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By Matthews Otalike, The Searchlight Correspondent / August 25, 2026

In the annals of Nigerian politics, few spectacles better illustrate the fusion of state power and partisan ambition than the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council unveiled in August 2026 for President Bola Tinubu’s re-election bid. The President installed himself as Chairman. Serving ministers, the head of the nation’s revenue service, the Defence Minister, governors, the Senate President, the Speaker of the House, and the Chief of Staff to the President populate the structure. This is not merely a campaign team. It is the deliberate deployment of the machinery of government into the service of one man’s retention of power. The propriety of this arrangement is not a matter of political etiquette. It strikes at the heart of whether Nigeria can still pretend to conduct free and fair elections, and whether public resources remain insulated from private partisan ends.

The Cast of Office-Holders

The principal officers and key members include:

• Chairman: President Bola Ahmed Tinubu
• Vice Chairman I: Vice President Kashim Shettima
• Vice Chairman II: Professor Nentawe Yilwatda (APC National Chairman)
• Director-General: Senator Abdulaziz Yari (former Zamfara Governor)
• Secretary: Governor Hope Uzodimma (Imo State)
• Deputy Directors-General: Senate President Godswill Akpabio; Speaker of the House of Representatives Tajudeen Abbas; Yobe Governor Mai Mala Buni; Senator Bamidele Opeyemi; Deputy Senate President Jibril Barau; Senator Adams Oshiomhole (Mobilization); Chief of Staff to the President Femi Gbajabiamila (Administration); Hon. James Abiodun Faleke (Election Planning)

Among the broader membership and directorates appear:

• Zacch Adedeji, Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS, formerly FIRS), named Deputy Director of Fundraising (with Ogun State Governor Dapo Abiodun as Director of Fundraising).
• General Christopher Musa (rtd.), Minister of Defence, actively engaged in pro-Tinubu mobilization structures and reported as accepting a formal role of Secretary within the campaign architecture.
• Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice Prince Lateef Fagbemi (Legal Directorate).
• Multiple serving governors as zonal coordinators and other officers.
• Senior presidential aides including Hadiza Bala-Usman (Assistant Secretary).

The full council runs into the hundreds, but the pattern is unmistakable: the highest echelons of the executive, legislature, and key agencies of state have been conscripted into the re-election project.

The Zacch Adedeji Question: Tax Collector as Fundraiser

No appointment better captures the ethical collapse than that of Zacch Adedeji. As Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service, he oversees the assessment and collection of federal taxes, the lifeblood of the public treasury. To place the same individual as Deputy Director of Fundraising for the President’s personal re-election campaign is to invite the most obvious conflict of interest imaginable. Opposition voices, including former Senator Dino Melaye, have already signalled legal challenges, asking the elementary question: how does a public servant charged with collecting the people’s money simultaneously organize the raising of funds for the man who appointed him?

Even if no naira is proven to have moved improperly, the optics and the structural temptation are corrosive. Taxpayers are entitled to believe that the official demanding their compliance is not simultaneously working to keep the incumbent in power. When the chief tax officer becomes a campaign fundraiser, the line between public duty and partisan service disappears.

Defence Minister in the Campaign Arena

Defence Minister Christopher Musa’s involvement raises parallel concerns. National security is not a partisan portfolio. The minister charged with overseeing the armed forces and coordinating responses to Nigeria’s multi-front insecurity crises has no business serving as a mobilizer or formal officer in a re-election campaign. The risk is not merely distraction. It is the perception, and potentially, the reality that security institutions may be subtly aligned with the political survival of the incumbent. In a country where elections have historically been accompanied by violence and intimidation, such dual roles poison the well of public confidence.

Public Resources and the Level Playing Field

The deeper problem is systemic. When governors, ministers, the Chief of Staff, legislative leaders, and agency heads staff a campaign council, the distinction between state resources and party resources collapses in practice. Official vehicles, security details, influence over contracts, access to data, and the sheer weight of incumbency become campaign assets. Opposition parties, already weakened by defections and internal crises, face not a political opponent but the consolidated apparatus of the Nigerian state.

Will there be a free and fair election in 2027 under these conditions? Formal voting may still occur. Ballots will be printed. INEC will announce results. But the spirit of competitive democracy, a genuine contest on a roughly level field, is already compromised. The deployment of serving public officials on this scale signals that the ruling party intends to treat the instruments of governance as instruments of electoral victory. This is the logic of competitive authoritarianism, not of a consolidating democracy.

The Economic Dimension

Nigeria’s economy remains fragile. Debt service consumes a crushing share of revenue. Poverty remains widespread. Insecurity continues to disrupt agriculture and commerce. To divert the time, attention, and institutional leverage of the very officials responsible for revenue mobilization, security, and economic management into full-scale campaign mode is an act of fiscal and administrative recklessness. The public till may not be emptied overnight into campaign accounts, but the opportunity cost, governance delayed, reforms stalled, attention diverted, is paid by ordinary Nigerians.

Conclusion: Power Without Restraint

President Tinubu’s assemblage of serving government officials into his re-election campaign council is neither novel in Nigerian history nor acceptable in a system that claims democratic credentials. It is the open declaration that the state and the ruling party are, for practical purposes, one and the same. Zacch Adedeji raising funds while collecting taxes, Christopher Musa mobilizing while overseeing defence, and a constellation of governors and ministers treating public office as campaign infrastructure, these are not signs of organizational strength. They are symptoms of a political culture that has abandoned the distinction between public trust and private power.

The Searchlight has long argued that democracy dies not only through coups and cancelled elections, but through the slow, bureaucratic capture of the state by those who already control it. The 2027 campaign council is a textbook case. Until serving officials are required to choose between public duty and partisan ambition, and until the use of state resources for re-election is treated as the ethical and legal offence it is, talk of free and fair elections will remain a ritualistic fiction. The Nigerian people deserve better than a contest in which one side arrives with the full weight of the Federal Republic behind it.