Tinubu’s first term is effectively over. His report card is ready. His wife already hails him as the architect of modern Nigeria. The National Assembly worships at his feet. This is the closest Nigeria has come to one-man rule. The irony is unmistakable.

A former opposition firebrand now presides over a system where dissent is handled like  treachery and politics is played for  crude power consolidation. What began as bold reforms has quietly morphed into a relentless  tightening of the grip on every lever of power, leaving little room for genuine debate or alternative voices. The joke is on the system. 

He enhanced the macroeconomic outlook by withdrawing subsidies. That move was a brutal but overdue fiscal correction—the old regime was bleeding trillions into corruption and smuggling. Fuel prices soared, the naira plunged, and the cost of living became unbearable for millions. Yet the reforms have been less about stopping sleaze and more about squeezing the poor while gathering revenues. Palliatives have often arrived too late or disappeared into connected pockets.

If he had first reformed his own lifestyle, tightened government spending, and handed the poor less misery and more hope through genuine investments, perhaps the country would have  already been named after him. That’s how much  he now owns it. Beyond tariffs and taxes, his other “achievements” include the brazen concentration of power in the hands of the Yoruba hands; the systematic destruction of the opposition—leaving the country a literal one-party state; and the open capitulation to terrorists and corruption. Nigeria has never been more insecure but the greatest threat to its existence could be the slide into a one party dictatorship.  On any honest democratic scale, the nation has slumped.

Tinubu’s priority is political conquest. Given time, he might yet eye the presidency of a United States of Africa. For him, unity probably  means the erosion  of  opposition and national unity  simply means every governor in one party, lapping milk at his feet. He had  once insisted that democracy without a strong and contending opposition was a sham. Today he has become Gnassingbé Eyadéma in all but name. He loves a democracy where governors are railroaded into the ruling party and opposition platforms are ruined by moles and judges. Critics say his undoing is he doesn’t know where or when to stop. Perhaps the odds he faced as a child make exceptional daring.  After making 2027 a walkover, will he be foolish enough to pack up and go in 2031? Nigerian democracy is in clear jeopardy.

At the recent Iftar dinner, Tinubu declared himself a die-hard democrat. He is certainly a die-hard politician. But since Paul Biya is also called a democrat, we can safely crown Tinubu the father of democracy in Nigeria. Many of the country’s childish governors will nod in agreement. Why not? Democracy has become a nebulous concept. Could Shagari ever have dared to usurp the UPN? The public was once enthralled by NADECO activism and its slogans. Now the masses have seen Tinubu and some of his colleagues. Cynical critics believe the country  was duped. NADECO sold the sovereign national conference as a cure-all panacea. Looking back, many of its foot soldiers appear no different from the megaphone-wielding patent-medicine dealers at Oshodi bus stop, hawking brightly coloured capsules for Staphylococcus aureus.

Hausa-Fulani hegemony was once blamed for all the nation’s woes. The reign of mediocrity. The Yoruba hegemony Tinubu has imposed brazenly is, in his eyes, the triumph of merit. Legacy will not be defined by what a leader tells his  friends at sumptuous Iftar dinners. Propaganda has a short lifespan. The taste of the pudding is in the eating. After one full term, security and electricity have worsened. Despite promises, the national grid still collapses frequently, generation hovering around 3,000-4,300 MW amid massive gas debts, leaving industries crippled and homes in darkness.  Moral decadence is the chief of all handicaps.

The Zamfara governor once accused the presidency of corrupt acquisition of opposition governors. He rejected the filthy offers his colleagues swallowed. A presidency literally buying and bullying opposition governors into the ruling party. With APC now controlling about 32 of 36 states and the PDP reduced to just a political vegetable, Tinubu can  thump his chest, but that is not development. That  once-recalcitrant governor has now succumbed. It is difficult to tell whether he went for the money or jumped ship because a certain minister, in cahoots with the judiciary, had rendered the opposition party unstable and unviable. The capitulation of yesterday’s whistle-blowers should trouble every Nigerian. The opposition is an indispensable democratic institution.  The  country has been captured.

Tinubu calls himself a die-hard democrat. The democracy he installed in Lagos is a colourful babasope-cracy. He can casually, single-handedly—or underhandedly through the subterfuge of the GAC—overrule the governor and the state leqgislature. Once he is in control , freedom becomes superfluous . When his men chased Igbo voters away from polling booths in his home state, he said nothing. His democratic credentials are sacrosanct.  Perhaps anyone who dared bruise the ego of a deity deserved the wrath of God and man. His silence wasn’t the only evidence of  complicity. He appointed some of the bigots  to high office.

Democracy is a die-hard system. It has survived impostors and despots. Its longevity also derives from its ability to retain its identity even after it has been disfigured beyond recognition. Even when all that remains is wretched babasope-cracy, democracy lives on like the ghost of a man denied a proper funeral. Perhaps if democracy did not have nine lives, die-hard democrats like Paul Biya would have long faced excommunication or abandoned it. But with democracy now bastardised, it is difficult to fault Tinubu’s claim—even when  his stooges in the National Assembly compel him to seek a third term.

Once democracy loses the power to force accountability, it should die. It should die to be born again. Because hanging around like Onyirionwu  only legitimises and fosters dictatorships. Nigerians deserve more than this hollow shell. The time for genuine rebirth is now, before the ghost of true democracy fades forever and the nation slips deeper into one-man rule disguised as progress.