- While over 1,100 Nigerians were kidnapped in four months and schoolchildren died in the bush, the President campaigned for 2027. The opposition went to Strasbourg. Someone has to explain why.
By Kio Amachree, June 7, 2026
There is a familiar and troubling ritual in Nigerian politics — the pilgrimage abroad to seek the endorsement of foreign galleries before earning the mandate of the Nigerian street. Bola Ahmed Tinubu performed it at Chatham House in 2023, bowing and scraping before a British audience that would decide nothing about Nigeria’s presidency. Now Peter Obi, the man his followers believe is Nigeria’s last salvation, has taken himself to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to discuss “sustainable development and democratic consolidation” while the nation he wishes to lead burns from within.
Let us be clear: Obi’s trip to the EU was not a scandal. Meeting foreign lawmakers is normal political activity. But timing is everything in politics, and the optics of an opposition presidential aspirant addressing European committees on Africa’s future while teachers are beheaded in Oyo State, while bandits roam northern highways with military impunity, and while Tinubu’s machine quietly blankets all 8,809 polling wards with reelection structures — that timing is either tone-deaf or strategically reckless.
The most dangerous political misreading in Nigeria today is the belief that Tinubu is weak. The assumption — fuelled by social media ridicule, viral stumbles, and relentless Obidient optimism — is that this is a spent and failing man who will fall of his own weight. That assumption is wrong, and indulging it may cost Nigeria its next election before a single ballot is cast. Tinubu is not sleepwalking toward 2027. He is running toward it with the full machinery of the Nigerian state behind him. He has already secured his APC ticket, reportedly with over 10 million ward-level votes, against a challenger who received fewer than seventeen thousand. He has placed the crown upon his head and he will not remove it voluntarily. Those who believe otherwise are confusing social media sentiment for political reality — a mistake Nigerians have made before, to devastating effect.
*”Tinubu did not win in 2023 because he was loved. He won because he was organized, ruthless, and certain. His opposition was none of those things. Nothing has changed.”*
The warnings are now coming from within the President’s own political family. Babachir Lawal, the former Secretary-General of the Federation and one-time Tinubu ally, stated bluntly this week that if rigging determines the 2027 outcome, Tinubu will win easily — describing him as the “master rigger.” That is not opposition propaganda. That is a man who knows the machine telling you how the machine works. Nigeria’s electoral history offers no reason to doubt him.
Meanwhile, the security situation has crossed from crisis into catastrophe. At least 1,100 Nigerians were kidnapped in the first four months of 2026 alone. Nigeria now ranks as the fourth most terrorism-affected nation on earth according to the 2026 Global Terrorism Index. The Yoruba Union, once a pillar of Tinubu’s political base in the southwest, has formally declared that “Tinubu should resign or forget 2027” — accusing him of meeting each new atrocity with a scripted condemnation while his support groups mobilize grassroots reelection structures. A former aide put it with surgical precision: every inch of Nigeria is now vulnerable. The insurgency is coordinated, well-resourced, and spreading southward. It does not behave like a domestic criminal enterprise. It behaves like something with a logistics chain, international reach, and a strategic purpose. Whatever its origins, its beneficiaries include those who profit from a broken Nigerian state.
*”The DEA and FBI files have not appeared because Washington is not finished using its asset. But the courts are closing in. Negotiation is now happening behind closed doors.”*
Into this landscape, Peter Obi must choose what kind of candidate he intends to be. The Obidient faithful will vote for him regardless. That base is not the problem. The problem is the vast, furious, exhausted majority of Nigerians who are not yet persuaded that he is the answer — who remember 2023, who watched their votes apparently counted in reverse, and who need more than economic competence and European photo opportunities to believe that this time will be different. Obi’s one-term pledge, which he continues to repeat, lands nowhere. No serious presidential candidate in modern democratic history has proposed self-limitation as an electoral platform. It signals either naivety about power or a reluctance to commit to the full weight of what governing Nigeria requires. It must be retired immediately.
*”The Obidients will vote for him. That is not the problem. The problem is the silent, furious majority who need a reason to believe the count will mean something.”*
What Obi must become — and has not yet become — is the kind of candidate who makes Tinubu uncomfortable. Not an annoyance. Not a technocrat with impressive spreadsheets. A genuine political threat. That requires returning to Nigeria, not to hold rallies for the converted, but to be present in the places where anger is sharpest and hope is most depleted. It requires a speech — not a well-organized policy address, but the speech of speeches — that tells Nigerians not what government should look like in theory, but why this specific regime has failed them in blood and treasure, and why he, specifically, will not. It requires abandoning the gentleman’s code when the opponent is not playing by gentlemen’s rules. Tinubu is not laughing with Peter Obi. He is laughing at him. That distinction must be understood before January 2027.
If the opposition arrives at the election dispersed, diplomatically courteous, and strategically outmaneuvered, what follows will not be an election in any meaningful sense. It will be a declaration, ratified by a compromised process and imposed on a population that has no organized leadership to channel its outrage. The streets will erupt. There will be no Peter Obi to lead the protests, because Peter Obi will have been in Strasbourg talking about democratic consolidation.
Nigeria deserves better. So does Peter Obi, who is capable of better. The question is whether he understands that the clock is already running — and that Tinubu’s machine never stopped.
Kio Amachree is President, Worldview International Stockholm, Sweden