Here We Go Again!

Olusegun Adeniyi

On Tuesday, the curtain fell on one of the most predictable rituals of Nigerian democracy. Political appointees biding their time in government, eyes firmly fixed on the next election, formally tendered their resignations. The directive from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Governors of the 36 states required all political appointees with electoral ambition to step down on or before 31st March, in compliance with Section 88(1) of the Electoral Act, 2026, and the timetable released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for party primaries ahead of the 2027 general elections.

On the surface, the directive is unremarkable. It is the law. Those who wish to contest elections must resign. No serious person would quarrel with that principle. But beneath that procedural veneer lies a deeper, more troubling question that Nigerians have long been too polite or too exhausted to confront: If, for instance, a minister, commissioner, special adviser, head of government agency etc. was appointed in August 2023, and is now walking out the door barely two and a half years later to contest election, it goes without saying that the office was merely a staging post. The gubernatorial seat, the senatorial ticket, the House of Representatives slot, etc. were always the real destination.

Consider the arithmetic. President Tinubu’s ministers were sworn in on 21 August 2023. The presidential term runs until 29 May 2027. Therefore, any minister resigning now would have spent roughly two years and seven months in office out of a four-year presidential tenure. And this is after many of them had spent their first several months in office merely ‘settling in.’ The pertinent question: How much public service actually happened in between? At the state level, the exodus is even more dramatic, with commissioners, advisers, and agency heads scampering towards party primaries in a political marketplace where governance has become an afterthought.

Now, I do not begrudge anyone their political ambition. That is a constitutional right. And it is not even about them. My main concern is the structural absurdity that allows an entire governance architecture to be hollowed out every election cycle. Effectively, we now run a system where a four-year tenure loses nearly two years to the rituals of political transition: the first several months to cabinet formation and the learning curve, and the final eighteen months or more to the gravitational pull of the next election. What remains in the middle is a sliver of actual governance, delivered by officials whose minds are often already elsewhere. 

And this is where the conversation must shift from the personal to the systemic. The resign-to-run provision in our Electoral Act is anchored on a legitimate democratic principle: Those who hold public trust should not leverage their offices for personal electoral advantage. Fair enough. But the implementation, in a country with Nigeria’s governance deficits, has produced unintended and devastating consequences. It has turned public service into a revolving door where the most critical positions in government are occupied by transient figures with eyes on something ‘juicier’.

Here is what makes it even more troubling. In many of the world’s most functional democracies, this problem simply does not exist because it was never created in the first place. In the United Kingdom, cabinet ministers are themselves Members of Parliament. They do not need to resign to contest elections. When a general election is called, every member of the House of Commons including the Prime Minister stands for re-election in their constituency. Governance continues uninterrupted until the very eve of the election. A British Home Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer does not abandon his or her portfolio 18 months early to ‘consult with stakeholders.’ They govern right up to polling day. Indeed, in the Netherlands and Sweden, when an MP is appointed as a minister, their parliamentary seat is temporarily filled by a substitute from the party list for the duration of their service. The system is designed to ensure continuity, not disruption.

In the United States, from where we photocopied the presidential system of government, cabinet secretaries are not elected officials. The concept of mass resignations ahead of an election cycle, as we witness in Nigeria, would be unthinkable in Washington DC. Only five American states even have formal resign-to-run laws for elected officials, and those have been the subject of considerable legal controversy. At the federal level, no such requirement exists for appointed officials.

In France, the resign-to-run principle applies only in limited circumstances, and the dual mandate system has historically allowed politicians to hold multiple offices simultaneously. It is a practice that was reformed not because it disrupted governance, but because it concentrated too much power. Even in Ghana, our West African neighbour whose democratic trajectory bears some resemblance to ours, the requirement for appointees to resign to contest party positions has been the subject of intense debate, with the ruling NDC recently setting staggered deadlines ranging from April to June 2026 for various categories of officials. In South Korea, public officials are required to resign 90 days before an election, not eighteen months or two years. That is the kind of proportionality that respects both democratic competition and the continuity of governance.

I highlight these examples not to suggest that Nigeria should blindly copy any foreign model. Our context is unique, and our challenges are particular. But the comparison is instructive because it forces us to ask a fundamental question: Why have we designed a system that virtually guarantees governance disruption every election cycle? Why must the Nigerian people accept that their ministers and commissioners will effectively be part-time public servants, dividing their attention between the responsibilities of office and the machinations of the next campaign?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the peculiar nature of Nigerian politics itself. In this country, elective office is no longer a position of service but the primary pathway to wealth, influence, and social standing. The competition for these positions is therefore not a contest of ideas or policy vision, but a scramble for access to resources. A minister who does not begin positioning for a governorship well before the formal resignation deadline is a minister who has already lost the race. The consultations, stakeholder engagements, strategic alignments, and all such rituals begin long before any formal letter of resignation is drafted. By the time the deadline arrives, the minister’s departure is a formality. Their mind left the office months ago.

The cost of this dysfunction is borne by ordinary Nigerians. When a minister leaves, the new occupant of that office, assuming one is even appointed promptly, will spend months getting up to speed, only to be serving during the final, often lame-duck phase of the administration. But this is not a partisan issue. Every administration in this Fourth Republic has suffered the same haemorrhage. It is a structural flaw embedded in our political and electoral architecture, and it will continue to produce the same results until we summon the courage to confront it. If we are truly serious about governance, and I sometimes wonder whether we are, then we must ask whether the resign-to-run requirement, as currently implemented, serves the public interest or merely the interests of politicians who see government appointments as stepping stones.

I concede the fact that Nigerian democracy has matured in many ways since 1999. But on this fundamental question of whether public office exists to serve the people or to serve the career ambitions of the officeholder, we remain stubbornly juvenile. The political system we have institutionalised is a product of ‘sharing the national cake’ philosophy and that explains why we have a public service essentially designed to serve private interests. Therefore, we need a serious national conversation around an appropriate political design that can help to harness the potential of our country for the greater good of our people. Until there is a constituency for good governance that is louder and more insistent than the constituency for political self-interest, it will be difficult for Nigeria to develop.

Pantami’s Graveyard Politics

I was at the Gudu Cemetery in Abuja last Sunday afternoon for the burial of the late Hajiya Umma El-Rufai, mother of the former Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai. Having come straight from Church, I was one of the first set of people to arrive the cemetery so I witnessed the preparation of the grave. And I made a number of mental notes. Arranged by the order of ‘arrival’, the el-Rufai matriarch was simply allocated the next available small space in the row of graves. That was a lesson in itself. But the greater lesson was in the solemnity of the occasion, as it is with the way Muslims bury their dead, which I have always admired.

Wrapped in a white shroud, the deceased was eventually buried without a casket in a ceremony devoid of any extravagance or drama. Well, that may not be entirely correct because someone actually intruded into the occasion with his own political drama, evidently just for ‘content creation’.

Ordinarily, there is this feeling of deep sorrow whenever a man, no matter how old or accomplished, is burying his mother. It is a traumatic ritual for those of us who have had the experience. It therefore came as no surprise that the El-Rufai who arrived Gudu Cemetery last Sunday to bid his mother goodbye was visibly shaken. But that still did not prevent the former Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Mallam Isa Pantami, from ambushing him (El-Rufai) for a ‘reconciliation’ handshake with his estranged successor, Governor Uba Sani that quickly went viral.

As we all left Gudu Cemetery last Sunday afternoon, the prevailing sentiment was that Pantami chose a solemn moment and hallowed ground to play politics. “Forgiveness is a personal journey of the heart, not a public performance for the cameras,” Muhammed Bello Buhari, a freelance journalist, wrote in his post on the sordid drama. I agree. Whatever may be the problem between Uba Sani and El-Rufai—and I don’t dabble into those strained political relationships on which one would never hear the full story—any genuine reconciliation effort must involve honest dialogue to address underlining grievances from both sides, repair broken relationship and rebuild trust. In any case, since Uba Sani does not have the power to stop the various charges for which El-Rufai is currently being ‘roundtripped’ by three federal agencies—the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), State Security Service (SSS) and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC)—has Pantami not set the governor up for opprobrium with his futile ‘reconciliation’?

Whichever way one looks at it, Pantami’s opportunistic grandstanding at Gudu Cemetery serves no useful purpose. Besides, for him to use the graveyard of a mother to extract nothing but sheer emotional blackmail from her grieving son smacks of insensitivity. Meanwhile, since we are talking about the grave, tomorrow is Good Friday which commences the most important weekend in Christendom. And as Christians all over the world mark the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, there can be no better time to reflect on the essence of our faith.

I wish all my Christian readers Happy Easter!

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