2027: Tinubu likely to win the Polls but what about winning the Peace?

IROHINOODUA EDITORIAL November 11, 2026

Amid threats, blackmail, ethnic backlash and economic challenges, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu looks good emerging victorious in January 2027 for a second term that runs for another four years. Truly, he worked for it.He planned for it. He is almost certain to take the trophy.
Some 33 state Governors out of 36 are with him. Out of 109 Senators, more than 80 are behind him. In the lower house, support for him hovers around 80 percent. What else, the roots of the leading opposition figures appear weak and fragile.

For instance, former President Atiku Abubakar and African Democratic Congress, (ADC) Presidential hopeful needs to fight harder to win his home base of Adamawa. The National Democratic Party, (NDP) candidate, Mr Peter Obi needs the Oracle to win his ancestral home of Anambra. Many of the other Presidential aspirants are satellites of the ruling All Progressives Congress, (APC). The most radical of them all, led by Mr Omoyele Sowore lack the financial muzzle, the network, the structure to win neither has he the temperate character needed alliance building even as his manifesto lack the revolutionary charm to grip the people.

But winning the 2027 election is not as important as winning the peace and staying in the hearts of 220million Nigerians especially in a country where legitimacy of the ruling party and the opposition is bought with cash.

Key Challenges

Charity begins at home: One of the greatest challenges is that President Tinubu to many ordinary people on the streets in the South West remains a stranger. That is the whole truth. A simple fact-chek is to listen to call-in progammes on local radio dominated 99 percent by Yoruba people.

The other test is to find out who is endorsing who. Are they ad hoc, make shift groups or traditional Yoruba groups known by history?Not having a firm grip in in ancestral home, a region known to determine the hot and cold of Nigerian politics, is in itself a significant setback considering the maelstrom that will inevitability dominate the race to the election and the fall outs after the last ballot is cast on January 16. To many people in the South West, Tinubu policies have emaciated and impoverished them.

He is perhaps the first President since the President Olusegun Obasanjo era that appears not to have any emotional connect with his own ancestral home. That President Tinubu finds himself in this situation is unexpected. As the Governor of Lagos State, he was the honeycomb around which all the social and cultural organisations in the South West revolved mainly Pan Yoruba groups.

Today, the distant between these groups and the President is as wide as heaven to earth. Wheareas, without a connect with these traditional groups, mandate protection, which is crucial during and post election material necessity becomes a myth.

That Tinubu is disconnected from his own people is not just a function of what he has achieved or what he has not. It is simply a function of his being encircled by largely Yoruba neutral aides who in themselves do not understand, do not appreciate and are never driven by the interest of the people of the South West.

Most Yoruba see the SW Ministers as 10 percenters or suit and tie technocrats who are not intelligent enough to understand the true value of what Charity Begins at Home means. Yet, the truth is that President Tinubu has taken decisive steps to protect not only Nigeria but also his own people especially in the context of security policies and investment drive, the South West being the epicentre of Nigeria’s economic prowess. He has also demonstrated courage to deal with the crisis associated with a garrison state. The state police for instance is an intervention coming for the first time in half a decade while the Lagos-Calabar highway remains an enduring landmark in just three years not to talk of quality highways being constructed across Nigeria and the SW.With this disconnection, educating the Yoruba masses on the achievements of the Tinubu administration in Nigeria and in the South West remains a huge vacuum. Worst of all is the Minister of Finance, Taiwo Oyedele. While occupying a strategic powerhouse, his impact among his own people is as visible as a star on sunny noonday. Only few months ago, he invited the largest Pan Yoruba group to have audience with him to be led by some nine leaders after he had written to them for a parley on the future of small scale industries, peace and economic security in the South West. Such a meeting is not a privilege but a democratic right of the people. But after the leaders had bought two way tickets from Lagos to Abuja from their own purse, Oyedele canceled the parley at the last minute, claiming he was travelling the following Monday with President Bola Tinubu. It turned out to be a scam. He never travelled. This meant the leaders had to lose at least 30 percent of their hard earned ticket money to the Airlines. Such is the level of contempt the Ministers from the SW have for their own people.

Atiku and the Fulani Challenge

For keen observers, Atiku’s decision to launch to launch his campaign in Sokoto, the seat of the 1804 Jihad was deliberate. Atiku, who is desperate to see power return to his kinsmen is ready to work with anyone to achieve his goal. The creation of state police and tinkling with the military structure already unsettles the Fulani whose interests Atiku rabidly represents. Atiku and the entrenched conservative forces will fight back for two reasons: They are obsessed with attempts to restructure the country; they are also determined to ensure Tinubu will not produce his successor in 2031. The Fulani leaders who appear to support Tinubu currently do so as a strategy to ensure power is handed over to one of them in 2031 expecially with the fear that the current Vice President, Kashim Shettima, a Kanuri already positioned to inherit Tinubu’s structure. There is also the fear of extremists who wish to re-enact 1804 Jihad and who have been sponsoring terrorists using them as political chips, scare dogs, to negotiate for power. Tinubu in his four years has dealth a big blow to terrorism turning their camps into ashes and going after their local and international sponsors. The continuation of Tinubu in power to them means an end to their primordial agenda. This group is determined to do everything to bring the house down. Atiku knows he would not win. His strategy s to discredit the Electoral process using the outcome of the election as a weapon of agitation hoping to spur upheaval.

What is to be done

The staring point is that President Tinubu needs to show and prove that his people, the South West are behind him.

He need bloc regional support to inspire solidarity from other regional blocs in the country.

For now, the South West concrete support is absent. That is the truth. The APC has failed woefully to connect with the real cultural forces in the South West

Nothing explains this more than the fact that after the sectional coup plotted to kill the President in 2025, so solidarity rallies or even a single press conferece was held in the South West to show support for one of their own

Those who are in charge of NURTW, though allies of the President, are rather driven by cash not ideology so also is the Iya Oloja cartel. Their silence on such a very significant threat is worrisome. Not even a visit of solidarity by South West traditional rulers. The Pan Yoruba groups were also mute

Too bad. It is not that the people outrightly hate Tinubu, but simply because the APC political machine in the South West is ideologically barren and most of the Ministers appear to lack any sense of history to understand why they need to oil and propel the unity of their own people to strengthen the pillar needed to sustain Tinubu from the tide of his enemies across the country.

It will be embarrassing for President Tinubu to win the election yet with very low electoral input from the South West. President Tinubu needs to re-enact his old ties with social and cultural groups in the South West, meet with the relevant groups personally and energise them to be able to go from home to home, bus-to-bus, street to street singing his songs and telling the people why they must unite behind him. If the home support is absent, the signal to hostile principalities and powers, hovering hawks desperate to see him fall, would be that he is not popular and if that is the case, why should other parts of the country give him support in the next four years and why wouldn’t they bring his government down on his knees?

To stabilise the country, gain public respect and national recognition is not possible without Tinubu first securing home support. What this means is not the lousy propaganda of APC faithful or the posters of yes men and women, nor the loud speakers of town criers, but the real blood and soul support from Pan Yoruba groups, artisan groups, cultural associations, who own the stake and who is determined they are a people ready to defend Tinubu’s mandate, promote the goodwill of the President and rally around him in facing the imminent whirlwind of the present, post election era and that of the imminently turbulent future that lay ambush in the future. Promoting the policies of Tinubu across the country and in the primary constituencies of the Ministers should be a natural expectation, but it is not.

Unfortunately, former Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola who used to be the bridge between the social forces in the South West and Tinubu is no longer available for that historical role and no one has filled the all important gap. The implication are many and laden with far reaching consequences.

First, the turn out of voters in the South West for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be imminently low if not ridiculously so. This does not translate to votes for Abubakar Atiku or Mr Peter Obi, but it simply means the SW will fall below the natural numerical threshold of its voting potential.Most voters are likely to stay away from the poll in SW, a people not known for falling in line behind their own auto automatically without being consulted

This will not only undermine the capacity of the traditionally vibrant people of the South West to lead mandate protection after the January poll, but will also strengthen the opposition expected to rally Nigerians against Tinubu in the coming years.Having a leader without conscious and concrete home base support is like fetching water into a basket hoping to fill it.