Just a week ago, your correspondent quietly and perhaps discreetly painted a picture of the emerging problems President Bola Tinubu is facing in his Lagos political base, using the drama around Nollywood actor and Lawmaker, Desmond Elliot, as a window into the unfolding tension.
The Desmond Elliot story helped to show how the President has, over time, sustained his throne as Lagos political lord through parallel political structures that report to him while also keeping watch over one another.
While your correspondent was somewhat discreet for political reasons, the emotions within the groups themselves were clearly not so restrained. This became obvious last Wednesday when the President’s daughter and President-General of market women, the Iyaloja-General, Mrs Folashade Tinubu-Ojo, erupted.
Without holding back, and as if in an apparent fight to protect her father’s political legacy, she expressed anger over how one of the major political blocs, the Justice Forum, has allegedly been riding roughshod over Lagos politics in recent years. The other major bloc is the Mandate Group.
Remarkably, both groups were formed around Tinubu at different moments of his political vulnerability.
The Justice Forum was formed just before the advent of the Fourth Republic, with members including some of the old hands from NADECO and pre-Fourth Republic politics, many of whom were favourably disposed to the returnee pro-democracy fighter, Senator Bola Tinubu.
Among them were old political fighters such as Mufutau Olatunji Hamzat, now deceased, who later in life became an Oba in his home state, Ogun State.
The group consisted largely of an old-boy political network with deep roots across Lagos. Its overwhelming influence, however, appeared to suffer a major check around 2006 when Tinubu proposed Babatunde Fashola as his successor in office.
Several of the old men in the Justice Forum, who thought they could influence the outgoing Governor, began what could be described as a half-hearted rebellion. It was in the midst of that tension that Tinubu’s then Man Friday, Rauf Aregbesola, formed the Mandate Group, with the vow that members would stand by anything Tinubu stood for.
It was from that declaration that the popular chant, “On your mandate we shall stand,” emerged.
The group, led by Aregbesola, vowed that whatever and whoever Tinubu wanted would prevail. It was on the strength of that loyalty that Fashola was successfully brought to power.
Following the success of that campaign, the Mandate Group blossomed, with Aregbesola as coordinator even while he served as Governor of Osun State. The group became especially strong in Lagos West, arguably the most populous senatorial district in the country.
Given that both groups looked up to Tinubu, it was not difficult for the leader to sustain his supremacy by balancing one group against the other.
Indeed, for some time, it seemed as if the Mandate Group, after its successful campaign for Fashola, had become dominant, even while Aregbesola was away as Governor of Osun State. Regular political pilgrimages to Osogbo by Lagos political actors seeking to navigate issues in Lagos were not uncommon.
In his absence, Aregbesola also groomed able lieutenants, one of whom, Mudashiru Obasa, rose to become Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly at the peak of the Mandate Group’s dominance in 2015.
As Aregbesola’s grip on Lagos faded following his exit from the Tinubu camp, it was not surprising that the influence of the group also began to wane.
However, Tinubu’s political sagacity was seen in the fact that despite his fallout with Aregbesola, he did not disown his political grandchildren, as it were, who belonged to the Mandate Group. In fact, he protected them.
A case in point was in 2025 when the old men in the Justice Forum, using the Governance Advisory Council (GAC), which is dominated by them, moved against Obasa as Speaker. Tinubu cringed and caused Obasa to be recalled.
The move by the Justice Forum, working in cahoots with the GAC and Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, was partly to pre-empt the emergence of Obasa as Governor.
For the Justice Forum, it would have been sacrilegious for someone from that group to emerge as the next Governor. Though the Justice Forum sulked at the recall of Obasa, it nevertheless had its way months later when it projected its men into about 80 per cent of the positions in the Local Government elections that held in July 2025.
At the time, there were reports that winners of the election alleged to be aligned with the Mandate Group were replaced by the Party in favour of Justice Forum members.
The attempt to perpetuate the same scheme in the selection of candidates for the 2027 election was what drew the fury of the Iyaloja-General, Mrs Tinubu-Ojo, last Wednesday.
She was specific, mentioning the names of persons alleged to be inclined to the Mandate Group who were denied in favour of the Justice Forum. She listed Mutiu Olaide Oladeebo in Agege Constituency II, Seye Oladejo in Mushin Federal Constituency and Olotu Emmanuel Ojo in Ojokoro, insisting that the aspirants won their respective primaries convincingly before attempts were allegedly made to alter the outcomes.
Ahead of writing this, your correspondent called around and hailed a political actor over his membership of the Mandate Group. He immediately rejected the acclaim, insisting that he belonged neither to Mandate nor Justice. In fact, the gist now is that many of the political actors around Tinubu who were once known to be Mandate Group members have, over time, moved into the Justice Forum.
Now, the feeling in Lagos is that, on account of the preponderance of the Justice Forum in the present political equilibrium in the state, and the fear that the emergence of a clone of the forum, that is Babafemi Hamzat, as the prospective governor of Lagos, is pushing the Mandate Group into a nosedive.
The continued ascension of the Justice Forum, as this column noted last week, underscores the fact that Tinubu’s capacity to mobilize the troops may be waning.
Therefore, the emergence of his daughter, Mrs Tinubu-Ojo, to champion justice for the Mandate Group, a group of political actors who once rallied around her father at a moment of vulnerability in 2006, is quite remarkable.
As some within the Lagos political ecosystem have said, the emergence of Hamzat, despite being undoubtedly the best among those who indicated interest in the governorship, may not have been totally welcomed by Tinubu.
But in the face of national issues confronting him here and there, and with age also telling on him, he may have chosen to look the other way.
Certainly, however, not his daughter and not others who desire to sustain the Tinubu hegemony that has defined Lagos politics for the past 27 years.