If economic health, social vitality, and the raw pulse of public opinion were the only indicators relied upon to prognosticate the chances of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s reelection in 2027, I would say with cocksure certitude that he is condemned to be a one-term president.
Not even the most hopelessly unthinking defenders of the Tinubu presidency can deny that his reign so far has been defined by unrelieved economic hardship, staggering inflation, a collapsing naira, and a deepening sense of despair among Nigerians. In other words, the objective conditions for his political repudiation are overripe.
Nonetheless, elections, especially in Nigeria, are not won on the basis of public frustration alone. They are won — or lost — on the strength of political organization, elite consensus, strategic emotional manipulation, and the ability to convert popular anger into electoral mathematics. Call those the subjective conditions of electoral triumph, if you like. And this is where the tragedy of the opposition begins.
The opposition is undisciplined, hopelessly spineless, irredeemably fragmented, strategically bankrupt, and is falling cheaply into the trap set for it by Tinubu.
First, the opposition is shaping up to be disappointingly provincial. It is dominated by elements from a slice of the North that seems to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms from loss of political power. This is reminiscent of the narrow-minded opposition to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term, which helped him to create a coalition of southern Nigerian, Christian northerners, along with portions of the North that felt excluded from the regional mainstream.
Perhaps the most egregious expression of naïve, historically inaccurate, self-sabotaging provincial self-importance from the region came five days ago from Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a former appointee of the Tinubu administration who, before his sojourn in the administration, was a higher-up at the Northern Elders’ Forum.
“In the next six months, the North will decide where it stands,” Dr. Baba-Ahmed said in a viral post. “If the rest of the country wants to join us, fine. If not, we will go our own way. One thing is clear: nobody can become president of Nigeria without northern support.”
Well, Olusegun Obasanjo was elected for a second term in 2003 without “northern” support. I inserted scare quotes around “northern” because, although Baba-Hakeem appeared to be ecumenical in his conception of the North (he referenced “Muslims, Christians, Fulani, Baju, Mangu” — the Baju and Mangu being ethnic groups from southern Kaduna and Plateau — indicating pan-Northernism), we all know that the North has never been a monolith and is often riven by religion.
When people like Baba-Ahmed talk of the “North” in such tyrannizing, self-aggrandizing terms, they often mean a particular part of the North.
Obasanjo deployed the perks of incumbency to mobilize the entire South, appeal to the Christian North, and to make offers to parts of the Muslim North that Muhammadu Buhari didn’t consider “northern” enough to deserve his electoral entreaties. Even if the election wasn’t rigged, Buhari didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of winning the 2003 election.
Former President Goodluck Jonathan used Obasanjo’s 2003 template in 2011 to defeat Muhammadu Buhari. But in 2015, Jonathan lost the Southwest to Buhari, which led to Jonathan’s loss and Buhari’s epochal, unexampled triumph.
This shows that no region can win a national election without the other, making Baba-Hakeem’s self-lionizing boast a rhetorical gift to Bola Tinubu. We’re already seeing its effect.
Several southerners who are wriggling in the torment of Tinubu’s economic policies have chosen to rather live with the sting of his policies than embrace the provincial arrogance of people like Baba-Ahmed who arrogate to themselves the exclusive power to determine who is president and who isn’t.
Similarly, in Nigeria’s informal power-sharing arrangement, the expectation is that after eight years of a northern presidency that ended in 2023, no northerner should be president again for the next eight years. But the northern opposition to Tinubu seems to be anchored on a desire for premature power grab back to the North.
Unless the northern politicians who have stuck out their necks to oppose Tinubu support another southerner with widespread appeal, their opposition will only strengthen Tinubu’s southern coalition and buy him sympathy from parts of the north that don’t enjoy regional political hegemony.
This is particularly so because since the start of the Fourth Republic, the South has never expressed opposition to northern presidencies by sponsoring southern candidates. The South supported Atiku Abubakar, a northerner, in 2019. Umar Musa Yar’adua’s main opponent in 2007 wasn’t a southerner. It was Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner.
But when it was the South’s turn to get presidential power in 2023, the North presented a formidable candidate in the PDP. In fact, the APC hierarchy, with the support of Muhammadu Buhari, settled on former Senate President Ahmad Lawan as the “consensus candidate.” That was embarrassing.
Already, there are insinuations that PDP governors who are defecting to APC are doing so not just because they are being bludgeoned into it through subtle EFCC prosecutorial threats but also because they fear that their party’s standard-bearer in 2027 will be a northerner.
I understand the dilemma of the northern politicians in opposition. Should they support a southern candidate to dislodge Tinubu, such a candidate would, as sure as tomorrow’s date, seek a second term. That would defer the presidential aspirations of the northern politicians by eight years instead of four.
If they sit by listlessly as Tinubu shoves them to the margins of the orbit of power, they will be like fish flailing out of water. They will be so disoriented and weakened that by the time presidential power drifts back to the North, they probably won’t even have the strength to fight for a place.
Northern opposition politicians like Nasir El-Rufai also don’t seem to realize that the Social Democratic Party (SDP) they have embraced as the vehicle to displace Tinubu is, in fact, Tinubu’s spare car.
It is fully fueled, tuned, and parked in his garage for contingencies. As early as April 2022, BusinessDay reported that Tinubu had opened backchannel talks with the SDP and explored it as a fallback platform in case his APC ambitions stalled.
In other words, the opposition is not commandeering an independent vehicle; they are clambering into a car whose engine hums to Tinubu’s touch and whose keys he can reclaim at will. They are, quite literally, riding shotgun in a machine built for their defeat. Unfortunately, he has also hijacked their car, the PDP!
Adewole Adebayo, SDP’s 2023 presidential candidate, unintentionally echoed this sentiment a few days ago when he used the metaphor of a car to send a not-so-subtle dig at El-Rufai.
“As for the coalition, we’re listening to them,” Adebayo said. “What we don’t want to be—we don’t want to be a get-away car for a conspiracy and robbery we did not plan. So, if you planned something somewhere and you want to use the SDP as a get-away car, that’s not available.”
Adebayo added another pointed dart to El-Rufai when he said, “if the coalition is a crying center for disappointed Tinubu followers, they should go back to Tinubu who gave the promise to them and resolve their differences there.”
In the end, Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s greatest electoral asset may not be the loyalty of the masses, the success of his policies, or even the cunning of his political machinery. It may well be the disarray, hubris, provincialism, and strategic myopia of his opposition.
They are too divided to form a coalition, too impatient to build trust across regions, and too blinded by immediate resentments to think in terms of long-term electoral triumph.
In 2027, Tinubu may stagger into a second term not because he inspires, but because he survives; not because he triumphs, but because those who should have dethroned him will, through a toxic mix of arrogance and amateurism, hand him victory on a silver platter.
It won’t be Tinubu who wins; it will be the opposition that loses. And Nigeria, trapped in the wreckage of broken possibilities, will pay the price.
Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.
