Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Engineer Babachir David Lawal, has said a joint presidential ticket pairing Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso would have a 70 per cent chance of winning the 2027 presidential election, rated President Bola Tinubu’s chances at 50 per cent, and declared that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has zero chance and will lose.
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Lawal made the remarks during an extensive interview on Symfoni TV’s “Naija Unfiltered” programme hosted by Olawale Oluad, in which he also described the Tinubu administration as “a failure,” said the President “has lost his soul” since assuming office, alleged that the 2027 election result “was written three years ago,” explained the circumstances of his bitter departure from the African Democratic Congress, and disclosed that he is under pressure to come out of political sabbatical.
Asked to rate the presidential contenders, Lawal was explicit that his assessment depended on a pairing rather than individual candidacies.
“Peter Obi will try to be fair to everybody. Peter Obi will try to do that which is right. Peter Obi, Kwankwaso, take note, I’m pairing them. I’m pairing them. Individually will be disaster, but I’m pairing them,” Lawal stated.
“So I’ll give them, on my own scale, close to like 70 per cent. Again, Bola, 50. Atiku, zero,” he stated.
On Atiku specifically, he was categorical: “Definitely, Atiku will lose. He will, and I pray he loses. I’m not the only one, and he will lose.”
He also indicated he would end his political retirement to support the pairing: “I’m on sabbatical but I’m under pressure to come out of my sabbatical. If I were to come back, I will go with Peter and Kwankwaso.”
Asked for his assessment of the Tinubu administration’s three years in office on insecurity and the economy, Lawal did not hesitate.
“In one word, it’s a failure. That’s what it is,” he stated.
“The people running the government don’t seem to be people who love the country. They are people who love themselves. I don’t think they even love their relations. So everybody is on his own for himself. That type of mindset cannot give you good governance,” Lawal stated.
“The citizens really are complaining east, west, north, south. Everybody is bitter that life is tough. No matter which position you find yourself in, life is tough for the ordinary man on the street. Life is tough for the minister whose capital projects are not funded. So in a nutshell, it’s a failed government,” he stated.
Responding to the argument that as SGF in the immediate predecessor government he lacks standing to criticise, Lawal answered: “Yes, they are free to say what they want. It’s a free country, there is freedom of speech so far, though it’s being eroded gradually. Tinubu says he’s rebuilding on what Buhari left, but he is building backwards, not forward.”
“The essence of government is that when you take over from another government, you make sure you progress in the positive direction. But the fact that they chose to go in the opposite direction, yes, it’s a continuation of government but in the opposite direction. Total calamity. That’s the way I see it,” Lawal stated.
Lawal, who describes Tinubu as a personal friend and says the President has publicly acknowledged the friendship, offered a striking account of what he believes changed.
“Tinubu has, as I can categorise to my knowledge, two faces of his life. Before he became president, he was an excellent human being. Tinubu does not tolerate your suffering as a friend. If you are in problems, he would go to whatever length possible to solve your problem. He listens. He takes advice. He is kind in that regard,” Lawal stated.
“I used to say that he had the same quality of character with Buhari. Buhari is also like that. Very kind, very sympathetic to somebody in trouble,” he added.
“He goes to become president. Something happened. And I know the time he changed, and I told him. I’m sure if he’s listening he will know,” Lawal stated.
“He has lost his soul,” Lawal declared.
Lawal offered an explanation for the change, locating it in Tinubu’s relocation to Abuja around 2022 as he pursued the presidency.
“Around 2022 going forward, he almost relocated to Abuja to be close to the seat of power, I suspect to pursue his political ambitions. Now the poor man, good man from Lagos comes to Abuja and runs into a country with different people, with different upbringing, with different cultural backgrounds, and they surrounded him,” Lawal stated.
“I can tell you, our people, particularly the northerners that were his friends while he was in Lagos, they now caged the poor man. They introduced some characters, induced him to do certain things that he would not do while in Lagos. At that point he was consumed by this ambition to be president. They kept telling him, ‘We will make you president. We are northerners. We are Fulani. We are Hausa people. We know Buhari.’ And they introduced him to these religious bigots,” Lawal alleged.
“So I classify it as, from that position, he started changing. I think I was closest to him anyway while he was in Abuja. I had access to him. My boss, the late Buhari, used to tell me, ‘This man says you are his best friend,'” Lawal recounted.
Lawal gave a detailed account of why he left the African Democratic Congress and why he insists the presidential primary that produced Atiku Abubakar was not a genuine electoral exercise.
“Why did I leave ADC? Because Atiku manipulated the congresses. It is shameful,” Lawal stated.
Challenged on whether he could speak to what happened across all 36 states and the FCT, Lawal set out his standing within the party: “Understand my position in that party. I was a national vice chairman. Apart from that, I was a very senior member of the founding coalition. I was somebody that had experience in how political parties are run. I had a very good relationship with the chairman, and the national secretary and I go back many, many years to the 1980s. So I was quite influential in a lot of the things that happened.”
He disclosed that he had been among those pushing for a consensus candidate rather than a national primary: “We didn’t believe that the party had the resources to do a national level primary. It was basically what INEC does, except done at the ward level. INEC goes to the polling unit. We didn’t have the resources. So everybody knew that this process cannot be free and fair.”
Lawal described his own role in constituting primary committees for his zone: “The rules were that the state will nominate five people, one from each senatorial zone, and then the zonal vice chairman will bring the chairman and the secretary from outside. They suggested it must be a former governor, former permanent secretary, big generals. I went out of my way to get people that I thought had integrity, because that’s my style. In the six states in my zone, I appointed them and sent them out.”
“All those people who were sent out didn’t do what they were supposed to do. They didn’t deploy the level of integrity that I expected of them. That pained me,” he stated.
He gave a specific account of what he personally witnessed in the FCT: “It was drizzling a little bit. So I went out trying to see what was going on. There was no election. Materials were not on site. So I complained to the senior leaders of the party. One of them, a senator, said, ‘You know it’s drizzling, they cannot do these primaries when it’s drizzling.’ So the electoral officers went to a safe place with the electoral materials. The people are at the polling units where they are expected to be. Nobody is seeing them. It’s live. I’m seeing it. I found other states, it’s the same thing.”
On the manner of his departure, Lawal was unapologetic: “I’m not somebody that likes to leave quietly. In my village there’s a legend that there’s a big snake in one mountain. Anytime it comes down, it clears everything and then rain begins to fall and there’s flooding everywhere. I’m like that. I go out as a hurricane, because sometimes it touches at my core values, and when it touches at your core values, there’s nothing to live for again.”
Asked to assess former Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi, who is reported to have joined the Atiku ticket, Lawal offered a mixed verdict.
“It’s just unfortunate that because of his maybe personal excessive ambition, he decides to pair with the devil,” Lawal stated. Pressed on whether he was being fair, he responded: “Why are you putting words in my mouth? It’s a simple logical conclusion. Who is he pairing with? He’s only with one person.”
“Now he has damaged his political career. First of all, his plank was that it was the turn of the South to produce the president. Along the way, any time they asked him whether he was angling for vice president, he said he was not angling for vice president. I was disappointed that he has joined,” Lawal stated.
“I used to look at him as somebody of integrity. He’s quite religious, which I appreciate. I had high regard for him as a man who keeps his word. My own calculation is that his character, his disposition, is one that he cannot function effectively in that environment, but he has chosen to because he’s hoping that they will do only four years and that might give him the advantage to become president. That is inordinate, but that’s who he is.”
“Overall, my assessment of him as a human being, as a person, is positive. But as a leader, I don’t know, because of his brashness. He’s another version of Wike, polished, but better than Wike,” Lawal stated.
He nonetheless described Amaechi as worth investing in: “Even if he doesn’t make it, he’s one of those people that we should invest in for a Nigeria of the future.”
Asked whether it is possible to defeat President Tinubu in 2027, Lawal made his most serious allegation.
“First of all, there’s the God factor. With God all things are possible. Second, one of the things that is happening is that Tinubu, I doubt if he has the physical ability to go through a rigorous campaign, physically and other internal health issues. So I read it as if he’s not ready for a contest, because that will help him avoid the physical campaign. So he will try other means,” Lawal stated.
“I know my man. We used to be together, and surprisingly, I know quite a lot of the things they do to win elections. We used to operate together. My thinking now is this: the result for the 2027 election is already written,” he declared.
Asked whether he meant a script was being written, Lawal corrected the interviewer: “Why are you talking of script? A script is still theoretical. I say it has been written. The script was written three years ago. So the result is there, or the methodology is there.”
Lawal set out what he described as the mechanism.
“Two things. Why do you think he purchased the opposition governors? Because first of all, that has denied the opposition access to funds. All the state governors are with him. So no opposition has access to funds to compete against him,” Lawal stated.
“Number two, the governors, because of the support they have from him, has encouraged them to be very cavalier in the manner in which they are spending state resources. So now it’s in their interest to make sure they deliver, and not for themselves, because the opposition will come,” he stated.
“They will do what they did in 2023, which our friend Nasir El-Rufai claimed they did for him. They will do the same thing,” Lawal alleged.
He named states: “If Adamawa is going to deliver Adamawa by hook or crook, more by crook, and Borno is going to deliver Borno to him by crook, and Yobe by crook, Gombe by crook, Taraba by crook, Kaduna, Kano, all those heavy states, the 19 states plus Abuja, the 20th, by crook they will all deliver. They will write the results. They allow you to go to the polling unit and pretend, and INEC will do some juju and announce the result that has already been handed over to them. And that’s the end.”
Lawal offered a bleak assessment of how Nigerians would respond.
“The problem would be the reaction of the people to that, and my own assessment is that every Nigerian will just remain in his house in no one’s trouble. The candidates will go to the courts, and SANs will collect billions of naira and impoverish them further, and that’s the end,” he stated.
“Nigerians will succumb to what we used to say in the military: with one bullet in your rifle, you can get 1,000 people to surrender, because nobody wants to take that one bullet. So every Nigerian will just go home and sleep. Some will not even come out that day. After the election, a lot of people will do some protest and collect money from people and try to protest. After some time they fizzle out, and that’s the end. We prepare for another four years,” Lawal stated.
Lawal argued that the opposition has forfeited its moral standing by conducting flawed primaries.
“They can deceive themselves and pretend they are campaigning. Every political party rigged the primaries. Up to now they just wrote names, every SDP, NNPP, all these PDP, they wrote. They are still fighting. There’s no party,” he stated.
Asked about the NDC specifically, he responded: “Especially NDC. Nobody can beat his chest that we did free and fair primaries. So what moral complaint do they have?”
Asked whether he feared that President Tinubu might pursue tenure elongation or a third term, Lawal was blunt.
“He will,” Lawal stated. “What will stop him now? Nigerians? Or the international assembly of crooks? Well, I think we will go down, subject to his health.”
Lawal also commented on the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council controversy, saying the manner of the government’s response aroused his suspicion.
“Where I smelled the rat is this: when the Chief of Staff did the press conference disowning this agency, it’s not his duty to disown agencies. And then the Chief Press Secretary to the President goes also to defend his position. I smelt a fish,” Lawal stated.
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