President And The Art Of Political Combat

A politician must be quick-witted, sharp-tongued, intelligent, and know how to use trenchant language to lampoon his opponents and detractors.

This is exactly why I doff my cap for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Tinubu does not merely reply to his opponents. He unmasks them. He has a knack for taking them to the cleaners, stripping away their carefully polished images and exposing what he presents as the contradiction between their promises and their records.

That gift was on full display again at the APC rally in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, where the President turned his fire on the two men leading the opposition charge for 2027: Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar. In both cases, his method was the same — confront them not with insults, but with their own history.

He Could Not Confront Erosion

Tinubu’s attack on Obi was direct and devastating in its simplicity.

Obi is the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) — the party Tinubu referred to as “one party they call NDC” — and a former governor of Anambra State.

Tinubu argued that leadership is proved not by slogans, but by confronting problems where they are most stubborn:
“He could not confront erosion. I, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, I confronted the Atlantic Ocean, I tamed it for you. Governor Umo Eno confronted the erosion in Akwa Ibom and he is working for you, he is stable.”
The contrast was deliberate. In Tinubu’s telling, Obi ran away from erosion in Anambra State, while he himself, as governor of Lagos, confronted a far bigger threat — the Atlantic Ocean — and tamed it. And while Obi could not solve erosion, Governor Umo Eno, according to Tinubu, confronted the same problem in Akwa Ibom and is delivering stability.

The message was clear: a man who could not solve erosion in one state cannot be trusted to solve Nigeria’s far bigger problems.

Leadership, in this framing, is not about eloquence. It is about confrontation. It is about staying to fight the problem, not running away from it.

From Privatisation to Party Hijack

Tinubu’s attack on Atiku followed the same pattern: use the opponent’s own history against him.

Last time, he said Atiku is an expert in privatising government assets, an exercise he described as a colossal failure. Atiku, as Vice President between 1999 and 2007, chaired the National Council on Privatisation and oversaw the privatisation programme. Tinubu’s argument is that the programme failed Nigerians, and that Atiku has never accounted for that failure.

This time, Tinubu accused Atiku of trying to repeat the same trick in politics — hijacking a political party that does not belong to him in order to privatise it.
“They [the opposition] lack the leadership and character. If a man [Atiku] that once upon a time was a baby of the PDP, became a father of the PDP and, because of a little inconvenience, he ran away from that party and formed a dangerous ADC in another party. Is that a leadership trait? Is that a leadership character? And he wants you to vote for him. It is not for banana. He cannot put a house in order.”
For Tinubu, Atiku’s frequent party-switching is not strategy. It is evidence of a lack of character, loyalty, and staying power — the very qualities a president needs.

If you cannot keep your own political house in order, how can you keep a nation of over 200 million people in order? That is the question Tinubu put to Nigerians.

The Court Ruling That Lends Credence to Tinubu

Then came a development that appeared to support Tinubu’s assertion.

On 5 November 2026, Justice Peter Lifu of the Federal High Court, Abuja, nullified the takeover of the ADC leadership by Senator David Mark, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and their allies — all associates of Atiku Abubakar — on the ground that it was done in disregard of the party’s constitution. The court declared the Mark-led caretaker committee illegal and invalidated actions taken under it, including the process that produced Atiku as the party’s presidential candidate.

The ADC has since filed an appeal and applied for a stay of execution, which is still pending. The judgment is therefore not yet final, and the legal process must be allowed to run its course.

But for Tinubu’s supporters, the ruling was confirmation: a man who cannot put his own party’s house in order, they argue, cannot put Nigeria’s house in order.

Not Like Other Mushroom Parties

Tinubu closed by drawing a line between the APC and the opposition:
“We are not like other mushroom parties. They don’t have the kind of character and the calibre of people that we have. You can roll down from the former chairman of our party, Umar Ganduje and many other characters here who have led and put together a united APC, people of great dependency, reliability and honesty.”
That is the essence of Tinubu the politician: combative, confident, and rhetorically ruthless. He does not debate his opponents on abstract ideas. He confronts them with their own records — on erosion, on privatisation, on party loyalty — and asks Nigerians a simple question: if they could not manage the small assignment, why should they be trusted with the big one?

Whether you agree with him or not, that is a formidable political style. And it is why, for his admirers, Tinubu remains in a class of his own.

@ Okoi Obono-Obla is a lawyer and public affairs commentator based in Abuja.