In an attempt to win a second term, President Bola Tinubu despatched envoys to the UK to negotiate the early release of Ike Ekweremadu, a former deputy Senate president who was given a nine-year prison sentence for organ harvesting by a British court in 2023.
Mr. Tinubu seems to be treading carefully while looking for fresh alliances to bolster his re-election campaign in light of opposition forces from various parties uniting under the ADC coalition ahead of the 2027 elections and U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued accusations of Christian genocide.
Even though the organ trafficker has only completed three years of the nine years and eight months sentence, Mr. Tinubu’s administration announced on Monday that Yusuf Tuggar, the foreign affairs minister, and Lateef Fagbemi, the attorney general of the federation, had arrived in the UK to negotiate Mr. Ekweremadu’s release.
The former legislator was found guilty of enticing a Nigerian 21-year-old to travel to the UK in order to give his kidney for Sonia Ekweremadu, the politician’s sick daughter. The individual told the Metropolitan Police that there was no plan to harvest his organ and that he had just been promised a job. In the UK, Mr. Ekweremadu and his spouse were found guilty and given prison terms for conspiring to remove the 21-year-old’s organ without his permission.
The timing of the envoy comes weeks after Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the ruling All Progressives Congress, signalling that full politicking for the 2027 polls is now underway.
Mr Tinubu, until now, seemed indifferent to Mr Ekweremadu’s ordeal since 2022, when he was seriously campaigning for the presidency up until the then-legislator’s conviction and sentencing in March 2023, when he became president-elect, soaking in the spoils of his triumph.
However, his recent interest in securing Mr Ekweremadu’s release ahead of time, less than 15 months before the 2027 Nigerian elections, has ignited debates that the president is plotting his winning strategy by wooing voters in the South-East. The move also sparked conversations that he might be more scared of losing his re-election bid than he is letting on.
As a presidential candidate in 2023, Mr Tinubu could only poll a sour 4,772 votes in Enugu. The convicted and currently incarcerated Mr Ekweremadu is from Enugu.
Mr Tinubu had the fewest votes from the South-East, a stronghold for his Labour Party rival, Peter Obi, in the 2023 presidential election. Mr Obi was ahead of Mr Tinubu by hundreds of thousands of votes in the geopolitical zone.
At issue again was the years-long detention of Nnamdi Kanu, headpin of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, accused of treason for advocating the secession of the South-East from Nigeria.
Mr Tinubu is largely unpopular in the South-East, and securing Mr Ekweremadu’s release might be his ticket to gaining the region’s favour.
