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PhD of Prince Charles Dickson
Bí ìtàkùn bá pa ẹnu pọ̀, wọn á mú erin so.
If creepers could join together, they would easily tie an elephant.
Politics is full of men who confuse noise with destiny. But fate, that slippery old masquerade, usually awaits structure. In 1984, New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon staggered into history by calling a snap election in a visibly drunken state, hoping to ambush the opposition. The bet failed. He lost.
In January 2009, in Nigeria, police in Kwara arrested a goat after vigilantes said an armed robbery suspect had transformed into the animal to evade arrest. The police kept the goat, but admitted they could not scientifically confirm the witchcraft.
A story is about power intoxicated by its own myth. The other concerns a society so burdened by superstition that absurdity can be shackled. Together they say something brutal about politics: sometimes leaders misunderstand reality, sometimes citizens arrest the wrong animal.
This is where Nigeria is moving towards 2027. The elephant in the room is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Not because everyone loves him. Not because his government has solved Nigeria’s problem. But because politics, especially Nigerian politics, does not assign power to the most denounced man.
He awards it to the man whose enemies can’t agree on which knife to use. INEC has already set the presidential and National Assembly elections for February 20, 2027, with the governorship and state assembly polls on March 6, 2027. The whistle is gone. This is no longer an era of abstract indignation. It is the age of arithmetic.
Now, let’s be honest, because fairness is not weakness. Tinubu’s administration does not walk on water. Yet we don’t even walk on pure failure. The World Bank said in its April 2026 Nigeria Development Update that macroeconomic fundamentals improved in 2025 and 2026, with the economy growing by about 4%, inflation trending downward although still high and FAAC gross revenues rising from N29.4 trillion in 2024 to NBS37.4 trillion in 2025. NBS says headline inflation was 15.38% in March 2026, with food inflation at 14.31%.
These are not small numbers. They suggest that some macro-stabilization is occurring. But macros don’t embrace hungry people. Revenues may increase while desperation deepens. A country may appear healthier in spreadsheets and sicker in the market.
This is the contradiction that torments Tinubu. The poverty of statistics and the statistics of poverty are not the same thing. The government can focus on improving indicators, better revenue collection, tighter monetary conditions and reform momentum. But the citizen does not live inside a PowerPoint.
The citizen lives within transport fares, school fees, rents, market prices and the humiliation of continuous improvisation. The World Bank’s April 2026 update shows that poverty will be at 63% in 2025, with only a gradual decline expected from 2026 onwards. That single figure is the real opposition press conference. This means that reform can be economically coherent and politically dangerous at the same time.
Then there is insecurity, the dark editor of every government boast. In the past few weeks and months alone, Reuters and AP have reported major bandit kidnappings in Zamfara, deadly retaliatory attacks in Katsina, mass killings in parts of Kwara and Katsina earlier this year, and student kidnappings in Benue.
Reuters also noted today, April 22, 2026, that Tinubu’s government is strengthening internal security amid economic strain, increased militant attacks in the north and political friction. This is the administration’s greatest vulnerability. Citizens can forgive difficulties if they feel protected. They rarely forgive hardship and fear in one package.
Yet here is the cruel truth: Tinubu can still win.
He may win not because he has defeated suffering, but because the opposition may still be auditioning for tragedy. The main opposition leaders formed a coalition around the ADC precisely because they understood the fundamental lesson of Nigerian electoral history: only a united opposition can seriously threaten an entrenched ruling machine. The unit is not a decoration.
It’s oxygen. An Atiku has signaled his intention to run in 2027. This is important because every opposition conversation still has a stubborn ghost within it: ambition.
And this is where the North becomes the sleepless question in the room. Atiku remains familiar, networked, savvy and deeply readable to elite politics. But familiarity can turn into tiredness.
Around him in some circles there is a suspicion, not always ideological, often emotional: the feeling of always arriving at the national bus stop with an extra ticket, another coalition, another final attempt. This is not an election number. It’s a political mood and moods matter.
Another deeper question is whether the North is willing to do an Obi, which means not simply tolerating Peter Obi as the South’s protest vessel, but actively investing in him as a viable national tool. This would require a leap from resentment to calculation, from sympathy to strategy.
It would be necessary for sectors of Northern politics to decide that electability is now broader than the old habits of rotation, the old patronage circuits and the old mistrust. This leap is possible. It hasn’t been proven yet.
As for Obi himself, the discussion around him is lazy at both ends. His admirers often speak as if moral clarity were already a model of governance. His critics often talk as if he were made only of emotion and Internet incense.
Both positions are not serious. Obi’s rise in 2023 was real because he converted public anger into a disciplined symbolic movement, and Reuters seized on this early when it described his effort to exploit Nigerians’ frustration with the status quo. But symbolism is not the same as statecraft. To do better than Tinubu, Obi would need more than clean optics and crowd tension.
It would need a tougher party architecture, stronger penetration into the North, better bargaining among elites, vote protection capacity and a clearer answer to the old Nigerian conundrum: how do you get from inspiration to application? In other words, it may be more than emotion, but it has not yet fully demonstrated the machine.
This brings me to Ndisgonabi. I heard it for the first time in that playful fatalistic exchange between my beloved friend Nima and her sister NG in a club in Amala. It sounds like Ndisgonabi.
The other would reply, it will be. Then I too started repeating it: Ndisgonabi. I will be. It seemed funny, warm, not serious. But like most street philosophy, it hid a knife under the wrapper. Ndisgonabi is what people say when they’re tired of pretending to be in control. It’s our local remix of “what will be, will be”. It is also, in politics, a dangerous narcotic.
Because once citizens start talking about Ndisgonabi about power, they have already given up on the republic.
No, what will happen will not always happen. Sometimes what will happen is what was arranged. Tinubu’s fate does not float in the sky like a divine reminder. It is negotiated on the ground by insecurity, inflation, power, elite deals, Northern calculations, opposition egos, media climate and public exhaustion.
If the creepers remain scattered, the elephant passes through the farm and calls it democracy. But if they commit, if Atiku stops being a yo-yo of perpetual possibilities, if Obi becomes more of a machine than a state of mind, if the North decides that interest is greater than habit, if the opposition learns that arithmetic is more sacred than vanity, then Tinubu can lose.
Until then, Ndisgonabi could simply mean this: Tinubu or Tinubu: May Nigeria win!
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