My Political Testament: How Reform was Refused and Tinubu Emerged

I did not come into Nigerian partisan politics by accident, nor did I enter it to manage decay. I came deliberately, convinced that a system which had normalized failure and baptized it as stability could, and must, be confronted and changed. I came in determined to do just that. It hasn’t been easy, but I […]

I did not come into Nigerian partisan politics by accident, nor did I enter it to manage decay. I came deliberately, convinced that a system which had normalized failure and baptized it as stability could, and must, be confronted and changed. I came in determined to do just that. It hasn’t been easy, but I have been steadfast. That is why many who follow my path from a distance say that I am an extremist. Some say I am a hardliner. While most who have been close to me and understand my struggle attest that I am an honest, dedicated and loyal Nigerian patriot who is unreservedly committed to creating a better future for the country. What follows is neither grievance nor revisionism – it is my personal political testament.

2. Having fought for ten years to get the entrenched PDP system change its untoward ways, including instituting more 10 court cases against it, with no headway we then conceived, organized and coordinated the political process that led to the formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) so as to give birth to Muhammadu Buhari’s fourth presidential contest. That intervention was also deliberate, not accidental. It was anchored on Buhari’s widely acclaimed personal integrity and moral standing, and on a clear reform objective: to break the PDP’s monopoly on power and use that rupture to redefine the Nigerian state – its ethics, its institutions and its relationship with citizens!

3. We understood something fundamental – i.e. Nigeria could not be reformed from the opposition outside. In other words, power had to be won before the system could be changed. Having carefully understudied the national constituency politics, the structural weaknesses of Buhari’s three earlier defeats and the fault lines of Nigerian politics, we designed a strategy to create a coalition sophisticated enough to win, broad enough to hold and strong enough to confront entrenched elite interests. Against all formidable odds, it succeeded.

4. But unfortunately winning power, as we soon discovered to our chagrin, is not the same thing as winning the system. Once victory was secured in 2015, resistance to reform set in with remarkable speed. President Buhari, presented to Nigerians as the moral spearhead of change, was actually not what we envisioned him to be. He was no different from the others, for he purposefully gave himself out to be quickly and completely encircled by the very forces we had sought to dislodge to implement the reforms. Those of us who believed that victory marked the beginning of reform were promptly sidelined and locked out permanently. Government was formed without us; decisions were taken without us; structures were deliberately rebuilt to exclude us. The administration was run not merely without the reform agenda we painstakingly developed, but in quiet opposition to it.

5. What followed was not reform delayed, but reform refused. Institutions did not strengthen; they atrophied. Accountability became selective. The party that promised change became comfortable with continuity. By the end of Buhari’s 8-year tenure, the reform vision lay in ruins – not because Nigerians rejected it, but because the system, led by the president himself, neutralized it from within. The Buhari experience proved a hard truth – when Nigerian power feels openly threatened by reform, it does not negotiate; it absorbs, exhausts and ultimately destroys it.

6. That Buhari failure invariably created a vacuum. And, naturally, in Nigerian politics as elsewhere, vacuums are never empty for long. Into that space stepped Bola Ahmed Tinubu. President Tinubu did not hijack Nigeria’s democracy; he inherited a system already stripped of reformist intent. His now-famous declaration of “emi lo kan” (it is my turn) condemned as arrogance, should in fact be read differently. It should be noted to be among the most honest political lexicons Nigerian politics has produced in recent years. Political power in the extant system has rarely been about ideology or service. It has always revolved around turn-taking among elites, ethnic arithmetic and mastery of political machinery. Tinubu did not pretend to be a redeemer; he presented himself as a claimant. And the system rewarded him accordingly.

7. Many Nigerians, exhausted by insecurity, inflation and serial state failure, mistook control for competence. Tinubu promised neither order nor transformation. In a country where things often scatter before morning, even the promise of order can sound like leadership. And when endurance is mistaken for achievement, the bar for governance collapses. Let it be said plainly – Tinubu did not invent godfatherism, patronage or extractive politics; he refined them! His presidency is not the cause of Nigeria’s collapse; it is the consequence of a reform project rejected in 2015. As a famous Igbo proverb says, when the yam is left in the open, the goat does not ask who planted it.

8. This is why outrage focused solely on Tinubu misses the point. Remove him without dismantling the structures that sidelined reformers after victory, and another Tinubu will emerge – perhaps younger, perhaps older, perhaps smoother, perhaps harsher, but still cut from the same cloth. Nigeria’s tragedy is not that Tinubu governs; it is that a genuine attempt to redefine the system was refused, thus clearing the path for its most accomplished beneficiary!

9. This is my testament. I have seen the Nigerian state from the inside. It does not reform itself out of goodwill or gratitude. It changes only when bludgeoned by organized citizens, institutional courage and an uncompromising refusal to normalise failure. The mirror may be cracked, but it still reflects. Whether Nigeria again looks away or finally acts on what it sees will determine whether this testament becomes an epitaph or a warning that was, at last, heeded.