Nigeria’s current president, Bola Ahmed Adekunle Tinubu GCFR, was born in Nigeria on March 29, 1952. He assumed office on May 29, 2023. From 1999 until 2007, he served as governor of Lagos State. During the Third Republic, he represented Lagos West in the Senate.
Tinubu was born and raised in the southwest of Nigeria, into the merchant family of Abibatu Mogaji, the Ìyál’ọ́jà of Lagos. He attended St. John’s Primary School, Aroloya, Lagos, before proceeding to Children’s Home School in Ibadan. He completed undergraduate studies in the United States, first at Richard J. Daley College in Chicago and then at Chicago State University. He graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting
He worked as an accountant for Mobil Nigeria after returning to Nigeria in the early 1990s before entering politics in 1992 as the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for the Lagos West senate seat. Tinubu became a campaigner for the reinstatement of the Senate in 1993 after the dictator Sani Abacha disbanded it.
Political Career
When Tinubu joined the Social Democratic Party in 1991, his political career officially got underway. In the brief Nigerian Third Republic, he was elected to the Senate in 1992, representing the Lagos West district.
After June 12, 1993, presidential election results were overturned, Tinubu joined the National Democratic Coalition, a group that rallied support for the return of democracy and the declaration of Moshood Abiola as the election’s victor. General Sani Abacha took over as the military’s head of state, and after he fled the nation in 1994, he returned in 1998 following the military dictator’s demise, which marked the beginning of the Fourth Nigerian Republic.
During Governorship Tenure
Tinibu started new road development throughout his eight years in office to fulfill the demands of the state’s rapidly expanding population.
In April 2003, Tinubu was re-elected governor along with a brand-new deputy governor named Femi Pedro. In those elections, the People’s Democratic Party won every other state in the Southwest. He fought the federal government under Olusegun Obasanjo on whether Lagos State had the right to establish new Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) to accommodate its sizable population.
The federal government confiscated cash intended for the state’s municipal councils as a result of the incident. He participated in ongoing conflicts with PDP leaders like Bode George, the southwest PDP chairman, and Adeseye Ogunlewe, a former senator from Lagos State who had been appointed minister of works, during the latter half of his stint in office.
In 2006. Tinubu approached Atiku Abubakar, who was Nigeria’s vice president at the time, in 2006 about leading his party, the Action Congress (AC). Abubakar, a member of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), recently had a disagreement with President Olusegun Obasanjo over Abubakar’s desire to succeed Obasanjo as president. Under the understanding that he would serve as Atiku Abubakar’s running mate, Tinubu offered Abubakar the chance to join the AC and the chance to run for president on behalf of his party. Atiku declined the offer and, after joining the AC, selected Senator Ben Obi from the South East as his running mate. Despite Atiku running on Tinubu’s platform, the PDP won the election by a wide margin.
2023 Presidential Election
On January 10, 2022, Tinubu made his formal announcement of his candidature for president.
On June 8, 2022, Tinubu won the party convention vote of the ruling APC, scoring 1,271, to defeat Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and Rotimi Amaechi, who scored 235 and 316, respectively.
On March 1, 2023, INEC declared Tinubu the winner of the 2023 presidential election. He was declared president-elect after he polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat his opponents. His runner-up, Atiku Abubakar of the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), polled 6,984,520 votes. The Labour Party’s Peter Obi had 6,101,533 votes to come in third.