By Nathaniel Irobi
The 2027 presidential election is already shaping up as the most contested in Nigeria’s history, and the rumblings are unmistakable. Nigerians are feeling the squeeze from policies the present administration adopted to reset the economy and put it back on a sound footing.
The opposition, particularly the camp of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, has turned up the heat on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu with a barrage of media attacks and propaganda. Atiku, who said is making his final run, has seized on the fuel subsidy reversal and other kitchen table issues to make the President’s road rougher than anyone anticipated. However petty his tactics may appear, the ruling APC is clearly rattled. The President’s recent decisions to ease the cost of living and transportation are responses to the pressure from the ADC.
For Peter Obi, the picture is different, and it is not flattering. The vibe Nigerians saw in 2023 when he contested under the Labour Party has disappeared. The Obidient Movement was the bride of that campaign, with its energy, its crowds and its sense of possibility. That energy has dissipated. The crowds are thinner, the party has changed, and the candidate himself seems to be searching for a message that lands the way it did three years ago. More troubling for his supporters is that Obi has said nothing meaningful about how he would manage the affairs of the country if elected. He criticises the government with enthusiasm but keeps his own plans close to his chest, a habit that has invited scorn from unlikely quarters.
The Presidency has described him as a man with no plan, no alternative and no policy plank beyond what one aide called “sentimental nothings”. The APC campaign council has gone further, calling him an “irredeemable liar” and a “mediocre governor” whose image of fiscal prudence was a “well-packaged lie”. And then there is Omoyele Sowore, hardly a friend of the ruling party, who has called Obi a “packaged fraud” and accused him of renting political parties every election season not to liberate Nigerians but to help the establishment manage opposition.
When your critics include both the government you oppose and the activist who once stood on the same side of the barricade, the credibility problem is real. Obi’s inconsistency, his party hopping and his refusal to articulate a clear agenda have exposed what many did not notice in 2023: that the movement was built on sentiment, not substance.
Yet the question is not whether the opposition can make noise. It is whether it can win. On the evidence available, neither Atiku nor Obi can. The reasons are structural, financial and political.
The money is not there.
A presidential campaign in Nigeria is funded by war chests, not small donations. Atiku’s people have acknowledged privately that fundraising has been difficult, with some campaign officials working without pay. Obi’s situation is more precarious. Nyesom Wike said plainly that Obi no longer enjoys the quiet backing he had in 2023, when some figures in government circles believed he could win and quietly supported him. This time, nobody is backing him.
Obi’s 2023 coalition has fractured.
The Obidient phenomenon was situational. Obi benefited from youth anger at the political old guard, a Labour Party that had not yet collapsed into internal warfare, and a perception that he represented something new. The Labour Party is now a shadow of what it was, and Obi has moved to the Nigeria Democratic Congress. The energy that once filled stadiums has not followed him.
The opposition cannot agree on one candidate.
G100 alliance talks have gone on for months with no result. Atiku and Obi both believe they have a claim to the presidency, and neither will step aside. If they both run, they will split the anti Tinubu vote the way they did in 2023.
Kwankwaso complicates Atiku’s northern arithmetic.
He has moved with his NNPP structure into the ADC, and his influence in Kano, Jigawa and Katsina is not incidental. Reuben Abati noted that Kano is one of the states any serious candidate must win, alongside Rivers and Lagos. If Kwankwaso’s support goes elsewhere, Atiku’s northern base is no longer secure.
Atiku’s repeated attempts are a liability.
He has been running for president since 1993. Each new campaign invites the same question: what is different this time? The answer has not been compelling enough to expand his coalition beyond its traditional boundaries.
Obi’s party movements cost him the stability argument.
He went from the PDP to the Labour Party, and now to the NDC. Each move has a rational explanation, but the cumulative effect is an attack line that writes itself: a man who cannot keep a political home cannot be trusted with a country. This is one of Obi’s undoings.
The APC’s state level dominance is not decorative.
The ruling party controls the majority of states, and the governors who control those states control local machinery, party structures and access to resources. Tinubu’s campaign council has been inaugurated and has drawn in figures from the Accord Party, the PDP and the APGA.
Incumbency in Nigeria is historically decisive.
Only one sitting president has lost a re election bid since 1999: Goodluck Jonathan in 2015. That defeat required a united opposition, a weakened president and a challenger with a national coalition. None of those conditions is present.
Hardship does not automatically become opposition votes.
The Tinubu campaign will argue that the reforms causing pain are the same reforms that will produce long term stability. It is a coherent argument, and it will be backed by the full weight of the federal communication apparatus.
Obi’s northern weakness remains unresolved.
His 2023 showing was impressive in the South and in urban centres, but the North remains the decisive voting bloc. His arrangement with Kwankwaso addresses that weakness on paper, not in structure.
The Obidient Movement’s structure is not the same as electoral strength.
It has offices, coordinators and a results monitoring system linked to INEC’s IReV platform. That is serious organisational work. It does not automatically translate into votes when the enthusiasm that built the movement has cooled.
Tinubu’s political network is older and deeper.
He has been building networks since the days of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1990s. Atiku’s networks are concentrated in the North and have been contested by Kwankwaso’s movements. Obi’s networks are newer and more urban, which means they are thinner in the rural areas where votes are counted.
The campaign calendar is not friendly to a divided opposition.
INEC has fixed the presidential election for January 16, 2027. A united opposition would need months to negotiate a single ticket, build a joint campaign structure and agree on power sharing. A divided opposition needs all of that plus a miracle.
The moral argument against Tinubu is not enough.
Opposition campaigns in Nigeria run on the argument that the incumbent is corrupt, incompetent, or both. That argument may be true, but it has never been sufficient on its own. Jonathan lost in 2015 because the opposition built a national coalition that made his defeat structurally possible. Atiku and Obi have built separate campaigns with separate grievances.
The opposition’s real opponent is itself.
The biggest obstacle to Atiku or Obi winning in 2027 is not Tinubu’s money, not the APC’s structure, and not INEC. It is the inability of the opposition to subordinate personal ambition to a common purpose. Until that changes, the ruling party does not need to defeat the opposition. The opposition is defeating itself.
None of this predicts that Tinubu will govern well or that the opposition’s criticisms are without merit. It is a reading of the political terrain as it stands. Money matters. Structure matters. Unity matters. On all three counts, the opposition is trailing. Unless something dramatic changes in the months ahead, Atiku and Obi are heading toward another defeat, and the reasons will be the same ones that have plagued Nigerian opposition politics for a generation.
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