‘I am Jagaban, They Can’t Scare Me’, By Lasisi Olagunju

“Even a corpse put in a coffin will defeat Tinubu in 2027.” ADC chieftain and northern politician, Buba Galadima, gave that promise at the ADC convention last Tuesday. He was wrong. The corpse, the coffin and the carpenter will be buried by Hurricane Tinubu in the election of next year, unless…

Unless what?

Unless they remember that he is Jagaban Borgu and are ready to pay the price in full. Unless those who want to stop the chief warrior understand that noise is not power; that unity and crowd are not synonyms; and that a patient hunter, with quiet menace and inevitability, always defeats a shouting pack.

Buba Galadima said a corpse would defeat Tinubu next year. He must have read too much of Brian McGrath’s ‘Dead Men Running’. Through the lens of McGrath, we see American politics offering rare curiosities of the dead winning elections. The man lists four notable cases: Clement Miller (1962), Hale Boggs and Nick Begich (1972), and Mel Carnahan (2000)—all victims of plane crashes. Because of legal technicalities, their names remained on ballots after their death. And buoyed by sympathy, they all defeated living opponents. But those were American accidents of circumstance. In our politics, the dead do not run—and they certainly do not win; it is the living, daredevil, organised, and strategic who take power.

Generous Tinubu has already shown his opponents the magic in his pouch. He does not fear the living—and has no patience for ghosts that wander into his path. That is why he is a ‘General.’

It is twenty years, two months ago that Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s friend, the late Emir of Borgu, Alhaji Haliru Dantoro, made him the Jagaba of Borgu. Conferred on February 26, 2006, the title translates to ‘Leader of Warriors’ or ‘Chief Warrior’.

It is easy for me to understand the full import of the title. It has a parallel in Yoruba war hierarchy; its counterpart is Balógun (ọba ológun), the king of warriors. The Balogun used to be above the law; even his son was never wrong. Where a child of Balogun was punished for established wrongs, anarchy reigned.

Those who know told me that the Borgu title symbolises strength, influence, and leadership. My friend, a Hausa linguist, informed me that Jagaba is derived from Hausa: ja (pull) and gaba (front).

Last week in Abuja, the president reached for his war title and flung it at his enemies. Raising his 2027 war banner, he bellowed: “Me? They want to scare me off? It’s a lie. I am Jagaban.”

In that Borgu where Tinubu is the chief warrior, before the white man came, warfare “was a serious business…To an average Borgawa, a military defeat meant death; a Borgawa would never allow himself to be enslaved and would do anything to win, even if the war was prolonged or the country was under a siege.” There is a very rich literature on the wars and warriors of Borgu. One of them is a 1995 seminal piece authored by Professor of African History, Olayemi Akinwumi. The above quote belongs to him.

If you complain that the president has centralised power and the privileges that come with it, know that where he is chief warrior today, a few centuries ago, the ancestors of those who made him Jagaba “controlled and monopolised all the resources coming into the various states” of Borgu. They did it and dared the cheated to talk. That is what history says, I did not concoct it.

So, if the king made you a hawk, chickens must not feel safe again. The Jagaba uses the magic of Borgu for political banditry in Abuja. It is his war standard.

If I can afford it, I will point out a sharp and inconvenient irony: Borgu’s chief warrior has not been able to save Borgu from the surge of bandit attacks. Media reports say banditry has resulted in at least 42 deaths in Borgu between late December 2025 and early January 2026. The land of the “chief warrior” bleeds while its title is deployed in political theatre at the centre.

History deepens my conviction that this warrior president has crowned himself as king of self-help; audacious: Nineteenth-century accounts were less flattering. In ‘Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa’ (1829), Hugh Clapperton described Borgu in harsh terms as a land feared by its neighbours because of its uncontrolled banditry. Governor Ballay of Dahomey said he invaded Borgu because of the “incorrigible” bandits ruling its everywhere. Akinwumi got these from C. Hirshfield’s ‘The Diplomacy of Partition: Britain, France and the Creation.’

The warrior in the Villa reminding his enemies that he is Jagaban Borgu should serve enough caution and notice. Àwí fún ẹni kó tó dá ní, àgbà ìjàkadì ni. Bola Ahmed Tinubu spoke last week like a master wrestler—he has warned before the 2027 bout.

The Jagaba invocation calls up a history of war, a memory of dominance, and dread. It is a language of power, ancient, masculine, defiant. Both the title and the giver evoke memories of fear and victory.

Marching to 2027, Buba Galadima needs more than a corpse to scare and fall the Jagaba.

I also heard ADC’s national secretary, ex-Governor Rauf Aregbesola, saying at the party’s convention that in Nigeria, “there will be no coronation” next year. He was wrong too. The strongman has bought crowns for himself; he has also bought kingmakers who will crown him.

And I have my reason for saying this. Did the opposition listen to Tinubu that same Tuesday in the same Abuja? With a snide smile, the man said: “Senate President, I will send you to the other side to represent me, and then you can scatter them anyway you like. They’re confused.” Those words were uttered at a public event.

I thought the statement was a Freudian slip; a leak on what the strongman does to opposition parties. But a friend said, “No. I don’t think it is a Freudian slip. It is èmi ni; taa ni ó mú mi? (it is I; who will arrest me?).” True. Who?

On Thursday, the president doubled down. He looked in the mirror, saw the battle gear he had chosen, and approved of what he saw. Bold, even boastful, Bola Ahmed Tinubu told 36 state coordinators of his Renewed Hope Ambassadors at the Presidential Villa, Abuja: “Me? They want to scare me off? It’s a lie. I am Jagaban. I have been through this path before, and if I have to come back over and over again, I will do the same thing.”

Truly earthy, defiant, unmistakably ‘Jagaban.’ There was no hint of retreat in that declaration. No suggestion of fear. Only the certainty of a man who believes he understands both the terrain and the traps laid upon it.

And there are traps.

When he said “if I have to come back over and over again, I will do the same thing,” you would want to ask: do what again?

Hear Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the same event: “If they (the opposition) don’t want to see the hope in the roads we’ve built, in the children we’ve raised, in the economy we’re growing, we’ll lend them Bola’s glasses. One thing you need from me is a promise that I won’t run away from their fight.”

In the inverted world of our president, the hungry need “glasses” to see food in the waste bin; the hunted need “glasses” to feel safe in the grave.

It is a curious theatre: a beleaguered people asked to borrow corrective lenses of blind power to confirm the evidence of their own eyes.

That is what bats do: when the heat is on, they hang upside down—and call it balance.

Apart from Jagaban Borgu, Tinubu’s other ‘title’ is his acronym, BAT. Like his winged namesake, I should expect him to hear what others cannot hear. But power has powerful earplugs. Surrounded by sycophants, this president hears only applause, not distress.

Science tells us something useful here. Bats do not see their way through the dark; they hear it. They emit sharp sounds and navigate by the returning echoes. Take away that hearing, and the hunter becomes helpless. Early experiments from 18th century Italian priest and biologist, Lazzaro Spallanzani, to modern biosonar research, proved it: blind the bat, it still flies perfectly; plug its ears, it crashes into the night.

That is the danger of insulated power. When a leader loses the echo of the street, the hunger, the anger, the quiet despair, he begins to move with confidence but without direction. And our man has been showing so much of this, celebrating “distance without direction”, apology to Srilata Zaheer (2012) and his colleagues.

The president says no one can scare him from his 2027 goal and he “won’t run away from their fight.” Someone should tell him that it is not fear that unseats power; it is misdirection. A bat that cannot hear will still fly boldly—until it hits the wall.

But before hitting the wall, this BAT thinks he has conquered the forest. And he has proofs:

How many of the major parties, for instance, will be fit and proper to submit their electronic membership registers to INEC before the deadline imposed by the amended Electoral Act?

If a party has no recognised leadership, can it submit anything at all? And without a recognised register lodged with INEC, can it lawfully field candidates?

The law says it cannot.

A retired president of the Court of Appeal hinted at this recently; the old man flew the kite, as it were. He said someone should not have been allowed to be on the ballot in 2023 because the person was not a member of the party that fielded him. That may be a kite for what is coming. Many watched it glide overhead and did not grasp its meaning. We still are too dumb to get it.

All of us asking Bola Ahmed Tinubu to be nice and good are naive. We are not being nice to him. The man has spent too long in the streets to mistake goodness for a survival strategy. Leo Tolstoy, writer and philosopher, drew a hard line between ambition and goodness: “In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.” Our man knows as much as Tolstoy knew.

I am surprised that the opposition people and the whole of the Nigerian people do not know that this is the moment of coup de grâce. Chief Obafemi Awolowo called it a “judelex coup.” In our language, it is simpler: one very ambitious man holding the yam and the knife.

There is a story by Aesop about a small bird and justice. In the story, the bird builds her nest on a courthouse—a place where people go to seek justice. But before her babies can fly, a snake comes and eats them.

When the bird returns and finds her nest empty, she cries bitterly. Her tears are not just because she has lost her babies, but more importantly because the wrong happened to her in a place built to protect the innocent and deliver justice.

Anyone who has conquered all would vibrate the way the president vibrated throughout last week. I think about what Nigerians have as their INEC and what remains of their courts.

Presidency. INEC. The courts. Today, in the mind of the majority, they form a triangle, deadlier than the Bermuda Triangle. A combo of the three has a simple meaning: victory for the man in power; defeat for those outside it, no matter what figure they have.

Our tragedy is not that the dead failed to warn us. It is that we, the living, failed to listen. We ignored their truths, but time has a way of vindicating the ignored.

A part of the people in power today, and a part of the opposition claim their roots in Chief Awolowo’s politics. Have they ever asked how Awo would have described or reacted to what is going on today?

Fortunately, Awo did not leave us guessing. He spoke clearly, clinically, prophetically. On Sunday, 27 January 1980, at an event organised by the Tribune Group to mark the 25th anniversary of Free Universal Primary Education in the old Western Region, he delivered a speech that now reads like a commentary on our present politics.

The speech is published in ‘Path to Nigerian Greatness’ (1981). Listen to him:

“It will be agreed that when someone who is a party to a dispute before a court, unconstitutionally and illegitimately took part in appointing, or indeed, actually appointed, the presiding judge who is also responsible for picking the other members of the judicial panel, that person has successfully staged a judicial coup. When someone who is one of five candidates at an election has the electoral commission, responsible for the conduct of the election, completely on his side to the extent that the commission was prepared to do and indeed did all kinds of infamous manipulations to ensure his victory, then he has successfully staged an electoral coup. When, furthermore, one of five candidates has all the forces of, plus all the instruments of coercion possessed by, the executive behind him to guarantee his victory by hook or by crook, then that candidate has achieved a successful executive coup.”

That combination in the hands of one man forms a system where outcomes are predetermined and democracy is quietly strangled.

Indeed, Chief Awolowo brilliantly put the three together: judiciary, electoral commission, executive. He called what they did together a “judelex coup de grâce”—or simply, a judelex coup: a fusion of the judicial, electoral and executive arms of government in the service of power.

And now, ahead of 2027, a dangerous mood is spreading. People are surrendering before the contest even begins. They say nothing will change. That the game is fixed. That participation is a mere ritual, not a pathway to anything different from the pain of the present. Plato, reflecting on power and the masses, observed: “Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

Those who are not surrendering are boasting without planning.

I wish I could tell all the sides that democracies do not die only by manipulation; they die by abandonment and by lack of plan by ‘the other side.’

Our husbands know that this moment, as hardship bites, they can sustain power by loyalty, by structure, and strategy. And they are working hard at it, with money, threats and promise of electoral heists that disarm the people.

In America, where we copied this painful democracy, voters often hold the president directly responsible for their economic well-being. In 1932, Herbert Hoover was swept out of office after failing to arrest the Great Depression. In 1980, Jimmy Carter paid the price for stagflation and soaring interest rates. In 1992, George H. W. Bush lost despite victory in the Gulf War. His presidency was undone by recession and a broken tax pledge.

Nigeria is not America. Here, suffering does not always translate into electoral punishment. Petrol prices soar. Living costs rise. Misery deepens. Yet the mandate holds often for those who defend the very policies that worsen the pain. We endure our tormentors; sometimes, we even reward them. Niccolò Machiavelli reminds us of the ruler’s advantage: “Men are so simple… that he who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

Those who shouted against misbehaviour in the past are abusing those shouting against it today. They are a proof that George Orwell is right: “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” They question our patriotism; they wonder why we do not use their glasses to see.