A Wish for Bola Tinubu Beyond 2027: Arise O Compatriots

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From Daniel Osa-Ogbegie

There are moments in a nation’s life when everything hinges on the quality of leadership it chooses. History is littered with examples of countries transformed by the right leader at the right time. Leaders who harnessed the force of vision, discipline, and conviction to lift their people from despair to destiny.

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew inherited a backwater island with no resources yet transformed it into a gleaming metropolis and a model of governance. Rwanda, after the horror of genocide, rose again under Paul Kagame to become one of Africa’s most efficient states. Ghana, while still battling systemic challenges, has managed to position itself as a democratic beacon in West Africa, owing to years of relatively steady and principled leadership.

Leadership, real leadership, isn’t a luxury. It is a lifeline. It is what determines whether a people rise with dignity or groan in perennial chaos.

So, in 2023, when Bola Ahmed Tinubu emerged as President of Nigeria, some of us dared to hope. I did not arrive at that hope out of excitement or ideological alignment. My preferred aspirant, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, had lost the primaries of my then Party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and I found myself consigned to supporting Tinubu as the Party’s candidate. I consoled myself with the legacy of his time as Governor of Lagos. He had shown flashes of capacity. He assembled competent teams, built institutions, and laid foundations that seemed to endure.

Apparently, I thought, a man who helped build Lagos could scale his governance ethos to the national level.

Now, with painful clarity, I must admit, I was wrong. Utterly wrong.
The illusion has shattered. The promises have curdled into despair. Bola Tinubu’s presidency has become a national affliction. What little hope existed has been torched by empty arrogance, policy chaos, and a tone-deaf leadership more interested in elite gratification than national healing.
Today, Nigerians are worse off than they’ve ever been. The Naira is in freefall. Food has become a luxury. Security is a daily prayer point. Young people are escaping the country in droves for pastures in Europe, America, Asia and even other parts of Africa, unfortunately. Parents are weeping over the future of their children. Meanwhile, the government continues to talk down on a hungry nation, holding up convoluted economic theories while real lives crumble beneath the weight of avoidable hardship, with Tinubu and his cronies only mouthing off the increasingly meaningless “renewed hope” mantra.

What Tinubu’s presidency has delivered is not renewal, it is regression. A brutal, unforgiving regression.
To contemplate a second term for Bola Tinubu is to play Russian roulette with the soul of this country. It is to take a matchstick to a nation soaked in petrol and hope for a miracle, when in fact, it would cause a combustion no one survives. Another four years of this leadership would not just be a continuation of failure; it would be the end of whatever fragile hope Nigerians still hold.

It must be stated though, that Tinubu’s failure should not be seen in isolation. It is part of a broader national tragedy, our serial betrayal of responsibility at the ballot. A country that could, in the full glare of modern history, hand Muhammadu Buhari the keys to national leadership for eight empty, ruinous years cannot in good conscience expect the world to take it seriously. Buhari was an open book—bare, empty, uninspiring; and yet, he was handed power and held it for nearly a decade.

Now, Tinubu. A man whose myth has collapsed under the weight of national expectations.
Let us not make the mistake of treating this as a mere “anti-Tinubu” crusade. Nigeria’s problem is not just who must go, but who must come. This is not a call to replace Tinubu with another relic of a tired, insipid and greedy political class. It is a call to raise the bar altogether.

The next President of Nigeria must be someone who represents a break from the past. He must be a leader with personal credibility, visionary clarity, and a proven track record of real-world effectiveness. Not another career politician. Not an Atiku. Not any of the recycled men whose politics is built on tribe, tokenism, and tactical deception.

If we cannot, in 2027, summon the moral and political strength to install such a leader, then perhaps we must ask the unthinkable: Should Nigeria continue as one nation?

What, really, is the point of pretending we are one people if we cannot agree to give ourselves the leadership we need to survive? Why continue to mortgage our lives and futures to a system that feeds on our divisions and punishes our expectations? If we cannot come together to demand a new order, then let us begin an honest conversation about going our separate ways. Maybe then, each nation within Nigeria can forge its own destiny, and perhaps fulfill its potential.

However, first things first. Let us not entertain the idea not even for a second that Bola Tinubu deserves a second term. To do so is to spit in the face of reason, to sacrifice a nation on the altar of sentiment, and to prove, once again, that we are incapable of learning from our own pain.
Arise O’ compatriots, not in chorus to a dead anthem, but in action to save a dying nation.

DAN Osa-Ogbegie, a lawyer and Statesman, writes from Benin City.