Politicians uniting behind Tinubu ahead 2027 is a reminder of the days of Abacha —Dele Farotimi

•‘From age 16, I knew I would clash with Nigeria’s ruling class someday’

Popular lawyer and activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, in this interview by SAM NWAOKO, shares his opinion on the 26th anniversary of Nigeria’s return to democratic rule, and on a number of other issues of interest.

It was 26 years on Thursday, May 29, 2025, since Nigeria began the current democratic experience. It has been a mixture of various emotions. How do you think Nigerians should celebrate the anniversary?

It is delusional to speak of celebrating anything because it is a difficult time which the All Progressives Congress (APC) has brought in bold relief. We should rather be calling for mourning as a collective because there is nothing to celebrate and there is no democracy either.

So, rather than celebrate, we should, like the people of Nineveh, put on our sack clothes? But there are assurances by those at the helm of affairs that things are looking up in the country?

When you look at our reality today in Nigeria, the country has never been more unsafe. Insecurity has never been more rife. The Nigerian people have never been more deliberately divided along ethno-religious lines by those ruining the country while pretending to rule it. So, while they might be busy congratulating themselves that they have never had it so good, they are completely right about that. It has never happened that corruption is strutting around in broad daylight so unashamedly as what we have today. It has never happened in the history of Nigeria that those who have criminal allegations hanging around their necks, persons who were yesterday being hunted for being thieves are today the ones who are at the helm of affairs. So, how can they possibly say anything other than the fact that it has never been so good? It is so good that they are even coalescing together as one because their interests are served as a collective. But it is up to us the victims of their misrule and mis-governance to ask ourselves where we were 20 years ago. Things are so bad today that Nigerians are yearning for Abacha. That is how bad things have become and our democracy has regressed so badly that we are seeing hints of the exact things we were seeing in the last days of Abacha–all the politicians coalescing and acclaiming someone as being the best and nobody else is capable of anything else. So, just as they were coalescing to acclaim Abacha, they are today coalescing, acclaiming Tinubu. The politicians are as one; they cannot have anything against one another but the people who have become as victims to them are the ones who have to be bold enough and look at their objective realities and refuse to be told what is contrary to the evidence of their own senses. If persons are earning less today than they were earning 20 years ago, when the Naira had not been destroyed in real terms; if electricity has become as expensive as it is today while salary has not moved; if the price of petrol has become as prohibitive as it has become today and yet salaries have not moved; life has become so degraded for the people that suicide rates have become astronomical and they are busy clapping for themselves, acclaiming themselves as the best thing since sliced bread, it is for the people to believe the evidence of their own senses and not accept the delusional declarations of the ‘ruining crass’.

As steps towards addressing the misnomer, you have asked Nigerians to make demands of our rulers, that we must demand reforms. Which one do you think should be the best way to start? Beyond sophistry, what are those practical steps we can take to begin to demand these reforms you have suggested?

When I ask people to demand electoral reform, and that is the only thing I have placed in the political agenda in the last year–demanding that we should be asking for electoral reform–I am not so blinded as not to be cognizance of the fact that the political class is not interested in electoral reform. I will explain why: I am asking for electoral reform because that is the pathway to citizenship in Nigeria. If the Nigerian’s vote should count, the politicians would learn to respect the Nigerian but because our votes have never been allowed to count, the politicians have retained the prerogative to do as they please. So, my demand for electoral reform is in actual fact a shortcut to a revolution to make the Nigerian citizens. On the other hand, I do not expect the politicians to accede to electoral reform demand, but it is my belief that it is for the victims to frame the argument and then stand behind their resolve to be free. It is not for the oppressor to hand over freedom on a platter, but if we do not properly identify the core of the struggle for the people, make them to understand that this is the minimum irreducible that they should demand from the system, it becomes impossible to awaken them to the fact of their enslavement. But when we make a just demand for electoral reform, which is centred around a demand for citizenship because of what use are you in a state if you are labelled citizen but you vote has no value? So, if we couch this argument for the people and they come to the understanding of the fact that this has nothing to do with who you are as an ethnic person or as a religious person–it has nothing to do with your ethno-religious affiliations or even your partisan interest, but it is an enduring quality of citizenship to be able to vote for who leads you – so, if we couch it in those terms and these are truthful, honest terms in which this argument may be couched, we now wait to see what the system would do in response to this just demand. If and when the system predictably refuses to give this just demand considerable consideration, then it becomes legitimate for those of us championing this to call the system out and to galvanise the people to confront that system that would have revealed itself as one that is predicated on the slavery of the people and not their citizenship, because it is not beyond the kern for citizens to demand that their votes should count. What else expresses citizenship if you do not have a vote?

One of the things people express worry about is the Nigerian legislature which they see as being far from the ideal, especially with what has been going on of late. Do you see the legislature as one which could help in this cause, can it self-amend?

At the beginning of this interview, you spoke about 26 years of democracy and I was quick to correct you that we are not in a democracy. I was very deliberate. The Yoruba will say when you challenge a cripple whose load is lopsided and not sitting well and he says to you ‘you are looking at the load on my head that is unbalanced, why haven’t you looked at my feet that are crooked’? The argument is this: If the people in the houses of assembly or the National Assembly – be that the House of Reps or Senate – are truly accountable to the people for their presence in that place and their subsequent return in the next election, you will not find them senselessly singing ‘on your mandate we shall stand’. They are not responsible to the people because their powers do not flow from the will of the people. So, when you complain about the irresponsible manner in which the legislators or any strata of our rulership have conducted themselves, you must understand that it is the function of that disconnect, which means that they are divorced from the afflictions of the people. Another Yoruba proverb says ‘how is it the concern of the monkey that the baboon has diarrhea?’ They are not related to us, they don’t care about us. They care only about themselves and that is why you see them congregating together and once they get to the National Assembly, they become one whether you voted them in as Labour legislator or they went in as APC or PDP. It doesn’t matter. The Nigerian ‘ruining crass’ is one. It is the people that are divided. So, that disconnect is borne out of the fact that our votes do not count. If they were responsible to us, they would be more mindful of their conduct and they would be more responsible to the people that elected them. They know that all they need is the sanction of the ruling cabal and then they will get both the INEC and the judiciary to do their will unless we find a way to reform the process or make our own will prevail over their own.

Some politicians are right now coalescing and they say it is a coalition. Do you see this standing on any solid legs or solid ground? Could that be the beginning of a movement that will achieve something for this country?

I have no interest in the congregation of politicians. It does not interest me, it does not excite me. I am unmoved by the congregation of politicians. Nigerian politicians have never been divided. Elections might divide them on account of interests not being taken care of; disappointments felt by people like Nasir El-Rufai – if El-Rufai were to be in Tinubu’s cabinet, he would be busy preaching the gospel of ‘Balablu’ pretty much like you have Wike doing today. He would have been busy preaching. Even those who were violently against Tinubu are today singing the direct opposite of the songs they were singing before. Is it Atiku that was a part of the breakup of the PDP, who went to the APC as one of its founding members and then left the APC to go back to PDP…? It is fine for all these people coming together, politicians will do that but it does not concern me and I do not have interest in their conglomeration.

What would interest me, and what I am excited about and I am working towards is a unification of the victims of Nigeria. Whether they be in the east or in the north or in the west or in the south; whether they be Christians, traditional believers or people who are agnostic or atheists, it shouldn’t matter as long as they are Nigerians and they want the good of Nigeria. I am interested in those kinds of people coming together and finding common cause. But I don’t have interest in politicians coming together. Most of the people coming together are the people I would love to see banked up in jails. I would love to see them coughing up what they have stolen. I would love to see some of them accounting for their crimes, clear crimes. There are some of them that have cases to answer and so, because they are coming together in the name of coalition… no, I am not interested. Those don’t interest me, it is a spectacle to observe for the comical purposes that it serves and sometimes you get information about what is going on merely because of the squabbles among them. Other than that, it is a sideshow that should not interest any serious-minded person who is looking for change in Nigeria. It is how the Nigerian victims unite, that is what should be interesting all of us, not how the politicians unite. If they unite today, you will be shocked to hear that the ones in APC would join them tomorrow. So, what then changes? Nothing changes because the politicians are uniting; it is the victims that need to unite.

You refer to yourself as ‘a victim of Nigeria’ in your bio on X. A typical Nigerian would rather see you as a privileged Nigerian rather than a victim, considering your position in the society, and they would say you are not among the real victims. How would you react to such sentiments?

Those who define life in material terms would think that they are people who are beneficiaries of Nigeria. The reality is that even the biggest thieves in Nigeria enjoying the common wealth are themselves victims, just victims in a different manner. No matter how much money you have in Nigeria, no matter the kind of car you are driving, you are still driving in streets riddled with potholes. If you are driving a Rolls Royce, however rich you may be, you are still driving on the same street rife with insecurity, armed robbery, kidnapping, terrorism, etc. You are still subject to the same ‘accidental discharge’–and I wonder how it can be accidental that a trained person carries a rifle and fires all in the name of seeking to apprehend a person driving through a one-way street. We are all victims of Nigeria. The reality is that we all know it to varying degrees. Even the governor is a victim. He may or may not know it but he is a victim. Eventually, the irresponsible powers that he wields as a governor or as a councillor or as a commissioner or as a member of the House of Reps, senator or even the president, eventually they themselves fall victim to the irresponsible power. The dangerous precedent that is being set in the pursuit of narrow interest would come back to bite everybody in the buttocks.

I label myself a victim of Nigeria and I want people to note that the bio has been there for years. It is not something that happened yesterday, because I have been conscious of my victimhood since I was 16 years old. Once you are living in a place that is not governed by law, you are automatically a victim of power because you become a victim of impunity. Once power is ungoverned by law, impunity governs that space. I became conscious of the fact that impunity governs Nigeria since I was 16 years old. I am now 57, so how can I not describe myself as a victim of Nigeria? I went further to say I am ‘a patriot of an unborn nation’, because if you call yourself a Nigerian patriot and you are not one of those who have stolen this nation blind or my brothers who have taken up jobs in the armed forces idealistically believing that they are in a country that has citizenship, and they are serving a nation; aside from those two¬–one positive and the other exceedingly negative–then nobody has the right to call themselves patriot. How can you be a patriot when you are not citizens? That is the sense in which I call Nigerians victims. Even the ‘ruiners’ are themselves victims.

‘Some privileged victims’ refer to those who are not ‘privileged victims’ as people de-marketing Nigeria, because they are complaining about how the country is being run. How would you advise them in their own victimhood?

This is one of the things that interest me about our country Nigeria. I have noticed over the years that the ‘ruiners’ of Nigeria have never argued against the fact that they have ruined the country or that they are ruining the country. It is usually their victims who are the most vociferous in arguing otherwise. I am saying this because you asked how I would advise them. They are aware of what they are doing, they know. But they are so short-sighted because they have numbered life in terms of wealth. They believe that it is always about material acquisition, ignoring the fact that we are all temporary beings that will pass away with time. So, because their focus is always entirely on the carnal – on how many cars, how many women, how many men, how many houses, how much food, how much wine… 40-year-old whisky–those are the things that take their attention. It becomes very difficult for them to understand that being mortal, they should pursue immortal goals based on clear vision so that when they are gone, they may be remembered. So, how do you go about the business of advising somebody who is willfully doing evil? It will be a waste of my time because they know what they are doing, but they have interpreted their best interest as being found in the primitive and sick acquisition of the public wealth. So, I cannot advise them, they are willfully ignorant and deliberately wicked. It is impossible to advise such people and it will be a waste of my time.

It is the victims who need to wake up and come to the knowledge that it is a waste of time expecting these people to do anything good. They are deliberately evil, it is not by accident. Or, you think it is by accident that you don’t have electricity in your country? We started rebuilding Lagos-Ibadan Expressway in Obasanjo’s second term. Obasanjo left office 19 years ago, but they have not finished rebuilding that road. Portions of it are already failing. You think that is by accident? Are we so incompetent that we can’t build a road? Is it by prayer that they have built prayer city? Is it prayer that built Canaanland? It is not prayer, everything is not by accident, we are the ones who need to come to the knowledge of the fact that these things are deliberate. We need to understand that so that we stop deluding ourselves into expecting that these people may change. They cannot change. They are doing exactly what they believe is in their own interest and expecting them to change is a delusion. They will not.

Six years ago, you called on Buhari (who was the president then) to wake up because you said Nigeria was crumbling. The message was like a song. What would be your song for President Bola Tinubu now?

It was actually not a song but just a subtle way of passing a message because there are times you see some things and you just get tired of continually screaming about the dangers ahead. So, you resign yourself to one-liners. I must have seen something at the time that, again, alarmed me because I had become an “alarmist”. I became tired of constantly wailing, so sometimes I will just post a simple sentence or just an epigram. I must have seen something that buttressed my position that Buhari has destroyed Nigeria. Buhari finished that job, he completed it. In 2022, I said that Buhari had already destroyed Nigeria and that whoever that was going to succeed him would have to be somebody capable of envisioning a new Nigeria and selling that vision to Nigerians. Unfortunately, Nigeria has been given to an undertaker and unless the miraculous happens, Nigeria is already dead it is just waiting for the burial.

But for the sake of the innocent lives that are trapped inside the territory, for the sake of the entire black race that would be damaged almost irreparably if Nigeria is destroyed in a manner that is unpeaceful, I would love that it be a different song because that song has already come to pass. If there is a song that suggests the possibility of a new day, maybe a new dawn might be birthed if we are courageous enough to dare. But honestly I don’t have any hopeful song that comes to mind as I speak.

Even with the work towards a renewed hope?

What renewed hope? You have to be delusional to have ever believed that Tinubu was ever going to offer you any hope talkless of hope being renewed. What would be the basis of that hope outside of delusion? The man was governor in Lagos State for eight years and then the de-facto power behind the throne for a further 16. That was before he was seeking the presidency. Lagos is rumoured or believed to be the fifth largest economy in Africa. On its own, Lagos economy is higher than that of the rest of Nigeria combined. But that economy that was solely in his possession for 24 years wasn’t good enough to produce anything that is fifth best in Africa. We don’t have the fifth best healthcare delivery system; the fifth best educational system; we don’t have the fifth best infrastructure. There is nothing in Lagos that befits excellence except you are looking solely to impunity and brazen stealing. Other than that, nothing else. So if somebody like that now came and told you that he was going to give you renewed hope in Nigeria, after he had also told you that he would carry on the policies of the Buhari government, you have to be delusional to believe that lie. I once described Tinubu and Atiku as the twin horsemen of the apocalypse. What I said at the time has come to pass. What we have today is a country that is functionally dead. The first duty of a state is the protection of the life and property of citizens. I doubt if there are more places in the world that are more unsafe than Nigeria. The Nigerians in the Benue through, the ones on the Plateau, the ones in the forests of Yorubaland, of the Middle Belt; those living around Uromi, those in Ughelli; Nigerians in Enugu; Nigerians all over the place who are being murdered by Fulani terrorists unchecked, are those the people whose hopes have been renewed? There is nothing hopeful about our country again. Tinubu and the APC and generally the Nigerian political class and what they call democracy have killed the hope, they have struck out every hope. How do you describe a country whose citizens are fleeing through the desert to the Mediterranean as a hopeful place? How? Where else in the world do you have a body that parallels or equates JAMB? It is only in Nigeria, we are a so-called federation and in a federation you have a centralised exam body and that exam body is so incompetent that children are committing suicide because of its incompetence and then you have its head coming out to shed crocodile tears and that is supposed to be the end of it. And you are renewing hope…? What kind of hope can you renew in such an environment? There is nothing hopeful about our circumstances, we are the ones who need to act in understanding of the fact that our position and circumstances are hopeless. We should be bold enough to tell ourselves this truth, we shouldn’t buy into the delusion. That politicians are jumping from one party to another in pursuit of their own immunity and retention in office shouldn’t distract us. Hope has been evaporated, completely vapourised. Even for the rich, the situation is hopeless how much more for the average Nigerian. You cannot even talk about the poor again you can only speak in terms of the impoverished because the poverty of the Nigerian is as a result of the deliberate policy of impoverishment. Poverty has been weaponised against the people and we are talking about hope. What hope? You pay a man N100,000, it is not even enough to feed himself alone how much more a wife and children, then he pays rent and so on. How? And you call that hope…? It is the most deceitful and wicked slogan to be clinging on to after the reality of the Nigerian.

From all of these, it can be inferred that the ordinary Nigerian is in a cul-de-sac… a kind of prison.

The Nigerian is in a vice-grip. As the state itself is buffeting him because it appears the only thing they are very good at doing now is to find multiple ways to extract value out of the Nigerian. So, as the state is buffeting him, state-sponsored terrorists are equally buffeting him. And I say that deliberately without mincing my words because that has become a fact that should be stated without fear; because if the state is turning a blind eye to terrorism within its territory, and there are clear evidences of collusion between the state and the terrorist, we should be able to call it that without hesitation. So, the Nigerian finds himself in that situation. If the state is not taxing him, the terrorist is taxing him. The EFCC rarely has anything to do with corrupt politicians, but it has all the time in the world for the poor young man who is struggling to earn a living online and not necessarily in ‘yahoo-yahoo’, because not everybody carrying a laptop around earning a living online that is a ‘yahoo-yahoo’. But, of course, there is no protection for the same Nigerian from the hands of the police who are assaulting him, and from the hands of the EFCC because by the time he runs to the judiciary, he finds that the judiciary is more interested in protecting the status quo than the preservation of his own rights. So, what happens to him? Nothing except more punishment. So, the lot of the Nigerian is rarely ever different from that of a fowl which is constantly assailed by the eagle in the skies, the fox on the ground and the owner who is also looking at it happily as a fat and yummy food. So, being a Nigerian equates to being a victim.

What is your most memorable experience in December last year when you were in detention?

As the saying goes, something like this: Cometh the hour, cometh the man. I had known since I was 16 years old that a moment such as the one I had to contend with in December would come. I always knew that Nigeria and I would have to come against each other at some point. So, I was more interested in measuring myself and seeing how I perform against known or expected repercussions of my activities. Every system must fight back, so I knew that the system was always going to fight back at some point. I then had the opportunity because that was merely the first in the round of battles that are bound to come. I am sure that at some future point, the Nigerian state and I would dance further ‘palongos’. I am not under any illusion as far as that is concerned. So, it was nice to measure myself. It was beautiful to see that I had been prepared for what was to come. So, it was nice. For me, it was a nice experience even though it wasn’t one that I would have desired for myself, but it was one that was inevitable and I was more interested in seeing how I responded or reacted to the situations in which I found myself and I’m reasonably happy. It was a test and it merely presages what is to come. That was it for me.

If you are to define Dele Farotimi beyond being a victim of Nigeria, how would you define yourself? Who is Dele Farotimi?

I’m just another Nigerian who just wants to live my life in my own little corner. There is nothing extra. I’m just living my life and I am happy living my life. I wish I could be left by the state and the system to live a more qualitative life than I am forced to live in the country of my birth. Other than that, I’m just another Nigerian; nothing special.

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