A Special Feature
Ramadan is here. Lent is here. Two of the world’s oldest and most demanding spiritual traditions have arrived in the same season — the Muslim faithful fasting from Fajr to Maghrib, the Christian faithful walking the forty days of Lenten discipline toward Easter Sunday. This convergence is rare and it is instructive. Both traditions are saying the same thing, in different languages, with the same authority: that the highest things require the deepest patience. That genuine faith is never a feeling alone. It is a practice. A daily, costly, returning to what you have chosen to believe in spite of everything that invites you to stop.
There is no better season to speak about Gboyega Nasir Isiaka -GNI. And there is no better word to begin with than the one he has carried, without apology, across fifteen years of public life: Believe!.
The word arrived the way all truly earned convictions do. Three gubernatorial campaigns, each one its own complete political and emotional universe, and each one returned a result that a lesser spirit would have read as a verdict. A final word. A closed door. GNI read each of them differently. He read them as a comma. When Lincoln lost his Senate race in 1858 to Stephen Douglas, a friend found him walking the railway tracks alone at night in Springfield and asked him how he felt. Lincoln answered: “I feel like the boy who stubbed his toe. I am too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.” What the story does not record is what Lincoln did next. He returned. Two years later, he was President of the United States and the very qualities that defeat had forged in him became the qualities that history required. GNI did not borrow Lincoln’s story. He lived his own version of it, on Nigerian soil, in the specific complexity of Ogun State politics, with all its pressures and intrigues and shifting loyalties.
To Believe, at its surface, is simply to accept something as true. A conviction. A trust. This is what the dictionary offers. Deeper down, the word is altogether something else. The Letter to the Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Notice the precision of that language. Not the sentiment of things hoped for. The substance. Something with weight, with structural integrity, something you can build on. The Quranic tradition speaks with equal authority, describing those who believe without visible confirmation as people of taqwa, a God-consciousness that elevates the spirit above its most instinctive appetite for immediate reward. Across both traditions, across centuries of lived experience, the teaching is the same: genuine belief is not passive. It costs something. It holds on after the evidence runs out.
This is the register in which GNI has always operated. The Believe that has organized his public life was forged in the specific furnace of repeated disappointment, and it emerged from that furnace with the particular quality that untested optimism can never produce. Mandela, who spent twenty-seven years in a prison cell sustaining a conviction that the world repeatedly told him was finished, said: “Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” GNI has fallen. He has gotten up. He has come back to the arena, each time, carrying the same word, not diminished by the carrying, deepened by it.
What makes his journey remarkable in the context of Nigerian public life is its stubborn refusal to be transactional. The dominant grammar of politics in this part of the world is the grammar of the expedient, the trading of principle for proximity, of conviction for comfort, of the long vision for the immediate gain. GNI has written in a different grammar entirely. His fifteen-year development plan for Yewa North/Imeko-Afon Federal Constituency federal constituency is the most eloquent proof of this. A fifteen-year vision does not come from personal ambition. Personal ambition thinks in electoral cycles, in the narrow distance between one campaign and the next. A fifteen-year vision comes from love — the particular, almost stubborn love of a man who has looked at his constituency and seen, with clear and patient eyes, what it has the capacity to become. There is a tradition from the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) about a man who planted a tree in dry, difficult ground, knowing that its shade would not fall on him in his lifetime. The Prophet declared the labour entirely blessed, for every bird that rested in its branches, for every stranger who paused beneath it. GNI is planting trees. His people will rest in their shade.
Churchill addressed the students of Harrow School in 1941, in the darkest year of the Second World War, when the case for despair was arguably stronger than the case for hope. His speech was memorably short. He said: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”* He did not say: never give in when victory is certain. He said: never give in. Full stop. The absolute simplicity was the power. GNI’s Believe carries the same unqualified quality. It does not say: believe when the conditions are favourable. It says, simply, Believe — the same word in the sun and in the rain, on the campaign trail and in the aftermath of a difficult result, across the years of quiet, unglamorous labour.
As 2027 draws closer, the question that Nigerian political culture has trained us to ask is already forming in the air: is this the year? It is a reasonable question. We are creatures of narrative and we find satisfaction when the arc of a story arrives visibly at its resolution. The deeper question, and the one this sacred season is really asking, is this: what does it mean to have already won? MLK, accepting the Nobel Prize in Oslo in 1964, said: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Infinite hope — not hope conditional on a particular result by a particular date, hope that has accepted the full grammar of the long road and decided, with clear eyes, to keep walking. This is what GNI has already secured. A victory no electoral result can manufacture and no political reversal can revoke. He has remained recognizably himself across fifteen years of extraordinary pressure. He has held faith with a word and through holding faith with the word, has held faith with the people it was always meant to serve. The Quran, in Surah Ash-Sharh, repeats its promise with deliberate intention: “Indeed, with hardship will be ease. Indeed, with hardship will be ease.” The scholars of tafsir note that hardship appears once, with the definite article, a specific, singular difficulty. Ease appears twice, plural, layered, arriving in forms the sufferer could not anticipate from within the suffering. GNI’s hardships have been real and specific. His eases are still arriving.
Rilke, writing to a young man adrift in a difficult season, offered counsel that has survived over a century because it remains perpetually true: “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”GNI has been living the questions. He has carried them without demanding that they resolve on his schedule. The Easter story, which the Lenten faithful are walking toward right now, makes the same declaration in its own profound way, that what appears to be an ending is, in the economy of grace, the threshold of something larger than the imagination had room for. That the stone gets rolled away. That what was buried comes back bearing gifts that only the burial could have prepared.
This Ramadan. This Lent. This season in which two great traditions of faith are holding their breath together in the direction of the sacred, let the life and the mantra of GNI speak to everyone who has ever carried a vision through a wilderness, everyone who has watered a seed in dry ground, everyone who has come back to their conviction the morning after a long and difficult night.
The time is now. The compass is true. Keep Believing.
Ramadan Mubarak. A Blessed Lenten Season.
The author writes on politics, faith, and the character of leadership in Nigeria.
