The APC’s 2027 Presidential Campaign Council should not be dismissed as another routine list of political appointees and campaign operatives. It is a political document, a revealing portrait of the values, priorities, sensitivities and political calculations of the government seeking another mandate. And on that score, its composition deserves the most searching public scrutiny.
At 223 members, the council is large enough to accommodate Nigeria’s extraordinary diversity. Yet the question is not simply how many names appear on the list. The real question is who is represented, who is conspicuously unrepresented and underrepresented, what communities are being recognised, what communities are being taken for granted, and what message the composition sends to a deeply divided and wounded country.
Yes, Governor Umar Bago for instance, is designated North-Central coordinator, and therefore it would be factually wrong to claim that the entire zone has been excluded. But representation is not merely putting one prominent politician from a geopolitical zone on an organisational chart and declaring the problem solved. Meaningful inclusion is about political visibility, balance, confidence and sensitivity.
For Benue and much of the North-Central, the composition should be particularly sobering. This is a region that has endured devastating insecurity, displacement, destruction of livelihoods and repeated attacks on communities. It is also a region in which religious identity and perceived political exclusion have become increasingly sensitive questions. At a moment when national leadership ought to be consciously building bridges, the campaign council appears remarkably insensitive to the optics of balance.
This is especially troubling against the background of the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket. Whatever the constitutional validity of that arrangement, a politically intelligent administration should understand that legitimacy is not sustained by legality alone. It requires sensitivity to the fears, anxieties and perceptions of citizens who feel excluded.
A presidential campaign council should therefore have been an opportunity to demonstrate that this administration understands Nigeria’s plural character and is determined to reassure every region, religion and community that it belongs in the Nigerian project.
Instead, the composition risks reinforcing precisely the opposite perception.
AND THEN THERE IS ZACHAEUS ADEDEJI
But perhaps the most brazen and politically outrageous name on this list is that of Zach Adedeji, the Executive Chairman of the Nigerian Revenue Service (NRS).
His inclusion raises a question that goes far beyond campaign organisation. It raises the fundamental question of whether the machinery of the Nigerian state is gradually being converted into the financial infrastructure of an incumbent’s political ambition.
What, precisely, was the grand promise of the Tinubu administration’s tax reform?
Was it to modernise taxation, broaden the tax base, improve compliance, eliminate leakages and build a more efficient and equitable revenue system? Or was it ultimately to construct an increasingly centralised architecture for extracting more money from an already impoverished population, while presenting the resulting increase in government collections as an economic miracle?
The transformation of the FIRS into the NRS, and the broader attempt to consolidate revenue collection, must be examined within the constitutional architecture of Nigerian federalism. Nigeria is not a unitary state. Revenue powers are distributed across the federation, and any attempt to centralise revenue streams belonging constitutionally or institutionally to sub-national authorities raises serious questions about federalism, fiscal autonomy and the proper limits of federal power.
The danger is that “tax reform” becomes a euphemism for tax extraction.
And Nigerians are entitled to ask a brutally simple question: if the government announces spectacular increases in tax revenues while ordinary citizens experience declining real incomes, collapsing purchasing power and rising living costs, where exactly is the reform dividend?
Where is it?
If people are paying more but living worse, then the government cannot simply point to bigger revenue numbers and declare victory. Revenue mobilisation is not itself economic prosperity. A government can extract more from citizens while citizens become poorer. The measure of a successful fiscal reform is not merely how much the government collects, but whether the system produces growth, investment, employment, productivity, fairness and improved household welfare.
The suspicion becomes even more troubling when the architect or principal administrator of this revenue machinery is simultaneously deployed as a senior operative in the President’s re-election campaign.
It inevitably creates the appearance of a revolving door between public revenue mobilisation and partisan political financing.
And that is precisely the kind of perception a serious democracy should avoid.
One cannot spend years telling Nigerians that the tax system is being fundamentally redesigned to generate unprecedented public revenue, then place the head of that revenue machinery at the centre of the President’s re-election effort and expect citizens not to ask whether the enormous fiscal machinery of the state is being positioned to serve an enormous political project.
That question becomes even more uncomfortable in light of allegations surrounding the financing of the APC campaign in Osun State.
Reports and political allegations have put the cost of that campaign at more than ₦110 billion, involving an extraordinary mobilisation of governors, federal lawmakers, ministers, senators, federal appointees, aides and security personnel. The APC nevertheless suffered a humiliating defeat.
Those figures and allegations deserve independent scrutiny rather than political repetition as established fact. But if anything remotely approaching that scale of public and political resources was deployed in a state election, Nigerians are entitled to ask what the financial architecture of the 2027 presidential campaign will look like.
And it is particularly pertinent because Adedeji has been identified as having played a financial role in the Osun campaign and is now positioned to play a role in the presidential campaign.
That is not a trivial coincidence.
It raises a question about the relationship between the state’s revenue-raising machinery and the ruling party’s electoral machinery.
It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that the much-advertised tax reform could become less about creating a modern fiscal state and more about creating a larger pool of resources over which an increasingly centralised political establishment exercises influence.
That would be a profound betrayal of the very idea of reform.
FROM TAX REFORM TO POLITICAL WAR CHEST?
This is where the Nigerian public deserves far more than slogans.
If government revenue is rising, Nigerians deserve transparent evidence of where the money is coming from, where it is going and what proportion is being spent on debt servicing, infrastructure, social investment, recurrent expenditure and other legitimate public purposes.
They also deserve confidence that public institutions collecting those revenues are not being politically subordinated to the electoral interests of the governing party.
The most dangerous development in any democracy is not simply corruption in its traditional form. It is the gradual fusion of party and state.
When the people who control taxation, monetary policy, public accounting, procurement, security and the machinery of government are simultaneously incorporated into the political apparatus of the incumbent, the distinction between the resources of the Nigerian state and the resources of the governing party becomes dangerously blurred.
At that point, an election ceases to be a contest between political parties and begins to look like a contest between an incumbent political machine backed by the full weight of state power and everyone else.
Perhaps, therefore, the APC should complete the circle.
If the objective is genuinely to deploy the entire financial and institutional weight of government behind the President’s re-election, then why stop with the NRS chairman?
Why not also formally incorporate the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Managing Director of the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Plc and the Accountant-General of the Federation?
That would at least make the architecture transparent: the revenue collector, the monetary authority, the currency printer and the nation’s chief accountant; all assembled around an incumbent seeking another term.
Of course, such a suggestion is deliberately provocative. But sometimes political absurdity has to be exposed by taking its underlying logic to its logical conclusion.
Because if every institution capable of mobilising, managing, accounting for or deploying public resources can be drawn into a partisan campaign structure, then the question becomes: where does the party end and the state begin?
And that is a question Nigerians cannot afford to ignore.
ADEDEJI’S REMARKABLE THEORY OF AUSTERITY
There is another reason Adedeji’s inclusion is so politically jarring.
The NRS chairman has attracted attention for public comments reportedly citing the President’s short distance walk from his residence to his office and his purported consumption of fewer than three square meals a day as illustrations of reductions in the cost of governance.
If that is genuinely the administration’s evidence of fiscal prudence, Nigerians should be worried.
A president walking less than 50 metres from his residence to his office is not a fiscal reform.
A president eating fewer than three meals a day is not a macroeconomic indicator.
Neither tells a Nigerian family struggling with food inflation, rent, school fees, transport costs, electricity bills and collapsing purchasing power that the government has become more efficient.
This is where the difference between propaganda arithmetic and economic reality becomes important.
The Nigerian people do not eat budget aggregates.
They eat food.
They do not pay their children’s school fees with GDP statistics.
They pay with income.
They do not measure prosperity by the number of naira entering government coffers.
They measure it by what remains in their pockets after paying for the necessities of life.
A tax reformer should therefore be explaining how the tax system will stimulate enterprise, formalise economic activity, protect low-income earners, encourage investment and increase productivity, not offering presidential walking distance or meal frequency as evidence of a reduction in the cost of governance.
That is not tax reform.
That is political theatre.
THE CAMPAIGN COUNCIL AS POLITICAL REHABILITATION CENTRE
And then comes what may be the most damaging aspect of all: the apparent normalisation of unresolved corruption controversies within the campaign structure.
Betta Edu, whose removal from the Federal Executive Council followed the controversy surrounding her tenure, has been appointed Director of Women Mobilisation despite an unresolved EFCC investigation. Ngozi Olejeme has also been given a senior role while facing an ongoing money-laundering trial. She has pleaded not guilty, and the constitutional presumption of innocence must, of course, be respected.
But the political question remains entirely legitimate:
Why would a presidential campaign deliberately place people carrying unresolved corruption allegations and ongoing legal controversies at the centre of its campaign machinery?
A campaign council is not a courtroom. Nobody is suggesting that membership constitutes a conviction. But political leadership is also about judgement, optics and public confidence.
If the President is asking Nigerians to trust his government for another four years, why surround the campaign with individuals whose public records require precisely the kind of explanation the campaign ought to be avoiding?
The impression is unavoidable: the APC campaign council increasingly looks less like a showcase of national renewal and more like a political rehabilitation centre for controversial political actors.
That is a devastating indictment because political rehabilitation is not necessarily wrong. People can repent, reform and rebuild their reputations. But rehabilitation should ordinarily follow accountability, not replace it.
A political party that is serious about fighting corruption should be especially careful about presenting unresolved corruption controversies as badges of political usefulness.
And if this standard continues, Nigerians may reasonably begin wondering where the rehabilitation programme ends.
At this rate, one would hardly be surprised if every controversial political financier, operator or alleged underworld figure willing to demonstrate political loyalty suddenly finds a place somewhere in the campaign architecture.
By this I mean the KC Luxurys, the Tompolos and others who may not formally appear on the council but are allegedly accommodated through the shadowy ecosystem of political movements such as the so-called “City Boys” structure.
That is the absurdity to which political impunity eventually leads:
When loyalty becomes the qualification, almost everybody becomes appointable.
A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IS ALSO A STATEMENT ABOUT NIGERIA
But the consequences extend beyond domestic politics.
Nigeria’s international reputation matters.
We cannot complain endlessly about the country’s reputation for corruption, weak institutions and political impunity while simultaneously constructing political platforms that appear indifferent to the credibility problems surrounding some of their occupants.
A presidential campaign is an advertisement for the country itself.
The people standing beside the President are part of the message he is sending to Nigerians, investors, international partners, diplomatic missions and the global community.
If the campaign machinery looks exclusionary, religiously insensitive, financially opaque and populated by figures carrying unresolved ethical controversies, then the damage is not merely electoral. It reinforces the worst stereotypes about Nigeria’s political class.
And this is where the silence of political actors in Benue, Plateau, and the North-Central becomes particularly disturbing.
Our political leaders have spent years normalising poverty, exclusion and political marginalisation to the point where citizens are sometimes persuaded to regard deprivation as their natural condition.
They have also become accustomed to accepting whatever political arrangement is handed down from Abuja, however insensitive, simply because “that is how politics works.”
But politics does not have to work that way.
The Osun voter understands this.
The Benue and North Central voter must understand it too.
The Christian in the North-Central should understand it. The Muslim from Kano, Sokoto, Jigawa, Borno, Oyo, etc who believe in genuine pluralism should also understand it. Every Nigerian who believes that political power should unite rather than divide us should understand it.
The question is not whether every individual named on the APC list is personally disqualified from political participation.
The question is much larger:
What does this composition tell us about the kind of political Nigeria the APC wants to build between 2027 and 2031?
Does it look inclusive?
Does it look nationally representative?
Does it inspire confidence among communities that already feel abandoned?
Does it demonstrate religious sensitivity?
Does it communicate a serious commitment to a clean government?
Or does it simply reinforce the perception that political loyalty, proximity to power and usefulness to the ruling establishment matter more than credibility, inclusion and public confidence?
These are not merely partisan questions.
They are questions of national character.
Nigeria is a federation of more than 250 ethnic groups, multiple faith traditions, competing regional interests and profoundly different historical experiences. A presidential campaign seeking a renewed mandate should therefore look like Nigeria in all its complexity, not merely like an extension of the political establishment surrounding the incumbent.
The APC had an opportunity to use this campaign council to reassure Nigerians: to demonstrate inclusion, repair religious anxieties, recognise neglected regions and put forward a team whose credibility would strengthen the President’s case for another mandate.
Instead, it has produced a structure that invites questions about exclusion, political favouritism, accountability, fiscal centralisation and national sensitivity.
That should worry every Nigerian.
Because a government does not campaign only with its manifesto.
It campaigns with the people it chooses to stand beside.
And when the head of the national revenue machinery stands prominently inside the political machinery seeking the President’s re-election, Nigerians have every right to ask where the boundary between public revenue and partisan political power has been drawn.
If that boundary cannot be clearly identified, then the government owes Nigerians an explanation.
Because the greatest danger is not merely that public money might be used improperly.
It is that Nigerians could gradually become conditioned to believe that the state exists to finance the political ambitions of whoever controls it.
That is not democracy.
That is political capture.
And perhaps this is the most important question the 2027 election will ultimately ask:
Will Nigeria remain a republic whose institutions belong to its citizens, or become an electoral machine in which the resources of the state are progressively converted into instruments for preserving political power?
The APC campaign council is therefore not merely a list.
It is a mirror.
And Nigerians should look very carefully at what it reflects.
Alex Ter Adum, PhD* Writes ✍️ from Mbabur, Gwer East LGA, Benue State.
