit militias’ attacks in the Northwest, states like Benue were devastated by terrible attacks by a myriad of armed groups, and the Southeast reeled from an underground insurgency by various factions of IPOB.
And in all these, the Buhari administration was effectively missing in action, with the Armed Forces, Police and State Security Service, left to figure out how to manage the little resources allocated to them to tackle these burning fires that were spread across multiple states and regions.
The Tinubu candidacy for the 2023 elections, was packaged and sold as the competent version of the APC, one that was definitely different from and much more capable than those ‘semi-literate’ Buharists.
We were told the man himself is a genius political operator who has also ensured that he is surrounded with the most capable technocrats, and unlike Buhari who had no idea what to do once he got into office, his structure is well-prepared and had plans ready to get the ball rolling on day one.
Of course, after the disaster that was Buhari, Nigerians were not so gullible, but bloated egos, selfishness, inefficient mobilisation and disorganisation amongst the opposition’s ranks, ensured that with some creative politicking, the Tinubu candidacy was able to become the Tinubu presidency.
The last eighteen months of the Tinubu presidency has in turn proven to be an even worse disaster than the cumulative eight years of Buhari, a record that even I had thought was impossible to beat.
The complete hollowing out of the real economy, the economy of actual living people, not numbers and statistics by acclaimed suit-wearing experts that doesn’t buy crayfish in the market, has been astonishing to see and experience.
The cost of living has become so crazy, that the very cost of just surviving as a regular Nigerian not working for some multilateral organisation, multinational corporation, international NGO, and also not a political player surviving on fantastic corruption; is now at apocalyptic proportions.
To put it succinctly, if you live in Nigeria, earning in naira, at regular man income, you are fucked. There’s no nicer way to express the catastrophe that the last eighteen months have been for your existence.
For an administration that claims to be competent at economic policy and to be making the decisions it has made since it assumed office based on competence, it is ironic that no other administration since the Babangida years, has overseen the destruction of small and medium enterprises (especially in manufacturing) at the scale this one has.
Rising energy costs both in fuel and electricity, plus the collapse of the naira which has pushed up importation costs of key manufacturing inputs, has ensured that what little small and medium manufacturing we have, is either shutting down, or is on its way out.
The result of this has been people being put out of work, and families losing what was often the only source of income, plus foreign exchange earned from exports to neighbouring countries drying up.
The administration can speak as much English it wants, and its propagandists on social media can tell us how Tinubu’s plans for us are the best thing to happen to this country since the invention of sliced bread, but the reality remains that what we are undergoing is not only not economic progress, it is economic regress. Degrowth instead of growth.
Economic regression/degrowth has the terrifying but inevitable side effect of increased insecurity, as people desperate to survive - which as everyday passes is becoming more and more Nigerians- are very amenable to taking up crime as an occupation, or joining up with non state armed groups including bandit militias and the various flavours of insurgencies we have, who are willing to provide them with a living wage.
In the past we have seen this happen in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, where impressionable and desperate people, voluntarily joined Boko Haram and ISWAP in order to survive, and then stayed long enough to get indoctrinated into becoming fervent believers.
Even more recently I have noticed this happening in parts of the Northwest where displaced people of Fulani ethnicity who are desperate to survive, join bandit militias, not because they necessarily want to rape and loot and plunder, but rather because the only clear path of economic mobility available to them has been joining such a group.
In a few cases, we have observed some soldiers quit the military because the apocalyptic rise in the cost of living has rendered their salaries ineffective and useless, and on quitting the military either leave for Sudan to fight for the Rapid Support Forces there, or become private security for illicit mining operations in Kaduna, Niger and Zamfara States. Illicit mining operations that are themselves in bed with all manner of bandit militias.
This is the reality we are going to have to contend with for the next thirty months give or take, until the next scheduled transfer of power in 2027.
The Tinubu Organisation (what I call the President and his political structure), is aware that they were immensely unpopular when they assumed office in 2023, and are currently widely reviled, propaganda claims of being beloved by the people to the contrary.
However they have deliberately chosen to not correct their course, because of two key reasons. Firstly is their confidence that come 2027, they can manoeuvre the political and electoral mathematics to their favour; secondly is that in order to ensure their politico-economic dominance long after Tinubu himself is no longer on the scene, they need to see through the policies that they are implementing, which are responsible for the unraveling of Nigerian society as we know it.
The Tinubu Organisation believes it can shape the political and electoral terrain to its favour, because of how it came into power in the first place. In my first newsletter (embedded below), I briefly shined a light on what that means.
In one section, I said:
If we are talking reality, in short form, elections in Nigeria are won through the frontdoor - i.e gathering required threshold numbers, winning prescribed constitutional geographical percentages, ensuring your paperwork is in order - and also through the backdoor. The backdoor is where voter bribery, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing (in the old days), lawfare to overwhelm the competition pre-election, and judicial manipulation post election, all come into play.
Of the four main candidates in the 2023 election, only one (the current president) had a solid numbers mobilisation game in four of the six geopolitical zones of the country. The Atiku campaign lost the numbers game in the Southeast and South South , through its own unforced errors, when Peter Obi defected to the Labour Party- unannounced - with his base, and Nyesom Wike was snubbed for the Vice Presidential ticket in favour of Ifeanyi Okowa.
The Obi campaign simply couldn’t get the numbers it needed in Northern Nigeria, and Kwankwaso was too financially under-resourced to mobilise voters outside Kano State.
The split of Peter Obi from former vice president Atiku Abubakar, with whom he contested the 2019 election as his vice presidential candidate, already narrowed the chances of Tinubu losing the 2023 election. But other faulty assumptions made by both Atiku and Obi, only served to further choke the chances Tinubu would lose.
Atiku Abubakar and his faction of the PDP, at the last election idealistically relied on the hope that Nigerians were tired enough of the APC to deliver the frontdoor of electioneering to his candidacy by voting for him against the other names on the ballot.
The campaign of Peter Obi, the former Anambra governor and the Labour Party candidate, on the other hand, relied on his popularity amongst a specific section of the youth, coupled with the APC running a Muslim-Muslim ticket against accepted political practice, which it believed would rally the Christian vote around it.
The Tinubu Organisation understood then as it understands now, that in order to effectively win the election, especially as the incumbent party (or president now), you must succeed at both the games of the front and back doors. In the last election it ruthlessly applied itself to ensuring it did just that, ensuring it got enough votes to cross the required threshold in the states of the Southwest, Northeast, Northwest, and North Central, with the backdoor being utilised to clear the way in some states of the South South and Southeast.
Today, they control the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC), that famously ‘independent’ body that is above being corrupted. They control the entire directing mechanisms of the national security architecture, and they boast a far larger war chest - one that is still growing - than any other potential candidates. The have the backdoor fully locked down in their favour.
Their weakness lies in the frontdoor, the actual voting public, and despite their ability to provide financial and material incentives to get out the vote, they are aware of how universally reviled and hated their administration is across the country.
However as they are currently politicking ahead of 2027, this administration counts on two things:
The First
Is that the general apathy of Nigerians who are being beaten down by a daily struggle to survive, would translate into a lack of interest in voting, which would allow their own mobilised loyalists and mercenary voters to dominate the polls. They are especially confident that apathy will keep the coast clear for them to dominate the polls with their mobilised loyalists and voting mercenaries, because of the weakness of active opposition and resistance to their policies since they assumed office, despite how badly the people are suffering from them.
Even the #EndBadGovernance protests that worried the administration, turned out to be tepid compared to the #EndSARS protests four years ago, with only specific protests in Northern Nigeria becoming any cause of concern by taking on a pro-military coup/pro-Russia colouration ( incidents which were organised by the junta in the Republic of Niger to spite Tinubu).
The Second
Is that they can adequately settle the players and groups that control large and small voting blocks across the three northern regions, and the Southwest, and thus mobilise voting mercenaries, while the opposition would fail at mobilisation and also remain divided between the various parties and candidates, like in the 2023 election.
I am normally an apolitical person, who personally does not care much for electoral politics beyond an analytical standpoint, and who has always hidden behind the veil of professionalism to avoid getting too entangled with political operators outside the policy realm.
However today I believe that it is absolutely necessary for the future of the Nigerian people, that should the Tinubu administration not change the directions it has chosen to take this country in, it should be resisted, mobilised against and must be made to lose the 2027 presidential election.
It has done more damage to this country than what fourteen years of Buhari and Jonathan combined did, in just eighteen months. It has, in such a small amount of time, managed to shatter the one thing that no other administration or regime before it has ever managed to do; the unbreachable wall of hope that Nigerians typically possess.
If it has managed to do so much damage in just eighteen months, a year and a half, I dread what six and a half more years of it being in power would do. And since the earliest opportunity we the people will get to completely rid ourselves of it is in 2027, then we absolutely cannot risk allowing it to win the elections scheduled for that year.
The eight years of Buhari, plus the last year and half of Tinubu have been time wasted, time in our developmental journey which we will never get back. To put it in context from March 2014 to June 2024, India increased its electricity generation capacity from 248,000MW to 446,000MW, and of that number, renewable energy alone has increased from 75,519 MW in March 2014 to 195,013 MW in June 2024.
Nigeria on the other hand took from December 2015 to December 2022 to grow our installed power generation capacity from 12,132MW to 13,097MW, with the capacity to transmit around 8,100MW. However in reality due to the fickleness of our grid we can only regularly transmit around 4,000MW.
In the eighteen months since Buhari left and Tinubu took over, our grid has been collapsing even more frequently than we were used to, with the whole of Northern Nigeria thrown into more than eight days of darkness just a week ago as the grid collapsed again.
We cannot afford to waste the four years from 2027 to 2031 under a continuation of the Tinubu Organisation who have in their first term clearly demonstrated that they have no plan for the development of this country, rather they only care about securing their hold over power, even if it comes at the expense of the viability of the country itself.
They do not care if our best brains, skilled workforce and our professional class are being hollowed out by the Japa (escape through emigration for you non-Nigerians) syndrome. They do not care that our manufacturing base is being choked to death by their economic policies. They do not care that Nigeria cannot continue to borrow at excessive rates to fund vanity projects awarded as infrastructure contracts to enrich their structures.
As exemplified by President Tinubu’s personal campaign slogan “E mi lokan” (a yoruba phrase that translates as “it’s my turn”), they care solely about power for power means. And unlike the Buhari administration which was out of its depth, the Tinubu Organisation is very deliberate and calculated in what it does, usually.
As the world changes, and global and major regional powers seem to be preparing for a global conventional war over causes as diverse as Ukraine, Taiwan, the Middle East, or the South China Sea, we need to prepare too for the future and our place in it.
We cannot afford to allow the Tinubu Organisation to not only waste the years from 2027-2031, but to continue on its path of setting Nigeria back, at a time when our very survival will depend on how quickly we can recover from the economic stagnation and then regression that has characterised the years from 2007 till date.
In order to ensure that Nigeria stands a chance of surviving and thriving in the future, the Tinubu Organisation must lose the 2027 elections, and in order for that to happen, Nigerians irrespective of ethnicity, religion, region and class, must create a coalition of the willing and work together to mobilise as many people and resources as possible, to ensure that Nigeria wins and Tinubu loses.
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