NOW HEAR THIS Nigerians all over the world. It is the political equivalent of a husband telling his wife, ” I don’t need to come to see your parents anymore, the marriage is already sealed. ” Which means the bride is not Valued.
The Arrogance Of A Conqueror Is To Assume That All The Citizens Are Idiots: By Hon. Dr. Sunny Oby Maduka (DSM)
Independent Newspaper Sat. Oct 24, 2026 Page 23
There was a king who summoned his village people to the Ancestral square, and told them, “I do not need to beg you to make me king again. Stay in your huts, I have already bought the crown from the chief priest.” The villagers clapped, because the king’s drummers were loud.
But the old men in the corner wept, for they knew that when a king stops asking for your vote, he has stopped seeing you as a human being.
That is what happened in Abuja on October 14th, 2026.
When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu inaugurated his Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) and publicly declared that he would personally choose where to go to campaign, and by implication where not to go.
Personally, any citizen who clapped for that statement is, without any apology, a verified fool. This is because, such a statement was not a slip of tongue. It was not a matter of age. It was not about ill-health.
It was a coronation speech, totally devoid of a campaign speech.
In 2023, PBAT staggered, he slurred, he fell in Kano, he made incoherence look like mortality.
Many Nigerians pitied him.
Today we know that it was a theatre script. It was a well-rehearsed script of vulnerability designed to trigger sympathy.
The man who acted dying to win power is now acting invincible to keep power. The script has simply changed from Act One: The Fragile Candidate, to Act Two: The Conquering Emperor.
What does it mean when a President tells you he does not need to come to you to ask for your vote?
It means you are valueless to him.
It means you are inconsequential.
It means you do not matter enough to waste his precious time.
It is the political equivalent of a husband telling his wife, “I don’t need to come to see your parents anymore, the marriage is already sealed.”
That is not an excuse, but a contempt – pure and simple.
Rhetorically, this is what George Orwell called in 1984 “the arrogance of power that no longer seeks to persuade, but to command.”
When a leader stops campaigning, he stops campaigning for consent. He is no longer seeking legitimacy; he is announcing ownership.
The implication is damning: PBAT has assumed that INEC is in his pocket, the judiciary is in his pocket, the security architecture is in his pocket, the media is in his pocket, and a few gullible Nigerians are in his pocket.
Therefore, Nigeria is no longer a Republic to be contested for; it is a conquered territory to be administered, and Nigerians are not citizens to be persuaded, but tools to be used.
Our elders will say: “When a man says he has bought the whole market, ask him who sold the market to him.”
Who sold Nigeria to PBAT?
His permutation is childish but dangerous: “If I could win in 2023 as an outsider, despite Muslim-Muslim ticket, despite cash scarcity, despite fuel scarcity, despite all odds, how can I lose in 2027 as an incumbent with all the levers of power?”
That is an ego speaking. As Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.” The man who believes he has caged all the governors, caged all the political leaders, and caged all gullible citizens, forgets that even a caged lion will bite when it is starving.
To tell your PCC members to go and fulfill all righteousness while you sit in Aso Rock is to institutionalize insult. It is like sending your servants to go and marry a bride on your behalf.
The bride knows she is not valued.
Campaigning is not a waste of time Mr. President.
Campaigning is the only time power remembers the people.
It is when the President remembers the road to Makurdi is bad.
It is when he remembers that the school in Gusau has no roof. When you cancel that ritual, you declare that those roads and those schools do not matter.
African Proverb says that: “A king whose palace is too high to hear the cry of his people will one day have no people to rule.”
PBAT will also shun media interviews, as he did in 2023. He will rely on surrogates and proxies, attack dogs and rented voices, to checkmate the press. It is a deliberate strategy of unaccountability. As Chinua Achebe warned in Anthills of the Savannah, “A man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.
A President who refuses to answer questions cannot know where the nation is bleeding.
This overconfidence may be the very seed of his failure in 2027. Nigerians may be patient, but they are not all stupid. As Thomas Sankara said, “You can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea.”
At a time when insecurity has turned farms to burial grounds, when poverty has made garri a luxury, when hunger walks the streets like a madman, when our hospitals are mortuaries and our schools are poultry sheds, when corruption wears agbada and impunity wears uniform – to tell Nigerians that campaigning is a waste of time is to slap a hungry man and tell him not to cry.
The great playwright Wole Soyinka said, “The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.” But PBAT sees criticism as noise from inconsequential people.
His greatest undoing is his erroneous belief that Nigerians are eternally stupid and have learnt nothing from his uncaring attitude. He believes the youth are still the same youths of 2023.
He is wrong.
The youth of 2026 are wiser, hungrier, angrier, and more organized. The youth whose future has been mortgaged for Eurobonds and external validations, the youth whose Japa dream is now a national anthem – they are watching.
The battle for 2027 will not be a walkover as his bootlickers have fed him with.
It will not be a 3 a.m. coronation announcement.
It will be a moral war, a spiritual evolution, a referendum on the survival of a nation in dire need of people-oriented leadership.
Frantz Fanon taught us that: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
The mission of this generation is to prove that Nigeria is not a conquered territory.
Nigerians will not be in deep sleep this time to wake up and hear that their true choice has been misplaced at 3 a.m. The era of “go to court” as a lullaby is over.
The people are awake.
Everything will depend on how INEC decides to conduct the election. The people have only one demand: a credible, transparent, and verifiable election. Anything less will be resisted, not with violence, but with the unbreakable will of a people who have decided to reclaim their country.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
It’s only a fool or a bastard that will call a President’s absence from campaign grounds as a political strategy.
Since three years ago, Nigerians have been begging the president to come on a live media chat to talk to them, and all these years, PBAT has rebuffed the citizens, thinking that he has bought them as his commodities, easily disposable. If there is any time to campaign, this is the best time, at least, to assure Nigerians that he has heard and felt their pains, and if given a second chance, he will make them smile again.
This is strategy, empathetic strategy to a president who truly deserve the empathy of the citizens.
A President who thinks Nigeria is already in his barn without going to the farm to check will wake up on election day to find that the barn is empty, and the farm – the people – has moved on.
He who thinks the people are too worthless to campaign to, will soon find out that he is too worthless to be voted for.
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