When opposition stops thinking…

By: Osa-Ogbegie Dan

ONE of the laziest and most embarrassing pastimes of Nigeria’s opposition today is its puerile obsession with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s age. Having failed repeatedly to build a compelling national alternative, they now busy themselves with social media arithmetic, waving around the age of his daughter, Folashade Tinubu-Ojo, and asking with rehearsed mischief: How can Tinubu be 74 while his daughter is 64? It is a preposterous line of attack, built on falsehood and sustained by intellectual lassitude. The truth is straightforward. Folashade Tinubu-Ojo is not 64. She is 49, going on 50. President Tinubu’s widely cited date of birth is 29 March 1952, which places him at 74 in 2026. So the entire talking point is not merely weak. It is false. Anyone who sees that woman and still insists she is 64 is not mistaken. He is being mischievous and deliberately peddling falsehood. And that, in truth, is the deeper problem with much of Nigeria’s opposition: it has become intellectually lazy.

Instead of confronting the hard questions of governance, economy, security, institutional reform and national cohesion, it retreats into cheap mockery, gossip, innuendo and emotional drama. Rather than interrogate policy with seriousness, it chases trivia. Rather than build persuasive alternatives, it manufactures ridicule. Rather than confront governance with ideas, it substitutes mockery for substance. It is the same empty theatre, the same shallow performative opposition, the same unserious politics that has repeatedly failed them at the ballot box. Yet they persist in it, as though repetition can somehow convert silliness into strategy. A serious opposition would by now be presenting a coherent alternative vision for Nigeria, sector by sector, with clarity, discipline and intellectual honesty. But that would require work. It would require thought. It would require a seriousness many of them have shown little appetite for.

And when the time of serious political reckoning comes, Nigerians will not merely ask questions of Tinubu. They will also ask hard and unavoidable questions of those who parade themselves as alternatives. Atiku Abubakar is not the future. He has spent more time pursuing power than explaining why he should be trusted with it. He represents a tired recycling of elite ambition, not a fresh governing vision. His politics increasingly feels like a permanent candidacy in search of a convincing national purpose.

Peter Obi thrives on moral posturing and digital enthusiasm, but governance is not a motivational seminar and a hashtag coalition is not a statecraft doctrine. A nation as complex as Nigeria cannot be governed by perpetual indignation, selective statistics, and the illusion that public frustration alone is a programme. Increasingly, he comes across as a provincial apostle, animated less by a coherent national doctrine than by a grievance-laden mood around perceived Igbo exclusion. Nigeria does not need another sectional presidency dressed up as moral insurgency. We have had enough of provincial power wrapped in national language. That experiment should have ended with Buhari. And truth be told, each time one listens carefully to Peter Obi, what emerges is too often a bizarre convolution of monologues that confuse more than they clarify. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso remains trapped in the narrowness of regional vanity, too often projecting a politics of provincial ego rather than broad national accommodation, in ways that make it appear as though he is contesting not to govern Nigeria, but to become the Ayatollah of Kano, or perhaps of the Muslim North, sadly.

Nasir El-Rufai may be brilliant in flashes, but brilliance without balance is dangerous. Nigeria does not need a combustible technocrat with a taste for provocation and an uneven record in managing plural realities. Governance is not warfare against your own citizens. He will also have to explain, honestly and convincingly, the troubling legacy of Southern Kaduna, where many still believe his stewardship deepened wounds rather than healed them. He must also explain the recklessness of producing a Muslim-Muslim ticket in a deeply combustible Kaduna State, long defined by delicate religious and ethnic schisms. That was not courage. It was political insensitivity elevated to doctrine. By contrast, Tinubu’s public life, whatever critics may say, has never been empty of governing content. In Lagos, he helped lay the institutional and fiscal architecture that transformed the state from a struggling subnational unit into one of Africa’s most viable economic centres. He did not merely govern Lagos; he helped redesign its possibilities.

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As President, he has chosen the hard road of reform over the cowardice of postponement. He has confronted distortions that many before him lacked either the courage or discipline to touch. And while the pain of reform is real and should never be dismissed, so too is the necessity of rescue. A broken country cannot be healed by denial, and a bleeding economy cannot be saved by sentimental slogans. That is the point. Serious reform is rarely romantic. It is often painful before it becomes productive. But Nigeria is better served by difficult correction than by sentimental decline. We are, slowly but surely, moving away from the years of drift and into an era of structural reckoning.

The opposition may continue counting wrinkles, inventing ages, and rehearsing lazy propaganda. Tinubu, meanwhile, is governing. And in politics, as in history, builders will always outlast hecklers.

•Dan, Esq., is a Benin City-based legal practitioner and public affairs commentator.