The Presidency has hit back sharply at NDC presidential candidate Peter Obi for calling on President Tinubu to resign in the wake of UK PM Keir Starmer’s exit, dismissing the demand as “childish and hollow” and pointing out that Nigeria’s fixed-term presidential system makes the British comparison invalid.
Keir Starmer’s resignation in London has set off a political firestorm in Abuja. NDC presidential candidate Peter Obi wasted no time on Monday, taking to X to call on President Bola Tinubu to follow the British Prime Minister’s lead and step down, citing governance failures on electricity, security and the economy.
But the Presidency fired right back. In a statement issued on Monday, Special Adviser on Information and Strategy Bayo Onanuga dismissed Obi’s call as “childish, undemocratic and a distraction from governance,” saying Obi’s comparison was fundamentally flawed because the two countries run entirely different systems of government.
“His view is also simplistic, as is often the case anytime he opens his mouth. Obi forgets our country does not run a parliamentary system of government like the UK. We run a presidential system, with the president elected to a fixed 4-year term,” Onanuga said, as reported by Daily Post Nigeria.
The Presidency concluded with its sharpest jab yet, saying: “We are now convinced that Peter Obi lives in his self-constructed echo chambers, where he reels off lie after lie to himself and believes his self-created reality about the situation in Nigeria. We sympathise with him.”
Obi had tried to turn Tinubu’s own past words against him, recalling that before the 2015 election, Tinubu had repeatedly called on then-President Goodluck Jonathan to resign over insecurity and economic hardship, including during the Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction.
The Presidency, however, pointed to recent APC victories in Ekiti, Nasarawa, Enugu, Ondo and Rivers states as an early referendum showing Tinubu remained popular with Nigerians, and urged Obi to take his case to the ballot box in 2027 instead of X.
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