One Man Runs Nigeria's War and Its Re-election

Christopher Musa is Nigeria's defence minister — the man in charge of the war against bandits and jihadists. This month he also became the man running a grassroots campaign structure for President Bola Tinubu's 2027 re-election ^[1]. The two jobs do not live in separate rooms. Musa has said that anyone who questions whether the 2027 elections should hold as planned is an enemy of the country, and he has tied the right to vote to conditions his own office controls.

Nigerians are willing to vote as long as the locations are safe — Christopher Gwabin Musa

He is also the minister who warned, in his own words, what the state police bill his government rushed through the Senate could become if handled badly — and then backed its passage anyway.

State police, if properly harnessed, well planned and effectively implemented, could become the silver bullet we need to address many of our security challenges. However, if it is poorly planned and badly executed, it could become the Hiroshima that many people fear. — Christopher Gwabin Musa

One man, both tracks, no wall between them. Hold onto that figure, because it repeats across the whole of the Tinubu government's security apparatus. The Rivers State emergency is the clearest case. In March 2025 Tinubu suspended an elected governor and the state assembly for six months and installed a sole administrator — a move one senator likened to military rule ^[2]. The emergency was sold as a response to political crisis. But Nyesom Wike, the federal minister who drove it, later said the quiet part aloud: the emergency rule was how the government got around Supreme Court rulings on local government funding.

Assuming there is no emergency rule, would local governments have accessed funds today? Will the states have accessed funds today? Certainly not so the emergency rule becomes imperative. — Nyesom Wike

The emergency ended in August 2025. Eight months later, the suspended governor, Siminalayi Fubara, did something no one predicted in March: he joined the ruling APC and endorsed Tinubu for 2027 ^[3].

In football, the saying goes that no coach changes a winning team. — Siminalayi Fubara

Then there is Nasir El-Rufai, the former Kaduna governor who helped bring Tinubu to power and is now in opposition. He sits in detention on corruption charges with bail conditions the opposition calls impossible, and the ADC's read is blunt: keep him in custody until after the election ^[4].

There is a political prisoner in Nigeria today, and his name is Malam Nasir el-Rufai. — African Democratic Congress

On Democracy Day this June — the same day Tinubu declared a national security emergency — police teargassed protesters in several cities, including presidential candidate Omoyele Sowore, who was hospitalized ^[5].

Today, operatives of the Nigeria Police Force deployed a strange gas at the protest ground, at close range which entered my lungs and left me struggling to breathe before I eventually collapsed. — Omoyele Sowore

The state police bill was fast-tracked through the Senate with suspended rules and no public hearings ^[6]. Peter Obi warned it could be turned against political rivals ^[7]. And the electoral commission, INEC, now stands accused of disobeying court orders outright ^[8].

As belief in bias grows, the 2027 elections could become more contested, more litigated, and possibly unstable. — Murtala Muhammed

None of this would matter if the crisis were invented. It is not. In February, 56 people were killed in a single attack in Niger State ^[9]. More than 300 students and 12 teachers were kidnapped from one school, and Catholic bishops warned the country is nearing a breaking point ^[10]. The government reclassified kidnappers as terrorists in December ^[11], and it can point to real results: more than 20,000 bandits neutralized in Bauchi alone ^[12]. This is not a fake emergency. People are dying, and the state is fighting back. That severity is the load-bearing fact. It is what makes the political uses hard to challenge. Question the emergency powers and you can be called soft on security. Question the electoral timeline and you are, in the defence minister's words, an enemy of the country. And the guardrails that would normally check this are themselves degraded: a legislature that rubber-stamps, a judiciary where lawyers paid N9.45 billion in bribes to judges between 2018 and 2020, voter turnout collapsed to 27.1% ^[13]. The fortress being built against insecurity is being constructed by dismantling the legal foundations of the state it is meant to secure. Tinubu himself has named the danger with precision. He gave Christian bishops a list of what to denounce.

You should raise your voices against anti-democratic practices, such as vote buying, hate speech and the weaponisation of ethnicity or religion. — Bola Ahmed Tinubu

And at a security summit he said the one thing that undercuts the whole apparatus.

Force can suppress violence; it cannot resolve the grievances that produce it — Bola Ahmed Tinubu

The man articulating the principles is the one operating the machine. That is not a gotcha; it is the structural point. When the person who names the danger is the person who controls the apparatus, there is no one left outside it to sound the alarm.