Prominent human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana, has criticized the ongoing national discourse on power rotation ahead of the 2027 elections, dismissing it as a needless distraction from the country’s worsening social and economic crises.
Speaking during an interview on Politics Today, a programme aired by Channels Television on Monday, Falana said the fixation on who gets to lead or which region should produce the next president diverts attention from urgent issues such as insecurity, hunger, poverty, and collapsing infrastructure.
“I’m not going to join the campaign for power shift or power remaining in one part of the country for four years or eight years. No, that’s diversionary,” Falana declared during the live broadcast.
The fiery legal luminary, known for his advocacy on social justice and accountability, argued that rotational politics, often paraded as a tool for equity, has become a convenient excuse for the ruling elite to avoid tackling structural problems holding the country back.
He stressed that Nigerians are more concerned about survival than about regional political arrangements, and called on politicians to redirect their energies toward addressing the real pain points of the population.
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“The Nigerian people are not interested in elite power games. They want food, security, jobs, electricity, and access to healthcare. Anything short of that is political theatre,” he said.
Falana also urged citizens to be wary of being drawn into what he described as a manufactured distraction meant to suppress calls for good governance.
The senior lawyer’s comments come at a time when conversations around zoning and power shift are heating up in political circles, with several interest groups and politicians subtly laying groundwork for the 2027 general election.
But for Falana, these debates merely mask the deeper dysfunction in Nigeria’s system and distract from the urgent need for institutional reform and people-oriented policy delivery.