There was a time in Nigerian politics when the destruction of an opponent’s campaign poster was regarded as a petty misdemeanor, the work of overzealous street urchins, quickly forgotten by the next news cycle. That time is over. In the run-up to the 2027 general elections, the defacement and destruction of campaign materials has become a national phenomenon, a symbolic theatre of a much deeper rot, and a warning sign that the coming polls may be contested not by ideas but by machetes.
In early October 2026, a video went viral showing a man wielding what appeared to be a machete, slashing posters bearing the images of President Bola Tinubu and Vice-President Kashim Shettima, while graphics proclaiming “Tinubu Must Go” flashed across the screen. The Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, responded swiftly, not to condemn the act of destruction itself, but to brand it “a sponsored thug of the opposition” engaged in “a planned propaganda stunt,” arguing that the deliberate recording and circulation of the incident was designed to manufacture a narrative that the President had been “rejected” by Nigerians .
Keyamo’s framing is revealing in two directions at once. If he is right that the video was staged, then it speaks to a disturbing culture in which political messaging is fabricated through choreographed lawlessness: thuggery as content creation. If the opposition’s counter-claim is closer to the truth, that such destruction is real, recurrent, and directed at their own materials with equal or greater ferocity, then the minister’s selective outrage becomes part of the problem. The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has in fact accused the authorities of a double standard: swift, high-level commentary when ruling-party posters are touched, and stony silence when opposition offices are invaded and party property is destroyed. Either way, a poster mounted on a public wall has become, in today’s Nigeria, a litmus test of whose violence counts and whose does not.
The destruction of paper is the least of the challenge. Across the country, political gatherings are being broken up with cutlasses, convoys are being turned back by stick-wielding youths, and in at least one documented case, a party member has been killed.
In September 2026, the ADC’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, presented a chilling memorandum at a press conference in Abuja. Between July 2025 and September 2026, the party documented attacks on political meetings across no fewer than nine states, Kaduna, Kebbi, Ekiti, Cross River, Rivers, Edo, Osun, Kogi, and Enugu, involving destruction of party property, assaults on participants, and threats against citizens because of their political preferences .
The catalogue is grim. In Rivers State, at Community Ward One in Odua Local Government Area, the home community of the ADC’s vice-presidential candidate members preparing for a political meeting were attacked, and a young party member named Kamadiyoi was killed . Around the same period, armed men disrupted an opposition gathering in Enugu, leaving injuries; and in Kogi State, thugs attacked ADC members in two separate wards as they prepared for meetings, leaving several in hospital . Earlier, in February 2026, the ADC secretariat in Benin City was attacked during a political gathering, while gunshots were reported at the residence of former Edo State governor and former APC National Chairman, Chief John Odigie Oyegun. The police confirmed both incidents and announced investigations, yet, according to the ADC, there has been no arrest, no prosecution, and no public update .
The violence has not spared one of the biggest names on the ballot. Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), had his convoy stopped by stick-wielding youths as he travelled to Yelwata in Benue State to commiserate with families of victims of the June 13, 2025 massacre in which hundreds of villagers were reportedly killed. The convoy was forced to make a U-turn and the visit was cancelled . The APC-led Benue State Government attributed the blockade to security concerns and claimed Obi had failed to notify Governor Hyacinth Alia, an explanation the opposition rejects as a thin bureaucratic veneer over raw intimidation. The following day in Kaduna, suspected thugs disrupted ADC campaign activities before police deployed tear gas . In Edo, Governor Monday Okpebholo had previously warned Obi against visiting the state at all .
This is the pattern the opposition fears most: a patchwork of “no-go areas” in which candidates cannot campaign freely in many parts of the country. As the Tanimu Turaki-led faction of the PDP warned, “If allowed to persist, it means no candidate will be able to campaign everywhere, as every candidate will be prevented from campaigning in his opponent’s terrain” .
Worse than the violence itself is the rhetoric that licenses it. Nigeria’s political class, across the divide, has spent the past year normalising language that would, in any serious democracy, end a career. Ahead of the August 2026 Osun governorship election, Senator Francis Fadahunsi, who represents Osun East, reportedly urged supporters of the All Progressives Congress to “kill” members of the rival Accord Party . In Borno State, the Commissioner for Youth and Sports Development, Sainna Buba, reportedly threatened to cut off the fingers of anyone who refused to support the ruling APC . And in the Federal Capital Territory itself, the seat of the federal government, the Chairman of Kuje Area Council, Danjuma Shekwolo, reportedly warned residents to either support the APC in 2027 or leave the council area. Days later, suspected thugs armed with cutlasses attacked an Accord Party gathering in Kuje, dispersing participants, destroying campaign materials and furniture, and injuring at least one person. Read that sequence again: a threat, followed within days by an attack matching the threat. This is no longer a metaphor. When an elected official tells citizens to vote a certain way or vacate their homes, and thugs subsequently enforce the ultimatum with cutlasses, we are describing brigandage, plain, criminal, and prosecutable. Yet prosecutions are precisely what have not happened. The ADC has demanded that the Inspector General of Police publicly account for the status of investigations into these incidents, noting pointedly that “the Nigerian police is not APC police; it is the police of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” . Until the first political sponsor or high-profile thug is charged, convicted, and imprisoned, every investigation announcement is merely administrative theatre.
It is into this combustible environment that President Tinubu chose to utter, at a meeting with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria, the words: “all is fair in politics.” The President’s defenders have rushed to contextualise. Professor Damian Opata of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, argued that the remark reflects “brutal courage in speaking and acting on truth and reality,” tracing the phrase to John Lyly’s Euphues and its Machiavellian reduction to “the end justifies the means” . But even Professor Opata conceded that critics are justified in arguing that, as President, such an expression “could send the wrong signal because he embodies the nation’s conscience and ethical standards” .
That concession understates the matter gravely. A president is not a private citizen trading proverbs. He is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the head of the government that controls the police, and the leader of the political party whose members: commissioners, councillors, senators are presently threatening voters with amputation and expulsion. When such a man says “all is fair in politics,” the thug in Kuje hears permission. The senator in Osun hears vindication. The police commissioner weighing whether to arrest a governor’s aide hears hesitation. Context is not exoneration. Even if the President intended nothing more than jaded realpolitik in a sparring session with bishops who had demanded free and fair elections, improved security, and good governance , the effect of his words in the current climate is dangerous and must be corrected, publicly, specifically, and forcefully.
I suggest therefore that, thePresident should now do three things, and do them sincerely.
First, he should speak to the nation, not to party loyalists, not through aides, and declare unambiguously that the campaign season is not a war, that no Nigerian will be threatened, attacked, or displaced for their political choice, and that the phrase “all is fair in politics” does not describe his government’s tolerance for violence. Words from the Villa set the weather for the entire security architecture.
Second, he should order the security agencies to clamp down visibly, even-handedly, and without regard to the party, on the politicians and thugs responsible for these acts of brigandage. The starting list practically writes itself: the sponsors of the Kuje attack, the perpetrators of the Odua killing, those who disrupted the Kaduna and Enugu gatherings, whoever fired shots at Chief Oyegun’s residence, and the officials who issued the threats in Osun, Borno, and the FCT. The law does not lack instruments: conspiracy, assault, arson, unlawful assembly, murder. What has been lacking is the will to apply them against the powerful.
Third, there should be consequences inside the party. Keyamo’s reflex, to treat attacks on ruling-party posters as a national emergency while attacks on opposition lives go unremarked, must be retired. Party officials at every level who incite violence should face suspension, and governors who turn their states into fortresses against opposition campaigning should be told, in terms they cannot misunderstand, that federal might will not shield them. The opposition, for its part, must resist the temptation to answer lawlessness with lawlessness. The ADC has pledged non-violence, and its documentation of incidents, sober, state-by-state, dated, is the correct model of accountability . All parties should sign and honour a genuine code of conduct enforced by INEC and the National Council of State, with automatic sanctions, including disqualification of campaigns for breaches.
Nigeria’s democracy has survived military rule, annulled elections, and judicial heists. But it cannot survive the normalisation of political violence by a political class that has grown comfortable issuing threats from podiums and sending apologies afterwards. Every cutlass raised at a campaign rally, every poster slashed, every convoy turned back, every finger-threatened voter, erodes the only asset that makes elections meaningful: the belief of ordinary Nigerians that politics is a contest they can join without risking their lives.
President Tinubu still has time to be remembered not as the president under whose watch campaigns became combat, but as the one who drew the line and enforced it. “All is fair in politics” may be a proverb; murder, arson, and intimidation are crimes. The President knows the difference. He must say so, and then prove he means it.
Dr Frederick Imuebe Braimah is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Elizade University Ilara-Mokin, Ondo State. Nigeria.
Gatekeepers News is not liable for opinions expressed in this article; they’re strictly the writer’s.
