On current trends, the 2027 election is increasingly looking like it would be a repeat of the 2007 election. There is even good reason to believe the 2027 election could be worse. I am therefore writing this piece today as an early warning signal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
By a rare consensus in Nigerian politics, the 2007 presidential election has been adjudged as possibly the worst ever held in this country. That election was so wild and predetermined that it is now widely agreed that the winner was declared even while voters were still voting at thousands of polling booths across the entire country. In fact, that election was so bad that even the winner, the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, admitted forthrightly that the election was significantly flawed.
His first pledged was to reform the electoral system, and he did. As we trudge slowly but steadily towards Election Day 2027, however, the writing is by now clear on the wall that the election may well turn out to be worse than in 2007. For an indication of that, I invite the reader to look closely at President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2027 election strategy, which is not only already in effect, but is clearly playing out for all to see. I have previously described Tinubu’s 2027
re-election strategy as akin to a person trying to enter their own house by jumping over the fence. That metaphor is by now clear enough for all to see.
Rather than campaign and win on his record in office, Tinubu’s 2027 strategy appears to rest on a tripod of tactics. The first of these tactics appears to be to destabilise, disrupt and distract opposition parties by all means possible. The second tactic looks like to divide the North in the reverse direction of 2023, this time by alienating the largest and dominant group in the region. The third tactic appears to be to use all the institutional apparatuses of the federal state-INEC, the judiciary, anti-corruption agencies, etc-to skew the electoral field in only one direction. And for this strategy to be successful, all three must work concurrently according to plan.
You may argue that no one had traced Tinubu’s hand directly in all of these things, and you may be right. But what is more important than who does what is the fact that events are manifesting in a particular way, and that their combined effects on the entire election process is leading to particular outcomes. And on that score, an early warning is justified because no one but the most rabid partisan would fail to see that the electoral field is now playing out-in overdrive-according to these three scripts. This, then, is a warning to all.
I don’t know who came up with this ‘brilliant’ idea of how to win a Nigerian presidential election, but they probably read their books upside down in school. It is easy to learn everything about power. But it is also easy to forget the most important thing about power, that is, the limits of power. We are all witnesses to this script in motion, but we must all wonder aloud about what the end game would look like if we factor in the limits to the power of any one person, even the power of an incumbent Nigerian president standing for re-election.
First of all, it is true that the whole idea of crippling opposition parties appears to be working successfully right now. It is also true that the script playing out in the PDP, ADC, NNPP, and Labour Party has been entertaining, as opposition figures run from one court or party to another. But this early ‘success’ should not give Tinubu’s people any false hope because this approach, if it’s a deliberate approach as many Nigerians suspect, has its limits and an expiry date.
More importantly, if the end game of all the legal, political and institutional hurdles that opposition parties like the PDP, ADC, LP, NNPP, and maybe NDC soon enough too, have been facing over the past three years or so is to make Tinubu and the ruling APC the only viable candidate and party on the ballot on Election Day, then even a false alarm at this stage will be useful for us all because things are highly unlikely to turn out that way.
Nigeria is not Cameroon or Uganda or Zimbabwe where one candidate, even an incumbent, can manipulate and manoeuvre the entire electoral system to their sole benefit. Nigeria is a huge and diverse country of 230 million people, and with some of the most competing regional, religious, ethnic, and personal interests ever imaginable. When they want, and especially when pushed to the wall, Nigerians are also among the active political animals on this planet, in both senses of the term. Therefore, regardless of the merits and demerits of the legal, political, and anti-corruption cases currently being faced by opposition parties and their leaders, there will be no election in 2027 if there are no credible opposition
parties and candidates in the election.
As a journalist, I have stayed clear of partisan politics, and don’t particularly think highly of any political party in Nigeria. But whenever I look at the travails of opposition parties in the past three years, I am increasingly wondering why anyone will be actively playing a script that General Sani Abacha, even as a military head of state, tried and failed in 1998. Or for that matter, a script that then President Obasanjo tried and failed in 2006. Remember the late Chief Bola Ige’s ‘five fingers of a leprous hand’? That is what the current strategy of crippling the opposition, if indeed, it is someone’s strategy, looks to me, and the only outcome I can think of is failure. It simply won’t work in Nigeria’s complex federation, then or now.
There is also the not-so-small matter of how much Nigeria and Nigerian elections have changed in those 20 years since 2007. The problem here is not so much that a 2007 kind of election would be impossible to replicate in 2027, but that the social, political and constitutional consequences of such an election are potentially more volatile than Nigeria can contain. This is true even if the election is only perceived to have been irredeemably flawed.
Nigeria is bursting at the seams with young people whose political consciousness has risen to stratospheric levels, who are digitally savvy in a changed media environment, but who yet cannot see in any future for themselves in the current political and governance arrangement. Moreover, for many millions of Nigerians, Tinubu’s own warped economic policies have directly and unbearably exacerbated the cost-of-living crises they have long faced. Equally important, the country as a whole has gotten used to better and more credible elections since 2011, even if problems remain in several areas.
Therefore, the sort of election where there are no credible opposition parties and candidates, or where an INEC Chairman will just stand up and declare a winner because the outcome is pre-determined is unlikely to go down quietly under the social and political circumstances of 2027 in Nigeria. For the Nigeria of today, an in-your-face flawed election would represent nothing but a trigger for what is better imagined than described.
President Tinubu and his party can win this election, but they must win it free and fair. Nigeria is not Cameroon or Uganda. This is my warning, and I rest my case.