Why does opposition look less ready than they were in 2023?, by Stephanie Shaakaa

The Nigerian opposition has spent four years talking about the need to unite. It has held meetings, explored coalitions, changed political platforms and produced new alignments. Yet, with the January 16, 2027 presidential election approaching, several of its most prominent figures are once again pursuing separate tickets.

That is difficult to explain away as a problem of timing. The opposition has had four years to study what happened in 2023, when three major challengers entered the presidential race separately and divided substantial opposition support. Bola Tinubu won with 8.79 million votes, while Atiku Abubakar received 6.98 million, Peter Obi 6.10 million and Rabiu Kwankwaso 1.50 million. Those figures do not explain every dimension of the election, but they demonstrated the political consequences of fragmentation.

Four years later, the opposition knows the arithmetic. What it has not yet demonstrated is that it has learned the politics.

An election is not won by adding the supporters of different politicians together on paper. Those supporters have to be persuaded to accept a common candidate, a common programme and, perhaps hardest of all, a common political future. The leading figures in the opposition are not political novices waiting for someone to explain how power works. They have their own organisations, ambitions, constituencies and calculations. That is precisely why bringing them together has proved so difficult.

The proposed coalition around the African Democratic Congress appeared to offer the opposition a vehicle for doing what it failed to do in 2023. But the arrangement fractured. Atiku remained with the ADC and secured its presidential ticket, while Obi and Kwankwaso moved into a different political arrangement. Meanwhile, Seyi Makinde is pursuing his own presidential bid under the Allied Peoples Movement. INEC has now confirmed a field containing separate opposition candidates alongside Tinubu.

That does not mean cooperation is impossible. Fresh negotiations are still taking place. In September, opposition parties began another effort to explore a single presidential candidate, and new talks involving Atiku and Obi are being pursued. The difficulty is that the same fundamental question remains unresolved.Who is prepared to surrender his individual ambition for a collective project?

That is why the opposition’s problem is bigger than having too many candidates. It is a problem of trust.

Can Atiku’s supporters accept Obi? Can Obi’s supporters accept Atiku? Can the political machinery built around either man be persuaded to work for someone else? Can candidates who have spent years cultivating personal followings accept an agreement whose greatest reward may eventually go to another politician?

Those are not sentimental questions. They are the practical mechanics of building an electoral coalition.

A serious coalition must settle its rules before it settles its candidate. Who makes the important decisions? How is the presidential candidate chosen? How are regional interests accommodated? What happens to those who lose the nomination? What guarantees exist that an agreement reached before the election will survive after the election?

Without answers, every coalition risks becoming a temporary arrangement held together by a shared desire to defeat the incumbent and weakened by the separate desire to inherit his office.

The opposition must also confront another uncomfortable reality. Dissatisfaction with an incumbent does not automatically create a government-in-waiting. Nigerians can be unhappy with the economy, insecurity or the direction of the country and still ask what the alternative intends to do differently. They may want change without being convinced that those offering it have resolved their own disagreements about power.

That is where 2027 differs from 2023. The opposition cannot rely solely on enthusiasm, rallies or social-media energy. Presidential elections require the less glamorous work of organisation: structures in wards and local governments, polling-unit agents, voter mobilisation, funding, communication and the discipline to keep the machinery functioning when personalities clash.

The opposition has had four years to build those foundations. Instead, much of its energy has continued to be consumed by the question of who should carry the flag.

There is still time for negotiations to produce a new arrangement. The recent talks demonstrate that the desire for cooperation has not disappeared. But time also makes compromise more difficult. Once candidates have secured tickets, assembled campaign teams and invested political capital in their own campaigns, stepping aside becomes harder and the cost of disappointment becomes higher. Current reports show that Atiku, Obi and Makinde remain committed to their separate presidential ambitions even as consensus efforts continue.

The real lesson of 2023 was therefore never simply that the opposition should “unite.” It was that political energy without political coordination has limits.

If the opposition wants Nigerians to entrust it with the presidency in 2027, it must demonstrate something more difficult than opposition to Tinubu. Its leading politicians must show that they can negotiate among themselves, accept rules they did not personally write, accommodate interests beyond their own strongholds and build a common project that survives disappointment.

The country does not need an opposition united only by its desire to replace the government in power. It needs one capable of explaining what comes after that replacement, how the new government would work and why its own internal disagreements would not simply follow it into Aso Rock.

Four years after 2023, the opposition has another opportunity to demonstrate that it understood the lesson of that election. What matters now is whether its politicians can move beyond appearing together and actually build a political arrangement in which competing ambitions are governed by a common purpose. Until that happens, the opposition’s greatest challenge may not be finding voters who want change, but convincing those voters that the people asking for power have learned how to work together once they have it.