Politics, in theory, is meant to be the management of collective hope. In Nigeria, however, it increasingly resembles the management of personal survival. Offices are no longer treated as temporary platforms for service, but as strategic shelters from irrelevance, investigation, or economic uncertainty. Public power has become largely private. Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the endless migration of politicians from one office to another, carrying ambition the way nomads carry luggage.
I had just returned from a week-long conference and was preparing to enjoy the quiet relief of a Friday evening when the news flashed across my phone: Abubakar Malami had obtained the nomination form to contest the 2027 governorship election in Kebbi State under the African Democratic Congress.
I had just returned from a week-long conference and was preparing to enjoy the quiet relief of a Friday evening when the news flashed across my phone: Abubakar Malami had obtained the nomination form to contest the 2027 governorship election in Kebbi State under the African Democratic Congress. His declaration was dramatic in tone and moral urgency. Kebbi, he argued, had collapsed under the weight of poverty, insecurity, failing healthcare, youth unemployment, and educational decline. He painted a portrait of a state abandoned by leadership and paralysed by institutional neglect. Reading him, one might almost imagine he had spent the last decade in exile from Nigerian governance rather than at the very centre of federal power.
This is what makes Nigerian politics such a theatre of astonishing amnesia. Malami did not speak as a man detached from the machinery that produced many of the conditions he now condemns. He spoke as a former attorney general under the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, a government whose record on justice, accountability, and institutional reform remains contested.
One struggles to identify any transformative judicial legacy attached to his years in office. Yet he now speaks with the moral freshness of an outsider arriving to rescue a broken system. That contradiction is the real story.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt once warned that the gravest danger in politics emerges when public life loses its relationship with truth and responsibility. In such moments, power no longer serves society; it serves itself. That observation feels painfully relevant in contemporary Nigeria, where many politicians speak as though governance happened around them, never through them. It is difficult not to ask whether the pursuit of office in Nigeria has become less about leadership and more about insulation. The governorship, the senate, ministerial appointments, and party realignments increasingly appear as stations in a long career of political self-preservation. Immunity becomes a strategy while influencing chameleons themselves into insurance.
Nowhere is this obsession more visible than in the Nigerian Senate. In Ogun State, where I come from, the Senate increasingly resembles a retirement destination for former governors. The current governor, Prince Dapo Abiodun, is positioning himself for the Senate. His deputy, Alhaja Noimot Salako-Oyedele, is also linked to senatorial ambitions for the Ogun West Senatorial district. Otunba Gbenga Daniel is already in the red chamber and wants to return (where he is wrestling the ticket with the sitting governor), while Ibikunle Amosun has been there before and wants to return again. At this rate, one begins to wonder whether governance in Ogun is only a preparatory school for senatorial ambition.
Should one even excuse Governor Abiodun’s senatorial interest as the familiar next step in Nigeria’s political conveyor belt? But the return ambitions of both Otunba Gbenga Daniel and Senator Ibikunle Amosun raise a more, equally, unsettling question. What exactly is it about the red chamber that continues to draw former governors back into its orbit long after they have occupied the highest office in their states? Is it legislative passion, political relevance, institutional influence, or something far less noble? Whatever the answer may be, the pattern has become too consistent to ignore.
Kayode Badmus, a friend with whom I live here in the UK, once joked that the blueprint for Ogun State’s development must be stashed somewhere within the National Assembly, where it is only accessible after one has first occupied the hallowed halls of Oke Mosan. It is a joke that carries the weight of an uncomfortable truth. Since 1999, the political leadership has consistently seen the Governor’s office as a transit camp for the Senate. Now, we see this contagion in Imo. Governor Hope Uzodimma is already campaigning for the 2027 Senate race. Coming just two years and four months into his second term, his entry into the race raises a stinging question: Is this an abandonment of a sovereign, statewide mandate in favour of a localised, sectional one? Does the Governor truly not know what he wants, or is there an esoteric, unstated motive behind eyeing the Senate before his current seat is even cold?
If a governor, vested with executive authority, direct access to state resources, and immense constitutional power, could not fundamentally transform the condition of the people while in office, what exactly becomes possible in the Senate that was impossible in Government House? Is this truly an extension of public service, or simply a continuation of political relevance?
The pattern extends beyond Ogun. Across Nigeria, former governors — Aliyu Wamakko and Aminu Waziri Tambuwal of Sokoto; former Gombe State governor Danjuma Goje; former Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello; former Delta State governor Ifeanyi Okowa; former Abia State governors Theodore Orji and Orji Uzor Kalu; former Gombe State governor Ibrahim Dankwambo; former Benue State governor Samuel Ortom; former Kebbi State governors Adamu Aliero and Abdulaziz Yari; former Plateau State governor Simon Lalong; and former Taraba State governor Jolly Nyame — routinely seek senatorial seats (and currently want to return) immediately after leaving office. The Senate has become less a legislative institution and more a sanctuary for political veterans unwilling to exit the stage. Some genuinely possess legislative value and administrative experience. Others simply refuse to imagine life outside power. This is why Nigerian politics often feels trapped in circulation rather than renewal. The same faces rotate through the same institutions under different titles while the underlying conditions of governance remain stubbornly unchanged.
Yet perhaps the most fascinating feature of Nigerian politics is not even the pursuit of office. It is the complete fluidity of political identity. Parties now function less as ideological homes and more as temporary bus stops. Politicians move between them with astonishing ease, carrying neither philosophical consistency nor embarrassment. Principles are exchanged as casually as campaign posters.
