…A Rejoinder to ‘Yemi Success’s Open Letter to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu
By Oyewole O. Sarumi PhD
Introduction: When A Letter Speaks For Millions
In April 2026, a passionate open letter addressed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu — signed by ‘Yemi Success — made its way into public discourse. It was raw, rhetorical in places, and unflinching in its central thesis: that Nigeria’s problem is structural, not cosmetic; constitutional, not electoral; and that the presidency of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu may represent the nation’s last, best opportunity to tear down the architecture of decay and build something worthy of the country’s potential.
This rejoinder does not merely endorse that letter. It builds upon it, provides it with the data it deserves, and frames its urgent plea within the wider body of constitutional scholarship, governance research, and the hard lessons of Nigeria’s post-independence political economy. And it extends the argument further — specifically, to make the case for a transition from the current presidential constitutional model to a Republican, regionally-anchored federal structure that devolves power, distributes responsibility, and invites genuine competition among regions.
Nigeria does not lack resources. It does not lack talented people. What it lacks — with stunning consistency, across six decades — is a constitutional framework that rewards productivity rather than dependency, accountability rather than extraction, and long-term vision rather than the perpetual management of artificial crises. That framework can be changed. President Tinubu has, at this moment in 2026, the political capital, the governing party machinery, and the personal history to make it happen. The question, as ‘Yemi Success rightly asks, is whether he has the will.
“Nigeria does not suffer from a lack of elections. Nigeria suffers from a lack of structure.” — ‘Yemi Success, April 2026
The Presidential Constitution: A System Built For Elites
Let us begin where honesty demands we begin. The 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria — largely a military document hurriedly dressed in civilian clothing — was not designed to serve the Nigerian people. It was designed to manage them. It concentrated power at the centre, placed enormous patronage resources in the hands of the federal executive, and created a system in which the path to prosperity for any state, any region, or any political actor ran directly through Abuja. This was not accidental. It was structural.
Nigeria operates what political scientists classify as a hyper-presidential system — one in which the chief executive wields disproportionate control over national resources, regulatory instruments, security architecture, and judicial appointments. Unlike the American presidential model, which came with robust federalism, separation of powers with genuine legislative independence, and fiscal autonomy at the state level, Nigeria’s presidential constitution borrowed the form but discarded the substance. What resulted was a hybrid: a nominally democratic presidential system that is, in practice, a centralised patronage state.
The evidence is overwhelming. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the 36 states and the FCT generated a combined Internally Generated Revenue of approximately ₦3.63 trillion in 2024. That figure sounds impressive until you examine it structurally. Lagos State alone contributed ₦1.3 trillion of that total — more than 35% of the national sub-national IGR — while the bottom-performing states languished in ranges that could not sustain even a modest municipal government in a middle-income country. In 2023, Lagos State’s IGR of ₦815.86 billion exceeded the combined IGR of 29 other states. The North East region — six states spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, with tens of millions of inhabitants — recorded a collective IGR of just ₦104.4 billion in the same year.
Data Point
Nigeria’s 36 states and FCT generated ₦3.63 trillion in IGR in 2024. Lagos alone contributed ₦1.3 trillion — over 35% of the national total. The entire North East region generated ₦129.8 billion. (NBS, 2024)
What does this mean in practice? It means that the majority of Nigerian states — by the most conservative estimates, upwards of 25 to 30 of the 36 — are fiscal dependents. They cannot pay salaries, fund education, maintain infrastructure, or manage security without the monthly FAAC allocation from Abuja. A state like Zamfara, which reduced its FAAC dependence from 90.52% in 2022 to 74.66% in 2023, was celebrated as a fiscal reform success story. Read that again. A state is celebrated for having three-quarters of its revenue sourced from federal handouts. This is the depth of the structural disease Nigeria is dealing with.
And yet, the 1999 Constitution that produces this outcome is defended ferociously by those who benefit most from it: federal legislators who control enormous constituency project budgets; ministers who supervise agencies that duplicate state functions; technocrats and civil servants whose career empires are built on the exclusive legislative list; and political elite networks whose entire logic of power depends on the centre remaining fat, generous, and approachable. The constitution does not serve Nigeria. It serves the political class. That is why it resists reform. That is why Gani Fawehinmi fought for structural change until he drew his last breath. That is why Femi Falana, Olisa Agbakoba, and a generation of constitutional activists have raised their voices at every platform available to them. And that is why, today, that struggle falls to the one man with the political tools to actually execute it.
“It is easier to promise rice than to redesign a nation. It is easier to chant unity than to build a system that sustains it.” — ‘Yemi Success, April 2026
What A Republican Constitutional Model Would Actually Look Like
When we speak of returning Nigeria to a Republican constitutional model with regional architecture, we are not speaking of secession, tribalism, or the dismemberment of the Nigerian project. We are speaking of the logical completion of Nigeria’s original federal promise — a promise that was made in 1954 under the Lyttelton Constitution, honoured briefly in the First Republic, and then systematically dismantled by successive military governments beginning in 1966.
Under the First Republic, the regions — North, West, East, and later Midwest — were not beggars at the federal table. They were engines of development. The Western Region introduced free primary education in 1955, a policy so bold and so regionally financed that it remains a benchmark of sub-national governance to this day. The Eastern Region built trade and industry. The Northern Region’s groundnut and cotton agricultural programmes generated significant regional revenue. These were not accidents of good luck. They were the deliberate outcomes of competitive federalism — a system in which each region had the constitutional mandate and the fiscal autonomy to develop at its own pace, using its own resources, with accountability to its own people.
A return to that spirit — updated for the twenty-first century — would mean designing a Republican framework with the following core architecture. The centre would be genuinely lean, retaining responsibility for national defence, national police, external affairs, internal affairs coordination, customs and immigration, and a streamlined set of national regulatory functions. The regions — whether reconstituted as the six geopolitical zones or some other configuration agreed upon through a broad national dialogue — would assume primary responsibility for education, healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, power, internal security, and all taxation on resources originating within their territories.
Resource control would be a foundational pillar of this model. The current system, in which oil extracted from the Niger Delta is pooled at the centre and distributed according to a formula that rewards population over productivity and fiscal responsibility over fiscal effort, is not federalism. It is a mechanism for the perpetual redistribution of someone else’s wealth — and it has produced the Niger Delta’s legitimate grievance for decades. Under a properly structured Republican model, the revenue from natural resources would accrue primarily to the region of origin, with a defined contributory share to the national government for shared federal services. This is how successful federal systems work. It is how Germany’s Laenderfinanzausgleich balances regional equity without stifling regional initiative. It is how Canadian provinces manage their natural resources. Nigeria does not need to reinvent the wheel. It needs to admit that its current wheel is square.
Constitutional Fact
Section 9 of the 1999 Constitution requires any amendment to be approved by two-thirds majority in both chambers of the National Assembly, and ratified by at least two-thirds (24) of the 36 State Houses of Assembly. (Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999)
The concern that is inevitably raised at this point is security — how would regions protect their people without a strong central security architecture? This is a fair question that deserves a serious answer. The answer is that regional security — or more precisely, constitutionally anchored state or regional policing — is precisely what the present system has failed to deliver. From the Fulani-farmer crisis in the Middle Belt to the IPOB agitation in the South East, from banditry in Zamfara to kidnapping across the North West, the evidence is unambiguous: a single, centrally controlled national police force of approximately 370,000 officers attempting to secure a country of over 220 million people across 923,768 square kilometres is not a security architecture. It is a security fiction. Regionally anchored policing — with national standards, national intelligence sharing, and national oversight — would close the gap between the state and the citizen that criminal networks currently exploit.
The Mathematics Of Now: Tinubu’s Unique Constitutional Window
Here is where the argument transitions from the theoretical to the urgently practical. As of March 2026, President Tinubu’s APC controls 31 of Nigeria’s 36 state governments — approximately 86% of all governorship seats in the federation. The ruling party also commands supermajority control in both chambers of the National Assembly, having crossed the two-thirds threshold through a combination of electoral victories and opposition defections. In the 10th National Assembly, APC’s dominance at both federal and state level is the most overwhelming any ruling party has enjoyed since the return to democracy in 1999.
Political Data
As of March 2026, APC controls 31 of Nigeria’s 36 state governments (86.1%). The party also commands a legislative supermajority in the National Assembly. (Intelpoint, March 2026)
The mathematics of constitutional reform in Nigeria is not complicated. Section 9 of the 1999 Constitution requires that any amendment be approved by two-thirds of the National Assembly and ratified by two-thirds — that is, 24 — of the 36 State Houses of Assembly. A president who controls 31 governorships, and through those governorships exercises significant influence over their respective State Houses of Assembly, possesses, at this historical moment, the structural capacity to drive the most comprehensive constitutional reform Nigeria has ever seen. The 10th National Assembly’s constitutional review process — which had already approved over 80 constitutional amendment bills by March 2025, spanning judicial independence, state policing, fiscal federalism, and governance restructuring — demonstrates that the appetite for reform is present, even within the existing framework.
The question of constitutional reform is not, therefore, a question of mathematical feasibility. It is a question of political will. And this is where ‘Yemi Success’s open letter lands with its most pointed challenge — and where this rejoinder must be most direct.
Tinubu knows what needs to be done. He has always known. He was a founding member of NADECO — the National Democratic Coalition that emerged in the aftermath of the June 12, 1993 annulment and made restructuring its central demand. His years as Governor of Lagos State were a masterclass in subnational fiscal assertion, taking on the Obasanjo federal government, winning before the Supreme Court, and building Lagos into the most fiscally independent sub-national entity in Nigeria’s history. Lagos today generates more IGR than the entire North East, North West, South East, and North Central combined. That outcome did not happen by accident. It happened because Tinubu, as governor, understood that fiscal autonomy is the foundation of governance quality.
But there is a pattern in Nigerian politics that is painfully familiar: bold ideas in opposition become convenient silence in power. Tinubu articulated structural reform from the trenches of NADECO. He executed fiscal federalism from the corridors of Alausa. He promised restructuring from the campaign platforms of 2023. And now, more than two years into his presidency, there is no comprehensive constitutional reform agenda. There are tax reform bills, LGA autonomy moves, and state policing conversations — all welcome, all incremental — but no grand constitutional settlement that addresses the root cause of Nigeria’s governance crisis. Even the cable.ng was constrained to ask directly, just days ago in April 2026: where is restructuring?
“Ironically, Tinubu has the pedigree to lead this effort. His progressive credentials and federalist stance position him to build consensus. His political network spans regions, offering a rare chance to bridge divides that have stalled reform.” — TheCable, April 2026
The Opposition Illusion: Why Change Cannot Come From Elsewhere
There are those in Nigeria’s political circles who believe that if the APC fails to deliver, the opposition will. This is a comfortable fiction that deserves to be examined clearly. The figures who currently animate Nigeria’s opposition landscape — veterans of the PDP, men and women who have held every manner of power in this country across the last twenty-five years — carry with them the full weight of the governance record of that era. The roads not built, the schools that collapsed, the security that failed, the treasury that was looted, the oil revenues that were spent without a cent of structural investment — these are not abstract indictments. They are matters of public record.
The opposition forces of 2026 are not assembling around a vision for Nigeria’s constitutional renewal. They are assembling around the arithmetic of 2027. They are coalitions of convenience — not constituencies of conviction. The former governors, former ministers, and party veterans who populate these opposition formations have demonstrated, through the full record of their governance tenures, that they are skilled at accessing power and poor at deploying it for structural transformation. They have been inside the system they now propose to fix. They benefited from the very constitutional architecture they now critique — when they critique it at all.
This is not a partisan observation. It is a structural one. The point is simply this: if Nigeria waits for a political messiah from the opposition to deliver constitutional reform, it will wait indefinitely. The constitutional change Nigeria needs will not come from a new set of faces at Aso Rock who are working with the same document, the same exclusive legislative list, and the same fiscal concentration that has produced the current crisis. It must come from a decisive act of political leadership that uses existing power to redesign the power structure itself.
That is the paradox of this moment. The man with the constitutional tools to do the work is currently in the seat that benefits most from the status quo. To restructure is to diminish the very federal centre that Tinubu now inhabits. It requires a level of strategic self-transcendence that few leaders in any country, at any time, have been willing to exercise. And yet that is precisely what history demands of him.
History’s most consequential leaders are not those who managed the status quo well. They are those who recognised that the status quo was itself the problem, and acted accordingly. Mandela gave up power to entrench democracy. De Gaulle rewrote France’s constitution to create a more governable republic. Lee Kuan Yew built Singapore’s institutions on a philosophy of meritocracy and fiscal discipline so robust that it outlasted his own administration. Tinubu has the opportunity to join that company — but only if he is willing to do the one thing that none of his predecessors has attempted: deliberately and comprehensively restructure the constitutional foundation of Nigeria.
The Voices That Have Never Stopped Calling
It would be historically irresponsible to discuss this subject without honouring those who paid enormous personal costs to advance it. Chief Gani Fawehinmi — the ‘Senior Advocate of the Masses’ — spent his entire legal career fighting not just for individual justice but for systemic change. He challenged military decrees, defended political prisoners, and argued relentlessly that Nigeria’s constitutional structure was the root cause of its governance failure. He died in 2009 without seeing that change. But his voice has never left the public square.
Femi Falana, SAN, carrying that legacy forward, has consistently argued that restructuring is not a regional demand but a national necessity — that a Nigeria in which regions compete, govern themselves, and are accountable to their own people is a more stable, more just, and more productive Nigeria than the one we have. Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, former president of the Nigerian Bar Association, has made the same argument for decades, advocating for a lower temperature in the language of restructuring while insisting on its substance. Speaking at events as recently as June 2025, Falana joined voices with the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland, Iba Gani Adams, in making a resounding appeal for structural reforms to avert what he described as worsening instability.
These are not radicals or separatists. They are among the most distinguished members of the Nigerian legal and civic community. When they say that the 1999 Constitution cannot deliver the Nigeria that Nigerians deserve, they are speaking from a combined century of professional experience with that document — its gaps, its contradictions, its perverse incentives, and its fundamental unsuitability as the framework for a diverse, resource-rich, and deeply federalist society of over 220 million people.
NADECO itself has never retreated from this position. In the immediate aftermath of Tinubu’s Supreme Court victory in 2023, NADECO publicly called on the president — as one of its most prominent former chieftains — to implement the el-Rufai panel’s recommendations on restructuring and to restore Nigeria to federal constitutional governance. In commemorating the 30th anniversary of June 12 in 2023, NADECO reiterated the demand that the president return Nigeria to the path of the federal constitutional governance upon which it secured independence. That demand has gone unanswered for three years.
“NADECO urges President Tinubu to prove beyond reasonable doubts that he remains faithful and committed to restoring Nigeria to the negotiated federal constitution.” — NADECO Statement, October 2023
THE NORTH MUST NOT BE LEFT BEHIND: THE CASE FOR UNIVERSAL BENEFIT
The argument for constitutional restructuring is sometimes framed, unfairly and inaccurately, as a southern agenda — a device by which the oil-producing South seeks to retain more of its natural resource wealth at the expense of the North. This framing is both strategically counterproductive and intellectually dishonest.
The northern regions of Nigeria — vast, historically proud, agriculturally endowed, and rich in solid minerals, livestock, and human capital — are, if anything, the biggest losers under the current constitutional arrangement. The concentration of power at the federal centre has not served northern development. It has served northern political elites who access federal resources and distribute them through patronage networks rather than institutional investment. The ordinary citizen of Zamfara, Taraba, Kebbi, or Yobe is not benefiting from federal centralisation. These states, with FAAC dependence rates that have historically exceeded 80 to 90% in many cases, are proof that proximity to the federal allocation system does not produce development. It produces dependency.
A properly structured federal republic — in which northern regions control their agricultural marketing, their solid mineral extraction, their livestock value chains, and their land use — would position the North to build a productivity-driven economy for the first time since the First Republic’s marketing boards. Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, and Katsina have the resource base to be competitive, self-sustaining regional economies. What they lack is the constitutional permission to build that economy without routing every decision through Abuja.
The same logic applies across every zone. The South East, with its legendary entrepreneurial culture and manufacturing capacity, has been structurally constrained. The South South, despite producing the oil wealth on which the entire federal system runs, has some of the worst human development indicators in the country. The North Central, sitting at the confluence of Nigeria’s agricultural heartland, should be the breadbasket of West Africa. Every zone has the potential to grow. What the current constitution does is pit them against each other in a competition for federal handouts rather than enabling them to compete by developing their respective endowments.
Regional Disparity
In 2024, the South West generated ₦1.7 trillion in IGR, while the North East generated only ₦129.8 billion. Structural reform — not more federal allocation — is the sustainable path to regional equity. (NBS/Intelpoint, 2024)
The insecurity that now threatens Nigeria’s coherence — banditry in the North West, herder-farmer clashes in the Middle Belt, separatist agitation in the South East, militant activity in the South South — is not, at its roots, a religious or ethnic crisis. It is a governance crisis. It is the predictable consequence of a constitutional arrangement that has failed to deliver development, that has made young men desperate and available for recruitment into violence, and that has kept security architecture so centralised as to be fundamentally unresponsive to local conditions. Regional autonomy, with regional security architecture, is not a threat to national unity. It is its precondition.
The Architecture Of Reform: A Practical Blueprint
For the benefit of decision-makers and senior policymakers who may read this piece, it is important to move beyond the level of argument and briefly outline what a viable reform pathway might look like. The goal is not to prescribe a final constitutional outcome — that must be the product of broad national dialogue — but to demonstrate that reform is not the abstract, unachievable ideal that some claim it to be.
The first imperative is a National Constitutional Conference, convened under presidential authority, with broad and representative composition. Nigeria has done this before. The 2014 National Conference convened by President Goodluck Jonathan produced a substantive report that has, to this day, never been implemented. Tinubu dismissed that conference as a ‘Greek gift’ during his opposition days. As president, he has the authority to convene a new, improved process — or simply to accept the substantive outputs of the 2014 conference as a starting point. Either pathway is available to him. What is not available is the option of indefinite inaction.
The second imperative is a deliberate and decisive devolution agenda. The 10th National Assembly’s constitutional review process — which as of late 2025 was in its concluding phase, with recommendations for devolution of powers to states, greater local government autonomy, state policing, and fiscal federalism — provides the legislative platform. What has been missing is executive leadership. The Speaker of the House of Representatives noted in November 2025 that the success of the review would be determined not in Abuja but in the 36 State Houses of Assembly. With 31 of those assemblies aligned with the APC, the executive has an extraordinary opportunity to direct, shape, and accelerate the ratification process.
The third imperative — and perhaps the most important for long-term sustainability — is the psychological and civic reconstruction that ‘Yemi Success identifies so powerfully in his letter. Constitutional reform without civic transformation is a new document filled with old habits. The Nigerian mind, conditioned over sixty years to see government as a source of handouts rather than a framework for collective agency, must be re-educated. This is the work of public intellectuals, faith leaders, educators, and communicators. It is not quick. But it must begin, and a constitutional restructuring that changes the material incentives of governance — that makes it more rewarding to generate revenue than to receive it, more valuable to develop your region than to lobby Abuja — will do more to reshape civic psychology than any curriculum reform alone.
The Legacy Question: What Will History Record?
Every leader, at some point, confronts the question of legacy — not the legacy of re-election or political survival, but the legacy of historical consequence. What will the Nigeria of 2050 say about this administration? What will it say about the man who, in 2026, commanded 31 governorships, controlled the National Assembly, and faced a country in structural crisis?
If President Tinubu uses this window to pursue incremental reforms — tax bills, subsidy removals, naira floating, LGA autonomy — he will be remembered as a bold economic reformer who tinkered at the edges of a broken system. These reforms are not without value. They are genuinely difficult and genuinely consequential. But they are, ultimately, analgesics for a patient who needs surgery. They relieve symptoms. They do not address the disease.
If, on the other hand, Tinubu uses this window to drive a comprehensive constitutional settlement — to convert Nigeria from a patronage-fed presidential republic into a genuinely federal republic of regions with a lean, focused centre — he will be remembered as the transformative leader that Nigeria has waited for since independence. He will be remembered as the man who reconciled his NADECO past with his presidential present. The man who proved that Nigerian leaders can, in fact, take structural risks for structural rewards. The man who gave the coming generations a fighting chance.
‘Yemi Success is right: history will record not that Tinubu lacked opportunity, but whether he lacked the courage to seize it. With 31 governorships, a compliant National Assembly, a constitutional review process already in motion, and a country aching for structural salvation, the opportunity is as unambiguous as it has ever been for any Nigerian leader.
The opposition, for all its noise, will not deliver constitutional reform. It cannot, because it does not have the instruments, and because many of its principal architects have a vested interest in the very centralised model they occasionally criticise. If structural change is to come, it must come from power, not from those who aspire to it. It must come now, not after 2027.
“Asiwaju, history will record not that you lacked opportunity, but that you lacked the courage to seize it. Nigeria’s golden moment can be now.” — ‘Yemi Success, April 2026
Conclusion: The Republic Nigeria Has Always Deserved
This rejoinder has tried to do several things simultaneously: to affirm and amplify the core argument of ‘Yemi Success’s brave and important letter; to provide the empirical scaffolding that grounds that argument in data; to outline the constitutional mechanics through which reform is achievable; to make the case that regional restructuring is a pan-Nigerian benefit rather than a sectional project; and to frame the entire enterprise in terms of the legacy question that every serious leader must eventually confront.
Nigeria is not a poor country. It is a country made poor by poor design. Its states do not lack resources — the minerals, agricultural land, maritime assets, solar capacity, and human talent distributed across the federation represent an extraordinary endowment. What they lack is the constitutional permission to access, develop, and benefit from those resources without routing every decision through a federal apparatus designed to serve political networks rather than citizens.
A Republican constitutional model — with a lean federal centre focused on defence, foreign affairs, national policing standards, and macroeconomic stability; with regional governments that are genuinely empowered, fiscally autonomous, and constitutionally accountable; with a fiscal framework that rewards productivity over dependency; and with a security architecture that puts protection of citizens in the hands of governments that are geographically, culturally, and politically closest to those citizens — is not a dream. It is a design choice. It is the design choice that Singapore made. That Germany made. That India, with all its diversity, made work. That the First Republic Nigerians made, briefly and brilliantly, before the military dismantled it.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was present at the birth of the movement that demanded this change. He built Lagos into a living proof of concept for what fiscal autonomy produces. He now sits at the apex of the very system that this change would reform. He controls the instruments through which this change could be accomplished. And he knows — because he has always known — that the presidential constitution as currently constituted is a machine for producing the outcomes Nigeria has suffered for over thirty years.
The men and women who have dedicated their careers to this cause — Gani Fawehinmi from his grave, Falana from his chambers, Agbakoba from his practice, NADECO from its institutional memory — are not asking for the impossible. They are asking for the constitutionally achievable. They are asking for the act of political courage that transforms a competent administrator into a consequential statesman.
Asiwaju, the hour of history is upon you. It will not wait for a second term. It will not wait for the 2027 elections. The window of political arithmetic you currently command is a once-in-a-generation alignment of power and opportunity. Use it to give Nigeria the republic it has always deserved. Use it to restructure not just the economy, but the constitution from which all else flows. Use it to write the chapter that the generation after us will read with gratitude rather than grief.
The choice is yours. But history is watching.
About the Author
Prof. Sarumi, a digital transformation architect and leadership strategist with over 40 years of cross-sector experience across Nigeria and the African continent, writes from Lagos.
