Tosin Olayinka
Political scientists who study presidencies have long drawn a distinction that ordinary citizens rarely notice. Alexander George’s classic work separated the “custodian-manager” from the “honest broker.” Bradley Patterson’s studies of the American White House staff describe the chief of staff as the person who turns a leader’s ambition into a working calendar. The consensus across that literature is that presidents are remembered for their vision, but they succeed or fail on the machinery beneath it. Nigeria’s machinery sits in the hands of Rt Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, CFR, and it is worth asking why he is so well suited to the job.
Few figures arrive at the Chief of Staff’s office with a résumé so precisely fitted to it. He served in the House of Representatives from 2003 to 2023 for Surulere I, was Minority Leader from 2007 to 2015 and Majority Leader from 2015 to 2019, and then became the 14th Speaker, serving until 2023. Consider what those roles teach. As Minority Leader for eight years, he learned to build coalitions without holding power. As Majority Leader, he learned to deliver a governing agenda through a chamber of competing egos. As Speaker, he learned to keep a national institution steady through a full electoral cycle. Those are the skills the Presidency demands: reconciling ministers who compete for attention, moving decisions to a busy principal, and keeping the executive on speaking terms with the legislature. He took office as Chief of Staff on 14 June 2023, and those tasks were already second nature to him.
The Renewed Hope Agenda is an ambitious programme. It covers subsidy removal, exchange-rate reform, tax overhaul, infrastructure financing and social investment, and none of it can be delivered by declaration. Each item must be sequenced, defended in the National Assembly, explained to the states, and reconciled with the party’s demands. A President sets priorities, and a Chief of Staff makes sure they do not stall between the desk and the field. This is where Gbajabiamila’s value is easiest to overlook, because good coordination is invisible when it works. His relationships across both chambers, built over two decades, shorten the distance between an executive proposal and a legislative outcome. His long loyalty to the President, which goes back to their Lagos days, lets him carry difficult messages into difficult rooms and be heard. In the language of organisational theory, he lowers the transaction costs of governing. In plain English, he helps get things done.
The Renewed Hope vision also rests on a social contract. Citizens who bear the cost of reform want to see the state answer them, and any Presidency that asks for patience must also find ways to put something in people’s hands. That thread links the Chief of Staff’s office in Abuja to a stadium in Lagos. This past Saturday, the 2026 Gbaja Mega Empowerment Programme filled the National Stadium in Surulere, and the scale was considerable. He said 3,905 beneficiaries received N250,000 each and 348 others received N500,000 each, while 61 beneficiaries received electric vehicles, 40 received minibuses, and 100 received laptops. The package as a whole comprised N1.15 billion in cash support and 279 vehicles, including minibuses, electric cars and electric tricycles. Security patrol vehicles, an ambulance, Toyota 18-seater buses and vocational tools for young entrepreneurs completed the offering, and about 5,000 residents of the Surulere constituencies benefited.
Look past the headline figure, and the design shows careful thinking. Much of it backs livelihoods rather than mere consumption. A minibus is a daily income, an e-hailing car is a small business, and a laptop is an entry ticket to the digital economy. The cash grants give traders working capital that no commercial bank would extend to them on comparable terms. The programme also leans towards the future. He said electric cars had been provided for e-hailing businesses, tied the effort to the administration’s environmental commitments, and promised electric vehicle charging stations in Surulere. An electric tricycle in a Lagos neighbourhood is a small piece of the energy transition, delivered directly to the people who will use it.
It was also built to be fair, which in Nigeria’s history of empowerment schemes is no small matter. Lists are too often padded and benefits too often diverted. The event was originally scheduled for June and postponed so that beneficiaries nominated through wards, community associations and trade groups could be verified. He said he did not want anyone to collect what was meant for another person. Delaying a crowd-pleasing event for the sake of integrity was more admirable than a rushed and impressive-looking rollout would have been. There is a human dimension too. Reflecting on his two decades in the House, he told the audience, “Everything I have become in public life, I owe to you.” Politicians often say such things. Fewer return with N1.15 billion’s worth of proof, and the event reminds us that a national office-holder is still, in the truest sense, accountable to a home constituency.
Anyone who has watched Nigerian public life for long knows that prominence has a price. Only the tree heavy with ripe fruit draws stones; nobody wastes a pebble on a barren one. Gbajabiamila has stood at the centre of power for three years, so he has been a constant target of rumour, insinuation and the kind of fake news that spreads faster than any correction can follow. The sharpest test came with the controversy over the so-called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, an organisation whose legitimacy was widely questioned. A House of Representatives ad hoc committee said it found no evidence that he approved, established or participated in its activities. At Saturday’s event, he said the Police, the DSS and the ICPC had cleared him and that their reports are in the public domain. He described the season as one in which stories were written, strange accusations were made, and lies were told. Readers are free to weigh the findings for themselves, but his response speaks for itself. He did not retaliate or retreat. He said due process was followed despite pressure to reach conclusions before the investigations were finished, and then he went back to work and back to his people. Pressure has a way of revealing what a public servant is made of, and in his case it has hardened rather than broken him. The stones have not shaken the tree. If anything, its roots have gone deeper, its trunk is thicker, and its fruit is still ripening in the open for all to see. That offers a quiet lesson for anyone tempted to mistake noise for substance.
The honest verdict is a favourable one. The Chief of Staff’s office is defined by discretion, reach and trust, and Gbajabiamila has all three in unusual measure. He brings legislative experience that few in Abuja can match, and a personal history with the President long enough that the two men can disagree privately and still move together in public. As last Saturday showed, he has not let the gravity of high office pull him away from the streets that made him. Critics will note, as they always do, that generosity in an election season has political value. They are right, and nothing is shameful about it. Politics is the business of earning consent, and doing so with cars, laptops and working capital is a good deal better than doing it with rhetoric alone. The true measure of the programme will be whether those minibuses are still running and those small businesses still trading a year from now, and the care taken over its design suggests he expects them to be. Renewed Hope needs a President with a vision and a Chief of Staff who can turn it into daily work. Nigeria has both, and the second is too easily forgotten.
•Hon. Tosin Olayinka, LL.B (Hons), B.L., LL.M (London)
Programme Director,
Renewed Hope Global
WhatsApp: +234 704 117 6329.
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