Former Nigerian Economic Summit Group chairman and accomplished investment banker Mohammed Hayatu-Deen has formally declared his candidacy for the 2027 presidential election on the platform of the African Democratic Congress, positioning himself as the technocratically capable and reform-oriented leader Nigeria required to simultaneously and decisively confront its worsening security catastrophe and its deteriorating economic foundations at a moment he described as an existential crossroads for the country.
Hayatu-Deen, who had previously entered the 2023 presidential race before withdrawing his candidacy, announced his renewed political engagement during a television interview, describing the accelerating and visible deterioration of national conditions under the current administration as leaving him with no credible moral option but to re-enter the arena and offer Nigerians an alternative. He painted a deeply concerning picture of a country confronting simultaneous and mutually reinforcing crises, drawing on intensely personal experience to convey the human cost of insecurity that too many Nigerians were experiencing on a daily basis, including the kidnapping of his own sister who was held in captivity for more than two years before managing to escape through her own resourcefulness.
He argued that the origins of Nigeria’s security catastrophe were not recent but stretched back across decades to the compounding and interacting effects of systematic poor governance, accelerating poverty, and deliberate structural neglect of the northern region, where he said approximately 90 percent of the estimated 105 million Nigerians now living below the poverty line were concentrated. He also identified critical regional environmental factors, including the proliferation of weapons and armed groups following the collapse of the Libyan state, and the dramatic shrinking of Lake Chad over recent decades, as accelerants that had displaced millions of people, eroded traditional livelihoods, and created the conditions for the emergence and growth of violent extremist organisations across the Sahel region.
On his choice of the ADC as his presidential platform, Hayatu-Deen was frank and direct in describing Nigeria’s established opposition landscape as having effectively disintegrated, leaving a vacuum that the ADC was uniquely positioned to fill. He characterised the Peoples Democratic Party as a hollow shell after years of internal collapse driven by elite interests, deep factional warfare, and a failure to renew itself organisationally or ideologically. He described the Labour Party as similarly beset by factional disputes that had consumed the energy and momentum that Peter Obi’s 2023 presidential campaign had generated. In contrast, he portrayed the ADC as a growing and increasingly serious coalition of experienced politicians, technocrats, and reform-minded leaders who were collectively capable of mounting a credible, well-resourced, and genuinely competitive challenge to the ruling All Progressives Congress in 2027.
He rejected characterisations of himself as a political outsider or a newcomer to public affairs, pointing to his tenure as Group Managing Director of the New Nigeria Development Company where he managed a vast and complex portfolio of companies across multiple sectors, and to his advisory roles to past federal administrations on economic policy matters, as evidence of a career that had consistently and meaningfully operated at the intersection of public policy, institutional governance, and economic management. He cited his involvement in national policy initiatives including the Vision 2010 programme as further evidence of his long-standing commitment to Nigeria’s development.
He argued that Nigeria’s present existential challenges demanded a leader with proven economic expertise, deep institutional knowledge, and a clear-eyed understanding of how to design and implement structural reforms rather than a candidate whose primary qualification was conventional political experience in a system that had produced the very problems the country now needed to overcome.
Hayatu-Deen outlined his priority agenda, saying his first action upon assuming office would be to convene a comprehensive national security and economic recovery summit bringing together the country’s best minds from the military, intelligence, economic management, and development policy communities to develop an integrated strategy that addressed both challenges simultaneously rather than treating them as separate problems with separate solutions. He described his candidacy as driven by long-standing and deeply held conviction about Nigeria’s unrealised potential and the belief that the country possessed all the human, natural, and institutional resources needed to achieve transformation, but had consistently lacked the quality of political leadership required to mobilise those resources effectively.
