Barely six weeks into the 2027 presidential election campaign Nigerian politicians are promising to walk on water. The last person to pull that off successfully was Jesus Christ, and that was over 2,000 years ago. Despite the near-impossible odds of repeating such headline-grabbing miracles, we are daily bombarded with similar claims by those who want us to hand them the keys to Aso Villa.
Promises in themselves are not bad; the problem is politicians have a poor record of keeping them. Repeated cycles of disappointment have produced an increasingly cynical voter population and declining turnout on polling day. Another consequence of this pattern of office seekers not keeping their words is greater scrutiny of what they claim they would do.
More and more, people are asking politicians for details of how they hope to deliver what they are offering. They are digging into the past to see what today’s would-be miracle workers did with the power they once wielded.
The challenge is slightly different for the three leading candidates – President Bola Tinubu, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and one-time Anambra State Governor, Peter Obi. The incumbent has a record generated by his policies over the three years. Everything he has done – the good, the bad and the ugly – is being used against him.
His tenure-defining decision to remove fuel subsidy has affected all aspects of life in the country. It has produced a cost of living crisis with prices spiralling out of control as petrol pump price skyrocketed.
But it hasn’t been all doom and gloom. There have been unprecedented success stories arising from the government’s reforms. These have been acknowledged by World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director General, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who said the Tinubu administration has stabilised the economy. One of the president’s fiercest critics, former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, has also admitted that macroeconomic stability has been achieved.
There are many individuals and corporate bodies that have done well for themselves on the back of Tinubu’s reforms. The problem is these success stories haven’t been well ventilated and celebrated. Instead, they have been drowned out by the cries of those who are struggling – not necessarily because their numbers are insignificant, but because they haven’t been amplified.
So, what we’ve seen is an administration on the defensive when it has so much to celebrate. Part of this can be traced to the penchant of Nigerians to be suspicious of the powers-that-be. The opposition is also doing a good job of manipulating the cynical and ignorant as well as pressing all the right populist buttons.
Take the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway which the administration conceived as a legacy project. What ordinarily should have been hailed as landmark infrastructure that would accelerate development in all states it traverses, has been portrayed as an unnecessary white elephant, a road to nowhere. Initial questions were about costs and the contractors. Next, the critics argued that it would never get done even in the face of progressive work at both ends of the road.
Exchange rate stability, increase in foreign reserves and growth of GDP have been dismissed as mere manipulation of statistics with no impact on the average man. You hear opposition mouthpieces ask dismissively whether Nigerians would eat statistics.
Aside other issues currently at work in this election cycle, Tinubu’s second term bid increasingly hinges on the ability of his campaign to sell his administration’s successes to voters, as well as convincing them about the long term benefits of staying the course.
Atiku, veteran of many presidential campaigns, understands the game. He doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. He can regurgitate the question that opposition candidates have asked across the globe when challenging incumbents: ‘Is your life better off today than it was four years ago?’
That is what he has recycled in the line about ‘Tinubu making life more expensive and he will make it cheaper.’ How? By restoring fuel subsidy, he says. After backlash about a violent U-turn on his previous vow to remove subsidy, he moderated his position to say he will only subsidise production, not consumption. A few days later, he doubled down on his earlier promise.
While Atiku’s pledge has struck a populist chord in places, it has generated push back elsewhere. A few days ago, Abia State Governor, Alex Otti, warned that those backing the return of subsidy didn’t mean well for the country. Aliko Dangote also stated that reintroduction of subsidies or price controls would hurt his refinery’s profit margins and complicate financial planning.
Where Atiku’s promise has found traction it appears to be based on a romantic illusion. People think that if the African Democratic Congress (ADC) candidate wins the 2027 election, petrol price would magically revert to N180 per litre. That isn’t going to happen. Property values and rental rates that have surged in the last three years are not reverting to 2022 levels; neither would prices of all goods and services be transformed to what they were before Tinubu’s ascent.
Atiku is in a place of comfort as an opposition candidate. He can lob stones at the incumbent and draw attention to all his supposed failings. He has never been president for a day so we can mainly assess him on the basis of his proposals for the office he seeks.
That is not to say he doesn’t have a record or a past. As Vice President under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, he was one of the most powerful individuals to ever occupy that office. He virtually ran the economy and presided over the privatisation of many government-owned assets. That exercise remains mired in controversy.
Only recently, the report of a three-member International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) tribunal in the arbitration between Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limit and the Federal Republic of Nigeria, over the truncated Mambilla Power Project, threw up Atiku’s name in the mix.
Leno Adesanya, promoter of Sunrise Power, told the tribunal in Paris that he transferred $500,000 to Jennifer Douglas, Atiku’s former wife, as part of a foreign-exchange transaction carried out for the former Vice President.
The payment was made on January 30, 2003 – less than four months before Sunrise was purportedly awarded a build-operate-transfer contract for the Mambilla hydropower project – through China Castle Investments Limited, an offshore company controlled by Adesanya.
While Atiku has denied any wrongdoing and stated that he wasn’t directly involved in the process of contract award, the timing of the tribunal’s final report and the salacious details that have emerged couldn’t have been more diabolical. For a man coming to rescue Nigeria the whiff of scandal is devastating. It’s an invitation for his rivals to revisit a past filled with unanswered questions and make them campaign fare.
It’s the same pattern with Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) flag bearer, Peter Obi. Here is the ultimate Teflon politician. Ever since he started running for president nothing that has been thrown at him has dented his near-fanatical base. In 2023, he didn’t face serious scrutiny as the forces backing him propped him up on a pedestal and crowned him with a halo.
It’s been a different ride this time. Much of the negative attention he invited by his continuous promotion of himself as Nigeria’s most saintly politician. Now, he’s entangled in a back and forth with Anambra State Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, over his claim that he didn’t hand over debts to his successor.
His great achievement, trumpeted over the years, has been that he left N36 billion in cash and $150 million (along with other investments totalling over N75 billion) for his successor, Willie Obiano. Perhaps he would have continued to bask in that glory had he not issued a dare to Soludo to provide evidence he left debts, upon which he would stop campaigning.
The Anambra government has since come out with evidence of indebtedness, including salary arrears owed to workers at the state’s Water Corporation. Particularly, controversial is the claim that he left N2.13 billion in the Ecological Fund account. The government has said it found no such amount in the account he provided.
Obi’s defence so far is to repeatedly wave his handover notes without disputing the facts raised by the government. He has also been silent on the whereabouts of the missing Ecological Fund. Instead of addressing this, he’s said he wouldn’t bandy words with Soludo. Such a position might be sufficient for his unquestioning fans but not for a wider audience seeking clarity from a man who wants to govern them riding on the platform of probity and integrity.
The starter’s gun has been fired and the candidates have left their blocks. It promises to be a bruising contest in which not only the incumbent’s record and past would face laser-like scrutiny. Those who say they are better alternatives to him should know that 2023 isn’t 2027 and they, too, would face a more thorough examination under very harsh searchlights.