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Ndisgonabi—Tinubu or Tinubu
Ndisgonabi—Tinubu or Tinubu
By Prince Charles Dickson, PhD
Bí ìtàkùn bá pa ẹnu pọ̀, wọn á mú erin so.
If creeping plants could unite, they would easily tie up an elephant.
Politics is full of men who confuse noise for destiny. But destiny, that slippery old masquerade, usually waits for structure, which is often established through careful planning and consensus among political leaders. In 1984, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Robert Muldoon staggered into history by calling a snap election in a visibly drunken state, hoping to ambush the opposition. The gamble backfired. He lost. In January 2009, police in Kwara, Nigeria, detained a goat after vigilantes claimed an armed robbery suspect had transformed into an animal to escape arrest. The police kept the goat but admitted they could not confirm the witchcraft scientifically. One story is about power intoxicated by its own myth. The other is about a society so burdened by superstition that absurdity can wear handcuffs. Together, they say something brutal about politics: sometimes leaders misread reality, and sometimes citizens arrest the wrong animal.
That is where Nigeria is drifting toward 2027. The major issue at hand is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Not because everybody loves him. This is not due to his government’s success in solving Nigeria’s issues. But in Nigerian politics, power is not awarded to the man who is most often complained about. It awards power to the man whose enemies cannot agree on which knife to use against him. INEC has already fixed the presidential and National Assembly election for 20 February 2027, with governorship and state assembly polls on 6 March 2027. The whistle has gone. This is no longer an era of abstract outrage. It is an era of arithmetic.
Now, let us be fair, because fairness is not weakness. Tinubu’s administration is not walking on water. Yet it is not walking on pure failure either. The World Bank said in its April 2026 Nigeria Development Update that macroeconomic fundamentals improved through 2025 and into 2026, with the economy growing at around 4 per cent, inflation trending downward though still elevated, and gross FAAC (Federal Account Allocation Committee) revenues rising from N29.4 trillion in 2024 to N37.4 trillion in 2025. NBS says headline inflation was 15.38% in March 2026, with food inflation at 14.31%. Those are not small numbers. They suggest that some macrostabilisation is happening. However, macroeconomic indicators do not provide direct support to those in need. Revenues can rise while despair deepens. A country can look healthier in spreadsheets and sicker in the market, as the economic indicators may show growth while the actual living conditions of the population deteriorate.
That is the contradiction that haunts Tinubu. The poverty of statistics and the statistics of poverty are not the same thing. Government can point to improving indicators, better revenue capture, tighter monetary conditions, and reform momentum. However, citizens do not experience life through a PowerPoint presentation. The citizen lives inside transport fares, school fees, rent, market prices, and the humiliation of constant improvisation. The World Bank’s April 2026 update shows poverty at 63% in 2025, with only a gradual projected decline from 2026 onwards. That single figure represents the true opposition to the government’s narrative. It means reform may be economically coherent and politically dangerous at the same time, as it could lead to increased public unrest and opposition from those who feel threatened by the changes.
Then there is insecurity, the dark editor of every government boast. In just the past weeks and months, Reuters and AP have reported major bandit abductions in Zamfara, deadly retaliatory attacks in Katsina, mass killings in parts of Kwara and Katsina earlier this year, and the abduction of students in Benue. Reuters also noted today, 22 April 2026, that Tinubu’s government is tightening internal security amid economic strain, heightened militant attacks in the north, and political friction. This situation is the administration’s greatest vulnerability. Citizens may forgive hardship if they feel protected. They rarely forgive hardship and fear in one package, as this combination often leads to a deep sense of betrayal and distrust in leadership.
And yet, here is the wicked truth: Tinubu can still win again.
He can win not because he has conquered suffering, but because the opposition may still be auditioning for tragedy, as they struggle to present a compelling alternative to the ruling party’s narrative and fail to effectively mobilise their base. Key opposition leaders formed a coalition around the ADC precisely because they understood the central lesson of Nigerian electoral history: only a united opposition can seriously threaten an entrenched ruling machine. Unity is not decoration. It is oxygen. Atiku has signalled his intention to run for office in 2027. This issue matters because every opposition conversation still has one stubborn ghost inside it: ambition.
This is where the North becomes a significant issue. Atiku remains familiar, networked, seasoned, and deeply legible to elite politics. But familiarity can curdle into fatigue. There is a suspicion around him in some quarters, not always ideological, often emotional: the feeling that he is forever arriving at the national bus stop with one more ticket, one more coalition, one more final attempt. That is not a polling number. It is a political mood, and moods matter.
Another more profound question is whether the North is willing to do an ‘Obi’, meaning not merely to tolerate Peter Obi as a southern protest vessel but to actively invest in him as a viable national instrument. That would require a leap from grievance to calculation, from sympathy to strategy. It would require sections of northern politics to decide that electability is now broader than old rotation habits, old patronage circuits, and old distrusts. That leap is possible. It is not yet proven.
The argument surrounding Obi himself is lazy at both extremes. His admirers often speak as though moral clarity is already a governing blueprint. His critics often speak as though he is made only of emotion and internet incense. Both positions are unserious. Obi’s 2023 rise was real because he converted public anger into a disciplined symbolic movement, and Reuters captured that early when it described his effort to harness Nigerians’ frustration with the status quo. But symbolism is not the same as statecraft. To do better than Tinubu, Obi would need more than clean optics and crowd voltage. He would need a tougher party architecture, stronger northern penetration, better elite bargaining, vote protection capacity, and a clearer answer to the old Nigerian riddle: how do you move from inspiration to enforcement? In other words, he can be more than emotion, but he has not yet fully proved the machine.
That brings me to Ndisgonabi. I first heard it in that playful, fatalistic exchange between my beloved friend Nima and her sister NG at an amala joint. One would say, ‘Ndisgonabi’. The other would answer, ‘It’s going to be.’ Then I too started echoing it: Ndisgonabi. Gonna be. It sounded funny, warm, and unserious. But like most street philosophy, it concealed a dangerous edge beneath its surface. Ndisgonabi is what people say when they are tired of pretending control. It is our local remix of “what will be, will be.” It is also, in politics, a dangerous narcotic.
Once citizens start saying ‘Ndisgonabi’ in relation to power, they have already surrendered the republic.
No, what is destined to happen is not always predetermined. Sometimes the future is determined by what has already been organised. Tinubu’s fate is not floating in the sky like a divine meme. It is being negotiated on the ground by insecurity, inflation, incumbency, elite bargains, northern calculations, opposition ego, media climate, and public exhaustion. If the creeping plants stay scattered, the elephant walks through the farm and calls it democracy. If Atiku quits his indecisiveness, Obi prioritises strategy over sentiment, the North prioritises interest over habit, and the opposition values unity over vanity, then Tinubu can lose.
Until then, Ndisgonabi may simply mean this: Tinubu or Tinubu—may Nigeria win!
By Hassan Gimba
Originally published in December 2021, this article is being republished because its concerns about the rule of law, insecurity, and the fear ordinary Nigerians experience remain relevant today. It serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect citizens, uphold justice, and restore peace and security across the country.
Our current situation of a glaring failure of the rule of law must disturb any Nigerian who has come of age. The average citizen today lives in fear. When you retire into your house, you pray to God to deliver you from evil marauders who have removed peace from the calmness of the night. When the sun rises, you again rely on God to protect you from those who have made the law their own.
In Nigeria today, the rule of law has taken flight. Charlatans carrying guns that are daily becoming accessible to any riff-raff who want to own any quantity can erect a checkpoint on any federal road and operate for hours, kidnapping, killing and maiming passengers. Sometimes they set cars on fire with commuters, comprising women, children, infants, and the elderly and sick, trapped inside.
They can walk for hours unhindered, despite our drones and Tucanos, with tens, sometimes hundreds, of their prisoners from the main road into the bushes. Many times, they videotape such operations, up to the torturing of their captives and send them to all to see on social media. They rape their female victims – single or married – irrespective of their age or physical condition. The unlucky men who tingle their fancies get sodomised, too. And nothing happens because the rule of law does not affect them.
Many of the women who make it out alive come out pregnant or, worst of all, with some diseases. Those “captured” with a heavy pregnancy that would not allow them to move quickly or far got shot dead. This scenario happened to Pharmacist Hannatu Mohammed in Zaria in August this year. Kidnappers killed her because she could not move fast enough because of her pregnancy. She left behind two children.
There was this story of a captive who gave birth to twins in the camp of these bandits. They threw the newborns to their dogs for breakfast. The woman went mad. Another case was that of a newborn who was fed sleeping pills once it started crying.
In all these cases and many more, reported and unreported, that cannot be catalogued here because of their number, the living victims and their families cry alone; friends and family mourn the dead. They receive nothing – no justice and no mention of compensation or even condolence – because those who should protect and care for them are engrossed in feeding their fantasies. The rule of law can go to blazes!
In November this year, gunmen raided the staff quarters of the University of Abuja and made it a hell for two hours. They abducted six people, including two professors, a deputy registrar and three family members. The Minister of the FCT, Muhammad Bello, however, told the university’s governing council that the crime was carried out to raise doubts about security in the nation’s capital and to attract publicity. How did he know that? Did he confer with the bandits, or confirm their motives? Another question: what are the other uncountable and routine crimes perpetrated daily in the country meant to achieve – like the raids on the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), police stations, prisons (I do not call them “Correctional” because I doubt if they have corrected anybody) and other government facilities?
What are the daily blockades of roads, killings, burning, maiming and kidnapping of passengers meant to achieve? What about the attack on the rail tracks, abduction of school children, raiding of airports and houses of individuals to kidnap – to achieve what?
It has now reached an unfortunate and unpardonable level that kidnappers negotiate terms of release with kidnapped victims’ loved ones. There are stories that even the military and paramilitary forces pay for their kidnapped members to be released. The forces of anarchy have cowed the enforcers of the rule of law.
Well, true or false, bandits who raid wherever they want and kidnap whoever they wish are now a government unto themselves. They collect taxes from farmers before the locals may till their farms. Farmers also pay “taxes” before they can harvest from their farms.
Nigeria’s situation fills all reasonable humans with dread. Last week, just when we were shocked at the unprovoked incineration of passengers on a bus, another sad news hit the airwaves. The people of Maza-Kuka in Ba’are village of Mashegu Local Government Area in Niger State were made to cry when 16 worshippers were shot dead while observing the early morning prayers in a mosque.
Without the rule of law, no nation can survive as an entity. All failed states are so because non-state actors have overwhelmed constituted authority.
Many can swear by whatever they worship; Nigeria is on the brink, and at any moment the nation can tip over. The search now is for who will pull us back. In this treatise, I will discuss this.
How did we find ourselves in this sorry pass? One school of thought believes our security forces are well below the required number and, therefore, overstretched in most cases. Others theorise they lack technological facilities, coupled with low motivation because of poor welfare.
But is it? Nigeria, with a population of about 200 million, has a force strength of close to 400,000. That is one police officer per 500, or 0.2 per cent of the populace. The United Nations’ (UN) standard for the police-to-people ratio is one police officer for every 450 citizens. Perhaps ours should be one law enforcement officer for 45 people.
Togo, with a population of 8 million, has 4,000 police officers. That is one police officer per 2,000, or 0.05 per cent of the population, but God help you if you break any law in the country. Benin Republic, with a populace of 11.5 million, has 10,000 police. That is 0.08 per cent, or one police officer for every 1,150 citizens. But try to break the law in that country and see. These are just two West African countries that have shown the rule of law can thrive, not because security forces watch the population eagle-eyed.
Yes, our police lack the technological edge to deal with modern crimes, and, worst of all, their welfare and training are not the best. Their salary is paltry, and, even at that, they don’t always get paid when due.
But the failure of the rule of law here is not so much about the number of our security agents as about their low morale, their poor application of themselves to duty – very like all public service employees, disruption of morals in the citizenry, and the historical failure to punish offenders. Above all is the dearth of a responsive leadership to bind us into a nation of law-abiding, love-your-brother people.
Therefore, we can say moral decadence is at the root of our problems as a nation. However, the right leadership can correct it. We shall look at this. We shall also look at how failing to punish criminals has affected our collective security and the way out in our next instalments.
Lest I Forget
By Hassan Gimba
On Thursday, July 30, 2026, Saudi Arabia announced the formation of a 14-member Multinational Maritime Defence Coalition, ostensibly to guarantee freedom of navigation in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. Its practical objective is to break the Houthi naval blockade of Saudi Arabia declared on July 20.
The founding members are Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Bangladesh and, yes, Nigeria.
Turkey, which has one of Europe’s largest militaries, brings NATO membership, a powerful navy and a strong economy. Pakistan, a nuclear power, is also being courted by the United States for its strategic importance in the Global South. Nigeria, meanwhile, may be regarded as the coalition’s African representative.
But the Houthis have survived a decade of Saudi-led military operations, including years of airstrikes and a naval blockade, without capitulating.
A maritime coalition unwilling to conduct effective ground operations in Yemen faces the same strategic limitations that previous anti-Houthi arrangements encountered. Saudi Arabia previously recruited black fighters from Sudan, only for many to be killed in a conflict that had little to do with them.
Even naval escorts and convoy systems cannot guarantee the safety of ships. The shore-based missiles and drones used by the Houthis cannot be neutralised from the sea alone.
The Houthis have also demonstrated their ability to challenge superior military powers, with the US military losing F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones during operations in the region. Washington attributed some losses to accidents, mechanical failures and operational pressures rather than direct Houthi action.
Iran understands this dynamic. That may explain why Tehran’s response to the coalition appears to be one of patience rather than alarm. The Houthis survived the first Saudi-led coalition; Iran will calculate their chances against a second.
The proposed coalition could, however, be stillborn. Several countries that might be expected to support Saudi Arabia have either declined to join or expressed reservations. The UAE and Oman, for instance, have not signed the founding statement.
The United States has also rejected Saudi Arabia’s proposal, while European countries have been unable to establish a similar coalition. Yemen’s Houthi-linked Al-Masirah has described the proposed alliance as incapable of breaking the blockade or protecting targets within the range of Yemeni missiles and drones.
Even the British shipping publication Lloyd’s List reportedly questioned the coalition’s effectiveness, describing it as more of a political message than a naval force capable of changing the security situation in the region.
But where does Nigeria fit into all this?
Nigeria does have a five-year defence pact with Saudi Arabia, signed on December 9, 2025, covering military cooperation, intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism efforts. But can Nigeria mobilise Africa, or even West Africa, behind such an undertaking?
Nigeria is still battling Boko Haram, banditry, kidnappings and other armed groups at home. What would it mean for the country to confront an adversary whose missiles and drones have challenged the military capabilities of the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia has American military bases, sophisticated weapons and enormous financial resources, yet it has struggled to defeat the Houthis. What, then, is Nigeria’s own there?
Nigeria has not even dredged the Niger River, yet it wants to help protect the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait. What is Nigeria’s own there?
I would not object if Nigeria had derived substantial benefits from its relationship with Saudi Arabia. But what exactly have we received?
For instance, Nigerians do not obtain Saudi visas on arrival, except under privileged circumstances involving holders of Schengen, UK or US visas.
The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre has conducted periodic free medical missions in Nigeria, including eye-care programmes under Saudi Noor, specialised procedures such as hearing implants at the National Hospital, Abuja, and cardiac interventions in Kano. These, however, are temporary humanitarian programmes conducted in partnership with Nigerian public hospitals rather than permanent Saudi government facilities.
The Saudi German Hospital network also has a presence in Nigeria. Still, it is a private healthcare group founded by the Batterjee family and is not owned or operated by the Saudi government.
Saudi Arabia has supported the construction of numerous mosques in Nigeria through non-governmental organisations, royal donors and religious bodies. But where are the Saudi-funded hospitals, primary, secondary or tertiary institutions dedicated to engineering, medicine and modern sciences?
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has funded hospitals, schools and other infrastructure projects across several African countries. These include hospitals and schools in Zambia, a $75 million Mother and Child Referral Hospital in Guinea, the rehabilitation of the King Khalid University Hospital in Bujumbura, Burundi, and an 800-bed specialised gynaecological and paediatric hospital in Lusaka.
The Saudi government has also funded the $50 million Riyadh Referral Hospital in Sierra Leone and invested $28 million in regional public schools in Niger Republic. It has built a scientific secondary school and a higher college for teacher preparation in Benin Republic, with similar projects reported in Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Senegal and Cameroon.
Yet none of these countries has been called upon to help Saudi Arabia fight the Houthis.
Perhaps that was partly what Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré had in mind when he reportedly declined a Saudi offer to build 200 mosques and instead requested investments in schools, hospitals and job-creating infrastructure. He argued that Burkina Faso already had enough underutilised mosques and wanted the funding redirected towards vocational centres, hospitals and other development projects.
Saudi Arabia has enormous resources with which to entice countries to support its strategic interests. But there would be no need for all this brouhaha if Riyadh stopped doing the bidding of the United States and Israel, eased the restrictions imposed on Yemen and allowed the Yemeni people to breathe.
Then, to us: What is Nigeria’s “own” in fighting the Houthis for Saudi Arabia?
What have the Houthis done to Nigeria?
This is a fight we know little about, a conflict that does not concern us directly. Before committing Nigerian resources, personnel and lives to it, perhaps the government should first answer this simple question in pidgin English: Wetin be Nigeria’s own for di mata?
Concluded.
Hassan Gimba, ANIPR, is the Publisher and CEO of Neptune Prime.
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