Nigeria, March 21 -- As the results of the 25 February presidential election filtered in, it shocked many, especially the political elites in Lagos, that Senator Bola Tinubu (now president-elect) had lost his home state to the candidate of the Labour Party, Mr Peter Obi. Although the All Progressives Congress (APC) also failed to pull a win in Kano, Osun, Katsina, and the FCT, Abuja, losing Lagos seemed to cut deeper.

A post-mortem of the shocking result in Lagos yielded two significant conclusions. The first was that the ruling party in Lagos had lost the support of young voters - a critical demographic in the 2023 elections. Secondly, and even more worrying, was that it had lost the confidence of the educated middle class population in...