Barely mid way into his four-year tenure, President Tinubu has scored a contradictory political victory. He has succeeded in getting the political barometer of the nation to swing towards preparations for 2027 instead of pressuring him to deliver on the promises he and his party made in 2023. In tandem, a nationwide gale of opposition to the Tinubu presidency is building up in many fronts.
The national discourse has however moved gradually away from whether Mr. Tinubu is a good president to whether he stands a chance of being re-elected for a second term in 2027. This is a major political victory albeit one that promises to rebound with dire consequences for both the president and the many who seek his job in 2027.
Those who insist that Mr. Tinubu is more of an adept politician than a technocratic administrator may have this development to swear by. Ordinarily, the current mood of the nation ought to dictate that our political discourse should be dominated by arguments as to how to make the lives of Nigerians more livable. The epidemic of hunger, the massive deprivations, the avoidable economic hardship and the desperate internal security situation are all issues that dominate the lives and thoughts of most Nigerians. But Tinubu and the politicians have managed to thwart these and navigate the focus into the brackish waters of Nigerian election politics.
But in Nigerian politics, matters of rice and garri, house rents and school fees not to talk of fuel prices and transport fares and prices of basic medications have a way of refusing to disappear from the radar of public perception. But for now, it is all about the prospects of 2027 and the profiles of the gathering opposition to Mr. Tinubu’s lacklustre dispensation.
Interestingly, the politicians do not seem so concerned about what the public thinks about Mr. Tinubu’s performance on the job. It all seems to be about seeking to uproot the man from his political deep roots and all costs paid accommodation at Aso Villa.
A primary level of the brewing opposition is of course at the partisan level. The main opposition party is still the PDP with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as its perennial mascot. Characteristically, Atiku has been busy with pointed criticisms of the Tinubu government nearly every inch of the way. As an opposition leader, his perspectives on the pitfalls incumbent government seem somewhat too predictable.
As the major opposition party, the fate of the PDP is literally in the hands of the Tinubu formation. Through the agency of FCT Minister, Mr. Nyesom Wike, the PDP has a resident destabilization machinery acting on behalf of the APC . That machinery has only one charge: to ensure that the party dies an incremental death and is in no position to wage a consequential challenge against the APC in 2027 or any time. We can already see the handiwork of the agents in the festering crises in the party. The free for all fights, the ejections of the BOT chairperson from the party, the conflicting court rulings on who really presides over the party etc.
The other strident voice of the opposition is that of Mr. Peter Obi and his dwindling Labour Party. Unlike Atiku, Obi has two voices. He speaks for both Labour Party and for his ubiquitous ‘Obedient family’. He has been busy following the incumbent government with day to day close marking with criticisms based on basic fundamentals of governance, public responsibility, accountability and sensitivity to the welfare of the masses. Consistently, Obi has mostly assessed the performance and priorities of the incumbent government on the basis of his own emphasis on education, healthcare and poverty alleviation. He has hardly presented the Nigerian public with an alternative governance and development template. Consequently, his considerable youth followership still remains a social media and mostly Twitter phenomenon.
Yet the business of political opposition, properly conceived, goes far beyond pointed criticism of the incumbent government. A properly structured opposition ought to be literally an alternative government in the shadows. For every government policy or programme it disagrees with, the public ought to expect it to come up with a reasoned alternative to that of the incumbent.
Many Nigerians will recall the character of political opposition in the days of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his Unity Party of Nigeria in particular. Awo and his party had alternative computations on the national debt, the cost of each primary and secondary school, what it would cost to provide low cost housing for deserving Nigerians etc. There was an alternative template for governance. In effect, we have passed through political periods when opposition was rooted in ideological differences and differences of strategy and policy implementation. We have arrived at the point where political opposition is literally now more of a beer parlor banter and street side quarrels among politicians.
Majorly, then, President Bola Tinubu’s political career is faced with three major opposition threats. An aggressive multi party opposition is building up against him and they are not disguising their determination to chuck him out of the Villa in 2027. From inside his ruling APC, the more progressive wing of the party is organizing an oppositional standpoint against the Tinubu government as retribution for their alienation since after the party’s victory in the 2023 presidential election.
Thirdly and perhaps most consequentially, the Tinubu administration is faced with an increasingly widespread nationwide indifference and apathy from the general populace. People are so innured of suffering and hardship that they can hardly feel the presence of a government that faintly appears to have a mandate to rule a united nation. It is only that the President has been quarantined into his personal power cubicle or is cocooned in the comfort of his South West primary constituency.
Partisan opposition from other parties and the disgruntlement of the populace are natural occurrences in the political life of any nation. But opposition from within a ruling party has a potential of weakening the ruling party from within.
The co- existence of different tendencies in a political party is a sign of good health. By their nature, parties are organic creatures that bring together people with different shades of the same basic conviction in broad consensus about society. The elite of a party represent only a rough consensus, not a perfect unity of beliefs, ideas and strategies. So the coexistence of different tendencies is natural in the anatomy of parties as political organisms.
The ruling APC went into the 2023 presidential primaries and election looking like one party. It emerged in power as the truly fractured and divided party that is now on display. There are at least two APCs. There is the dominant Tinubu APC which is in power at the federal level and in most states of the federation.
The APC whose ‘progressive’ name and flag the party flies is mostly progressive merely at the level of party label. But the APC of Tinubu, Akpabio, Umahi and Ganduje is essentially a conservative and traditional Nigerian political assemblage of convenience held together by money, influence and vested interest. It is a party on the side of the rich and with an undisguised commitment to create more billionaires through government patronage. It does not matter to the party whether the billions they put in private pockets trickle down to the masses. Instead,, the masses are further pushed to the walls of poverty through tariff hikes, levies, taxes and higher rates on utilities. Mass immiseration becomes a tool of governance to create a more pliant populace.
This wing of the party has an ideal of the Nigerian future which happens to be in the past- the place of old national anthems and old political models.
On the contrary, there is the more truly progressive, radical wing of the APC most of whose candidates lost the party primaries at the state and federal levels. A social democratic wing with clearly identifiable nationalist slant. A clear people oriented idea of social progress. They believe that an enlightened leadership that adheres to the popular wishes of the popular masses, does what they want, tells them what they want to hear and maintains an activist proactive approach to governance. Lineage, history, examples in contemporary global political leadership. This arm of the APC is the party of Yemi Osinbajo, Adams Oshiomole, Rotimi Amaechi, Nasir El-Rufai and the many others who think in their mould.
The illusion that this more progressive arm of the APC would remain silent into the 2027 political season is foolish. Most of them are relatively young politicians. They are visible, aggressive, eloquent brilliant and aggrieved. They feel short changed and cheated out of the power game. To that extent, they are angry about the state of the nation and their own collective plight as part of a political elite. They are afraid of being counted among the Buhari-bred politicians that later came to betray the nation and the hopes of its peoples. How to exonerate themselves from the infamy of the Tinubu faction. That is the historic burden of the ‘the other APC’.
In my view, the most consequential groundswell of opposition to the Tinubu presidency is an internal APC elite opposition rooted in the northern precincts of the country. There is a growing feeling among the northern political elite that Mr. Tinubu has betrayed the political followership that Mr. Buhari bequeathed to him. Not even his Moslem-Moslem ticket seems to have dented the growing disquiet in the north. Unfortunately, there is no corresponding increase in any southern zonal followership.
Clearly then, there is an efflorescence of opposition forces massing up against the Tinubu presidency towards 2027. It is regional, partisan and even broad based among the masses. Yet the more diverse this opposition is , the larger it gets. And yet, the larger it is, the most difficult it could be to form a coalition of forces. The paradox is that a large and unmanageable opposition is in the interest of Mr. Tinubu. He is in a unique position to use his power and resources to keep his opponents permanently divided and thus prevent the emergence of the kind of formidable opposition coalition that can chase him away from Aso Rock Villa in 2027.
•Written By Chidi Amuta
