2027: How Tinubu won before the poll

By Law Mefor,

It is both strange and sad how today’s opposition has refused to learn from history. All Progressives Congress (APC) proved this in 2023 by amalgamating five opposition legacy political blocks with Muhammadu as a single candidate to unseat PDP’s President Goodluck Jonathan.

History teaches one unchanging lesson about how an opposition wrestles power from an incumbent: it starts with a united front and a joint candidate. Even a joint candidate is no guarantee against incumbency around here.

Yet what we have today is not a united opposition but a splintered and headless one. Everyone wants to be president. Atiku wants to be president. Peter Obi wants to be president. Kwankwaso and Makinde want to be president. Amaechi and el-Rufai want to be president. No one wants to step down for anyone except those forced out by fate. They cannot all be running and hope to win with their votes divided.

Nowhere in history has a divided opposition ever upstaged a determined incumbent. It has never happened in Nigeria, and it does not happen in any serious presidential democracy. Yet this scattered opposition believes it can unseat President Bola Ahmed Tinubu – a man who won even when a sitting president, the Central Bank Governor, and much of the powers-that-be did not want him to win.

Now Tinubu is president. He controls the levers of power. As the Igbo proverb says, ijide dike na ani, inataro ya mma, obu mgbe okwuru oto — if you fail to wrestle a machete from a strong man when he is on the ground, you cannot do it when he is standing.

To understand why 2027 is already decided, we must look at the dozen factors that actually produce Nigeria’s president. These factors are more powerful than social media noise.

The Mood of the Nation and Rotation

The first and most powerful factor is the mood of the nation. Even under the military, the mood of the nation dictated where power went. That mood produced an unwritten but binding law: power must rotate between north and south for the sake of stability and equity. It is not written into the 1999 Constitution, but Nigerians have accepted it as sacred. When there was an attempt to produce a northern successor to President Muhammadu Buhari in 2023, it was northern APC governors who resisted it and insisted power must go south. That same mood will define 2027. The south would have done only four years under Tinubu.

The national consensus will be that the south must complete its eight years, just as the north completed its eight under Buhari. Any candidate who attempts to truncate this will be fighting the entire south and the majority of fair-minded northerners. Ask Goodluck Jonathan what happened in 2015. He was seen to have breached the understanding that he would do only one term after completing Yar’Adua’s term. The nation revolted. The same revolt awaits anyone who tries to stop the south in 2027.