When you read a single article from an author, you get a perspective. However, when you read the article in the context of other written by the same author, you may see things in a different light.
This is a response to “Tinubu’s Baffling Northern Exclusion Strategy” by Faroog Kperogi. Kperogi’s column is, as ever, fluently written and rhetorically muscular. He has a gift for the arresting phrase, and “Nigeria’s economic fate can now be decided entirely in Yoruba” will travel. He also has an enviable command of the granular appointment-level evidence that makes his arguments feel watertight. But beneath the polished prose lies an argument that is analytically thinner than it appears, methodologically inconsistent, and, in places, quietly at war with itself.
It is important to say upfront that the appointment of the new Special Adviser on Home Security is puzzling and requires more explanation. For me, Tinubu’s government is bloated with appointments. In a time of austerity, it is hard to understand what appears to be a duplication.
Having said that, you can accuse Tinubu of many things, but lack of political astuteness is not one of them. One of the criticisms of Tinubu and his government is that he focuses too much on politics, and this criticism is well deserved. Although things are hard for the average Nigerian, it is nevertheless true that he has been applauded by the likes of the World Bank, the IMF, the Financial Times and the Economist for the way he has transformed the Nigerian economy. Regardless of whatever he achieved on the economic front, his eyes are always completely on the ball politically.
This morning, I had a conversation with one of my friends in Nigeria. I said that when you look at Tinubu, he appears frailer than Atiku who is much older. However, whenever I hear him speak, it is difficult to wave away his soundness of mind and intelligence. Tinubu is no mug. An honest assessment of his pedigree before politics put him far ahead of his competitors. A man like that will not take decisions that he has not carefully thought through. Tinubu’s political sense means he clearly understands the importance of Northern Nigeria to his re-election bid in 2027. A strategy built around excluding Northern Nigeria would be foolhardy and is highly unlikely to come from a man who knew how critical the North was to his election in 2023.
The Buhari Comparison Does Too Much Work and Inadvertently Undermines the Thesis
The column’s load-bearing comparison is that Buhari, “the most narrow-minded and provincial president Nigeria ever had,” was nonetheless less sectional than Tinubu because he “ceded some power to Osinbajo” and “left control of the economy to the Southwest.” This is where the argument first begins to wobble.
If Buhari was the most provincial president in Nigerian history, and Tinubu is now worse, then the metric of provincialism is doing far too much explanatory labour. Kperogi himself, in his own past columns going back to 2015, documented Buhari’s lopsided security appointments, what he himself coined as the ‘undisguised Arewacentricity’ of the service chiefs (see the links to relevant articles at the end of this article), the IGP, the EFCC under Magu, the DSS, Customs and Immigration. The honest comparison is not whether Buhari elevated Osinbajo (yes, occasionally and theatrically) but whether Buhari distributed the strategic instruments of state evenly. The answer, by Kperogi’s own prior record, was no. Yet that prior record is set aside here so that Buhari can function as the moderate foil to a more extreme Tinubu. This is a rhetorical convenience that a reader unfamiliar with Kperogi’s archive would miss.
More importantly, the Osinbajo precedent is selectively framed. Osinbajo’s outsized influence in the first term was substantially curtailed in the second. The Mamman Daura faction reasserted itself, the economic management team was reorganised around him, and several of his initiatives (the social investment programmes especially) were taken away from the vice president’s office. The image of a Buhari who trusted a Yoruba man is therefore a first-term snapshot pressed into service as a whole-presidency generalisation.
The Famadewa Appointment: Speculation Dressed as Evidence
The pivot of the column is the appointment of Major-General Adeyinka Famadewa as Special Adviser on Home Security, which Kperogi reads as the tacit edging of Ribadu and the completion of a northern purge. Examine the logical structure here carefully. First, a new duplicative office has been created. Second, the appointee is Yoruba. Third, therefore, Ribadu is being surveilled and the north purged.
The first claim is true and a legitimate critique on governance grounds. Nigeria genuinely does not need another security adviser when the Office of the National Security Adviser, Ministry of Interior, Department of State and Security, National Counter Terrorism Centre and service chiefs already exist. Kperogi makes this institutional argument well. But the second-to-third move is pure inference, and Kperogi himself concedes as much in a paragraph that essentially demolishes his own thesis: “These speculations may have no basis in fact. For one, Ribadu is still the international face of the Tinubu administration. You don’t send someone you distrust to negotiate on your behalf with… the United States.” He then adds that Shettima “seems to get along just fine” with Tinubu.
This is a remarkable moment. Having spent two-thirds of the column building the case that Tinubu has purged northern influence, Kperogi acknowledges that the most powerful northerner remains the international face of the government, and that the vice president’s relationship with the president is not visibly strained. The column never recovers from this concession. It pivots instead to “perception is the currency of reality in politics,” which is true, but is a different argument. The original claim was structural exclusion. The fallback is optics management. These are not the same thing, and the slide between them is not signalled to the reader.
The Arithmetic of Section 145 and the Shifting Goalposts
The handling of Buhari’s power transfers to Osinbajo is revealing. Kperogi writes that Buhari “formally transferred presidential powers to Osinbajo at least five times” and then, in the next breath, acknowledges that “some people count only three because they focus on the longer or more politically consequential acting-presidency periods.” This is the kind of move that should make a careful reader pause. The five-count is generous because it folds in routine short trips during which Section 145 was invoked almost ministerially. The three-count is the substantively meaningful one. By foregrounding the larger number, Kperogi inflates the contrast with Tinubu, who has not transferred power even once. Buhari was away for 50 days on one occasion and 103 days on another. Tinubu’s trips are not always so clearcut, as they often appear to combine private and official duties.
The Voting Bloc Argument Conflates the North with the Muslim North
Kperogi writes that “63.6 percent of Tinubu’s 8,805,420 votes came from the North.” This number, taken at face value, frames the entire argument. A president who got most of his votes from one region is excluding that region. But the 63.6 percent figure aggregates the Christian Middle Belt, the Hausa-Fulani core, Borno and Yobe (where the APC has long had organic strength independent of Tinubu), and Kwara and Kogi (whose voting behaviour is shaped by Saraki-era and Bello-era dynamics that have nothing to do with northern Muslim consolidation).
When Kperogi later writes that “the Muslim North isn’t politically invincible” and that to defeat it one needs the South plus “Christian North and a sprinkling of the margins of the Muslim North,” he is implicitly conceding that the 63.6 percent was not a Muslim-North bloc vote. It was a coalition. But he has already spent the column treating it as if it were. The Christian Middle Belt voters who delivered Plateau, southern Kaduna, southern Borno and parts of Adamawa are folded into “the North” when it suits the indictment, and quietly separated out when the electoral strategy section needs them to be a distinct constituency.
This matters because the prescription at the end (galvanise the South, the Christian North, and the margins of the Muslim North) is precisely what Tinubu’s coalition arithmetic appears, by the column’s own evidence, to be attempting. The Shettima pick, Remi Tinubu’s outreach to northern Christians, the Wike alliance, the courting of southern minorities through ministerial slots; these are the building blocks of exactly the anti-Muslim-North coalition Kperogi describes as the only viable path to defeating it. Tinubu is not stupidly alienating his base. He appears to be rebuilding a different base. The column never engages with this possibility, which is the most interesting strategic reading of the appointments it laments.
“The North Remembers” and the Question of What Is Actually Owed
There is a deeper political-philosophical issue the column dances around without confronting. The implicit normative claim is that Tinubu owes the North something proportional to its electoral contribution. But Nigerian federal practice has never operated on a straightforward votes-in, appointments-out basis. The federal character principle, the zoning conventions, and the geopolitical balancing of the six zones are all designed precisely to prevent vote-share from becoming the metric of inclusion, because that logic would entrench the demographic dominance of the North in perpetuity.
If Tinubu’s appointments breach federal character, the indictment should be made on those grounds, not on the grounds that the North did not get its money’s worth for its votes. Kperogi gestures at the Southeast exclusion in a single sentence (“His studied representational exclusion of the Southeast is already well established”) but the column’s emotional and argumentative weight sits entirely on the northern grievance. A more analytically rigorous version of this piece would treat the Southeast exclusion as the more constitutionally serious failure and the northern marginalisation as a political miscalculation. Kperogi inverts the priority, and the inversion is not defended.
The Silence on Wike
The Wike-shaped hole in this column is conspicuous. Nyesom Wike is named once, in passing, as the exception that proves the southern-minority rule. But the FCT Minister has accumulated a portfolio of influence (over Abuja’s land bureaucracy, over PDP defections, over the security architecture of the capital) that arguably exceeds what most ministers in any recent administration have wielded. If the thesis is that power has been concentrated in a Lagos-Yoruba clique, Wike’s prominence is a serious anomaly. If the thesis is that power has been concentrated in a small Tinubu loyalist circle regardless of geography, then “Lagos boys” is the wrong frame and the column needs a different argument. Either way, Wike deserves more than a cursory mention. Other southern minorities in government includes Festus Keyamo, Abubakar Momoh, Heineken Lokpobiri and Ekperikpe Ekpo. Appointments in Nigeria has to have federal characters. It is not how well known the people in government are that matters. Instead, it is the portfolios they hold.
The Closing Move: From Analysis to Prophecy
The final paragraphs slide from electoral analysis (“what Tinubu’s 2027 electoral game plan is”) into something darker: “Whatever it is, it can’t be a legitimate electoral victory.” This is a substantial accusation, that the 2027 election will be rigged, smuggled in as the logical conclusion of the appointment analysis. It does not follow. A president might pursue a flawed electoral strategy and still win or lose legitimately. The leap to predicted illegitimacy requires evidence about INEC, the security agencies, BVAS protocols, the judiciary, and the conduct of off-cycle elections since 2023. None of that is offered. The column lets the rhetorical momentum carry the reader across an evidentiary gap.
What the Column Gets Right, Notwithstanding
It is worth being clear about what survives the critique. The institutional case against the Famadewa appointment, that it duplicates the NSA’s mandate and muddies the chain of command, is sound and important. The observation that Tinubu has not invoked Section 145 even once is factually correct and worth interrogating. The Lagos-centric character of the inner circle is real and well-documented elsewhere.
The problem is not that Kperogi has no case. It is that the case he has is being asked to bear more weight than it can carry, and the strongest version of his argument, the alleged federal character violations, the institutional incoherence of duplicative security offices, is buried beneath a weaker version premised on northern grievance arithmetic and inferential leaps about Famadewa’s ethnic role.
A sharper column would have led with the constitutional argument, treated the northern marginalisation as one symptom among several, and resisted the temptation to translate Yoruba appointee into ethnic surveillance without harder evidence than a duplicative job description. As written, the piece will satisfy readers who already share its priors and confirm to sceptics that Nigerian political commentary too often substitutes ethnic accounting for institutional analysis.
Previous articles from Kperogi that are relevant:
Fulanisation of the North by the South
oyebode.com 