Yemi Osinbajo: Lawyer, Pastor, Former Vice President of Nigeria and Career Timeline

Few Nigerian public figures have managed to be a pastor, a law professor, a state attorney general and a vice president at the same time in their careers, and fewer still have stayed in the headlines after leaving office. Yemi Osinbajo is one of them. His name moved up Nigeria’s search trends this week after a public disagreement over claims made by a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation about how the late President Muhammadu Buhari viewed his 2022 presidential bid. That argument is recent and contested, so it gets a short, careful section below. The larger story is a long working life that began in a lecture hall in Lagos.

Quick facts

• Full name: Oluyemi Oluleke Osinbajo
• Born: 8 March 1957, Lagos
• Known for: 14th Vice President of Nigeria (2015–2023); Attorney General of Lagos State (1999–2007)
• Education: University of Lagos (LLB, 1978); Nigerian Law School (1979); London School of Economics (LLM, 1980)
• Titles: Professor of law; Senior Advocate of Nigeria
• Party: All Progressives Congress (APC)
• Faith role: Pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God

A Lagos schooling built on public speaking

Osinbajo was born in Lagos in 1957 and went to Corona Primary School before moving on to Igbobi College in Yaba. He was there from 1969 to 1975, and the school record he left reads like a debating society’s honour roll. He won the school prize for English oratory in 1972, the Adeoba Prize for English oratory in each year from 1972 to 1975, the Elias Prize for best performance in history in 1973, and the African Statesman intercollegiate best speaker’s prize in 1974. He also took the school prize for literature in 1975.

That pattern matters, because it foreshadows the career that followed. Whatever else his critics and admirers disagree about, both camps tend to describe him as a lawyer who can hold a room. His reputation as a speaker was built long before he went anywhere near a campaign trail.

Law at Lagos, then London

From 1975 to 1978 he studied law at the University of Lagos and graduated with a Second Class Upper degree. He also picked up the Graham-Douglas Prize for commercial law. A year at the Nigerian Law School followed in 1979, which got him called to the bar as a barrister and solicitor. He then went to the London School of Economics, where he earned a Master of Laws in 1980.

His national youth service came in between, in 1979 and 1980, and he spent it as a legal officer with the Bendel Development and Planning Authority in the old Bendel State. It was a small posting, far from the Lagos courts, and it gave him an early look at how government agencies actually handled legal questions.

From lecturer to professor

In 1981, at 24, he joined the University of Lagos as a law lecturer. He became a senior lecturer in 1983, a post he held until 1986. Between 1988 and 1992 he worked as a senior special adviser on solicitation and litigation to the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Bola Ajibola. During those years he also wrote and edited a long list of legal texts, including Nigerian Media Law (1991), Cases and Materials on Nigerian Law of Evidence (1996), and, with Fola-Arthur Worrey, Cross Examination: A Trial Lawyer’s Most Potent Weapon (2006). He also contributed to a series of Federal Ministry of Justice reviews on subjects ranging from narcotics law to human rights.

One line on his résumé tends to surprise people who know him only as a politician. He served as a senior officer in the Justice Division of the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II), and he later wrote about legality in a collapsed state, drawing on what he saw there. He was also named to a United Nations committee of experts on conduct and discipline in peacekeeping in 2006.

In 1997 he became a professor of the law of evidence and headed the Department of Public Law at the University of Lagos. That role ended in 1999, when politics called.

Eight years as Lagos attorney general

When Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999, Bola Tinubu became governor of Lagos State and appointed Osinbajo as Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice. He stayed through both of Tinubu’s four-year terms, until 2007. He then left government, became senior partner at the law firm Simmons Cooper Partners, and went back to teaching and legal practice. During the same period he continued his pastoral work in the Redeemed Christian Church of God, which he has described as a calling that runs alongside his legal life.

The 2015 ticket

When the opposition merged to form the All Progressives Congress in 2013, Osinbajo was among the Nigerians asked to help write its manifesto. The result was a document titled “Roadmap to a New Nigeria”. Its headline promises included a daily school meal, cash transfers to the poorest households that enrolled and immunised their children, and job-creation schemes for young people.

On 17 December 2014, the party’s presidential candidate, retired General Muhammadu Buhari, named Osinbajo as his running mate. Instead of relying only on big rallies, Osinbajo ran a series of town hall meetings across the country. The Buhari–Osinbajo ticket beat the incumbents, Goodluck Jonathan and Namadi Sambo, in 2015. Both men were sworn in on 29 May 2015 at Eagle Square in Abuja. Four years later the same ticket won again, defeating the People’s Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, and the second oath was taken at the same venue on 29 May 2019.

What the vice presidency involved

As vice president, Osinbajo oversaw the economic planning team, which produced recommendations for the president to approve. Two episodes defined how Nigerians saw him in office.

The first was acting presidency. When President Buhari wrote to the National Assembly on 9 May 2017 about a medical trip to the United Kingdom, Osinbajo became acting president. Some of his decisions during those stretches drew attention, among them an executive order directing international oil companies to move their headquarters to the states where they operate in the Niger Delta. Accounts of how his actions were received inside the president’s circle differ, and we have not independently confirmed any of them.

The second was a decisive move in August 2018. While acting as president, Osinbajo dismissed the Director-General of the State Security Service, Lawal Daura, after armed and masked operatives blocked the National Assembly complex. Matthew Seiyefa replaced him.

Other moments from the second term are easier to date. In February 2019 a helicopter carrying him crashed in Kabba, Kogi State. He survived, and he went on to give a scheduled campaign speech the same day, thanking God that no one was hurt. In October 2019, as the government debated social media rules, he said he did not think regulation was necessarily the way to go and asked citizens and leaders to police the space themselves. On 31 March 2020, Buhari appointed him to chair an economic sustainability committee created to cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The 2022 primary

In April 2022 Osinbajo announced he would seek the APC nomination for president. At the party’s primary in June 2022 he finished third with 235 votes from delegates. The ticket went to Bola Tinubu, his former boss in Lagos, who later won the presidency. Osinbajo stayed in the party and served out his term until May 2023.

Life after office

Osinbajo kept an international profile once he left the vice presidency. In May 2023, shortly before his term ended, he was named to chair the Commonwealth observer group for Sierra Leone’s presidential election. The group included experts in politics, law and the media. In July 2023 he became a global adviser to the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a partnership focused on clean energy in developing countries. The alliance’s head, Simon Harford, said Osinbajo had long been a role model of public service on planning, climate and the investment climate.

He has also set up a non-profit called Future Perspectives, which aims to equip young people with skills in innovation, policy and project implementation. According to published descriptions, it has support from the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Why he is in the news this week

This week, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation Babachir Lawal made claims about how Buhari regarded Osinbajo’s decision to contest against Tinubu in 2022. Lawal reportedly said Buhari considered it distasteful. Osinbajo’s former spokesman, Laolu Akande, rejected those claims in statements carried by Premium Times, Punch and TheCable. According to those reports, Akande said Buhari had offered support at least four times and praised the campaign in public. He also denied other allegations about staff composition and called the office inclusive. We are reporting both positions as they were published. We have no way to verify either account independently, and neither side has produced documents we could check.

What we could not verify

• Which of the competing accounts of Buhari’s private views on the 2022 bid is accurate.
• Any details about his current income, holdings or business interests, which are not publicly documented, so we do not estimate them.
• The inner workings of the acting-presidency periods, which come from secondary accounts of differing reliability.
• His plans for any future political role. He has not announced one in the sources we reviewed.

Sources

• Premium Times
• Punch
• TheCable
• The Guardian Nigeria
• Wikipedia
• Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet
• Commonwealth Secretariat