In a seismic rupture within Nigeria’s ruling political establishment, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Babachir Lawal has detonated an explosive declaration: President Bola Tinubu’s 2023 electoral victory was illegitimate, and Labour Party’s Peter Obi was the true winner. The incendiary accusation, delivered Monday on national television, strikes at the heart of Tinubu’s embattled presidency and exposes deepening fractures within the corridors of power.
Speaking with the authority of a former cabinet heavyweight who once navigated Nigeria’s highest bureaucratic echelons, Lawal framed his assertion as irrefutable fact. “We monitored the polls, gathered field data, and discovered some results were altered,” Lawal stated on Channels Television’s Politics Tonight, his tone devoid of diplomatic hedging. “President Tinubu did not win that election. The result we had at the time showed he lost.” This blunt repudiation, coming not from an opposition stalwart but from a figure once central to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) machinery, transforms a lingering opposition grievance into an internal insurrection.
When pressed on whether personal animus fueled his stance, Lawal unleashed a damning character assessment of the president: **”He is arrogant—full of himself.”** The former SGF traced their rift to Tinubu’s perceived offense against him, rejecting the narrative that he was the instigator. “He thinks I’m the one who offended him. I didn’t; he offended me,” Lawal asserted, intertwining personal grievance with a constitutional crisis. This fusion of the intimate and the political underscores the volatile undercurrents threatening Tinubu’s governing coalition.
Lawal’s broadside lands as Tinubu grapples with nationwide strikes, currency collapse, and security crises. By resurrecting questions about the election’s integrity from within the president’s broad political family, it weakens Tinubu’s capacity to unify a fractured nation. Provides tangible ammunition to Obi’s “stolen mandate” narrative. Reveals the fragility of the APC’s big-tent coalition.
Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga swiftly dismissed Lawal’s claims as “bitter rantings,” yet the damage transcends partisan spin. With a former head of Nigeria’s civil service casting doubt on the foundational event of Tinubu’s presidency and doing so not in opaque whispers but in prime-time proclamation the crisis of legitimacy deepens. As Lawal’s words echo across a polarized nation, they resurrect a specter Nigeria cannot afford to ignore: Can a government besieged by questions about its very origin effectively govern? The silence from the villa speaks volumes; the reckoning, however, has only begun.
