As the political clock of Nigeria inches inexorably toward February 20, 2027; precisely one year, ten months, and a day away, the murmurs of opposition defiance against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) grow ever more cacophonous, yet remain conspicuously devoid of substance. What ought to be a disciplined and methodical march toward national redemption risks dissolving into a tragicomic footnote in Nigeria’s democratic annals, not for want of public appetite for change, but for the abject failure of the opposition elite to subordinate personal ambition to collective purpose.
History, that implacable chronicler of political fortunes, offers the 2013 APC merger as an exemplar of what disciplined, strategic coalition-building can yield. The union of disparate opposition tendencies -Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and a faction of the All-Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) – transcended personality cults and provincial calculations to present a coherent, electorally viable alternative to a then-fatigued People’s Democratic Party (PDP). It was a feat neither accidental nor casual, but the product of two years of painstaking negotiation, ideological compromise, and power-sharing pragmatism.
By lamentable contrast, the present generation of opposition leadership appears consumed by narcissistic soliloquies masquerading as coalition-building. Atiku Abubakar’s recent press conference and putative coalition announcement, bereft of institutional imprimatur from his own party, exemplifies this dilettantism. That the PDP governors’ forum, custodians of the party’s territorial and structural capital, swiftly disavowed any merger or alliance plans speaks to the dangerous fissures beneath the surface.
Governor Seyi Makinde’s cautionary intervention, that no political marriage can be contracted without the consent of the party’s legitimate organs, was not mere procedural pedantry but a fundamental assertion of party sovereignty. Politics, he aptly observed, is the arbitration of interests through legitimate processes, not the vanity project of itinerant political jobbers.
The predictable counter-reactions have further illuminated the poverty of strategic consensus within the opposition constellation. The PDP South-South Youth Amalgamation’s excoriation of the Atiku-El-Rufai axis as a desperate assembly of spent political forces underscores a generational skepticism about recycled leadership devoid of ideological coherence. Their critique is no empty polemic but a sobering commentary on the electorate’s growing intolerance for political opportunism dressed in reformist garb.
Compounding this malaise is the apparent ideological and strategic incoherence within the Labour Party (LP), which, despite its surprising showing in 2023, remains a fragile vessel, vulnerable to internal indiscipline and factional insurrections. The Nigeria Renaissance Group’s public admonition to the LP leadership captures the party’s existential dilemma: whether it will evolve into a credible mass movement or disintegrate into a cacophony of discordant personal ambitions.
In the interstices of this opposition disarray, the APC has demonstrated a ruthless institutional instinct for survival. By harvesting defectors from the PDP and other minor parties, most notably Senator Ned Nwoko and, prospectively, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the ruling party is not merely consolidating its numerical strength but also symbolically reaffirming its hegemonic status. Alhaji Abdullahi Ganduje’s declaration that the so-called opposition coalition would soon implode betrays a confidence born not merely of incumbency, but of the manifest incapacity of his adversaries to orchestrate a credible alternative.
The defiant reaffirmation of loyalty to the APC by erstwhile CPC stalwarts, despite recent defections by figures like Nasir El-Rufai, further attests to the ruling party’s resilience. Their communiqué repudiating reports of a CPC bloc defection, while affirming continued fidelity to President Tinubu’s administration, suggests that the vaunted ‘legacy factions’ of the APC remain intact, if not entirely content.
In this landscape, even Atiku Abubakar’s sanguine assertion that the project “continues” and that “the people have taken ownership of it” rings hollow against the backdrop of absent structural coherence, lack of grassroots mobilization, and evident elite discord. Ohanaeze Ndigbo’s Chief Ralph Uwazurike’s cautious optimism notwithstanding, it would be a heroic misreading of Nigeria’s political physics to presume that mere accumulation of disaffected elites, without a unifying ideological or programmatic vision, can upend an entrenched incumbent.
Moreover, Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim’s critique that the opposition’s resort to ethnic sentiment as a mobilization strategy is not only morally hazardous but strategically myopic should be heeded. Nigeria’s increasingly sophisticated electorate, scarred by decades of transactional politics, demands policy clarity and governance credibility — not tired tropes of ethno-regional grievance.
The fundamental policy implication of this disarray is the risk of democratic stagnation. A vibrant, disciplined opposition is not a luxury in a democracy but a structural necessity for accountability, policy innovation, and national cohesion. The absence of a coherent, united opposition not only imperils the prospects of regime change but deprives the polity of alternative policy frameworks on urgent matters of national security, economic reform, and federal restructuring.
As it stands, the opposition’s inability to rise above personal ambition, factionalism, and transactional defections condemns it to perpetual marginality. If this trajectory continues, 2027 will not witness a keenly contested transfer of power, but rather the reaffirmation of incumbency through default. The APC’s current advantage lies not in unassailable popularity or flawless governance but in the chronic indiscipline, strategic myopia, and ideological bankruptcy of its challengers.
In sum, unless the opposition’s myriad tendencies can rediscover the virtue of collective purpose, subordinate personal ambition to national interest, and articulate a policy-centered, pan-Nigerian political project, their much-vaunted ‘coalition’ will remain, to borrow from Shakespeare, a tale told by multiple actors, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
