“As a campaigning First Lady boasts of her senate record, her son performs loyalty on social media, and a President obsessed with a second term ignores mass kidnappings and Fulani terrorist incursions, the Tinubu inner circle grows ever more disconnected from a suffering, increasingly furious Nigeria”
As a campaigning First Lady boasts of her senate record, her son performs loyalty on social media, and a President obsessed with a second term ignores mass kidnappings and Fulani terrorist incursions, the Tinubu inner circle grows ever more disconnected from a suffering, increasingly furious Nigeria
The warning signs are everywhere — if only the Tinubu family were capable of reading them.
Senator Oluremi Tinubu, now trading on her title as First Lady while simultaneously invoking her twelve years in elective politics, recently boasted to APC women leaders that she is “the only woman on record” to have held quarterly town hall meetings for eight consecutive years in the Senate.
It is the self-portrait of a politician entirely absorbed in her own legend. Meanwhile, the kidnapped schoolchildren of Nigeria’s ravaged communities wait. They will keep waiting.
The First Lady has been crisscrossing the country rallying APC women for 2027, surrounded by the choreographed adulation that has become the Tinubu political brand — sycophants in campaign regalia, political songs filling government banquet halls, cheques for women’s “empowerment” dispensed like electoral sedatives.
In one week alone she visited Borno, Kano, and Kaduna, trailing governors and deputy senate presidents in her wake. Not one appearance has been devoted to demanding accountability for Nigeria’s epidemic of mass abductions. Not one.
When pressed on the country’s worsening security crisis at a gathering in Ekiti, the First Lady urged Nigerians to “remain hopeful,” assuring them that the Federal Government, security agencies, and international partners are “working to address the situation.”
Empty words delivered to people who are burying their children.
Then there is the son. Seyi Tinubu, in a video that went viral, declared his father is “driving this country in a direction this country has never, ever seen,” vowing to pray for his life and his second term. He is not wrong about the direction — only about whether it is cause for celebration. The direction is south: toward deeper insecurity, toward Fulani militia encroachment in communities that never knew such terror, toward an economy that grinds ordinary Nigerians to dust while the President’s family enjoys the perquisites of unaccountable power.
Seyi insists his father is “fixing the cracks,” asking Nigerians to be patient for a better future. Patience is a luxury the families of the murdered and the kidnapped cannot afford.
This is a family that has confused political theatre for governance, loyalty performances for policy, and the noise of sycophants for the voice of the people.
There is a political law as reliable as gravity: those who sing loudest at the court of the powerful are the first to cooperate with prosecutors when the walls begin to close. The same operatives now composing panegyrics, delivering votes on paper, and pledging millions at campaign rallies will be the first to present evidence, sign plea agreements, and distance themselves from the crimes of this administration in order to save themselves. History has no exceptions to this rule.
The Tinubu family would do well to study it.
No second term is coming. What is coming — through the weight of documented corruption, international legal exposure, the arithmetic of mass suffering, and the inevitable fractures within a coalition held together by patronage rather than principle — is a reckoning.
The sycophants will scatter. The flights to Paris are already being mentally booked. And all the quarterly town halls in the world will not matter then.
Kio Amachree is President of Worldview International and a commentator on Nigerian governance and accountability.
