By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
This evening, as dusk crept over the horizon, a brother called me with a sense of urgency that usually accompanies breaking news or a sudden spike in fuel price. “Aare,” he said, “you need to read Mayor Akinpelu’s diary. The man has written something you must see.” Curious, I opened the piece and was immediately transported into a world where logic bowed to loyalty, where reason was strangled by rhetoric, and where political astrology masqueraded as strategic analysis.
I read and wondered: how did an intelligent man become the chief priest of inevitability, chanting Tinubu cannot be stopped as though elections have become coronations?
Mayor Akinpelu’s piece, pompously titled “Why The Coalition Cannot Stop Tinubu’s Second Term,” is a masterclass in selective amnesia and historical distortion. It reeks of contradictions, froths with fallacies, and obsesses over a Lagos myth as if Nigeria were a glorified suburb of Ikeja. The good Mayor begins by conceding that “the country is hard; everywhere you turn you can feel it.” How noble! But immediately after baptising our collective suffering, he performs a theological somersault and declares the hardship “a necessary sacrifice,” a bitter pill Nigerians must swallow for an elusive healing. Pray, who prescribes poison as therapy and calls it patriotism?
Let us now exhume the corpse of his argument and perform an intellectual autopsy. The findings are shocking. Mayor Akinpelu builds his castle on sand by assuming that because Tinubu eventually stabilised Lagos after initial turbulence in 1999, Nigeria will stabilise under his watch. This is akin to saying that because a man successfully ran a kiosk, he is qualified to manage an international conglomerate.
Lagos is one state, blessed with a seaport and a revenue base fat enough to feed a small nation. Nigeria, on the other hand, is a federation of 36 states, battered by insecurity, corruption, and structural decay. Comparing the two is intellectual laziness masquerading as insight.
The Mayor argues that Tinubu survived sabotage in 2023; therefore, he will triumph again in 2027. This is political superstition. By that logic, a gambler who wins on Monday must win forever. Tinubu’s “victory” was not divine predestination; it was the by-product of a fractured opposition, compromised institutions, and an electoral system gasping for reform.
He writes: “The economy is stabilising but it is yet to translate to better living.” Stabilising? Nigerians are not eating economic theories; they are scavenging for survival. Stabilisation that does not reflect in the market is an academic ghost, real only in the minds of those who confuse PowerPoint for progress.
The Mayor caricatures the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as a “motley of strange bedfellows,” forgetting that APC itself was a coalition of stranger bedfellows united by ambition, not ideology. If APC could coalesce to dethrone PDP in 2015, why is it heresy to imagine ADC doing the same in 2027? Or is coalition-building only noble when it produces your preferred emperor?
And then, almost predictably, he drags Atiku Abubakar into his melodrama—painting the Waziri of Adamawa as though he were some desperate relic haunting the corridors of power. Dear Mayor, let us be clear: Atiku is not your political scarecrow; he is a democrat of enviable consistency, a man who has fought for restructuring, defended economic reforms, and invested more in the democratic struggle than those who now toast to power in the banquet of opportunism. Before you attempt to use Atiku as a prop for your inevitability gospel, remember that Nigerians are not suffering selective amnesia. They know who stood for democracy when it was dangerous and who is standing now only because it is profitable. Your cheap vilification of Atiku only exposes your bias and diminishes your credibility.
The diary elevates Tinubu to the status of political deity whose second term is as certain as sunrise. But history laughs at the myth of inevitability. If inevitability were real, Napoleon would still be in Waterloo, and Abacha would still be breathing down our necks.
Mayor Akinpelu preaches inevitability where democracy preaches possibility. Elections are not coronations; they are contests. To declare Tinubu’s victory as preordained is to spit on the graves of those who fought for democratic plurality. Nigeria is not a monarchy; it is a republic.
Even gods have been dethroned, ask history. The Mayor’s romantic ode to Lagos under Tinubu is the weakest leg of his argument. Lagos worked for Tinubu because the variables were friendly: a revenue-rich state, federal allocations, and a relatively docile opposition. Nigeria in 2025 is a boiling cauldron of insecurity, hunger, unemployment, and institutional distrust. Lagos is not Nigeria; a motorcycle manual cannot repair an aircraft engine.
He calls subsidy removal and naira float “necessary bold decisions.” Bold? Yes. Necessary? Debatable. Successful? Absolutely not. If boldness were the benchmark for leadership, then Nero deserves sainthood for fiddling while Rome burned.
Policy without cushioning measures is not reform; it is recklessness baptised as courage. The Mayor fears ADC because he understands the power of an organised alternative. He trivialises coalition politics, yet history has shown that unity can dethrone giants. In 2015, APC was born out of desperation and consensus. Why then does he panic at the thought of a similar coalition rising against his idol? His mockery of opposition unity is the nervous laughter of a man who knows the game is not as predictable as he pretends.
Dear Mayor, your diary is poetic but porous, bold but bankrupt of logic, optimistic but orbiting in delusion. You tell us Tinubu cannot be stopped. Sir, Nigerians have stopped colonialists, toppled juntas, and survived despots. Tinubu is not destiny; he is a politician, and politicians fall when people rise.
You baptise hardship as sacrifice, forgetting that hunger is not a sacrament and inflation is not redemption. Nigerians do not eat promises; they eat garri, and even that now competes with caviar in price.
So, kindly take your Lagos fairy tale back to where it belongs: the archives of nostalgia. This is 2025, not 1999. The myth of inevitability is the opium of political propagandists. And to those who share your hallucination, remember this: power is never permanent; it is only loaned by the people, and they can repossess it without notice.
In 2027, the ballot will speak louder than your diary. And when it does, the sound may not rhyme with your prophecy.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force
