I read Farooq Kperogi’s Saturday essay of 4th April 2026: How Opposition Tinubu Would Treat President Tinubu. It is a striking piece of political craftsmanship—polished, pointed, and piercing. It holds up a mirror to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and invites Nigerians to behold a jarring reflection: the insurgent opposition figure of yesterday standing diminished before the burdens of power today.
It is a powerful image. But like all mirrors, it reflects only a surface. Beneath it lies a deeper, more troubling truth that demands to be spoken with clarity and force.
As an opposition leader, he thundered against Goodluck Jonathan with the moral certainty of a crusader. Insecurity was not, to him, a policy challenge; it was an unforgivable failure.
Economic hardship was not an inherited burden; it was a betrayal. Fuel subsidy removal was not a reform; it was an assault on the poor.
His words were sharp, absolute, and unrelenting. He did not argue; he condemned. He did not persuade; he mobilized.
Today, those same afflictions—worsened insecurity, grinding economic pain, and a restive citizenry—sit squarely on his desk. And the language has changed.
The urgency has softened into caution. The certainty has dissolved into explanation. The man who once saw simplicity now pleads complexity.
Yes, there is contradiction here. Yes, there is irony. But to stop at hypocrisy is to miss the far more unsettling reality: power has not merely changed Tinubu—it has exposed the illusion that the problems he railed against ever had easy answers.
Kperogi’s central thesis—that Opposition Tinubu would have politically annihilated President Tinubu—is not wrong. It is, in fact, precisely the point. Opposition thrives on clarity, on outrage, on the seductive promise that what is broken can be swiftly mended if only the right hands take the helm.
Governance, however, is a harsher terrain. It is slow, resistant, and often unforgiving. It strips away the comfort of rhetoric and replaces it with the weight of consequence.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of insecurity. The bloodletting across communities, the stubborn persistence of violence, the haunting images of loss—these are not new. Tinubu once wielded them as weapons against the state.
Today, he confronts them as the state itself. And in that transformation lies a cruel lesson: the machinery of insecurity in Nigeria is far more entrenched, far more diffuse, than opposition rhetoric ever admitted. The ease with which blame was once assigned has given way to the difficulty of actually solving the problem.
The same arc unfolds in the economy. The fiery denunciation of subsidy removal has yielded to its implementation. What was once branded as oppression is now defended as necessity. This is not merely inconsistency—it is the collision between political opportunism and economic reality.
The subsidy regime was always unsustainable. Yet, in opposition, it was convenient to inflame public anger rather than confront fiscal truth. In power, that luxury evaporates.
Even in the theatre of democratic space, where Kperogi sees an alarming contraction, the story is more complex. The instinct to centralize power, to lean on institutions, to interpret dissent as threat—these are not inventions of the present administration.
They are recurring habits of incumbency. Tinubu, who once decried them as tyranny, now navigates them as instruments of rule. The distance between condemnation and participation has collapsed.
And then there is the symbolism—the quiet, unsettling image of a president meeting grieving victims at an airport, constrained by time, removed from the soil of their suffering.
Opposition Tinubu would have seized upon that moment with ruthless precision, turning it into an emblem of detachment.
President Tinubu, however, inhabits a world where symbolism competes with logistics, where presence is negotiated rather than assumed. It is an uncomfortable truth: in power, even empathy is scheduled.
What, then, are we to make of this unfolding drama?
Not, as Kperogi suggests, a simple morality tale of a man who has betrayed his own words. It is something more profound—and more disquieting.
It is the revelation that the standards Tinubu once wielded with such devastating effect were never anchored in the full complexity of governance. They were tools of conquest, not instruments of rule.
This does not absolve him. Far from it. If anything, it indicts him more deeply. For having risen to power on the strength of those absolutist claims, he cannot now seek refuge in the very complexities he once dismissed.
Leadership demands not just the courage to criticize, but the capacity to reconcile one’s past certainties with present realities.
Yet, the ultimate lesson extends beyond Tinubu himself. It is a cautionary tale about the nature of opposition in Nigeria—and perhaps everywhere.
The temptation to simplify, to weaponize suffering, to promise swift redemption—these are the currencies of political ascent. But they are also the seeds of disillusionment in governance.
Tinubu’s journey from opposition firebrand to embattled president is, therefore, not merely a personal contradiction. It is a national mirror.
It forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: how many of the certainties we celebrate in opposition are, in truth, illusions waiting to be exposed by power?
In the final analysis, Tinubu is not just struggling to govern Nigeria. He is struggling to live up to the myth he helped create.
And in that struggle lies the starkest indictment of all—not simply of the man, but of the politics that made him.
- Professor Ukertor Gabriel Moti (Professor of Public Sector Management and Governance).