Reforms are never opposed because they are failing. Reforms are opposed because they are working. This is the central truth behind the sustained, vicious, and increasingly desperate attacks, blackmail, and smear campaigns directed at Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo (BTO), Nigeria’s Minister of Interior. What is unfolding is not a debate about policy shortcomings or performance deficits; it is corruption doing what it has always done—fighting back ferociously against any attempt to truncate its lifelines. It is a full-scale counteroffensive by a deeply entrenched system battling for survival.
For decades, Nigeria’s Interior architecture functioned as a lucrative ecosystem of dysfunction. Manual processes, opaque procedures, discretionary bottlenecks, and deliberately engineered inefficiencies created an environment where corruption thrived, files vanished without trace, bribes became normalized, and citizens were reduced to beggars in their own country. This was not accidental. It was intentional, calculated, and sustained. And many benefited immensely from it.
BTO’s crime is simple: he disrupted the ecosystem of corruption.
Through aggressive digitization, automation, and institutional restructuring, human discretion—the oxygen that sustains corruption—has been systematically choked out. Processes that once required “connections” now demand compliance. Systems that once survived on inducements now operate on data. Timelines that once stretched endlessly are now fixed, transparent, and traceable. In real terms, the Ministry of Interior has been dragged from an analog bazaar into the discipline and accountability of a digital institution.
And when corruption loses access, it does not retreat quietly. It fights back.
The backlash against BTO is therefore not ideological; it is economic. Those who fed fat on a broken system have been cut off. Middlemen have been rendered obsolete. Rent-seekers have lost their leverage. The old gatekeepers—whose power, relevance, and livelihood depended on chaos and dysfunction—now face extinction. For them, reform is not governance; it is an existential threat, and the architect of that reform must be destroyed at all costs.
This explains why the attacks are personal, malicious, and unrelenting.
When reformers cannot be defeated on performance, they are assaulted on character. When systems cannot be discredited, their drivers are blackmailed. Smear campaigns become weapons of last resort. Half-truths are amplified into headlines. Lies are recycled with reckless abandon. Anonymous accusations replace evidence. The objective is not accountability; it is intimidation and deterrence.
Yet facts remain stubborn.
Under BTO, the Ministry of Interior has emerged as one of the most performance-driven pillars of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda. Service delivery has markedly improved. Transparency has expanded. Leakages have been blocked. Institutional credibility—both at home and abroad—has been strengthened. These are not slogans or propaganda; they are measurable, verifiable outcomes.
That success explains the hostility.
There is a dangerous irony at play: a system that failed Nigerians for decades now demands perfection from the man repairing it. The same voices that tolerated inefficiency, extortion, and decay suddenly claim moral outrage because reform is inconvenient and disruptive. This hypocrisy is neither accidental nor innocent; it is strategic.
Make no mistake: corruption does not only wear uniforms. It wears suits, speaks polished grammar, files petitions, bankrolls media attacks, and pretends to defend the “public interest.” But its fingerprints are always unmistakable—obstruction to change, resistance to transparency, hatred for digitization, nostalgia for the old order, and an unrelenting desire to preserve a status quo that once served narrow interests.
BTO represents the end of that nostalgia—and the end of that era.
What Nigeria is witnessing is not merely an attack on a minister; it is an attack on reform itself. It is a warning shot to anyone bold enough to challenge entrenched interests. It is the system sending a chilling message: “If you touch us, we will destroy you.”
But history is unequivocal on this point: every consequential reformer acquires enemies long before allies. Resistance is not proof of failure; it is evidence of impact. If BTO were ineffective, he would be ignored. If he were compliant, he would be celebrated. He is attacked precisely because he is effective.
Nigeria must therefore choose.
Will the nation side with a broken system that profits from chaos and dysfunction, or with a reformer who insists that governance must work for the many, not the privileged few? Will we reward courage, or shield corruption simply because it is familiar?
BTO’s war is not personal. It is institutional. It is the battle between the future and the past, between systems and shortcuts, between reform and rent-seeking. And like all such wars, it will be noisy, brutal, and unforgiving.
But one thing is certain: the old system is fighting because it is losing.
Capt. Bishop C. Johnson, US Army (rtd), is a national defense and military strategist, and a respected national security commentator.
Gatekeepers News is not liable for opinions expressed in this article; they’re strictly the writer’s
