Is Steve Osuji a Servant of the Yam God or of Peter Obi?
Steve Osuji’s 2027 Prophetic Fantasy
By Dr. Sunday Dare
9/14/20264 min read
There is a familiar and wearying style of Nigerian commentary that confuses bitterness with insight, partisanship with analysis, and insult with argument. Steve Osuji’s essay on the 2027 presidential contest belongs firmly in that tradition. It is heavy on condescension, exaggeration, and contempt for institutional facts. It presents an incumbent already doomed and an opposition figure already crowned. Once the rhetoric is stripped away, what remains is wishful thinking dressed up as political diagnosis.
Osuji’s piece is not a sober reading of power, votes, or policy. It is a symptom of a political habit that refuses to face the hard choices Nigeria must make after years of managed decline. His claims need to be tested against evidence, not applause.
The Myth of a Messianic Third Force
Osuji’s central project is to elevate Peter Obi into a political miracle: a man who supposedly “won” 2023 until the result was “glitched” away. That story comforts the opposition. It does not survive basic electoral arithmetic.
A candidate who failed to meet the constitutional requirement of a broad national spread, and who performed poorly across large parts of the North and Middle Belt, cannot credibly claim a national mandate. Strength in a few urban pockets of anger is not the same thing as a nationwide victory.
Nor does party-hopping become “organic consistency” simply because a commentator says so. Moving from the PDP to the Labour Party, and now, by some accounts, toward a still-forming vehicle such as the NDC, is not proof of principle. It is proof of restlessness. Osuji treats Obi’s dislike of conventional party structures as a virtue. It is more accurately an evasion of organization, debate, and nationwide accountability. A politician who prefers social-media fervor to institutional work is not a revolutionary. He is a populist riding a temporary wave of hardship.
Osuji’s treatment of other possible contenders is equally revealing. Donald Duke, Omoyele Sowore, Adewole Adebayo and others are waved away as “spoilers” and “clowns.” That is not analysis. It is intolerance. Anyone who will not kneel to the preferred candidate is expelled from seriousness. That is partisan gatekeeping, not journalism.
Tinubu’s Record Versus Populist Panic
Osuji describes the Tinubu administration as an “abysmal failure” while skating past the wreckage inherited on 29 May 2023. For years, Nigerian governments refused to confront two sources of national bleeding: an unsustainable fuel subsidy and a multiple-exchange-rate system that rewarded rent-seekers. Popular delay was chosen over painful repair. President Tinubu chose the opposite course from the first day.
That choice does not make every outcome good. It does mean that any honest appraisal must begin with the reforms themselves.
First, fiscal repair. Ending the opaque subsidy stopped a vast leakage of public money. Unifying the foreign-exchange market weakened a parallel-market racket. Revenues to federal, state, and local governments rose, giving sub-national governments more room to spend on their own projects.
Second, macroeconomic signals. Official figures cited by the administration put real GDP growth at 4.43 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2026. Rating agencies such as Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P have issued upgrades tied to those reforms. External reserves are said to have crossed $54.08 billion, their highest level in nearly 18 years, while the debt service-to-revenue ratio has improved from its earlier danger zone.
Third, infrastructure. The government points to public-private partnerships and the Renewed Hope Infrastructure Development Fund, including work on the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, the Sokoto-Badagry Highway, rail upgrades, and power interventions. The claim is not that every project is finished. It is that the state has shifted from phantom announcements toward large physical works.
Fourth, social cushions. NELFUND student loans, Credicorp and MSME support, and a new national minimum wage are presented as attempts to ease the shock of adjustment. Whether they are sufficient is a fair argument. That they exist is part of the record Osuji prefers to ignore.
Fifth, security and enforcement. Inherited insurgency, banditry, and kidnapping have not vanished. The administration argues that the armed forces have kept pressure on those networks and that the EFCC has been given a freer hand against illicit finance. Progress here is uneven. Denial of the problem is not the government’s case; denial of any effort is Osuji’s.
Vacation as Panic Politics
Osuji’s sneer that a presidential working vacation means the president is “on the run” or “incommunicado” is political theatre, not statecraft. A head of government is not competent only when seated in Abuja. Diplomacy, investment travel, and scheduled rest are ordinary parts of executive life. Turning a trip into a rumor of flight is a sign of opposition agitation, not evidence of collapse.
Substance Against Slogan
Osuji and writers like him can keep composing obituaries for a government still in office and coronations for candidates still short of a national coalition. They can treat every hardship as proof of unique villainy and every reform as invisible.
Voters, however, eventually judge results more than rhetoric. Governance is not won by moral display or economic slogans. It is won or lost on decisions that are costly in the short run and consequential in the long run. The Tinubu government has chosen confrontation with subsidy, exchange-rate distortion, and fiscal drift. If those reforms continue to show up in growth, reserves, infrastructure, and institutional repair, the 2027 argument will not be settled by prophecy. It will be settled by performance.
Forget the espresso. Smell the coffee.
Dr. Sunday Dare
Special Adviser to the President on Media and Public Communications_