President Bola Tinubu formally launched his re-election campaign on Saturday in Kaduna, in northern Nigeria, asking voters to return him to office in the election on January 16. By midday, thousands of supporters of his All Progressives Congress had filled much of the 10,000 capacity Ranchers Bees Stadium. Thank you for this massive showing up. It is a promise. Come 2027, January 16, you must go out massively and elect me again, Tinubu, 74, told the crowd.
His challengers are familiar: former vice president Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, who finished second and third in 2023. The campaign is likely to be dominated by the economy and security, and Tinubu’s pitch is that his reforms are beginning to pay off. Since 2023 he has scrapped fuel subsidies and devalued the naira, measures credited with improving public finances, foreign reserves and investor sentiment.
The cost side of that record is the opposition’s case. The reforms have fuelled Nigeria’s worst cost of living crisis in a generation, and petrol cost about 1,400 naira a litre in Lagos and Abuja in September and as much as 1,500 naira in parts of the north. Tinubu dismissed complaints about hunger and poverty by blaming his rivals: they created the hunger, they created the poverty, we are trying to eradicate it. An Atiku campaign spokesperson called that either delusion or a staggering case of political amnesia.
Kaduna was a deliberate choice of launch city: a northern crowd for a president whose reform programme is judged most harshly where fuel prices bite hardest. Whether the argument that pain precedes payoff holds through January is the central question of the campaign.