An open reply to Senator Babafemi Ojudu, CON, on his Independence Day letter to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu

My dear Uncle and Elder in the Struggle,

I read your letter to the President twice. The first reading was a journalist’s. The second was a nephew’s, from one who has known your voice at a distance, through our exchanges and through your closeness to my cousins, and who took his first lessons in citizenship from the stories of those trenches where you and others paid for the right of Nigerians to choose.

Let me say plainly what must be said first. Your letter is right in its timing and sound in its reasoning. A country walking toward a general election needs an elder who will refuse both the flattery of the courtier and the fury of the pamphleteer, and simply tell an old friend how the people are living. Our people say àgbà kì í wà lọ́jà, kí orí ọmọ tuntun wọ́: an elder does not sit in the market and watch a child’s head hang crooked on its mother’s back. You saw the head tilting, and you spoke.

You told the country that you neither campaigned for him nor voted for him in 2023. That admission is the letter’s credential. No one can call it a job seeker’s petition, and no honest reader will call it an enemy’s ambush.

So I come to honour the letter. I also come, with a nephew’s licence, to finish it.

The pot does not eat percentages

You are right about the hunger, Uncle, and the government’s own statisticians agree with you. The National Bureau of Statistics puts headline inflation at 15.39 per cent in August, down from 23.14 per cent a year earlier, with food inflation at 19.57 per cent. Read those figures as a market woman would. They say prices are climbing more slowly. They do not say prices have come down. The bag of rice that doubled has not halved, and the pot does not eat percentages.

The bishop who preached at Senator Tony Adeniyi’s funeral was reporting from the parish gate, where theory ends. The Bureau’s 2022 survey had already counted 133 million Nigerians as multidimensionally poor before this administration took its first decision. Into that old wound came the shock of 2023: petrol at its market price, a naira set loose, fares that leapt overnight. Anyone who says the reforms did not hurt insults the people who carried them.

So on the diagnosis there is no quarrel between uncle and nephew. The argument is over what a patient should do in the middle of a hard treatment.

Hunger carries no party card.
It knocks at every gate alike,
and the child who cries at midnight
does not ask who won the vote.

Relief is not a rumour

On the morning your letter appeared, the President stood before the nation and admitted that the journey has been “too hard for too many”. He named the cost of living as his first priority. The man you asked to listen was, at that same hour, saying much of what you wrote.

The record behind that speech can be checked. The economy grew 4.43 per cent in the second quarter of this year. Non-oil exports earned $6.1 billion in 2025, the highest figure on record, and crude losses to theft have fallen to their lowest level since 2009. Independent fact-checkers tested those claims the day after the speech and found them true.

Statistics, as you say, are not supper. So look at what has been aimed at the household. The minimum wage rose from ₦30,000 to ₦70,000. Since January, a worker on that wage pays no income tax; basic food, medicine, school fees and rent carry no VAT; and a small business turning over ₦100 million or less pays no company tax. The student loan fund has lent about ₦356 billion, interest-free, and by its own April count more than 1.3 million young Nigerians had benefited. The next push is the one your letter demands: irrigation and dry-season farming, seed and fertiliser, storage, and a cleaner social register so that money meant for the poorest household arrives at its door.

Is it enough? No, and the President did not pretend so. He conceded that families still struggle for the next meal, the next school fee and the next hospital bill. Uncle, there is a difference between a government that does not hear and a government that has heard and is still short of the mark. The first deserves your rebuke. The second deserves your shoulder.

The farm, the road and the Republic

On security you wrote the truest sentence in your letter: no farmer should have to choose between tending a field and staying alive. Benue, Zamfara, Sokoto and Kaduna have buried too many this year for anyone to answer you with slogans.

Structure is the honest answer. For nearly six decades a single police force, commanded from the centre, has been asked to guard every village in a country of more than 200 million people. In June this President sent the State Police amendment to the National Assembly. Both chambers had passed it by July, and it went to the state assemblies, where twenty-four of thirty-six must concur. A presidential working group is preparing for the morning after ratification. Generations of our elders asked for this in communiqués. It is now a bill with votes behind it.

You also asked that his words, his choices and his appointments tell every Nigerian that the country is equally theirs. That is the correct standard, and he should be held to it by friends before he is held to it by foes. A republic is a promise that the farmer in Logo and the trader in Onitsha, the herder in Katsina and the fisherman in Ilaje, stand at the same height before the state.

The ballot we bled for

You asked him to protect the vote even though his own name is on the ballot. Every democrat should sign that paragraph, and I add my name beneath yours. INEC must count without fear. The security services must guard voter, candidate and official alike. The courts must answer to the law alone. Where doubts are raised about the umpire, they should be answered in daylight, because a mandate is worth only what the losing side can be shown.

The calendar is set. Nigerians vote for President on 16 January 2027, and INEC’s final list carries eighteen presidential candidates, with Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi among them. The opposition is on the ballot and on the road. That is how a contest should look.

The man you describe on a thin piece of foam beneath the stairs at Alagbon learned what a stolen mandate costs before many of today’s voters were born. June 12 is the wound that made him. He won in 2023 at the polls and defended that victory through the tribunal to the Supreme Court. He knows that a second term obtained any other way would be worth less than the first. Your letter reminds him. Your presence would remind those around him.

The drum we beat in darker years
still hangs upon the wall.
Uncle, take it down again:
the road is long, the hour is late,
and the dancers know your hand.

Take the wheel again

Now, Uncle, to the part your letter left unwritten.

You told a story from the Third Mainland Bridge. At half past one in the morning the car struck the railing, and you, who had never handled an automatic gearbox, took the wheel and carried the candidate to Alausa. Forgive a nephew’s boldness. You did not stand on that bridge and compose a letter about the railing. You drove.

The country is on a long bridge again, crossing from the pain of reform to the proof of it. That last stretch is where steady hands are scarce.

You remain, by your own word, a member of the All Progressives Congress, a conscientious objector who will not defect for convenience. Then do not leave the field to those who only clap. In Alausa, Alhaji Lai Mohammed used to greet you as “our opposition”. The President needs that man again, and he needs him on the campaign bus, where the next four years are being argued out.

A campaign trail is the largest listening tour a democracy owns. Bring your letter with you and read it to him between rallies. Ask for the independent survey you proposed, and help to frame its questions. Tell him the price of garri in Ado-Ekiti on the days the briefing notes say otherwise. About fifteen weeks remain before 16 January. Counsel shouted from the pavement is heard once. Counsel given from the next seat is heard every day.

If conscience is the obstacle, remember that the trenches were never comfortable and never unanimous. You argued in them and still held the line. Keep your judgment whole, and carry it to the place where it can change the outcome.

What history will ask

I do not ask you to withdraw a word. Nigeria needs everything your letter demands: reform without cruelty, growth without exclusion, security without impunity, leadership without insulation from the people, and democracy without compromise. I ask only that you say those words from inside the journey, beside the old friend you once drove through the dark.

History will put one question to him: what did your power mean to those who gave it? It will put another to the rest of us: where were you standing while the answer was being written?

May the President have the wisdom to keep listening. May you find the grace to return to the road. And may those of us who inherit the unfinished work of that struggle never grow too comfortable to speak when the people are hurting.

Happy Independence Anniversary, Uncle.

Your boy in the unfinished struggle,

Jide Adesina
Editor-in-Chief, 1st Afrika