The media camp of former presidential candidate Peter Obi has launched a scathing attack on the ruling administration, describing the recent endorsement of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu by over 600 senior northern university academics as a calculated grand design to rig the 2027 general elections.
Reacting to the high-profile stakeholder gathering convened in Kaduna by the President’s Special Adviser on Political Matters, Ibrahim Masari, the Obi Media Office claimed that such gatherings mock genuine intellectual discourse and represent an institutional descent aimed at subverting democratic integrity.
- A Scripted Charade: The media team asserted that the purported endorsement—despite the academics’ conditional warnings regarding inflation, insecurity, and high living costs—was pre-arranged to create an artificial aura of mass acceptability for an administration struggling with public discontent.
- Compromising Academia: Echoing earlier concerns about the erosion of institutional neutrality, the office argued that leveraging university settings and academic titles for partisan mobilization sets a dangerous precedent for Nigeria’s electoral framework.
- ASUU’s Stance Rallied: The pushback aligns with swift clarifications from the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), led by Professor Chris Piwuna, which firmly distanced the union from the endorsement, maintaining that individual participation does not translate to an institutional mandate.
As political maneuvering heats up ahead of 2027, the friction over the academics’ backing underscores a deeply polarized landscape where every institutional endorsement is fiercely contested as either strategic progress or political engineering.
