There is a style of politics that matured in Lagos under the long shadow of Bola Tinubu: the calculated use of structure, thugs, administrative chokeholds, and the quiet message that opposition is not merely an adversary but an existential threat to be squeezed.
In 2023 it was visible in the selective traffic management that cleared roads for APC convoys while opposition movements were disrupted, in the pressure on markets and parks, and in the post-election targeting of non-indigenes after Peter Obi’s unexpected strength in the state.
That was not an aberration. It was the machine operating as designed.
That same logic is no longer confined to Lagos. Ahead of 2027, the pattern has escalated into open warnings from governors and their agents that opposition candidates should stay away or face consequences.
-In Ebonyi, Governor Francis Nwifuru has told local government chairmen that failure to deliver their areas for the APC will cost them their seats and has spoken of dealing with opponents mercilessly.
-In Borno a commissioner has warned that fingers could be cut for those who refuse the party.
-In the FCT a council chairman has declared that residents must back the APC or leave.
-In Benue, Peter Obi’s convoy was blocked by youths chanting for him to go back while he attempted a visit linked to killings in Yelwata.
These are not isolated slips. They are the operationalization of a doctrine in which the ruling party treats the country as an extension of its controlled territory.
APC figures were the first movers in this round. The party controls the presidency, most governorships, and the bulk of local structures. When those in power decide that opposition visits are provocations to be met with roadblocks, threats of removal, or declarations of persona non grata, they are not responding to violence; they are manufacturing the conditions for it.
Opposition parties that push back are reacting to an environment already made hostile. The assertion by the President, Tinubu that “all is fair in politics,” not only offered from the highest office, functions less as a description of competition than as cover for subordinates who hear permission.
Rivers State supplies the clearest illustration of the method. The intervention there has not been neutral mediation.
It has involved the deployment of federal leverage, assembly manoeuvres, conditions on tenure, and the installation of preferred outcomes under the cover of peace deals and emergency measures.
Access to the state’s resources and political machinery has been managed through alliances that subordinate local accountability to external calculation.
The excuses offered—stability, party discipline, anti-corruption—are thin when measured against the consistent result: control of the purse and the structures that feed it.
This is the Lagos template applied to a resource-rich state that did not previously operate under that particular godfather arrangement.
The precedent is poisonous. If every governor can decide which candidates may enter their state, which rallies may proceed, and which local officials must deliver results or be removed, competitive elections cease to exist in any meaningful sense.
Nigeria is not a collection of fiefdoms. It is a federation of people who move, trade, marry, and vote across state lines.
When ruling-party machines treat outsiders as interlopers and opposition as an infection to be quarantined, they accelerate the very fractures the country has spent decades papering over.
The amalgamated unity already carries enough flaws—ethnicity, religion, regional suspicion—without deliberate political exclusion layered on top.
Tinubu’s reputation as master strategist was before though to have been built on patience, alliances, and the gradual capture of institutions in Lagos.
If the current method of threats, selective access, and the export of thuggish control is what that title now means, then other states have every reason to reject it.
They managed their politics, however imperfectly, before this style arrived. They do not need Lagos hooliganism as the price of national alignment.
Governors who copy the playbook are not demonstrating strength; they are advertising insecurity and inviting backlash that will not stay confined to their borders.
Nigeria’s diversity is not a problem to be solved by silencing opponents in their own states. It is the condition in which any durable politics must operate.
The alternative is a contest of local machines in which the side that controls the police, the parks, and the threats simply declares victory in advance.
That is not strategy. It is the slow dismantling of the remaining space in which citizens can still choose.
The call is straightforward: stop exporting the Lagos method. The rest of the country was not waiting to be improved by it.
-Pamela O.
Daily Buzzwire
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