Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
Prof. Ulasi, Executive Editor of USAfrica, is the Chair of the Department of Radio, Television and Film, School of Communication at the Texas Southern University.
Let me say up front what this commentary is not. It is not an argument that Bola Tinubu has been a bad president, though I think he has. It is not a catalog of grievances against his administration, though I could write one.
If the case for Peter Obi in 2027 depended on tearing down the incumbent, I wouldn’t bother writing it — that kind of endorsement tells you nothing except who the writer dislikes more. What I want to make instead is the harder, more interesting case: that Peter Obi is the right president for this specific moment in Nigeria’s life, regardless of who stands across from him
Start with what that moment actually looks like. This is a country where a young population — the majority of the electorate now — has watched recession, currency collapse, and the slow bleed of insecurity eat into every plan they tried to make for their own lives. It’s a country where banditry and kidnapping have become background noise in the North West and North Central, where terrorism still stalks the North East, and where even the South West and South East have felt the edges of a security apparatus stretched too thin. Ethnic and religious fault lines that a healthier democracy would be closing have, if anything, widened. That’s the inheritance the next president of Nigeria will face. Whoever it is will need more than good intentions to meet it.
I keep coming back to 2023, because I don’t think you can understand the exhaustion driving this election without it. That was supposed to be the vote where a new generation, radicalized by #EndSARS and organized in ways Nigerian politics hadn’t seen before, finally broke through. Instead, they watched the Independent National Electoral Commission’s own promise of real-time result transmission collapse in practice — uploads that didn’t happen, a collation process that domestic and international observers alike said fell short of what the law required, and a suspicion of manipulation that never really lifted even after the courts declined to overturn the result.
I don’t think that suspicion faded because a legal challenge failed. I think it hardened into something more permanent: a sense, especially among young voters, that the game itself is fixed before anyone casts a ballot. That’s the real story behind all the talk of “hopes in the sand.” It isn’t just that government hasn’t delivered. It’s that the mechanism meant to hold government accountable felt broken too.
Which is part of why I find Peter Obi’s candidacy compelling — not just as a set of policies, but as a response to that specific wound. Obi spent eight years as governor of Anambra building a reputation, unusual in Nigerian politics, for treating public money as something held in trust rather than something to be distributed. Whatever else you think of his record, that fiscal seriousness is going to matter enormously to whoever inherits a treasury this strained. And the coalition he’s built — pulling support across regions and religious lines in a way Nigeria hasn’t really seen since MKO Abiola in 1993 — isn’t just a clever electoral strategy. It’s a rebuke, in practice, to the ethnic arithmetic that usually decides these races. A campaign this young, this cross-regional, this online, is itself an argument that Nigerian politics doesn’t have to run on the old rails.
And I’m hardly alone in this reading of the government. It’s telling that voices with no stake in Obi’s campaign have arrived at similarly grim assessments.
In June 2026, a group of elder statesmen that included former INEC chairman Attahiru Jega and former presidential Chief of Staff Ibrahim Gambari warned publicly that Nigeria was nearing a point where insecurity, alleged electoral manipulation, and the erosion of democratic institutions could converge into a genuine national crisis — hardly the language of people looking to score partisan points. Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed, who ran as Obi’s own vice-presidential candidate in 2023, has been even blunter about the government’s economic program, warning that any policy touched by corruption is doomed because, in his words, it “will never work.” For Femi Falana –Senior Advocate of Nigeria and human rights activist, “The government cannot claim to be fighting corruption while it continues to ignore court orders with impunity.”
Even in the Muslim North, a bloc the administration once counted on, prominent clerics have turned critical; one Sokoto-based Islamic scholar has said flatly that Muslims are suffering under Tinubu and that he is not governing on their behalf. And when the government moved to ban a protest song criticizing the president, it was Wole Soyinka — Nigeria’s Nobel laureate in literature and, by his own account, an old friend of Tinubu’s — who called the move “a return to censorship in Nigeria.” These are not fringe voices. When elder statesmen, a human rights activist, a former running mate, northern religious leaders, and one of the country’s most celebrated writers are all sounding versions of the same alarm, it stops looking like opposition talking points and starts looking like a diagnosis.
I’ll admit the record isn’t flawless. Obi’s national security credentials are thinner than I’d like, and running a state well for eight years is not the same test as running a $500 billion federal economy with a fraying security apparatus. His movement’s organizational muscle, especially in the machinery of a general election against an entrenched incumbent party, remains somewhat unproven. I don’t think those are small concerns, and I don’t think honest supporters should pretend otherwise.
But here’s the thing I keep returning to: none of it — not Obi’s fiscal discipline, not his coalition, not whatever platform either candidate runs on in 2027 — will mean anything if the vote itself isn’t protected. That has to be the foundation, not an afterthought. It means party agents and civil society observers actually present at every polling unit, collecting the BVAS slips and photographed results that Nigerian law already entitles them to. It means holding INEC to its own stated standard of real-time transmission and treating any backsliding from that standard as a serious warning, not a shrug-worthy glitch. It means courts and security agencies willing to act on evidence while it’s still fresh, rather than running out the clock until a new government is already in place. And it means the scrutiny — from civil society, from the diaspora, from the international observers who show up on election day and mostly vanish by the following week — has to last through the count, not just through the voting.
This, more than anything, is why I think Obi’s movement matters beyond Obi himself. It emerged out of the wreckage of a disputed election, and it has a direct stake in making sure the next one isn’t disputed the same way. That isn’t nothing. In a country where the fairness of the count is itself on trial, a candidacy built around insisting on that fairness is doing something more than campaigning — it’s making a case for what Nigerian democracy still owes the people who keep showing up for it.
