President Bola Tinubu’s ambition to secure a second term has driven him to send envoys to the UK to broker a deal for the premature release of Ike Ekweremadu, a former deputy Senate president sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for organ harvesting by a British court in 2023.

With opposition forces from different parties rallying under the ADC coalition ahead of the 2027 polls and renewed Christian genocide allegation by U.S. President Donald Trump, Mr Tinubu appears to be walking on eggshells while seeking new alliances to strengthen his re-election bid.

On Monday, Mr Tinubu’s administration announced that foreign affairs minister Yusuf Tuggar and attorney general of the federation Lateef Fagbemi landed in the UK to negotiate Mr Ekweremadu’s release, even though the organ trafficker has barely served three years of the nine years and eight months’ sentence.

The former lawmaker was convicted of luring a 21-year-old from Nigeria to the UK to donate his kidney for the politician’s ailing daughter, Sonia Ekweremadu. The man told the Metropolitan Police that he was only promised a job and was unaware of any plan to harvest his organ. Both Mr Ekweremadu and his wife were convicted and sentenced to prison in the UK for plotting to harvest the 21-year-old’s organ without his consent.

The timing of the envoy comes weeks after Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the ruling All Progressives Congress, signalling that full politicking for the 2027 polls is now underway.

Mr Tinubu, until now, seemed indifferent to Mr Ekweremadu’s ordeal since 2022, when he was seriously campaigning for the presidency up until the then-legislator’s conviction and sentencing in March 2023, when he became president-elect, soaking in the spoils of his triumph.

However, his recent interest in securing Mr Ekweremadu’s release ahead of time, less than 15 months before the 2027 Nigerian elections, has ignited debates that the president is plotting his winning strategy by wooing voters in the South-East. The move also sparked conversations that he might be more scared of losing his re-election bid than he is letting on.

As a presidential candidate in 2023, Mr Tinubu could only poll a sour 4,772 votes in Enugu. The convicted and currently incarcerated Mr Ekweremadu is from Enugu.

Mr Tinubu had the fewest votes from the South-East, a stronghold for his Labour Party rival, Peter Obi, in the 2023 presidential election. Mr Obi was ahead of Mr Tinubu by hundreds of thousands of votes in the geopolitical zone.

At issue again was the years-long detention of Nnamdi Kanu, headpin of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, accused of treason for advocating the secession of the South-East from Nigeria.

Mr Tinubu is largely unpopular in the South-East, and securing Mr Ekweremadu’s release might be his ticket to gaining the region’s favour.