Obi Pushes for Single Five-Year Presidential Term, Reaffirms One-Term Pledge

The 2023 Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has called for a constitutional amendment to limit the Nigerian presidency to a single term of five years.

Obi argued that such a provision would compel any president to focus entirely on delivering results within the limited time frame, rather than being distracted by re-election ambitions. He noted that this system is already in practice in South Korea, where presidents serve a single five-year term with no possibility of re-election.

“If I have the opportunity, we should stop having a second tenure for presidents. It should be five years,” Obi said during a visit to Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, at the Government House on Friday. “That is what is in South Korea, so people come in and know that they have a job to do,” he added.

The former Anambra State governor criticised the current political culture where, according to him, leaders spend only their first year in office governing and dedicate the rest of their tenure to preparing for the next election. “What people do now is to be president for one year and use the rest of the year thinking about the next tenure. Let’s stop it, let’s face the real job,” he said.

Obi’s comments come shortly after he reaffirmed his personal vow to serve only a single term if elected president. On August 3, he restated his pledge — first made during a widely attended X Space session in June — to complete just one four-year term.

“In my political life, my word is my bond… My vow to serve only one term of four years is a solemn commitment, rooted in my conviction that purposeful, transparent leadership does not require an eternity,” he wrote on his X handle.

He stressed that African history shows a pattern where the longer leaders remain in power, the more vulnerable they become to corruption. To back his point, Obi referenced figures such as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Nelson Mandela, who each left lasting legacies without serving two terms.

However, the idea of a single-term presidency has faced criticism. Chukwuma Soludo, the current governor of Anambra State, recently dismissed such pledges, saying any politician advocating for it “needs psychiatric examination.”