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Nigeria is a federation. Federal agencies do not get to shut down state governments because they suspect something may have gone wrong with the books. Trail the money into private hands. Do not turn off the treasury. The courts, the governors’ forum and the plain language of the Constitution have already said as much. The only question left is how many more times the lesson must be repeated.
There is a clean, structural reason Nigerian election season feels less like a celebration of democracy and more like a high-stakes tactical thriller. We built an election system where the referee is hired by one of the teams, trained by one of the teams, and paid out of a purse controlled by one of the teams.
There is a specific, quiet corner in Abuja where Nigeria’s most brilliant ideas go to die. It isn’t marked by a monument, but by dust. It is the graveyard of panels, commissions, and committees a place where billions of Naira and thousands of hours of expert labor are neatly bound into volumes, submitted in front of flashing cameras, and promptly forgotten.
Start with the constitutional oddity sitting in plain sight. The Board's Charter names Donald Trump personally not the office of the President, not the United States as a state party, but Donald J. Trump as inaugural Chairman, with a term that survives his presidency. He can only be removed through voluntary resignation or a unanimous vote of the Executive Board finding him incapacitated, and he alone selects his successor. No sitting president inherits the chair by virtue of the office; a future occupant of the Oval Office might find themselves outranked, within an organisation their own government helped charter, by a private citizen of their predecessor's choosing.
How Major Gideon Orkar's abortive putsch of 1990 handed Sani Abacha the power base that would ultimately devour IBB's grand design for permanent rule and why no dictator should ever be grateful to his own saviour.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 