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!