Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
This is an image travelling across our phones this week. It carries no charts and no big grammar, only a quiet question stamped across the green map of Nigeria. For some reason, it asks, we no longer hear the old thunder for a Sovereign National Conference. Did our constitutional afflictions heal quietly in the night? Or is it simply that the men who once screamed loudest for restructuring have found the air-conditioning of Aso Rock too sweet to disturb?
The picture laughs with four crying-with-laughter faces. But it is the bitter laughter of a people sold a dream and handed a receipt for nothing.
Let us name the man at the centre of that laughter. Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
THE MAN WHO SOLD RESTRUCTURING TO BUY POWER
Understand who is being discussed here. This is not some accidental beneficiary of the system. This is a chief architect of the restructuring gospel itself.
For more than two decades, Tinubu built his entire national brand on one sermon: that Nigeria is strangled by over-centralisation, and that true federalism is the only cure. The mainstream record is not in dispute on this. As press analysis has noted, Tinubu long positioned true federalism as the corrective to an over-centralised state, and the opposition bloc he led into the APC vigorously championed fiscal federalism, state police, devolution of powers and resource control.
That was his currency. He spent it to climb.
In opposition he wept for the federating units. In power he cannot find the tissue.
He came out of the pro-democracy struggle of the 1990s, the same crucible of exile and defiance that produced the demand for a sovereign conference where the nationalities of Nigeria would sit as equals and renegotiate the terms of their union. He rode that heritage. He wore June 12 like a royal robe, and on getting power he was quick to declare it a national holiday. Symbolism was cheap and he paid it gladly.
But when it came to the substance the June 12 generation actually fought for, the restructuring of a broken federation, the man went silent. Stone silent.
THE DARKEST FILE: RHETORIC IN OPPOSITION, BETRAYAL IN POWER
Here is the single fact that convicts him.
The pen is now in his hand. He holds the presidency, a captured National Assembly and 31 of 36 states after the defection wave of 2025 into 2026. If restructuring was ever a conviction and not a costume, this was the hour to deliver it.
Instead, watch the theatre. In September 2025, at the public hearing on the review of the 1999 Constitution, Tinubu, represented by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, called the exercise a golden opportunity to entrench good governance and described the constitution as a living document that must respond to the aspirations of the people. Beautiful words. Rehearsed words.
Now measure the words against the works, and measure the timing most of all.
For three long years the restructuring file gathered dust on his desk while the masses bled. Then, only as the 2027 campaign season came into view, the executive suddenly discovered urgency. In June 2026 Tinubu transmitted a State Police executive bill to the National Assembly. The House of Representatives passed it on 11 June 2026. The Senate rammed it through all its stages and third reading by 24 June 2026. It now sits before the 36 State Houses of Assembly, where at least 24 must ratify it before it returns to him for assent, and a separate National Policing Bill is still being drafted by a presidential working group whose public submissions only closed on 13 August 2026.
Read that timeline again. Silent for three years. Feverish in the season of votes.
And look closely at the bone he has thrown, because even that is hollowed at the centre. As reported, the same bill preserves extensive federal emergency and intervention powers, keeping the presidency’s hand on the switch. Senators such as Enyinnaya Abaribe cautioned openly against provisions that could let the President simply look at a state and decide to take it over. That is not the return of power to the federating units. That is centralisation wearing the mask of devolution.
Now weigh what is missing. A single, guarded police bill in year three is not the revolution he preached. Where is resource control? Where is true fiscal federalism? Where is the broader devolution that moves real power off the Exclusive List? And above all, where is the Sovereign National Conference, the renegotiation of the union by its own nationalities, the very demand his generation of activists carried into exile? Untouched. Unspoken. Buried.
This is precisely the trap the Coalition of United Political Parties warned about. Through its scribe Chief Peter Ameh, the CUPP recalled that Tinubu and the APC had passionately advocated fiscal federalism, state police and devolution while in opposition, and observed that those progressive ideals had lost urgency. Its warning was blunt: that such inconsistency reinforces the perception that reformist rhetoric is merely deployed for electoral advantage. A conviction held for 20 years does not wait until the eve of re-election to move. An election gambit does.
As one national commentary put it plainly, silence on restructuring is not neutral. It is a choice.
The man who needed the restructuring cause to climb the mountain now needs it buried so nothing disturbs his second-term arithmetic.
That is the deceit. Not a difference of opinion. Not the ordinary compromise of governance. A calculated abandonment of the very cause he weaponised to reach the top.
THE TALLY OF HARM
This is not an academic quarrel about legislative lists. Nigerians are dying inside the gap between what Tinubu promised and what he refuses to do.
The centralised security architecture he pledged to dismantle is the same architecture failing now in real time. Insurgency in the North East. Banditry in the North West. Kidnapping along the highways. Killings in the Middle Belt and across the zones. Communities bury their dead and wait, and for three years the state police reform that could bring security closer to the people was left to sleep, only to be rushed forward in the season of votes and hedged with federal powers of takeover that keep real control in Abuja.
Even a Yoruba socio-political group, in February 2026, had to charge Tinubu directly to move beyond rhetoric and champion structural reform, insisting that Nigeria must choose reform over repression and restructuring over decay.
His own showpiece tells the story. The Supreme Court granted the 774 local governments financial autonomy, and the administration paraded it as a landmark. Yet the reporting on implementation has been of a troubled and stalled rollout. Even the victory is hollow in delivery.
This is the pattern of the man. Loud conviction on the campaign platform. A shrug once the treasury keys are in his pocket. We saw the same choreography on subsidy, where the opposition tribune who once protested an abrupt petrol shock later executed a far more brutal one-shot removal himself and refused to step back when the masses cried out.
Deceit is not a single lie. Deceit is a method. And Tinubu has made it a method of governance.
THE PEOPLE REMEMBER, AND THE CAUSE HAS CHANGED ADDRESS
Here is the part Aso Rock did not plan for.
The restructuring cause did not die because Tinubu abandoned it. It simply moved house. It now lives with the platform that still says its name out loud.
The African Democratic Congress and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, have kept devolution of powers and the restructuring of the federation central to their political message, even as the ruling party lets the file gather dust. Atiku has, for years and consistently, argued for true federalism and the devolution of authority to the federating units. That is not a convenient 2026 discovery. That is a settled conviction.
So the meme travelling across our phones has an answer.
No, our constitutional afflictions did not heal in the night. And no, the agitators did not all go quiet. One set of agitators climbed into power and swallowed their own tongues. The rest of us kept the faith, and we now carry it to the ballot.
On 16 January 2027, the suffering masses will hold two files side by side. In one, a man who sold restructuring to buy power and then buried it. In the other, a candidate and a party who never stopped calling the federation home to renegotiate itself.
A deceit can win an election. A deceit cannot govern a grieving nation forever.
Nigeria is watching. History is taking attendance. And the people, who are neither deaf nor foolish, are already writing their verdict.
Tinubu is a deceit. The map remembers. The masses remember. And in January, the ballot will remember loudest of all.
TinubuIsADeceit
RestructureNigeria
AtikuForNigeria2027
ADCMovement
InformedInspiredInvolved
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org
24 August 2026
