By Reuben Abati
When the latest wave of defections began in March 2025, marked by the high profile exit of Mallam Nasir El Rufai from the All Progressives Congress (APC), Nigeria’s ruling party, of which he is a founding member, and his open association with “like minds” such as Waziri Atiku Abubakar (PDP) and Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party who together promoted the idea of a coalition of the opposition to get President Tinubu and the APC out of power, there had been speculations about whether or not coalition politics would work in Nigeria at this time.
I had reflected on the development in two pieces: “Nasir El-Rufai’s Defections: PDP, CPC, APC, SDP” (ThisDay, March 11) and “The Emerging Coalition Against Tinubu/APC” (ThisDay, March 18). Reactions to El-Rufai’s exit and the idea of a coalition were varied and robust. Shehu Sani, spokesperson of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which El Rufai had announced he was joining dismissed El-Rufai as a liability to the APC and his latest political choice as being of “no consequence”. El-Rufai’s old colleagues in the Kaduna State Chapter of the APC dismissed his defection as a “non-event” which no one should be disturbed about. Mr. Bayo Onanuga, Presidential Adviser on Information and Strategy, in a television interview had warned that the former Governor was sulking because he was not a Minister in President Tinubu’s cabinet, but “he should stop behaving like a child as if someone stole his bread and learn to move on”. El-Rufai was not ready to move on. Instead, the coalition leaders who wanted to sack Tinubu from office held public meetings. They even visited the former President, Muhammadu Buhari who tactically, and promptly dissociated himself from any attempt to sabotage the same party through which he served as President for eight years. Mr. Onanuga dismissed the coalition politicians as “disgruntled… sore losers, an amalgam of Tinubu haters” and that the President who is “focused on governance to build a prosperous country would not be distracted.”
It would be naïve for anyone to think that a political leader, not even one that is well versed in the art of conspiratorial politics, would wave off an attempt to unseat him from office. Politicians love to defeat their opponents. In the rough and tumble jungle of Nigerian politics, it is the person with the smartest strategy that wins. It is a fitting illustration of the political dexterity of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu that in less than two months, he and his strategists have switched the cards, and turned the tables. The voice of the coalition leaders has been muted out, drowned out, and when occasionally they speak up, they tend to sound like the meow-ing of a compound cat. The new reality in town is that the same opposition figures that were called upon by Atiku and co to join hands together to remove Tinubu are all now forming a pro-Tinubu coalition, kissing his ring, singing his praise. It didn’t take too long, less than a month for Mr. Adewole Adebayo, the 2023 Presidential candidate of the SDP, for example, who had earlier welcomed Nasir El-Rufai and other persons into the party, to start singing a different tune. At the 50th birthday celebration of his wife in Abuja, Adebayo told everyone within earshot in April that El-Rufai and Atiku will not be allowed to hijack the SDP for their personal battles against Tinubu, and that the SDP “will not be a getaway car for a conspiracy and robbery.” He even referred to the possibility of the coalition being “just a crime centre for disappointed Tinubu followers.” Mr. Adebayo has done a much better job than Tinubu’s appointed spokespersons. Within the same week that he made a volte-face as it were, Governors of the PDP, the main opposition party, along with the party’s leaders and the Acting National Chairman of the Party, Ambassador Umar Damagum met in Ibadan to distance themselves and the party from any coalition or merger talks. The PDP Governors literally threw their 2023 Presidential candidate under the bus, even when there was an attempt to sugar-coat the Ibadan meeting as an attempt to reposition the PDP as the go-to party for other Nigerian politicians.
The cloud cleared not long after when the PDP Governor of Delta State, Hon. Sheriff Oborevwori, the former Governor, Senator Patrcik Okowa, all members of the Delta State House of Assembly, local government chairmen and other party members decided to declare en masse for the APC. The main justification offered by both the former Governor and the incumbent is that Delta State cannot afford to be on the periphery of national politics. Senator Okowa put it as follows: “… It was not about me. It was not about the Governor, but about the fact that there is a need for us to connect to Abuja. That goodwill that is in Abuja, that resource that is in Abuja, of which Delta State is a large contributor – there was a need to connect to it.” It is odd that most Nigerian politicians believe that they have to connect with the party at the centre. Nigeria is a diverse, heterogenous nation. It must be the worst form of retrogressive politics to wilfully encourage the quasi-unitary system that Nigeria’s democracy appears to be. The collapse of the PDP structure in Delta State is most unfortunate. Since 1999, this had been a PDP state, but now Senator Okowa says he and the Governor and others have acted in the people’s interest. Which people? We need to be told what the people of Delta State have gained and where a referendum was organized to know the people’s mind. The political elite in the state are interested in themselves and the fight has now started over the control of the APC in Delta State, a three-way fight between the Governor, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, hitherto the APC leader in Delta, and Hon. Festus Keyamo, SAN, Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development. Governor Oborevwori has since gone to the Presidential Villa to pay obeisance to the President.
In Akwa Ibom state, Governor Umo Eno openly endorsed President Tinubu for a second term. He boasted that the people of the state “will stand by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for eight years”. He even quoted the Bible to justify his anti-party vituperations. Like Delta, Akwa Ibom has been a traditional PDP state having produced four PDP Governors since the return to civilian rule in 1999. In the North, Senator Sumaila Kawu (NNPP, Kano South) has also since led members of the New Nigeria People’s Party and the Kwankwasiya movement to the APC. Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, leader of the party is stunned! In Osun, Hon Wole Oke (representing Oriade/Obokun Federal Constituency) has also moved to the APC. Oke has been a lawmaker on the platform of the PDP for about 20 years. Like Governor Oborevwori of Delta state, he says his movement to the APC is strategic. The other big revelation is the endorsement last week of President Tinubu by Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). The President was on a state visit to Anambra where there would be a Gubernatorial election on November 8. Professor Soludo heaped so much praise on the President, who is of a rival party extraction, that a section of the crowd, APGA supporters, started singing: “Na our Papa be dis oh, we no get another one”. The reception for the visiting President was so joyous that the Governor at some point broke into a sprint and he and his guest had a short dance together. Tinubu left Anambra with a chieftaincy title conferred on him by 179 traditional rulers led by the Chairman of the Anambra State Traditional Rulers Council: “Dike si mba Anambra.” Confidently, the Chairman of the APC has boasted that “2027 is a done deal”.
Those who have argued vehemently with him on this score may be doing so in vain. No week passes without a new or old group pledging allegiance to President Tinubu, and it looks like there will be more. Over the weekend, PDP Governors met in Abuja, again, after the Ibadan meeting. The main news was that the meeting was attended by Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, a known PDP chieftain, and Governor, who designed the rebellion within the party in 2023. He has been very aggressive in reminding everyone of his unshakeable support for President Tinubu. He is said to be behind the crisis in Rivers State, and the mass movement of other politicians into the APC. He does not deny his loyalty to President Tinubu. The meeting of the PDP Governor’s Forum in Abuja ended without any major disclosures. It is not impossible that the PDP leaders ended their meeting, singing: “On your Mandate we shall stand, Tinubu, on your mandate we shall stand” as they did in Ibadan. We live in such interesting times that by the following day, the Nigerian media was awash with news of the declaration of support for President Tinubu’s second term in office by former First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan. She declared that Mrs. Remi Tinubu is her friend and she would not join anybody to remove her friend’s husband from office. Where are the coalition politicians? They seem to have lost out. The owner of the game has upstaged them.
However, there is now across the land, the fear of an emerging one-party state, namely that before the 2027 general elections, the only party that would be standing would probably be the APC. Or better still, the only Presidential candidate that will be standing on very firm grounds would be President Tinubu. With the growing politics of personality cult and the stomach, it would be much easier for the APC to win the election than at any other time since 2015. A one-party state is the very opposite of multi-party democracy which our country recognizes. The Nigerian Constitution recognizes the diversity, the pluralism of the country, and on that basis alone it would be difficult for anyone to impose one individual or one political party on Nigeria. Any attempt to change the Constitution along those lines could be stoutly resisted and it would be such a discredit to President Tinubu’s democratic credentials. He should not contemplate it.
The civil society in Nigeria today is in a relative wait and see mode; it is important that the APC government does not do anything to trigger its sleeping energy. One-party states are often based on a defined ideology such as communism in China, Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Vietnam or fascism in Nazi Germany and Musolini’s Italy. In next-door Republic of Benin, Mathieu Kerekou after seizing power in 1972, imposed a left wing, one -party state on the country. Benin later transformed to a multi-party democracy in 1990. The country is yet to fully recover from the damages imposed by that political experience. A one- party state is an authoritarian state. Professor Adele Jinadu, a political scientist, scholar and theorist has warned against the dangers of authoritarianism. Citizens in a one-party state are robbed of their fundamental freedoms, competition is not allowed, dissent is punished, power is centralized, the same centre that members of the Delta PDP are struggling to identify with. A one-party state reality will roll back whatever Nigerians have achieved with the return to civilian rule in 1999.
In states where people subscribe to a one-party system, the ideological illusion is that such states are organized for the benefit of the people and that the politicians are strictly guided by the common good. In Nigeria, all the defecting politicians mention the people’s name only in vain. What is it that motivates them to join the pro-Tinubu bandwagon? Persuasion, inducement, coercion, or the fear that they could be punished for crimes committed, or corruption? It is the fashion in Nigeria that once you identify with the centre or the man of power, you are rewarded with the forgiveness of your sins or a place in the corridors of power. The same Nigerian politicians who are disappearing into the APC today would run into another party the day the APC leaves power. They won’t even think about the amorality of their action. The name of the people will still be invoked: the same poor, impoverished people whose misery the leaders have failed to reverse. There is also the legal challenge. When the whole of Delta State PDP moved to the APC, the acting Chairman of the PDP threatened that the defection will be challenged in court, but can anyone trust that this approach will work? In Rivers with a similar situation, it was even the courts that further complicated the process. Whereas lawmakers can be challenged within the purview of Sections 68 (1)(g), and 109 (1)(g) of the 1999 Constitution, the law is silent on the fate of defecting Governors. The last time Nigeria saw a defecting Governor who demonstrated honour, integrity and pride was with Mallam Abubakar Rimi of Kano State ((1979 – 1983). When Rimi fell out with Mallam Aminu Kano, the leader of his party, the Peoples’ Redemption Party (PRP), and defected to the Nigerian Peoples’ Party (NPP), he resigned as Governor and handed over to his Deputy. It is a terrible sign of the times that men of such integrity are today in short supply. There is an urgent need for a Constitutional review to make it compulsory for anyone at all who leaves the party on whose platform he/she wins election to automatically vacate the position.
