APC reign has ruined Nigeria. Only a united opposition can end its run in 2027, but obstacles abound.
By Chudi Okoye
It would, in and of itself, mark a minor miracle if the main opposition parties could cobble together a viable coalition and rally behind a common candidate in Nigeria’s 2027 presidential election, given the knotty fault lines they must navigate. It would amount to a major democratic milestone if they actually win the election, defeating the ruling party and unseating a seemingly invincible President Bola Tinubu after just one term. It was the canny incumbent, after all, who engineered Nigeria’s first-ever presidential opposition victory, the 2015 upset that ushered in Muhammadu Buhari. Now with Nigeria impoverished and mired in pain under his presidency, Tinubu’s defeat – were the opposition implausibly to pull it off – would be nothing short of sensational. It would be partisan victory, democratic advance, and poetic justice, all rolled into one.
If there were ever a moment to “throw the bums out,” an opportunity for regime change in a hopelessly misgoverned country, it would be the upcoming 2027 general elections, which will occur at the 12-year mark of All Progressives Congress (APC) rule. All national indices have cratered under this incompetent party, even in comparison to the 16-year incumbency of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) it displaced.
Under the APC, Nigeria has become a global poster child for immiseration. About two-thirds of Nigerians suffer from multidimensional poverty, according to the National Bureau of Statistics – making the country the world’s poverty capital by volume, along with India, a nation over six times its population. While Nigeria’s GDP growth averaged over 7% between 2000 and 2014 under the PDP, it has languished around 3% since 2015. Nominal GDP tumbled from $552 billion in 2014 to just $188 billion in 2024, according to IMF estimates, with so far wild valuations for 2025. GDP per capita has crashed by 75%, from $3,223 to just $807 over the same period, placing Nigeria among the poorest countries per capita in the world. Inflation has soared from 8.05% in 2014 to over 31% in 2024, unemployment has surged, and the naira has collapsed from ₦197 to over ₦1,550 to the dollar.
Public debt has exploded over the APC decade, up 53% in dollar terms and a staggering 1,138% in naira terms, reflecting both fiscal recklessness and catastrophic currency devaluation. Even with this debt binge, critical infrastructure and public services have deteriorated. The real sector is gasping: businesses are failing, manufacturing is in retreat, and foreign investors have fled, triggering heavier reliance on reckless borrowing and inflating the fiscal deficit. Nigeria’s Human Development Index (HDI) stands at 0.564, far below the global average of 0.744, dropping from 152nd place in 2014 to 164th in 2023, according to UNDP data. Amid deepening poverty, governance continues to be marred by bloated budgets, inflated contracts, and opulence at the top – even as ordinary Nigerians sink deeper into hardship.
Compounding the economic collapse is a spiraling security crisis. Insurgency, kidnapping, banditry, communal violence, and terrorism have become endemic, further deterring investment, constraining mobility, and weakening the state’s capacity to govern.
Perhaps most corrosive of all is the APC’s abandonment of national inclusiveness. While the PDP’s flawed but recognizably pan-Nigerian ethos once held the centre, APC rule has entrenched brazen sectionalism. Buhari’s presidency skewed appointments and investments toward the North; Tinubu’s has shifted the favoritism to his South-West base. Federal positions, capital projects, and policy priorities have been tilted to his home region, eroding the principle of federal character and breeding resentment in marginalized sections. The resulting parochialism has undermined national cohesion and dangerously destabilized the polity.
Without question, APC rule has been an unmitigated disaster. Like the infamous analgesic APC – Aspirin, Phenacetin, Caffeine – whose side effects often outweigh its relief, Nigeria’s APC has left the nation with more pain than panacea. The party should have paid an electoral price, and nearly did in the 2023 elections, but for the PDP’s puzzling fragmentation. Were military rule not anathema in the current global zeitgeist – and were Nigeria’s own military not a hollowed force, discredited by its abject misrule – there might long have been a martial correction to this ongoing tragedy. But Nigeria has, for better or worse, settled into a democratic dispensation. A democratic correction is therefore imperative. This is why the 2027 elections are critical.
But what are the chances of a true electoral turnover in 2027? Can a fractured opposition flank dislodge a failed, yet entrenched ruling party – one that still controls the federal levers of patronage, propaganda, and power? Can opposition forces form a unified front to overcome these incumbency advantages?
Complicated Coalition
It is astounding that Nigeria’s opposition parties have not gained strength in the face of APC’s dismal record. If anything, these parties have become weaker – enduring defections, factionalism, and loss of political strongholds – while the ruling party appears to have recovered from its 2023 wobble, when it won by a slim plurality of 36.6%, 19 points less than its 2019 score and the lowest of any winning party in the Fourth Republic. As things stand, it is highly unlikely that any single rival party can, on its own, defeat the APC at the next polls. This explains the growing momentum behind opposition coalition, after initial tentativeness.
The main opposition forces now appear to be pursuing a two-pronged strategy. They’ve made an attempt to register a new political party with the Independent National Electoral Commission, called the All Democratic Alliance (ADA). But the effort has stalled amid INEC claim of competing submissions for the same acronym and complaint about application backlog. Sensing political interference, the opposition forces have activated a fallback: the adoption of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as its operational platform. Prominent figures from PDP, the Labour Party (LP), and even APC have taken up interim leadership roles, including former Senate President David Mark as interim National Chairman. However, while the ADC’s founding leadership resigned en masse in a “patriotic sacrifice” to accommodate the coalition, some state chapters are resisting the incursion, raising the specter of legal contests and internal sabotage.
The ADC may prove a pragmatic alternative, but there’s concern about its lack of public recognition and limited grassroots infrastructure. The party has no national machinery and barely registered in previous elections; even with a well-known figure like Pat Utomi as its presidential candidate in 2007, it couldn’t scratch up half a percent of the vote. Critics dismiss it as a “paper platform.”
However, recent Nigerian political history cautions against underestimating what a charismatic, nationally viable candidate can achieve with even the most obscure party. Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar demonstrated this in 2023. Obi transformed the nondescript Labour Party into a national force, winning 25.4% of the vote – carrying the Federal Capital Territory and 11 states, including Tinubu’s traditional stronghold of Lagos. Atiku, despite major defections and internal sabotage in the PDP, still secured 29.07%. Neither won, but both performed impressively given the headwinds. Their combined vote share easily surpassed Tinubu’s, and without its fragmentation, the PDP might well have romped home with a landslide. If either Obi or Atiku emerges as the coalition’s standard-bearer, they could transform ADC into a serious contender, assuming they’ve retained their political potency.
Make no mistake: 2027 will be a hard-fought election, likely the last stand for the protagonists of the previous cycle. President Bola Tinubu of the APC will fight with fierce intent for re-election, seeking to seal his legacy and potentially entrench South-West dominance. Atiku Abubakar, an ageing PDP veteran, will mount what may be his final charge, driven by ambition and a desire to redeem a thirty-year odyssey of thwarted aspirations. Peter Obi, for his part, is impelled by national relevance, a moral debt to his fervent supporters, and the grueling burden of Igbo presidential aspiration. Obi is the youngest of the trio, but he too faces the urgency of age, with his next viable chance potentially not until 2039.
Each man, then, is moved by more than mere ambition. In a tragic, Shakespearean sense, they seem trapped by fate, driven by the hunger for culmination or the yearning for closure, each acutely aware of history’s looming judgment. This will harden their postures and leave little room for retreat.
Yet here lies the paradox: having squandered their best chance to defeat the APC in 2023 by splintering the PDP, opposition forces must now reconsolidate into a coalition resembling the very party they fractured, if they hope to prevail in 2027. The logic is as damning as it is ironic: fragmentation weakened them then; reunification is their only viable path now. But there is a rub. For any coalition to succeed, one of the two leading aspirants – Atiku or Obi – must stand down, something they failed to do in 2023. And how can that happen now, given the unforgiving arithmetic of age, legacy, and narrowing opportunity?
This is the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma in political form. Both aspirants know that cooperation offers the best outcome for their cause, but each is burdened by personal imperatives that make compromise difficult, if not impossible. The result could be mutual ruin – a rerun of 2023, where division handed an improbable victory to the incumbent. The coalition’s challenge, then, is to find a rational path through this emotional and strategic minefield. If Atiku and Obi – or the political blocs behind them – can transcend this impasse, it would mark not just a tactical breakthrough, but a profound evolution in Nigeria’s democratic maturity. It would suggest a shift from egocentric ambition and parochial calculation to strategic realism and national purpose. And it would show that Nigerian opposition politics had learned from its past mistakes and finally come of age.
There is precedent for this. In 2013, after massive losses in previous elections, APC was created from a set of carefully selected opposition parties, coalescing around a single, dominant candidate, Muhammadu Buhari. The new party went on to defeat the PDP in 2015, marking the first time a ruling party lost power at the presidential level in Nigeria. It was a breakthrough for the coalition and a milestone for the country.
But that precedent came with caveats. The 2013 alliance was anchored on a candidate with clear numerical dominance. Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) had polled 31.97% in the 2011 presidential election, while the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), led by Tinubu, had just 5.44%. Other coalition partners barely registered. There was thus little debate about who would lead the ticket.
In contrast, today’s opposition bloc presents what may initially appear to be a balanced equation, at least between the two principal contenders. Atiku and Obi enter the 2027 cycle with broadly comparable national reach, similar vote shares in 2023, and distinct but substantial support bases. On the surface, there is no obvious senior partner. Yet this surface parity may conceal underlying asymmetries. A closer examination – parsing their 2023 performances beyond headline figures, tracking post-election shifts in regional loyalties, analyzing APC inroads into their respective bases, and assessing the durability of their coalitions – reveals more complex dynamics. When one also factors in personal reputation, political experience, networking capacity, rotational logic, and overall coalition viability, the strategic balance may begin to tilt.
These, I imagine, are among the critical factors that will shape the coalition’s internal calculus as it seeks to select a standard bearer – a decision that could determine not only the fate of the alliance but the direction of the country itself. To aid that effort, I will, in Part 2 of this essay, weigh the comparative strengths and vulnerabilities of the leading aspirants, and also explore viable strategies to ensure the coalition succeeds.
