Of the apparatchiks in campaign councils

The controversy over Zacch Adedeji’s appointment as Deputy Director of Fundraising in President Bola Tinubu’s 2027 Presidential Campaign Council is not merely about one man, nor should it be reduced to another partisan skirmish in which the ruling party is accused, and the opposition suddenly discovers the virtues of institutional propriety.

The same applies to Dr Bisoye Coker-Odusote of the National Identity Management Commission. The deeper question is what happens to the Nigerian state when those who temporarily control its machinery begin to deploy it, openly or subtly, in the service of electoral survival.

This is not new. During the PDP’s long tenure, governors and presidents routinely blurred the line between official functions and campaign rallies. State-owned broadcasters became megaphones for incumbents, civil servants demonstrated loyalty at political gatherings, and their presence was less voluntary than obligatory.

Even smaller regional parties leaned on local government structures and traditional rulers to project electoral influence. The pattern is not partisan but structural: whoever holds office discovers the utility of office in electioneering.

The opposition denounces it while out of power, then embraces it once in office. The cycle repeats, eroding the distinction between the state and the party.

Tinubu’s 2027 Campaign Council has followed the same template, unveiling serving ministers, governors, heads of agencies and other state apparatchiks drafted into partisan mobilisation to ensure his re-election. And the opposition, though loud in its denunciation today, has not fared better when in power, nor can they be trusted to do otherwise if fortuitous circumstances place them where Tinubu is now.

Appointments in Nigeria have rarely been about merit alone. They are instruments of patronage, binding allies to the fortunes of the president.

Adedeji and Coker-Odusote are not strangers to Tinubu; their relationships predate their official appointments. This is the Nigerian way: politics is personal, and loyalty is rewarded with office. But the difference that stirred the hornet’s nest is that these are not ordinary offices.

The Nigeria Revenue Service, which replaced the Federal Inland Revenue Service in 2025, controls taxation, the lifeblood of state revenue, while the NIMC manages identity data, the backbone of electoral credibility.

Therefore, these nominations have provoked allegations of conflict of interest and threats of legal challenge.

The issue is not whether taxpayers’ money has been diverted into campaign coffers; no such fact has been established, and neither has Nigeria experienced a Facebook-Cambridge Analytica-style data scandal.

The snag is whether a man entrusted with mobilising the Republic’s revenue should simultaneously raise funds for the ruling party’s campaign, or a woman in charge of the national data bank should oversee data for a partisan cause. That is not an accusation of guilt; it is a question of institutional hygiene.

Nigeria’s Public Service Rules forbid civil servants from holding office in political parties or campaign organisations. Yet Section 40 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of association, and the Supreme Court in INEC v. Balarabe Musa (2003) affirmed that civil servants cannot be barred from joining political parties.

This tension between administrative rules and constitutional rights complicates enforcement. The Electoral Act 2022 further prohibits the use of state apparatus to advantage or disadvantage any candidate.

These provisions are not decorative clauses; they reflect a democratic truth: an election cannot be a fair contest if one contestant campaigns with the machinery of the state strapped to its back.

Nigeria is not alone in this paradox. Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt have all wrestled with the neutrality of technocrats in governance. Nigeria’s case is distinctive because our institutions are weaker, and the perception of manipulation more potent. The danger is not necessarily malpractice but the erosion of public confidence.

Politics is as much about perception as reality. The opposition weaponises perception; the ruling party justifies it. The reality lies in the uneasy middle. Exclusion from campaign councils does not erase loyalty; inclusion does not automatically spell malpractice. The danger is in conflating state authority with partisan advantage.

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Orwell’s warning in Animal Farm resonates: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The Public Service Rules aspire to neutrality, but political realities often create exceptions. The task of leadership is to ensure that these exceptions do not erode democracy itself.

Nigeria has cultivated, over decades, a political culture in which the distinction between government and governing party becomes porous as elections approach. The state vehicle becomes a campaign vehicle; the official entourage becomes a political retinue; government visibility becomes electoral advertising; public appointments become instruments of mobilisation; administrative influence becomes political leverage; and, at the far end of the slope, public resources begin to acquire the character of campaign resources.

The law anticipates this danger. Section 95(2) of the Electoral Act 2022 provides that state apparatus, including the media, shall not be employed to the advantage or disadvantage of any political party or candidate. So does the Code of Conduct Act. Yet state capture rarely announces itself. It arrives disguised as protocol, logistics, consultation or the innocent continuation of government activity.

Consider the familiar convoy. A governor attends a political gathering with a long procession of official vehicles, security personnel, aides and protocol officers, all funded by the public purse. He may insist he is present as a party leader rather than as governor. Perhaps so. But politics is not performed in a vacuum. The symbolism of the convoy travels with him. It announces power before the microphone is switched on. It tells the crowd who commands the machinery and who possesses access to the instruments of government. The convoy is not merely transportation. It is political theatre, and theatre matters in a country where power is often communicated through spectacle.

This is why the misuse of state resources cannot be reduced to fuel receipts or vehicle logs. The deeper problem is unequal political capacity. One candidate arrives with a private campaign bus; another arrives with the apparatus of government. One has volunteers; another has aides. One has supporters; another has civil servants whose careers depend on him. What looks like consent may, up close, resemble obedience.

I have heard of a serving state governor seeking another office who instructs members of his official convoy, aides or political appointees, to register in, or transfer their Permanent Voter Cards to, his home community because that is where he intends to contest and where most of them, as a matter of duty, must be on election day.

The hypothetical is deliberately stark because it exposes the architecture of power. No problem if an ordinary citizen freely decides to transfer his voter registration.

A subordinate receiving the suggestion from the person who controls his appointment, deployment or political future occupies a very different moral terrain. Nobody needs to say, “Do this or lose your job.” Power does not always have to shout. Sometimes it merely clears its throat.

That is the subtlety of political coercion in hierarchical societies. The subordinate knows who signs the appointment letter, who can recommend promotion, who can transfer him, who can make one telephone call that alters the trajectory of his career. The instruction may be presented as a request while being understood as an expectation.

Plato’s allegory of the cave reminds us that perception can obscure reality. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar warns: “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” Achebe’s lament remains true: leadership fails when it cannot harmonise loyalty with legitimacy, patronage with neutrality, and politics with governance. Juvenal’s immortal question, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, who guards the guardians themselves, presses upon Nigeria with renewed urgency.

The prudent democratic instinct is to create distance wherever divided loyalty appears. Let technocrats serve the state visibly, and the party discreetly. Their exclusion from formal campaign councils would reassure the public of institutional independence. Their informal support would sustain party loyalty. This balance preserves both legitimacy and loyalty.

What matters is whether Nigeria can cultivate leadership that understands governance must serve all, while politics serves some.

The appointments of Zacch Adedeji and Dr Bisoye Coker-Odusote are politically expedient but ethically volatile. They highlight Nigeria’s enduring struggle to separate governance from partisan machinery.

The danger is not proven malpractice but the erosion of public confidence. The state must remain larger than the party. The office must remain larger than the office holder. And the citizen must remain larger than the politician.

Otherwise, every election risks becoming less a contest for consent than a struggle over who commandeers the machinery of government first. Nigeria’s democratic health depends not on whether technocrats serve campaigns, but on whether institutions retain credibility.

The state must remain larger than the party. The office must remain larger than the office holder. And the citizen must remain larger than the politician. When that hierarchy collapses, elections cease to be contests of consent and become struggles over who can commandeer the machinery of government first.

Nigeria’s democratic health will not be judged by who wins in 2027, but by how power behaves while seeking to win. If institutions bend into partisan instruments, the ballot box may still open, the votes may still be counted, but the contest will already have been tilted long before the first voter arrives. That is how a republic loses its way, not through coups or stolen treasuries, but through the slow, almost respectable conversion of public power into private political advantage.