2027: Opposition Still Has It All to Do

Postscript by Waziri Adio

The sober highpoint of the 2023 presidential poll is that a divided opposition delivered victory to Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Close to two-thirds of the electorate voted against Tinubu, who secured just 37% of the valid votes, the lowest share of votes recorded by an elected president since 1999. Scoring a minority of the votes did not stop Tinubu from becoming the president because Nigeria operates a first-past-the-post system backstopped with a spread requirement. This is just as it did not stop Alhaji Shehu Shagari from becoming the president 44 years earlier when he polled just 34% of the votes in the 1979 presidential election, Nigeria’s first and most competitive presidential poll till date.

Rousing themselves from an initial bout of denial, key opposition figures invested much of 2025 in assembling a united front to confront Tinubu in 2027. Their plan is to prevent a repeat of the strange electoral arithmetic of 2023 and 1979. They have made some progress. After flirting with a few options, they adopted the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as the opposition coalition platform last July. There and then, ADC transformed into the most vocal opposition party in the country. Its interim executive has been hard at work trying to erect or activate structures across the country. Its regular statements have magnified its presence and put the ruling party on its toes.

Prominent opposition leaders, especially Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Mr. Peter Obi who were both presidential candidates in 2023, officially decamped to ADC on 24th November and 31st December respectively. It is possible that Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, also a presidential candidate in 2023, may join the ADC train. It is also possible, probable even, that the rump of the disappearing Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), once Nigeria’s dominant political party, may collapse into the ADC coalition or be in alliance with ADC for the 2027 elections. It may even get better. The followers of the opposition candidates may opt to forget the past and turn their swords against the common enemy, the strange bedfellows within the coalition may just relearn that in politics the only permanent thing is interest, and ADC may emerge from the selection of its flagbearer not only unscathed but also as one strong, united family.

If things work out this way, a super coalition will emerge to take on the incumbent in 2027. But does this best-case scenario mean that the opposition is on course to creating an electoral upset next year? Not necessarily. It only guarantees an interesting two-way contest. The opposition pines for a repeat of 2015, when the All Progressives Congress (APC) defeated the PDP, the first time that a ruling party was dislodged from power in Nigeria. ADC’s plan is to do to APC in 2027 what APC did to PDP in 2015. For this to happen, forming a super and united coalition can only be the first step. The opposition still has it all to do. Today, I will discuss five challenges that I think a united opposition still needs to overcome to stand a real fighting chance.

The first challenge is the need to overcome the lure of convenient assumptions. There are three key assumptions that leaders of the opposition seem to find comfort in: that a united opposition platform automatically confers on the flagbearer of ADC the total votes that Atiku, Obi and Kwankwaso scored in 2023; that Nigerians are so fed up with Tinubu and his policies to the extent that they will choose, in a heartbeat, whoever the opposition puts forward against him; and that the only way Tinubu can win in 2027 is by rigging. While these assumptions may provide comfort, they are political non sequiturs and they miss the complexity and dynamism of electoral politics. To start with, our elections do not lend themselves to such neat arithmetic. Voters choose based on the options before them and factor in the context of the contest. As contexts change, voter choice cannot be taken as constant or frozen. It will thus be critical for the opposition to overcome easy assumptions that lead to complacency and create costly blind spots.

The second challenge is how the opposition handles the consensus about alternation of power between the north and the south. This is one elite bargain of the 4th Republic that seems to have found deep resonance with the larger electorate. Going by the logic of this consensus, the presidency should stay in the south till 2031 when it returns to the north for unbroken eight years. This consensus doesn’t favour the opposition coalition at the moment. It is an open secret that Atiku is going to run to be the ADC flagbearer and, from all indications, the ticket is his to lose. It is in response to the sticky nature of north-south alternation of power that some of the potential presidential aspirants from the south, Obi and Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, have been promising to do only one term if elected president.

The one-term promise, even from Atiku, is neither believable nor practical. No one can stop a sitting president from running for another term. The only southerner who can credibly promise to do one term is former President Goodluck Jonathan who will be constitutionally barred. He was warming up to run but seemed to have developed cold feet the moment his state governor decamped to the ruling party. The majority of the political leaders from the core north, especially those with age on their side, are likely to do a deal with Tinubu or just use the coalition to position themselves ahead of 2031. Northern voters, who are likely to be the kingmaker in the next election, may just be minded to play it safe too.

The best hope of the opposition is that the alternation of power doesn’t really matter to Nigerians, that it is just a ruse erected by the political elite, or that even if it is not a ruse, there are instances when voters are willing to set it aside, and that 2027 is one of such few instances. This position will be put to test next year.

There is another key feature of our electoral politics that will be put to test next year. This is the role of political structures in electoral outcomes in Nigeria. This is the third challenge the opposition will need to overcome. A common refrain in the opposition camp anytime a governor and other elected officials in a state decamp to the ruling party is that the election would be determined by the people not the governors. Their claim is not without basis: Obi resuscitated an obscure Labour Party (LP) and got 6.1 million votes in 2023 and Buhari started a new party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), barely a year to the election and had 12.2 million votes in 2011. This shows that an individual with widespread appeal can go far. But nearly is never enough.

The idea of opposition leaders coalescing in ADC itself is an acknowledgment of the primacy of structure in our electoral politics. To stand a good chance of gaining power, a political party must be able to assemble a winning coalition and the requisite spread. This was what gave the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) the edge in the competitive field of 1979. Having a national structure was why PDP dominated the political landscape for 16 years from 1999 to 2015. It was also the reason why APC was able to dislodge PDP in 2015 when Buhari’s regular 12 million votes got the extra he needed to get over the line. ADC, at best, is still a coalition of leading politicians, and mostly ex this and that. It does not yet boast of the heft of a winning coalition that APC offered in 2014. It might be worth remembering that APC was a coalition of three legacy parties and breakaway factions of two other parties and that it had 14 governors and a significant number of state and federal legislators in its fold when it took on and subdued the PDP behemoth in the 2015 polls.

Both ADC and APC, interestingly, are playing the coalition game. Despite the pretence of one of them, the two parties are trying to assemble a structure that can guarantee victory. Politicians are defecting both ways, though at a much higher rate and prominence in one direction, while one set of defections is publicly narrativized as patriotic and the other as evil. As at today, APC is light years ahead in this battle of coalitions. From being in control of 20 states after the 2023 elections, APC now has 28 to 29 of the 36 states in its corner and has absolute majority in the National Assembly. This definitely doesn’t mean that Tinubu will get the highest votes in all the 29 APC-ruled states. But such a spread should count for something. The ADC folks believe it would not count for much. According to some of them, they don’t think a majority of hurting Nigerians will be “foolish enough to vote for Tinubu”. This thesis will also be tested in the next election.

The ADC leaders seem to be operating under the impression that Nigerians are so universally fed up with Tinubu that most of them would vote for anyone but the incumbent. We were at that point in 2015, but it is doubtful we are back there at the moment. To be sure, every election is a referendum on the incumbent. And many Nigerians, for different reasons, have bones to pick with Tinubu. He has alienated some of the powerful people and sections who helped him to power in 2023. Most of his appointments have sectional tint. And his fiscal and monetary reforms have unleashed untold hardship on a majority of Nigerians, even though these reforms have also stabilised the economy, expanded the fiscal headspace for all tiers of government, and created opportunities for local and foreign investors and some big businesses.

The main strategy of ADC, individually and collectively, appears to be to drum up the failings of the Tinubu administration. This should be expected. ADC’s leaders and spokespersons go to great length to attack anything and everything, sometimes taking contradictory or strange positions, probably sold on the idea that constantly attacking APC is enough to signal depth and seriousness as an opposition party. Initially, that worked, then the novelty wore off. While most Nigerians know what ADC is against (which is Tinubu), very few know exactly what ADC stands for. The coalition is yet to shed the tag of being a collection of mostly displaced and disgruntled politicians who want to settle scores and who are itching to be back in power and reckoning.

Beyond nicely-crafted press releases in response to Tinubu’s policies, actions and gaffes, ADC has not been able to offer a clear and compelling vision of society that will make it credible alternative, compensate for the clear weakness of its political structure and enhance its mass appeal. It is not clear what ADC’s ideological leaning is or what its approach to governance will be. Even its slogan, as slogans go, is weak and unremarkable. The fourth challenge is thus the failure of ADC till date to move beyond what some call a paper or press release party—a party adept at grabbing headlines and reposts—to a party of ideas and imagination.

For example, what is ADC’s position on key economic and security challenges of the day, what will it do differently, and how? What will be its policy preferences and directions? The lingering economic and security challenges should have been seized upon by a political party intent on showing that it is prepared to be a more beneficial alternative to Nigerians. If ADC is still at its formative stage, what about those aspiring to be president on its platform? What are their specific policy positions on these issues? If most of them cannot genuinely posture as being new or different, at least they should be able to offer practical and smart ideas that they can even brand in case they are concerned that the incumbent and others may steal their ideas. The risk of ADC being undifferentiated or hiding under lame slogans and even lamer excuses (like the vacuous and technically incorrect “Nigeria is becoming a one-party state”) is that a sizeable number of Nigerians might just prefer to stick with the Tinubu that they know than the opposition that they don’t really know.

The fifth challenge for the opposition is that incumbency has not fully degraded Tinubu’s potential political advantage. Being in power has surely exposed his weaknesses and earned him some handicaps. But his vulnerability might be exaggerated, especially if that happens to be the main plank of the opposition campaign. If the economy starts to turn the corner in a way that positively impacts the average person from his third year, Tinubu may actually stand to benefit from what many critics, myself included, had described as a rash approach to reforms.

His big bang approach, rather than the well-sequenced, gradualist approach that most of us favour, may suddenly look inspired and many people might want to give him a second chance to see through what he started. Besides, there is the small matter of how access to state apparatus enhances the chance of an incumbent in a developing country anchored on patronage politics. This is not absolute as we saw with Jonathan in 2015. But it can be argued that the Tinubu of 2027 may actually be stronger electorally than the Tinubu that just limped past the post in 2023 when he was not an incumbent and when some in his own party were either indifferent to him or even worked actively against him. 2023 was an open election in the sense that no incumbent was on the ballot. 2027 is likely to be a different proposition: the leading machine politician of his generation is running for as an incumbent. Does this mean that Tinubu is home and dry were the election to hold today? Not necessarily. It only goes to show that it won’t be a cakewalk for either party.

Things can change rapidly in politics. Just one unknown or unforeseen factor can reset the field. We have a whole year between now and the next elections. That is a very long time in politics, an arena where even a day can make a world of difference. ADC has enough time to scale the challenges identified here and even others that may pop up along the line. But it is also enough time for its challenges to compound. Similarly, it is adequate time for Tinubu to consolidate or lose what has been identified as his edge. Politically, the year 2026 will be filled with twists and turns. It will be an interesting year.