It looks as if President Bola Tinubu has seen through the effete theatrics of opposition political parties and decided that they are not up to stuff, and disdainfully dismissed what he probably regards as their histrionics with the quizzical taunt, “They want to scare me off?”
Indeed, anyone who thinks that the motley of the disgruntled in Nigeria’s opposition parties will make tangible inroads against the quest of the ruling All Progressives Congress to achieve the re-election of President Tinubu in 2027 must think again.
This suggestion is not due to the popularity of the ruling APC or the outstanding performance of the President. It is because of the lack of cohesion of Nigeria’s “two-and-a-half” main opposition political parties, the rump of the People’s Democratic Party, the “borrowed dinner jacket” African Democratic Party, and the “half-child” Labour Party.
These parties and the practically invisible others are engaged in intra-party schemes, big egos that won’t acknowledge that anyone is better than the other, and unnecessary lawsuits that will make it impossible for reconciliation afterwards.
While the Independent National Electoral Commission has recognised the disputed convention of the PDP faction led by “amphibious politician”, Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, no one knows the fate of the one concluded last week by ADC.
As INEC has complied with the order of the Federal High Court to recognise the current leadership of the Labour Party led by Nenadi Sambo, its convention that is scheduled for April 28, 2026, in Umuahia, Abia State, under the auspices of its only governor, may likely be recognised.
Like the ruling APC, these opposition parties are a smorgasbord or patchwork of serial defectors from other parties, and that tendency, which shows them as opportunist birds of prey, is expected to weaken their resolve to work as united organisations.
The alarming rate at which their elected governors, legislators and stalwarts are defecting into the ruling APC portrays members of the opposition parties as people merely looking for opportunities to access the commonwealth of the nation.
By defecting in droves into the APC, they unwittingly handed over victory of the 2027 presidential election to the APC, and have therefore become complicit in their own allegation that President Tinubu and the APC want to win the election through the machination of a one-party state.
Only last week, the “stomach infrastructure” politics of Nigeria’s opposition parties became more evident as Governor Bala Mohammed, hitherto regarded as a strident critic of the APC, and the PDP structure in Bauchi State explained that they might no longer decamp en masse to the APC because their proposed 60-40 power-sharing formula was rejected by the APC.
The former National Publicity Secretary of PDP, Olisa Metuh, who joined APC on his birthday on November 25, 2025, has been nominated as a director of Renewed Hope Agenda by its Director General, Imo State Governor, Hope Uzodinma, to join dyed-in-the-wool APC stalwarts, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Sunday Dare, and Tunde Rahman, to publicise RHA’s activities and achievements.
Apart from wailing and whining, the pack of politicians in opposition parties who have been described as “fallen angels” clustered in the rain outside their homes, whose doors were shut against them, are not offering credible policy options to Nigerians.
Instead of advancing cogent arguments against the President, who has been endorsed to run again in 2027, opposition parties come across as a bunch of disgruntled politicians who lost out, found themselves as strange bedfellows in political parties (that are political associations at best), and can hardly articulate what they are about.
Rather than continue to throw shades at President Tinubu and the ruling APC, they could offer credible solutions to the insecurity problems facing the country, and interrogate the economic policies of the government with better alternatives.
They could tell Nigerians how they would resuscitate the Ajaokuta Steel Mill, encouraging more investment in domestic petroleum refineries, provide credible re-industrialisation of Nigeria, and provide regular electricity that President Tinubu has not delivered within three of the four years that he had promised.
They should be providing alternative suggestions if they are not comfortable with the President’s removal of subsidy, irregular supply in Nigeria, and the President’s 2025 declaration of a (largely unconsummated) nationwide security emergency and plan to hire 50,000 more police officers.
Some opposition politicians, posing as intellectuals, are no better than the “stomach infrastructure” lot. They employ grandiloquent and opaque English to describe simple conditions that they have chosen to present in esoteric terms.
They end up in the most pitiful state of disparaging some of the President’s economic policies that they took an active part in compiling for the APC when the going was good. The Yoruba would say, “Ija lo de t’orin d’owe,” a sarcasm on the state of affairs before a falling apart of friends.
Yet others, who were even ministers in former President Muhammadu Buhari’s APC government, now go about talking down on Nigerians in a way that suggests that Nigerians are witless juveniles who can be easily hoodwinked because they have no idea of what is good for them.
An Obafemi Awolowo in opposition would have garnered a collective of academics to interrogate the condition of Nigeria, think up solutions to deal with the situations, package them in a corpus of practical wisdom and applications and offer them as alternatives to the electorate. But it appears as if the era of the Awolowos has gone. Sadly.
While former Vice President Atiku Abubakar says he is willing to step down for an ADC consensus presidential candidate, and has also told a television journalist that 2027 would be his last presidential outing, the former Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, says he may dump ADC, that he however, claims will build a better Nigeria, if the party’s presidential primary was compromised.
Observers think that Abubakar appears to be gradually coming closer to the realisation that only a presidential candidate of Southern Nigerian origin will fly in the contest against President Tinubu, as Obi thinks that this is his trump card to clinch ADC’s presidential ticket.
Rotimi Amaechi, former Governor of Rivers State, who is probably banking on the Southern presidential candidate gambit, has rejected the idea of a consensus candidate, as Abubaker appears to be the shoo-in candidate.
It is going to be impossible to blame the President and the APC that metaphorically pissed on the grave of the opposition parties, whose members continuously act as if they are intimidated by what looks like President Tinubu’s mystic.
Allegations that the ruling APC has planted moles within their ranks merely confirm that it is easy to breach their ranks, because they were never united in the first place. Everyone knows that Nigeria’s political parties, including the ruling APC, are mere revolving doors that serve the purposes of Nigeria’s generally unprincipled politicians.
But worse is that, whereas the APC has already settled for President Tinubu as consensus presidential candidate, media speculations say that the ADC is splintered among Abubakar, and former governors, Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State, Obi of Anambra State and Rivers State’s Rotimi Amaechi.
As no one can confidently speculate on who might emerge as presidential candidates of the PDP and Labour Party, less than 12 months to the presidential election, it appears that the opposition parties have already conceded victory to the APC.
X:@lekansote1, lekansote.com
