By Boma Lilian Braide (Esq.)

In any healthy and functioning democracy, an approaching election season should be a time of optimism and civic renewal. A moment when Communities gather to debate ideas, evaluate progress, hold candidates accountable, and exercise the foundational right of choosing who leads them. In Nigeria, however, the journey towards the ballot box triggers a completely different and deeply disturbing transformation. As political campaigns gain momentum, a cruel and recognisable pattern emerges: highways turn treacherous, remote villages erupt in gunfire, and mass abductions of schoolchildren, market traders, and ordinary travellers hijack the National conversation. It is as though an invisible switch is thrown, transforming the country into a theatre of managed terror. This is not conjecture. It is a pattern, and patterns, by definition, are not accidental.

The question that demands an honest answer is not simply why Nigeria suffers from insecurity. It is why that insecurity escalates with such predictable precision at moments of maximum political significance. Why does the security architecture of the most populous nation on the African continent appear to buckle at the very moment its leaders are on their knees before citizens, soliciting votes? As political campaigns intensify, kidnapping cases multiply. The national conversation, which should centre on inflation, failing infrastructure, broken promises, and the reckless management of public resources, is instead consumed by grief, fear, and desperate crowdfunding for ransom payments. While citizens are submerged in this survival crisis, the political class quietly manoeuvres: contentious policies are pushed through without scrutiny, state resources are redistributed along patronage lines, and controversial electoral arrangements are settled behind closed doors. The terror in the hinterlands functions as a deliberate smokescreen, forcing the public to accept elementary security responses as extraordinary governance rather than the constitutional obligation they have always been.

Then, with a disturbing consistency, the violence subsides. When elections are concluded, certificates of return are issued, and new administrations are sworn in, the storm miraculously abates. Bandits retreat into the forests. School raids slow to a trickle. A temporary, fragile calm returns to communities that had been burning weeks earlier. Ordinary Nigerians are left standing in the ruins of their peace, asking the question that no one in authority has the courage to answer: is this a coincidence, or is it a contract?

To understand this riddle, one does not need a degree in political science or international security. The ordinary citizen only needs to look at history and connect the dots.
The historical record is not kind to those who prefer coincidence. In April 2014, as the country was preparing for what would become the most fiercely contested presidential election in its post-military history, 276 schoolgirls were abducted from their dormitories in Chibok, Borno State. The event did not merely shock the world; it fundamentally rewrote Nigeria’s political landscape, collapsing public confidence in the government of the day and making national security the decisive currency of the 2015 campaign. Then, in February 2018, barely twelve months before the 2019 general elections, another mass abduction struck; over 100 girls were seized from their school in Dapchi, also in Borno State. Leah Sharibu, the one student reported to remain in captivity on account of her faith, became a symbol not only of private anguish but of catastrophic state failure.

Now, as Nigeria turns toward the 2027 electoral cycle, mass abductions have flared again with surgical regularity, striking schools and farming communities across Kaduna, Niger, and parts of the South West, including communities in Oyo State that had no meaningful prior history of large-scale banditry. Three different administrations. Three different parties in control of federal power. Three different security architectures. One repeating script. The only constant across all three periods is the approaching election.

The political establishment’s preferred explanation for this violence is familiar: these are impoverished, poorly educated men surviving on the margins of a failing economy, driven to crime by the absence of alternatives. That explanation is not entirely false, but it is deliberately incomplete. If these criminal networks were simply desperate men improvising their survival in the bush, they would not consistently demonstrate the logistical coordination, operational intelligence, and political timing required to stage mass abductions involving dozens or hundreds of captives at precisely the moments of greatest national vulnerability. That level of coordination does not emerge from desperation alone. It requires organisation, communication infrastructure, and either extraordinary luck or something far more troubling such as an advance knowledge of when and where the state will choose to look away.

The hard truth is that insecurity in Nigeria has long ceased to be merely a breakdown of law and order. It has become a form of political currency, circulated within the broader economy of power. For political actors seeking to unseat an incumbent, a spectacular security failure delivers the most emotionally devastating argument for change, condensing complex governance debates to a single question that no campaign slogan can deflect: can your government keep our children safe? For others pursuing different objectives, a sustained climate of terror in specific regions provides a mechanism for suppressing voter turnout, driving communities away from polling units and creating the conditions under which results can be manipulated at leisure. Both motivations, discrediting an incumbent and neutralising opposition stronghold, converge on the same instrument: manufactured chaos. The ordinary Nigerian, in every case, absorbs the full cost.

Consider the parent in a rural village who has sold farmland, sacrificed livestock, and borrowed money from every relative just to pay ransom to faceless criminals. Consider the thousands of displaced families who cannot return to their ancestral homes because their safety has been traded away for political leverage. These are the human casualties of a system that treats insecurity as a bargaining chip.

Nothing exposes the cynicism of this arrangement more starkly than what happens on election day. During the peak of a kidnapping crisis, security authorities offer familiar explanations such as; insufficient personnel, inadequate vehicles, limited fuel, thin intelligence coverage. Communities are counselled to be patient, to cooperate with ongoing operations, to trust in a process that visibly cannot or will not protect them.
Then election day arrives, and overnight the Nigerian state locates resources sufficient to deploy hundreds of thousands of police officers, soldiers, and civil defence personnel across the country, tasked with protecting ballot boxes, party agents, and political VIPs with an efficiency that the security crisis somehow never inspired. The message this sends to the parent in a rural local government who sold farmland and borrowed from every willing relative to pay a ransom is as clear as it is devastating: in the hierarchy of Nigerian state priorities, a piece of paper inside a plastic ballot box carries more weight than a living child inside a rural classroom. No government communiqué has ever stated this openly. The evidence of budgets and operational deployment patterns states it plainly enough.

It is worth dwelling on what sustained, manufactured fear does to a citizenry, because the political benefits extend well beyond any individual election cycle. A society kept in a permanent state of emergency loses the mental and emotional capacity for sustained political engagement. When families are crowdfunding ransoms on social media, when communities are displaced into camps, when the evening news is consumed by abduction tallies rather than policy scrutiny, citizens cannot simultaneously interrogate why education budgets are chronically underfunded, why the naira has shed a devastating share of its value, or where the billions allocated for rural security infrastructure have quietly vanished. Fear also fractures communities along existing fault lines. When people are traumatised, they retreat into ethnic and religious identities as their primary sources of protection and solidarity. Political actors who have every incentive to prevent the emergence of cross-ethnic, issue-based coalitions understand this dynamic with precision. Terror creates the conditions under which citizens vote defensively rather than aspirational, which is exactly the kind of voting behaviour that entrenches patronage politics and makes genuine programmatic governance permanently impractical.

The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, one of Nigeria’s most formidable legal and civic voices, captured this dynamic with the directness that defined his life’s work. His much-quoted observation that any insecurity which persists beyond 48 hours carries the fingerprints of state permissiveness is not hyperbole. It is an accurate characterisation of how security crises are sustained, not because the state lacks the capacity to address them, but because their resolution does not always serve the interests of those who control the levers of state.

The solution to this cycle will not come from expecting its beneficiaries to dismantle it voluntarily. That is not how entrenched political systems reform themselves. Change comes from below, when citizens alter the terms on which they engage with political power. As the 2027 campaign season accelerates, Nigerians must collectively refuse the politics of distraction.

When a security crisis erupts, the civic response must not be ethnic blame, partisan defensiveness, or the uncritical celebration of any belated rescue operation. It must be institutional accountability, pursued without sentiment such as; who was mandated to protect this community, what resources were allocated for that purpose, where did those resources go, and who will answer for the failure in specific and measurable terms?

Community-driven security advocacy structures must be built and sustained independently of the electoral calendar. Citizens must insist that the intensity of security deployment visible during party primaries and inauguration ceremonies becomes the baseline standard for protecting public schools, rural markets, and interstate highways every week of every year, not only during the days when ballot papers are being handled. Candidates seeking office in 2027 must face questions that campaign rhetoric cannot dissolve: What is your concrete framework for community policing in ungoverned spaces? How will you audit the financial systems that have turned ransom payments into a multi-billion nairashadow economy? What mechanisms will ensure that security budgets reach operational units rather than disappearing through procurement corruption? These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum standard of seriousness that the moment demands.

The hundreds of Nigerians currently in captivity across forests in the North West, North Central, and elsewhere did not disappear in a security vacuum. They disappeared in an environment shaped by years of deliberate underinvestment, institutional neglect, and the quiet tolerance of criminal networks whose continued existence has served identifiable political purposes. As the next electoral cycle gathers pace, the political class must be denied the comfort of allowing these human tragedies to fade from public consciousness between news cycles. Every candidate must be pressed on the specific fate of those still unaccounted for. Every security budget must be scrutinised against verifiable operational outcomes. Every claim of helplessness from those who simultaneously demonstrate state capacity the moment their personal interests require it must be met with the full weight of the evidence against them.

True political leadership is not measured by the size of a campaign convoy or the noise of a rally crowd. It is measured by whether the most vulnerable citizens of a country can send their children to school in the morning with a reasonable expectation of seeing them return safely in the evening. By that measure, successive administrations have failed, and the citizens of this country are entitled to say so clearly, persistently, and at the ballot box. The forests must be cleared. The captives must come home. The political economy of manufactured terror must be broken. Not for the credit of any party or candidate, but because the people of Nigeria deserve a country in which their lives are treated as the priority on every day of the year, and not merely on the days when their votes are required.

By Dr. Sani Sa’idu Baba

First and foremost, I congratulate His Excellency, Atiku Abubakar, on his emergence as the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) for the 2027 presidential election. By most accounts, the ADC presidential primary was keenly contested and has been widely adjudged as one of the freest and fairest internal party primaries in Nigerian political history, especially when contrasted with the controversies that trailed the primaries of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) at various levels.

With the primary election now behind him, the next major task before Atiku is perhaps even more consequential: the choice of a running mate. The political atmosphere of 2027 is significantly different from that of previous election cycles. Millions of Nigerians have become disillusioned with conventional politicians and political establishments. The economic hardship, rising cost of living, insecurity and widespread disappointment associated with the much-publicised “Renewed Hope” agenda have created a new political reality. Nigerians are increasingly searching for leaders with visible personal accomplishments, integrity, competence and a proven record of excellence outside the government. This changing political mood should influence the choice of Atiku’s running mate.

A careful examination of the 2019 and 2023 presidential election results reveals important lessons. In 2019, Atiku Abubakar performed strongly across Southern Nigeria, securing 5,703,387 votes from the South-East, South-South and South-West combined. By 2023, that figure had fallen dramatically to 1,742,773 votes. The most striking lesson comes from the South-East. In 2019, when Atiku ran with Peter Obi, he secured 524,738 votes in Anambra, 355,553 in Enugu, 258,573 in Ebonyi, 219,698 in Abia and 334,923 in Imo, giving him a regional total of 1,693,485 votes. By 2023, those figures collapsed to just 9,036 votes in Anambra, 15,749 in Enugu, 13,503 in Ebonyi, 22,676 in Abia and 30,234 in Imo, leaving him with only 91,198 votes in the entire region. The implication is obvious: Peter Obi remains the dominant political force in the South-East, and it would be difficult for any South-Eastern running mate to significantly alter that equation in 2027.

The South-West, however, tells a different story. Despite the presence of Bola Tinubu on the ballot in 2023, Atiku still secured 941,941 votes in the region, including 354,366 votes in Osun, 182,977 in Oyo, 123,831 in Ogun, 115,463 in Ondo and 89,554 in Ekiti. Unlike the South-East where the PDP’s support almost disappeared, the South-West remains a competitive political battlefield with substantial room for growth. This suggests that Atiku’s running mate should come from a region where additional votes can realistically be won rather than from a region where voting patterns appear increasingly entrenched. This is where Chief Dele Momodu deserves serious consideration.

Unlike many politicians whose influence is limited to government structures, Dele Momodu has spent decades building a national and international profile through journalism, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, diplomacy and public engagement. As publisher of Ovation International, he has established relationships that cut across regions, religions, generations and political affiliations.

More importantly, Momodu possesses a unique political and cultural advantage. While he is proudly rooted in the South-West, he also enjoys deep ancestral and cultural ties to the South-South. In practical terms, he offers Atiku access to two geopolitical zones. At a time when names such as Bola Tinubu, Peter Obi and possibly Goodluck Jonathan and Donald Duke may influence regional voting calculations or most likely spoil the votes, choosing a running mate with cross-regional appeal becomes a strategic necessity.

The Delta State experience in 2023 further illustrates this reality. Having selected Governor Ifeanyi Okowa, then a sitting governor and arguably the most influential politician in Delta State, Atiku was expected to improve on his 2019 performance in the state. Instead, his votes declined from about 595,674 in 2019 to 161,600 in 2023. If a sitting governor could not significantly boost Atiku’s fortunes even in his home state, it suggests that regional balancing alone no longer guarantees electoral success. Increasingly, voters are responding more to personal credibility, influence and individual appeal than to geography or political office.

The argument becomes even stronger when historical precedents are considered. In 2014, Muhammadu Buhari selected Yemi Osinbajo as his running mate. At the time, Osinbajo was respected within professional and religious circles but was not a mass political figure. He had never served as governor and lacked the nationwide popularity associated with frontline politicians. Yet his credibility, intellect and professional accomplishments helped strengthen the APC ticket.

Today, Dele Momodu’s public profile, influence, visibility and political exposure are arguably far greater than what Osinbajo possessed before the 2015 election. He is a household name across Nigeria and among Nigerians in the Diaspora. He commands influence among traditional institutions, media stakeholders, business leaders, artists, youth groups and opinion moulders.

Similarly, when Atiku contested in 2007, he selected Senator Ben Obi from Anambra State as his running mate. Ben Obi was a respected politician, but few would dispute that Dele Momodu’s national visibility, international network and public recognition today far surpassed what Ben Obi represented politically at the time.

Beyond popularity, Momodu offers something increasingly scarce in Nigerian politics: loyalty, honesty, authenticity and integrity. He is widely regarded as a detribalised Nigerian, a promoter of national unity and a bridge between North and South. For decades, he has maintained relationships with political leaders, traditional rulers, religious leaders and ordinary citizens across all parts of the country. His influence in Northern Nigeria is particularly noteworthy. Few Southern figures enjoy the level of acceptance, goodwill and accessibility that Momodu commands in the North. This makes him uniquely positioned to complement Atiku’s longstanding political base while simultaneously helping to rebuild confidence among Southern voters.

Furthermore, Momodu’s appeal goes beyond politics. At a time when Nigerians are tired of career politicians and professional office seekers, he represents personal accomplishment, entrepreneurial success, intellectual depth and global relevance. His emergence on a presidential ticket would send a powerful message that competence, achievement and character still matter in Nigerian public life.

The challenge before Atiku in 2027 is not merely how to win an election. It is how to convince Nigerians that he represents a genuine departure from the politics that has disappointed them. That objective may not be achieved by choosing another conventional politician whose appeal is limited to political structures and elite negotiations.

The lessons of 2019 and 2023 suggest that electoral mathematics alone is no longer enough. Nigerians are increasingly voting for personalities, credibility, competence and hope. For that reason, Atiku Abubakar may need a running mate who symbolises achievement outside government, integrity in public life, national acceptability and genuine bridge-building capacity. Chief Dele Momodu fits that description.

As 2027 approaches, the Waziri Adamawa has a critical decision to make. If the goal is to present Nigerians with a ticket capable of inspiring confidence, expanding electoral reach and embodying the promise of national renewal, then Dele Momodu deserves serious consideration as his running mate.

Dr. Sani Sa’idu Baba writes from Kano, and can be reached via drssbaba@yahoo.com

By Shakirat Akintola

The undeniable magnetic pull of elite European football was on full display as thousands of local enthusiasts filled viewing hubs, sports lounges, and open-air centers across Cities to witness the 2026 UEFA Champions League Final. The high-stakes encounter between Paris Saint-Germain and Arsenal effectively transformed standard weekend spots into arenas of intense passion and collective suspense.

Long before the 8:00 PM kickoff, popular viewing venues across the municipality were already recording unprecedented turnouts. Seats were fully booked hours in advance, prompting operators to arrange auxiliary seating, while latecomers lined the perimeters just to catch a glimpse of the screens. The crowd represented a vivid cross-section of the local football community: dedicated Arsenal supporters hopeful for a historic continental crown, and a vocal contingent of rival enthusiasts eager to witness the drama unfold.

The atmosphere fluctuated sharply through 120 minutes of grueling football, punctuated by the sharp commentary and spirited debates characteristic of local match-day culture. When Arsenal’s Kai Havertz opened the scoring in the 6th minute, the ensuing roar was deafening, momentarily uniting strangers in celebration. However, the equilibrium shifted completely when PSG’s Ousmane Dembélé converted a 65th-minute penalty, elevating the tension to a fever pitch as the game stretched into a exhausting period of extra time.

With local power infrastructure traditionally tested during peak weekend hours, venue operators relied heavily on heavy-duty backup generators to ensure uninterrupted transmission of the broadcast. Ultimately, the pinnacle of European club football was decided by a tense penalty shootout, culminating in a 4-3 victory for PSG after a 1-1 aggregate draw.
While the final whistle dealt a heavy emotional blow to the local Arsenal faithful, it triggered immediate celebrations among neutral observers, capping off an evening of unparalleled community engagement.
“The turnout yesterday surpassed our expectations,” noted a prominent sports lounge manager in the area. “We had to expand our seating capacity outdoors to accommodate the crowd. Win or lose, an event of this magnitude serves as the ultimate weekend anchor for our people.”
Beyond the tactical display on the pitch in Budapest, Saturday’s massive turnout underscored a broader reality: in our communities, European football finals are no longer merely televised sports events—they have evolved into vital social rituals that define the weekend landscape.