Ibe Kachikwu’s Post-election Campaign – THISDAYLIVE

The dead do not answer back. Perhaps that is why Ibe Kachikwu has found fresh courage in telling his Buhari tales now, when the former president lies beyond rebuttal, beyond clarifications, beyond his famously clipped chuckles. It feels like an after-election campaign, waged against a ghost.

Kachikwu, Harvard-trained lawyer, magazine man turned oil technocrat, once sat at Muhammadu Buhari’s table as minister of state for petroleum. In those days, subsidy removal was the great untouchable. Buhari resisted. Kachikwu pushed. And now he says the president threatened to sack him if the gamble failed.

The memory is vivid in his retelling: sleepless nights, fuel queues stretching like hungry snakes, subsidised petrol vanishing across porous borders. He recalls daring the president’s wrath, introducing a policy of “price modulation,” and then the miracle—within two days, the queues disappeared, as if dissolved by sunlight.

It is a tidy story. Almost too tidy. For critics, the timing raises eyebrows. Why didn’t he speak so freely when Buhari was alive? Why wait until history’s courtroom has only one witness? The silence then, the speeches now, invite whispers about ambition dressed up as candour.

Kachikwu’s career has always shimmered with contradictions. He launched a romance magazine in the 1980s, charmed Nigeria with fatherhood columns, then moved into OPEC boardrooms and the thickets of subsidy debates. He wears both velvet and steel, a man equally at home with poets and petroleum accountants.

His new disclosures arrive in a season of reckoning, when Nigerians are still nursing the bruises of subsidy removal under Tinubu. Kachikwu insists he had the blueprint long before; that Buhari’s hesitancy was the nation’s missed chance. Yet hindsight, for all its neatness, rarely pays the pump price.

So what are these late revelations? Vindication, or vanity disguised as memory? Nigerians must decide. But one thing is clear: in politics, even silence ages into strategy. And sometimes, the loudest campaign is not fought for votes at all, but for the verdict of history.