A weekend visit. Sabon Gari, Kano. Invited by a friend to a Yoruba restaurant packed with weekend diners... plates of pounded yam and egusi steaming, and every pair of eyes -- Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, all of us -- glued to one television screen tuned to the INEC collation process in Osun. When it was called, the roof came off.
The "Dancing Senator" had danced his way to a second term: 511,067 votes against APC's 444,815... a margin north of 66,000. In that hall, it was a win for the whole nation. Most people there, including myself, had never set foot in Osun, but that win was celebrated like it happened at a polling unit in Gwiwa, Sokoto. That is the thing about hope in this country -- it travels!
But rewind to the prologue, because the dance nearly became a dirge. Days before the poll, the EFCC had frozen an Osun State Government account 10 days to the election. In a country where every federal agency is read as the president's long arm, the freeze looked like a mugging of democracy itself.
Then, to his credit, the president did something politically wise: a personally signed statement on August 6, saying he was "deeply embarrassed" by the timing, and instructed the EFCC to go to court and vacate the order. Whatever else you might say about Oga Asiwaju, the man understands optics: freeze a dancing governor's bank accounts days to the polls and you might as well be handing him a dancefloor for a victory dance party.
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For the first time in our history, one machine holds the presidency, both chambers of the National Assembly and 31 of 36 governorships. The once-mighty PDP has shrivelled to a two-state brand -- Oyo and Bauchi. Now we reach for terms like one-party democracy while talking, and even a governor who must be careful like Makinde has invoked the ghost of "Operation Wetie" -- the bloody Western Region crisis of the mid-1960s -- as a warning against this drift.
This brings me to the elephant in the room--or should I say, the "T-Pain" in the room. A while back while in Lagos, I learned from my taxi driver that the president is now "T-Pain". And before you ask, yes, it is in reference to the American Auto-Tune king.
Under Buhari, northerners coined the term Buhariyya in Hausa -- or Buharacy in English -- for our peculiar patient suffering. Today's lexicography is crueler and more precise: T-Pain. The "T" stands for Tinubu, and the "Pain" stands for what we are all feeling. But there is a clever, and perhaps unintentional, double meaning here that makes the metaphor perfect for our times. In the music world, T-Pain is famous for using Auto-Tune to disguise his voice making it sound better than it actually is. Sound familiar? Our government is a masterclass in Auto-Tune: it takes the raw, ugly reality of our economic hardship and tries to normalise it with press releases. The metaphor comes gift-wrapped: the first T-Pain auto-tuned reality -- took a flat note and made it shimmer. Our T-Pain auto-tunes in the opposite direction. Every policy announcement is tuned to the key of "e go better," while the actual note the common man sings is a cracked, hungry flat. Fuel. Transport. A mudu of rice. A chorus of wahala with no bridge and no chorus relief. The only thing more painful than the pain is that the pain doesn't know it is a hit song. Meanwhile ministers, senators and heads of juicy MDAs and their families live lifestyles that would make T-Pain's music videos look modest.
And here we must discuss one fascinating thing about the Nigerian man. Watch how fast the most virulent critics of the government go mute, or worse, become its most ruthless defenders, once offered a chair at the table. Few months back, the Canadian prime minister had described global politics with surgical clarity... "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu". For Naija, stomach infrastructure precedes every principle.
When I was in secondary school, people like Festus Keyamo were my heroes. They were firebrand freedom fighters who roasted "The Man" for a living. Now he mans the grill for The Man. Then there's the comedy act of this administration: Daniel Bwala, who in 2023 called Tinubu everything short of a plague, but is now Special Adviser, Media and Public Communications at the State House. He was eaten alive recently defending the indefensible on Al Jazeera while his own old sermons were read back to him. If laughter were fuel, the Fire Service would be the juiciest MDA by now.
Then there are those who cannot be bought -- because they don "belle full", perhaps because they have already stashed enough loot. And they are dealt with ruthlessly. Former Attorney-General Abubakar Malami and the bombastic Nasir El-Rufai have been cut to size!
Now the arithmetic of 2027. Barring a bizarre act of God, the APC will win the presidency again. Not because it is loved, but because it has successfully made itself the only option. The opposition front lies in ruins. Remember the grand April accord, the Ibadan Declaration, where Atiku, Obi, Kwankwaso, Amaechi and others swore a unified front under the ADC to avoid splitting the anti-APC vote? It lasted about as long as the time it takes to sing Nigeria we hail thee. Obi and Kwankwaso bolted to the NDC... Obi as presidential candidate, Kwankwaso as running mate, on a written accord: one four-year term, then power "returns North" in 2031. Atiku keeps the ADC carcass.
In the North and beyond, the street whispers a darker version: that the unified front was scuttled on purpose, that certain heavyweight "opposition" figures were always working for the other side, diverting votes away from any single front like the outing that deposed the PDP in 2015. The observable facts are already damning enough: three of the biggest opposition brands now run four different races.
And the Obi/Kwankwaso ticket is, frankly, a political joke in a formal suit. The calculation looks clever... add Obi's 2023 southern wave to Kwankwaso's Northwestern machinery -- but the summation is simplistic and naive. For better or worse, no one wins a presidential election without northern votes, and needless to say, the average Mallam will not vote for the NDC vehicle simply because Kwankwaso is riding as a spare tire. A vice president is a nobody in government, serving at the absolute pleasure and discretion of the president. The Mallams know that in their bones and will not hand their interests to be parked at the pleasure of a southern president they do not trust. Obi polled over two million northern votes in 2023 as an outsider; with Kwankwaso hitched to a vice-presidential seat, the chemistry changes entirely.
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By pure pedigree, among the three frontline horses, Obi is certainly the best option, but the climate of mistrust, exacerbated by a Yoruba man who is supposedly more amenable to northern interests will certainly play a big part. Nigerian politics don't run on idealisms like pedigree, so the average Mallam will not vote Obi. Why? He cannot be trusted. Same as Buhari could not be trusted and was not voted for by the Inyamuris in 2015.
And the South? In Lagos, the muscle memory of 2023 -- Obi's wave among Igbo voters in the president's own home state -- has not been forgotten. My taxi driver, not in so many words, told me the APC is "prepared" for those Igbos in 2027. A landslide reconquista of Lagos is fait accompli as far as the Yoruba are concerned even though they too are not smiling under Tinubu. Lagos is Yoruba turf, that is all that matters.
So, one party, one table, one auto-tune republic. The boys are not smiling, but at least there is a dancing governor in Government House, Osogbo.
