When Bola Ahmed Tinubu stormed the presidential primary in June 2022 and wrestled the APC ticket from a field of heavyweights, he did so largely on the strength of his own political capital, his own calculations, and the muscle of a coalition he had spent decades cultivating. Many of the governors who climbed onto his bandwagon did not do so out of conviction. They did so because their second-term ambitions required a friend in Aso Rock. The outgoing governors, those finishing their constitutional limits, were never truly his people. Their enthusiasm was borrowed, their loyalty transactional, their departure from the stage barely concealed.
That context matters enormously now, because the political architecture around Tinubu’s second-term bid is being built on a dangerously flawed foundation, the assumption that departing governors will deliver for him in 2027 the way they delivered, however reluctantly, in 2023. It is a miscalculation of the first order. These men were already compensated. They got their return tickets in exchange for their 2023 support. To expect them to show up again, on demand, when they are transitioning out of executive power and into legislative ambition, is to misread the nature of political patronage entirely. Reward, in Nigerian politics, does not breed eternal gratitude. It breeds appetite.
The men who stood with Tinubu at the polls were not the governors but the senators, hungry, battle-tested legislators who needed a president aligned with their survival. That partnership was the real engine of his first-ballot victory. Yet that critical coalition is being overlooked now, sidelined in favour of an increasingly overbearing class of governors who are not building Tinubu’s second term, they are building their own.
There is something deeply troubling about the Asiwaju that Nigerians are watching today. The man they knew, the strategist, the political chess master who survived prison, persecution, and repeated attempts to reduce him, was never a man to be held hostage by circumstance or by lieutenants. He was decisive to the point of brutality, calculating to the point of cold elegance. But something has shifted. Somewhere between the State House and the palaces of his political allies, the levers of decision-making appear to have been quietly relocated. The president moves, but the movement carries the fingerprints of other hands. The question, asked in hushed tones in Abuja corridors and Lagos boardrooms alike, is who is actually driving.
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The APC primaries have made this problem worse, not better. What was meant to be a clearing exercise has become a power demonstration. Nine governors, men who rode Tinubu’s coattails into office or renewed their tenures under his umbrella, have emerged as the loudest voices in the room. They are not merely advising, they are dictating. Their desperation to transit to the Senate is not about legislative service. It is about institutional survival and the continuation of executive power through a different corridor. And therein lies the danger.
The story of what Tinubu did for Nigeria’s governors is one that deserves more scrutiny than it has received. He came into office and removed the fuel subsidy in a single, audacious sentence. The naira floated. The economy absorbed the shock, and the states absorbed the windfall. The Federation Account allocation to states swelled dramatically. Governors who had been managing lean monthly disbursements suddenly found themselves awash in revenues that their predecessors never imagined. New roads were announced. Empowerment programmes were flagged. And while Nigerians on the streets absorbed the hardship of the transition, governors insulated themselves with the surplus and consolidated their political dominance.
Now those same governors are using that money, money that flowed from a presidential decision Tinubu made, to box him into a corner. The irony is almost Shakespearean. The benefactor is being encircled by his own beneficiaries. And the president, if the signals from the primaries are any indication, appears to lack either the will or the capacity to push back.
The transit of ambitious, executive-minded governors to the Senate is not a new story in Nigerian democracy, but its consequences are rarely examined with the seriousness they demand. These are not men who will arrive in the chamber and quietly learn the institution. They will arrive with the swagger of men who ran states, commanded security apparatuses, controlled party structures, and deployed billions at will. They will arrive knowing how power works, and more importantly, how to withhold it. Executive bills will not be passed on schedule. Presidential nominations will be delayed, queried, returned. Committees will be weaponised. Floor time will be traded. And all of it, every procedural manoeuvre, every strategic delay, will carry a price tag that leads back to Aso Rock.
The examples are already written into recent history, and Tinubu has no excuse for failing to read them. Goodluck Jonathan, a mild-mannered president who believed in the goodwill of his allies, was slowly bled out by a Senate that became an instrument of his political opposition. The legislature was not merely a check on his power, it became the launchpad from which his enemies built the 2015 coalition that removed him. Muhammadu Buhari, iron-willed on paper but administratively exhausted in practice, watched his second term dissolve into legislative warfare, ministerial gridlock, and the steady haemorrhage of political relevance. Both men, for all their differences, shared the same fatal vulnerability: they underestimated the Senate as a theatre of presidential destruction.
Tinubu should know better. He is a product of that theatre. He used it. He understands its pressure points. Which makes it all the more puzzling, and alarming, that he appears to be facilitating the very configuration that could consume his second term before it begins.
What makes the current set of governor-turned-senator aspirants particularly combustible is not just their ambition but their timing. A president’s second term, in the calculus of Nigerian politics, is a dead-duck period almost from inauguration day. The moment a president cannot seek re-election, the succession game begins. Loyalties fragment. Alliances calcify around potential inheritors. And those in the legislature, especially those with executive experience and independent political bases, do not wait for the president to finish his sentence before they begin rewriting the next chapter.
These nine governors will not enter the Senate as Tinubu’s men. They will enter as sovereigns in their own right, carrying the political weight of their states, the financial resources accumulated during their tenures, and the ambition of men who have never truly left the executive frame of mind. They will look at Tinubu’s second term not as a continuation but as a transition, and they will position themselves, and their preferred successors, accordingly. The floor of the Senate will become a negotiating table. Executive bills will become bargaining chips. And the president, unwinding toward retirement, will find himself increasingly dependent on the goodwill of men he once commanded.
There is still a window. Tinubu has not always been the man who bows to pressure, and this is precisely the moment that demands the decisive version of him to reassert itself. The coalition that won him the presidency was built on relationships with the National Assembly, with the senators and representatives who staked their political survival on his victory. Those relationships need to be the anchor of his second term, not the capricious loyalty of governors who are already transitioning their ambitions away from him.
The Jagaban built his legend by seeing further than his opponents. The question now is whether he can see past the men standing closest to him.
Seunmanuel Faleye is a brand and communications strategist. He is a covert writer and an overt creative head. He publishes Apple’s Bite International Magazine.
