A divided Nigerian opposition takes on Tinubu

For Nigerian opposition parties, unity was always the surest path to winning an election against a wily incumbent such as President Bola Tinubu. As the build-up to the 2027 presidential election began, the top three runners-up in the 2023 election teamed up in the African Democratic Congress (ADC). Among them were former vice president Atiku Abubakar, now 80, who has been seeking the presidency since 1992 and scored 29.07% of the votes as the candidate for the People’s Democratic Party, behind Tinubu’s 36.6%, in the 2023 election. Peter Obi (pictured), the Labour Party flag bearer, won 25.4% in that contest, while Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the New Nigerian People’s Party candidate, got 6.23% of the votes cast. Despite knowing that backing a single candidate could have guaranteed them an easy sweep of the votes, the coalition stalled over the issue of leadership. In the face of their stubborn ambitions, the alliance quickly unravelled. While Abubakar went on to dominate the ADC and captured the party’s presidential ticket, Obi and Kwankwaso left and pitched camp with the National Democratic Congress (NDC), a new party, as presidential and vice-presidential candidates respectively. Abubakar chose Rotimi Amaechi – a disaffected former All Progressives Congress (APC) bigwig – as his running mate. Tinubu kept vice president Kashim Shettima on his ticket. “Tinubu emerged victorious over a similar formation in 2023 and could do so again,” says Ben Spiff, an Abuja-based political analyst who tracked previous presidential campaigns. “It will take an unexpected factor to beat the incumbent as things stand.” Tinubu’s Achilles’ heel? On 12 September Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) released a list of 18 presidential candidates who will be vying in the 16 January election. It includes the top three contenders and an array of opposition parties with diverse tendencies and ideologies struggling for the mainstream. All are focusing their political attack on what they say is a cost of-living crisis engendered by Tinubu’s economic reforms. Indeed, the incumbent’s biggest challenge is to convince voters of the wisdom of the tough economic measures he took on taking office, including the ending of decades of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira exchange rate. Both actions triggered a surge in prices that took the annual inflation rate to the highest levels in 28 years n 2024 (it has since eased) and forced a hike in interest rates to record highs. While the Tinubu administration has insisted the measures were unavoidable and that more time is needed for the benefits to start to show, opposition parties have made the consequent hardships a campaign issue. Abubakar has pledged to restore fuel subsidies; and Obi is promising reforms with “a human face”, more accountability and prudent deployment of the savings. Tinubu’s camp warns against easy promises. Where a succession of governments had avoided the tough decisions, Tinubu showed courage in tackling them, information minister Mohammed Idris told a recent campaign meeting in the northern city of Kano. “We now have the fiscal headroom to undertake the developmental projects that Nigerians are seeing across the country,” he said. “Any attempt to take us back to those times of uncertainty must be rejected by all Nigerians.” The contest for votes A long-established route to election victory in Nigeria is to secure the support of at least two of the three biggest ethnic groups in the country, namely the Hausa of the north, the Yoruba of the southwest and the Igbo of the southeast, as well as a healthy sprinkling of ethnic minority votes. The top parties are targeting this pathway given how their candidates are stacked. Abubakar, though an ethnic Fulani, is working on his appeal as a Muslim in the hopes of capturing the most votes in the mainly Muslim north, including the majority-Muslim Hausas. With Amaechi from the oil-rich Niger Delta as his running mate, he is also making a bid for parts of the ethnic Igbo southeast and the adjoining eastern Delta, given his running mate’s affiliations. Tinubu, a Muslim and an ethnic Yoruba from the southwest, had in 2023 worked a calculus that aligned his home region with the north, and ran the risk of having two Muslims on the ruling party’s ticket in a country almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims. The strategy worked, with the backing of the late former President Muhammadu Buhari and several state governors delivering large block votes in the north. The president appears set to deploy a similar formula once more, though the context has changed. Buhari is no more and Tinubu has fallen out with several important men who contributed most to his 2023 victory. One of them, Nasir el-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna State, is currently in detention over allegations of corruption and security breaches that followed his public falling out with the incumbent. Nigeria’s poorer northern region has also taken a hit from Tinubu’s economic policies. The number of Nigerians living in “multidimensional poverty” rose from 56.2% in 2022 to 63% of the population in 2025, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The north’s share rose to 87m compared with the south’s 47m. Those now campaigning against Tinubu in the region are accusing him of impoverishing the north through his economic policies. Obi emerged as the insurgent candidate four years ago, even beating Tinubu in Lagos State, where he was once governor. He fancies his chances once more. With strong support among young people and a loyal following in his southeast base, he is also counting on Kwankwaso’s massive following in the northwest, particularly the populous Kano State. Obi and Kwankwaso have also publicly acknowledged entering into an agreement, under which Obi will do only one term if the ticket wins. This will pave the way for Kwankwaso, now 69, to run in 2031 and realise a long-nursed ambition. Tinubu benefits from defectors Still, it appears that wresting control from Tinubu through the ballot after his almost four years in power will be difficult. Since 2023, six opposition state governors have jumped ship, leaving the parties under which they were elected for membership of Tinubu’s APC. That has swelled the number of state governorships under the APC to 27 out of 36. These defectors have been joined by at least 75 lawmakers, including 25 senators and 50 members of the House of Representatives, further cementing the hold of Tinubu and the APC on power. “The fact is that governors win elections in Nigeria, and Tinubu already has a majority in his corner,” says Gozie Agbakoba, a former member of the House of Representatives. “I don’t see how they can beat him.” But the opposition parties are not letting up, sensing a disaffection in the populace with Tinubu over his government’s economic policies. Following a meeting with Tinubu in July, Nigerian Catholic bishops announced they had told the president that the country was “bleeding” due to his economic policies. “We told him the economy is not helping our poor people; he told us the economy is doing fine,” Cardinal John Onaiyekan, the leader of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, said after the meeting. “He told us quite clearly that he did not agree with us.” To increase political pressure on Tinubu ahead of the vote, lawyers representing Abubakar have filed for public disclosure of Federal Bureau of Investigation records on allegations of Tinubu’s involvement in drug trafficking while a resident in Chicago in the 1990s. Some opponents are also challenging the validity of his university degree certificate from Chicago State University, though BBC Africa found no evidence of forgery. Can discontent with Tinubu policies translate into an upset? No major opinion polls have so far been published on the presidential vote. But a survey published by SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based political risk advisory, found Tinubu going into the election with a negative favourability rating of -58.5 nationally. Amaechi follows with -46.7, ahead of Abubakar’s -31.8% and Kwankwaso’s -21.6%. Obi is the only one among the top candidates with a positive score, at +58.3%, according to the survey. “Discontent with the current administration is near-universal,” SBM Intelligence said in its analysis of the survey results. “But favourability is not the same as victory.” SBM Intelligence projects the NDC as the party most likely to win the election based on current sentiment – but only if there is a large turnout of voters. At least 77% of registered voters have indicated they are willing to vote in the coming election, but out of this number 42% cite violence as a disincentive to participation and 45% point to their distrust of the election umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), according to another survey by YIAGA Africa, a Nigerian election-monitoring group. Among those respondents, 21% cited insecurity as a deciding factor, another 21% pinned their decision on the quality of the candidates, with 17% pointing to their current economic conditions, the report said. Buba Galadima, a senior figure in the opposition NDC, has accused the government of planning to win the election by other means, saying the “Electoral Act was designed and perfected” to give the ruling party victory. “Tinubu is not thinking of a contest with anybody, but we won’t allow it,” he said recently. Three days after campaigns formally started in August 19, Tinubu inaugurated his campaign organisation with himself as the chairman and Vice President Shettima as his deputy, showing his readiness to fight for his re-election. “We have delivered on our campaign promises and set our country on a path of economic progress,” he said. “Let us soundly defeat all those forces who plan to take our country backwards.”