Oba Akiolu tells APC campaign: there is no vacancy in Aso Rock

The Oba of Lagos, Rilwanu Akiolu I, told the All Progressives Congress presidential campaign council on Monday that there would be “no vacancy in Aso Rock” for the next four or five years, an unusually blunt royal endorsement of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s bid for a second term.

The council, led by its director-general, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, had come to Iga Idunganran to seek the monarch’s blessing before taking the campaign on the road. Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and his deputy, Obafemi Hamzat, were in the delegation. The visit followed an earlier call on the Sokoto Caliphate — a map of the old power centres the party still believes it must court.

Akiolu did not leave much room for interpretation. “One important thing that I know very well is that for the next four or five years, there is no vacancy in Aso Rock,” he said, according to people in the room and accounts later shared with reporters. He prayed that the journey would be “smooth, failure-free and error-free,” then added a warning that politicians should not treat 2027 as a contest in which the end justifies the means.

The palace also used the moment to press an older Lagos demand: special status for the commercial capital inside the federation. That argument — that the city that funds so much of the country should not be treated as just another state — will sit uneasily with governors from the North and the East. It is, however, the price many Lagos elites now attach to their loyalty.

Opposition figures will read the statement as theatre. Palace politics in Lagos have always been entangled with the APC’s machine, and Akiolu has never pretended to be a neutral referee. Still, the phrase is built to travel. “No vacancy in Aso Rock” is the kind of line that fills radio, WhatsApp and the front of tomorrow’s papers.

What it does not do is settle the race. Tinubu’s camp wanted a show of traditional authority at the start of a long campaign. They got one. The harder work — inflation, security, the price of diesel, the patience of voters who have already been asked to endure a lot — remains outside the palace gates.

For the next four or five years, there is no vacancy in Aso Rock.