I follow debates on X closely, rarely weighing in. But there is a dangerous idea spreading that I can no longer stay quiet about: the growing insistence that Tinubu has no viable alternative. Quietly, persistently, people are planting a single seed in public consciousness. That performance does not matter, that our problems are simply the nature of things, and that we must accept Jagaban as our only true salvation until 2031. It sounds like political commentary. It is actually something worse. It is the slow normalisation of failure.                                                                       

Think about what accepting this idea actually means. It means swallowing our grief when relatives are slaughtered by bandits and terrorists, then travelling wherever the president demands to pay our respects, on his terms, not ours. It means watching Seyi Tinubu parade his city boy movement across our screens, distributing gold-cased iPhones, while millions of Nigerians cannot afford a single meal a day, and saying nothing. It means tolerating a president who governs with the confidence of a monarch, untouchable and unaccountable, while thugs like MC Oluomo operate in plain sight with the police conveniently occupied elsewhere. We are being asked to endure all of this because, apparently, there is no one better.                                     

That argument must be rejected. Loudly and without apology.                                                                                                

Accountability cannot be conditional on the availability of a perfect replacement. That is not how healthy democracies function, and it is not how we will build one here. The principle is simple: if you do not perform within four years, you must go. Not maybe. Not if we find someone obviously superior. You must go. The moment Nigerians begin consistently enforcing that standard, showing the red card to non-performing governors and presidents at the ballot box regardless of tribe, party, or opposition, something fundamental shifts. Politicians stop governing for themselves and start governing for survival. Power returns, slowly but surely, to where it belongs. A political class that once treated us as subjects begins to remember it was hired to serve us.          

That is not idealism. That is the basic logic of democratic accountability, and it works everywhere it is genuinely practised.                             

As for the claim that there is no one better, it does not hold up. Nigeria has governors, technocrats, and public figures who have shown they can deliver real results. The bar being set is not a high one. Tinubu is a man whose academic records remain in dispute, whose history is conspicuously difficult to verify, and whose name has been attached to documented drug trade investigations from the 1990s. This is not the profile of someone a corruption-weary nation should have felt compelled to settle for, let alone one it should feel obligated to keep.                                                           

We are not choosing between a difficult leader and chaos. We are being told to believe that so we stop asking questions. We should keep asking. We should keep demanding better. Not because the perfect candidate is waiting in the wings, but because the demand itself is what eventually produces leaders worth having.