President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s decision to let APC governors and party structures lead much of his 2027 re-election campaign is a defensible act of presidential time management but it also exposes a deeper contradiction in Nigeria’s federal accountability politics. At the inauguration of the APC Presidential Campaign Council in Abuja, Tinubu said he would not attend every rally because “there’s a country to run,” while asking governors, lawmakers and party leaders to carry his message to wards and local governments. The question is not whether a president should govern while others campaign; it is whether the same officials repeatedly cast as scapegoats for hunger, poverty and insecurity can credibly become the principal agents of presidential re-election.
A strategic delegation or political dependence?
There is a practical case for Tinubu’s approach. Nigeria’s presidency faces economic reform, security coordination, diplomatic obligations and fiscal management; a president cannot plausibly attend every state rally. The APC has also defended the arrangement by arguing that governors possess superior grassroots machinery and that increased federal transfers have expanded resources available to states and local governments. In a federation, governors legitimately control much of the administrative infrastructure schools, primary healthcare, local policing partnerships, land, agriculture and social registers through which national promises become visible.
Yet the arrangement is politically fragile because it rests on governors whose loyalty is transactional rather than ideological.
The campaign council includes not only APC governors but opposition figures such as Nyesom Wike of the PDP, Chukwuma Soludo of APGA and Ademola Adeleke of Accord, appointed as state coordinators. That breadth may signal coalition-building, but it also reveals dependence on personal bargains rather than a coherent governing coalition. Wike’s public challenge to APC governors to “prove their loyalty” by delivering their states illustrates the transactional logic now at the heart of Tinubu’s re-election effort.
The central contradiction is rhetorical. For years, defenders of the federal government have urged citizens to blame state governors for kidnapping, poverty and poor service delivery. That argument has some constitutional merit: governors are chief executives of federating units and bear real responsibility for state policing cooperation, social investment and local governance. But it becomes self-defeating when the president then entrusts those same governors with the campaign machinery that will determine his political survival.
If governors are competent enough to deliver votes, why are they not competent enough to deliver security and welfare? If they are too weak to solve hunger, why are they strong enough to deliver a presidential election? Citizens are entitled to ask whether “subsidiarity” is being invoked only when responsibility must be pushed downward, while credit and campaign authority are retained at the centre.
The social evidence makes this tension acute. The World Bank estimates that poverty rose from 56 percent in 2023 to 63 percent in 2025, affecting roughly 140 million Nigerians; it also reports that 50.8 percent of Nigerians about 123 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2025. The FAO estimates that nearly 36.3 million Nigerians faced severe acute food insecurity during the June – August 2026 lean season, including about 2.1 million people in Emergency conditions and roughly 10,300 in Catastrophe conditions. These figures do not absolve governors; insecurity, weak state capacity and poor subnational governance are real constraints. But neither do they permit the federal government to treat hardship as exclusively a state-level failure, particularly where macroeconomic reform, exchange-rate policy, fuel-subsidy removal, debt service, security architecture and emergency response are federal responsibilities.
From a public-theology perspective, political authority is not merely a mechanism for winning elections; it is a moral trust exercised on behalf of the vulnerable. The biblical prophetic tradition, and Islamic principles of public welfare converge on a common claim: rulers are judged by how they protect the poor, feed the hungry and secure the defenceless. Campaigning through surrogates is not inherently immoral. But outsourcing the campaign to officials accused of failing citizens without a visible framework for mutual accountability risks reducing leadership to electoral brokerage.
A morally serious campaign would therefore do more than mobilise governors. It would publish measurable commitments: state-by-state poverty-reduction targets, school-enrolment and primary-healthcare indicators, food-security interventions, security incident reduction, and transparent use of increased allocations. It would also distinguish between legitimate federal-state division of labour and evasion of responsibility.
What Tinubu should do
Campaign on a shared accountability compact. Tinubu should require participating governors to sign public, time-bound delivery compacts on security, food production, healthcare, education and social protection rather than merely asking them to deliver votes.
Publish allocation and performance data. The presidency and APC should release a dashboard showing federal transfers to states, internally generated revenue, capital expenditure, school and clinic functionality, and poverty or food-security indicators. Transparency would test the claim that higher allocations should produce better welfare.
Strengthen local security governance.
The federal government should accelerate state police debates, community policing, intelligence-sharing, and prosecution of perpetrators, while making governors formally answerable for coordination failures within constitutional limits.
Protect campaign finance integrity. Allegations that state resources may be diverted into campaigns should be met with independent audit trails, asset-declaration enforcement and clear separation between public office and party fundraising. Unproven allegations must not be treated as proof, but the risk is real enough to demand institutional safeguards.
Speak directly to citizens. Delegation cannot become absence.
Tinubu’s promise to still address Nigerians directly must translate into regular, substantive engagements on inflation, jobs, security and food prices not only controlled rallies.
The electoral stakes
Tinubu’s campaign strategy may be efficient, but it converts a governance question into a referendum on the entire APC-led federal-state establishment. Governor Hope Uzodimma himself framed the election as “a referendum on the APC as a whole,” not on Tinubu alone. That is precisely the danger: if the president delegates the campaign to governors, voters may reasonably evaluate the record of both levels of government together.
The deeper lesson for Nigerian democracy is that accountability cannot be selective. A president who shares campaign authority with governors must also share a credible account of national failure and a concrete plan for remedy. Otherwise, the 2027 campaign will not merely ask who should rule; it will ask who is prepared to govern and who is prepared to answer for the hungry, the displaced and the poor.
Cliff Stanley political scientist,
Write from Jos Ecwa Theological Seminary (JETS) ,
Cliffstanley3@gmail.com
07032826319