Tinubu’s Campaign Council, Star Power And The Real Work Ahead

Saturday morning, the All Progressives Congress dropped the list of its Presidential Campaign Council for the January 2027 election, and by afternoon, my phone had not stopped buzzing. Everybody wanted to know one thing: who made the cut, who got snubbed, and what the whole arrangement actually means for the road ahead.

Let me start with the obvious. This is, without argument, one of the most star-studded campaign structures assembled in recent memory. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as chairman, Vice President Kashim Shettima as vice chairman, and beneath them a roll call of names that reads like a roster of the party’s heaviest hitters. Mind you, when a sitting president chooses to personally chair his own campaign council rather than hand it to a proxy, he is sending a message. He is saying, in effect, that he intends to own this campaign, not delegate it.

Consider the architecture. Former Zamfara State governor, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, takes the director-general’s seat, the engine room of any campaign. Governor Hope Uzodimma of Imo State is the secretary. Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Speaker Tajudeen Abbas, the two most powerful men in the National Assembly after the presidency itself, have been deployed as deputy director-generals for the south and north, respectively, alongside Governor Mai Mala Buni of Yobe. That is not a ceremonial gesture. That is a party mobilising the full weight of its legislative leadership behind a single project.

Then there is Senator Adams Oshiomhole, who has been handed the mobilisation docket. Readers of this page will recall that I have written about Oshiomhole before. Whatever one makes of his combative style, nobody disputes that the man knows how to organise a ground campaign. Putting him in charge of mobilisation is a shrewd, unsentimental decision, and it tells me the party is not interested in passengers on this council. It wants workers.

James Abiodun Faleke’s return as deputy director-general for election planning, coordination and monitoring is another detail worth dwelling on. Faleke played a pivotal role in the 2022/2023 campaign that delivered victory, and continuity of this sort matters more than people admit. Campaigns are not run on charisma alone. They are run on logistics, on knowing which ward needs agents by Tuesday and which local government is haemorrhaging support.

A party that keeps its institutional memory intact, rather than starting from zero every cycle, is a party that has learned something from experience.

The media and communications arm deserves a mention too. Minister of Information Mohammed Idris Malagi, coordinating alongside Dele Alake, Bayo Onanuga, Lanre Issa-Onilu, and a bench of spokespersons, is, frankly, one of the more seasoned communications teams any Nigerian party has fielded in an election cycle. These are men who have sat in newsrooms, understood deadline pressure, and know the difference between propaganda and persuasion. If they do their jobs properly, the noise around this campaign should be less about gaffes and more about substance.

I also noticed the choice of elder statesmen brought in as advisers to the chairman: Chief Bisi Akande, Chief Segun Osoba, Senator Rochas Okorocha, Senator Abdullahi Adamu and Senator Florence Ita-Giwa. This is not window dressing. These are men and women who have sat in the trenches of Nigerian party politics since the Third Republic, who have seen coalitions built and coalitions collapse, and who understand the difference between managing egos and managing an election.

Any campaign that ignores that kind of accumulated wisdom in favour of only fresh faces is, in my view, gambling with its own survival. The legal directorate under Muiz Banire, with former Attorney-General Lateef Fagbemi and ex-governor Ibrahim Shema in support, similarly signals that the party expects this election to be contested in the courts as much as at the ballot box, which, given our recent history, is simply realism rather than paranoia.

Compare this to the scattered state of the opposition at the moment, and the contrast becomes even sharper. Where the opposition formations are still consumed by internal leadership tussles and unresolved court cases, the ruling party has managed to put in place a full, functioning structure. Politics, like war, rewards those who mobilise early. Say what you like about the APC’s internal contradictions, and there are many, but organisational discipline of this sort does not happen by accident.

Now, to be sure, there is a case for scepticism, and I would be doing my readers a disservice if I did not raise it. A council this large, with directorates, sub-directorates, zonal coordinators, legal teams and multiple layers of secretaries, inevitably raises the old question of the cost of governance and, by extension, the cost of politics in this country.

Nigerians who are still adjusting to the removal of the petrol subsidy and the naira float will look at a list this long and wonder how many of these appointments come with allowances, vehicles and estacodes drawn, one way or another, from resources that could be spent elsewhere. The opposition will also, predictably, point out that several names on this list are familiar faces recycled from previous campaigns and previous administrations, and ask whether “new” thinking is possible from an old cast. These are fair questions, and the council would do itself a favour by answering them early rather than waiting to be cornered by them later.

But here is where I part ways with the reflexive cynicism that greets every government announcement in this country. A campaign council, however large, is not in itself an indictment. What matters is what it produces. President Tinubu, in his charge to the council, said the party has “delivered on our campaign promises and set our country on a path of economic progress,” and that Nigeria is “at the cusp of reaping the benefits of a prosperous economy.”

Bold words, and I will not pretend the average Nigerian trader in Mile 12 or a civil servant in Lokoja is feeling that cusp in their pocket just yet. Inflation has bitten hard, and no amount of campaign architecture will paper over that reality on the ground.

Yet it would also be dishonest to pretend nothing has moved. The subsidy removal, however painful in its execution, has freed resources that previous administrations simply did not have.

The naira reforms, whatever their short-term shock, have begun to close the arbitrage gap that fed a small army of round-tripping racketeers for years. If this campaign council has any real job to do, it is not to recycle slogans about hope and renewal. It is to put verifiable numbers on the table. How much has actually been saved from subsidy removal, and where exactly has it gone?

How many of the promised palliatives reached the households they were meant for? What is the honest state of power generation today compared to May 2023? Nigerians are not interested in another round of “we are working,” they want line items.

This is where Faleke’s planning directorate and the media team, led by Idris Malagi, should earn their keep. An issue-based campaign, built on audited figures rather than applause lines, would do more for the party’s fortunes than any number of star names on a letterhead. Performance, not personnel, wins elections in the long run, even if personnel decides who gets to fight for that performance to be communicated.

There is also a zonal balancing act worth watching. The deployment of coordinators across all six geopolitical zones, from Olushola Adeyeye in the South West to Sani Danladi in the North East, suggests the party understands that 2027 will not be won on the strength of any single region. Nigeria’s political arithmetic has never rewarded a candidate who takes any zone for granted, and this structure, at least on paper, reads like an attempt to plant flags everywhere rather than concentrate resources on familiar strongholds.

None of this guarantees victory, and God forbid anyone in Abuja mistakes a well-drafted organogram for a mandate already secured. Nigerians have grown weary of grand launches that fizzle into the same old politics of stomach infrastructure and last-minute defections. The test of this council will not be the elegance of its Saturday morning press release. It will be whether, some months from now, ordinary Nigerians can point to something concrete and say, yes, my light bill makes more sense now, or my child’s school fees are more manageable, or the road to my village got fixed.

Credit where it is due: assembling this much institutional weight, from the Senate President to the Speaker to seasoned governors and battle-tested strategists, under one roof is no small administrative feat, and it shows a party taking its own re-election seriously rather than coasting on incumbency. The next test is converting that machinery into results that Nigerians can actually feel. These are the issues.