The Tinubu presidency has shown utter disrespect for Nigerians. It is above all insensitive to the suffering and hardship of most Nigerians. Instead of rendering a sensible mid term account of its mandate, the administration is celebrating the onset of the 2027 presidential election race.  A clear two years to the end of its tenure, major political voices in the ruling party are already predicting a sweeping Tinubu re -election victory and his coronation as the king hereafter.

The administration has cornered public opinion and its vulnerable opponents into a mindset that the most urgent national challenge of the moment is the 2027 election. The central question of the polity is being recast as: who succeeds Tinubu? Of course, there is a truism that groundless optimism is the most common disease of political animals. Show me a politicians that is not optimistic of victory at the next election and I will point at a platoon of wise fools!

We are at the mid term of a tenure that promised Nigerians nearly every opposite of the Buhari interregnum. Mr. Buhari, easily the most disastrous leader of modern Nigeria before the Tinubu catastrophe, had run the nation literally aground before tenure expiration saved him from himself  and rescued the nation from what was clearly the world’s most tragic instance of bad governance. Mounting debts, incoherent policies, perennial absenteeism of the leader,  disastrous elocution, embarrassing aloofness and industrial scale corruption were the hallmarks of the Buhari era. In the history of Nigeria, never had a Central Bank Governor been charged with the magnitude of treasury looting as Buhari’s Godwin Emefiele.

Then came Tinubu on the wagon of one of the most disgraceful elections in national history. A mandate secured on a razor thin majority of less than 30% of registered voters ushered in what has so far turned out to be Nigeria’s most clueless dispensations. Tinubu promised nothing. He said little that any one found coherent. No one recalls making sense of his campaign gibberish, They said he promised to  right the wrongs of the Buhari era even though he was running on the same party ticket as his Daura friend. In all fairness, no one remembers what exactly Tinubu said he was going to do with power. His only mission was to pack into a rent free Aso Villa. But two years after, here we are with a presidency that has turned our lives into two years in purgatory. The only Nigerians who now harbor any hope of a reprieve from hell are the few partakers in the feast of pork and patronage in Abuja.

Nearly every indicator of hardship is on digital display in today’s Nigeria. The majority can ill afford the next meal. Hunger has emerged as a national epidemic for the first time in our history. Access to electric  power has shrunk to the extent that even the Presidential Lodge in Abuja can hardly afford to pay its power bills and now has to install a solar panel to save costs.

Insecurity  has enveloped the entire national space, compelling informed people to suggest that the Ministry of Defense should be scrapped and replaced with an omnibus  Ministry of  Internal Security as all available security infrastructure and personnel all over the country have been deployed to joint internal security operations with hardly any tangible results.

Bandits, kidnappers, serial abductors and sundry gun men and women rule the highways and streets while official security personnel have since been outgunned by non -state agents and vigilantes of unknown nomenclature. A supposedly modern Nigerian state with well funded armed forces and over decorated officers is now shamelessly enlisting the services of native hunters, medicine men and charmers to stave off the forces of insecurity across the land.

It is this myriad of afflictions and failures that threaten the existence of the Nigerian state. It is these threats to national existence and the integrity of the Nigerian state that those who voted in 2023 are demanding that Tinubu and his gang should account for. At this mid term hour, Nigerians are asking for affordable food, essential drugs, affordable building materials, access to affordable education in schools without leaky roofs and guarantee of basic safety in their daily lives. It is accountability for these pressing basic needs and problems that demand urgent attention as the Tinubu government marks two years in office. National political offices that were meant to go round and give us all a sense of belonging to one nation have been cornered into one corner of our commonwealth.

To ignore these basic needs of the people and shunt public attention to the 2027 succession political battle is the height of insincerity and political deceit. To jump from that fraud to speculation as to why Tinubu deserves a second term in office is worse than mass deceit. It can only be that the administration is investing more energy  in mass deceit and amnesia than the real grind of governance. The efforts of the government  seem to be geared more towards succession politics than real time governance on a daily basis.

The obstacle to this deceptive politics is perhaps the possibility of an opposition coalition to challenge the APC in 2027. To counter this obstacle, whatever fickle opposition there is in the political space is being squeezed into a survival mode. The Peoples Democratic Party and its mascot, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, have been reduced to an unsettled chaotic herd. No one knows which executive now runs the party as conflicting factions engage each other in either fisticuffs  or silly litigations in various courts across the land. Corrupt judges that have to adjudicate in these cases are having a ball with their bankers. The special squad of destabilisers led by the ubiquitous FCT Minister, Mr. Nyesom Wike, are having a busy time disorganising the PDP all over the country. If indeed the PDP survives between now and the eve of 2027, it will be a ghost of its former robust self.

The Tinubu taskforce on political ‘realignment’ is leaving nothing to chance. It recognises the potential danger posed by the Peter Obi–led Labour Party. An increasingly popular political movement led by a charismatic political ‘good man’ cannot be ignored. Obi’s Labour Party and its back-up Obidient Movement presented a veritable threat to Tinubu’s ascendancy in 2023. Therefore, two active factions of  demolishers are at work on the Labour Party.

One faction of thugs led by one Lamidi Apapa has been busy challenging both the legitimacy and very existence of the party in court. A slightly more targeted attack is being led from within by Mr. Abure who ordinarily would be the Chairman of the party. In a recent move, Mr. Abure and his fellow travellers have suspended a slew of high level party members including a senator and the only state governor on the ticket of the party, Mr. Alex Otti of Abia state.

Beyond these party based destabilization antics, the incumbent government and ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has unleashed squads of recruiters all over the country who are busy attracting defectors and converts from other parties into the ruling party. So far, the results have been impressive. The most spectacular outcome has been recorded in Delta State where the incumbent governor and his immediate predecessor have defected to the APC. In addition, these political leaders decamped from the PDP with all their local government leaders. It is significant that Dr. Okowa, the immediate past governor of the state was also the vice presidential candidate of the PDP in the 2023 election. The Delta defection is therefore an arrow in the heart of the PDP in the strategic Niger Delta region.

There have been numerous other defections into the APC from other parties and political formations across the country. There is now a palpable fear in the political space that if the rate continues, the vast majority of politicians in the country would by the eve of the 2027 election be in the APC.

Fears have been expressed about the possibility of Nigeria ending up as a one-party democracy with other parties ending up as fringe minority parties. Former president Goodluck Jonathan has added his voice to those of opposition politicians like Atiku Abubakar in this regard. But some key opposition politicians have waved this possibility off, insisting that what is going on is the result of a political herd mentality.

Politicians are trooping to the ruling party where they think the bulk of patronage is flowing. Nigerian politics is principally about instant pork and patronage. Very few Nigerian politicians want to be left out in the cold of political wilderness.  The APC has deployed poverty to attract membership.

There is however an overriding political curiosity and worry about the gale of defections and mass migration into the APC in particular. At a time of grave national disquiet about worsening social and economic conditions throughout the country, it is curious that the mass of political followers should be tempted to join the very political party whose leadership has literally run the country aground. Clearly, there must be forces beyond naked political sentiments driving the entire movement.

The consequences are many and could be dire. An early start of campaigns for elections that are two years away  could lead to a vast dissipation of resources and political energy that would in fact make the fledgling opposition forces more attractive. The gathering of divergent political interests and tendencies in one inchoate ruling party could inject disequilibrium into the mechanism of the ruling party and lead to a pre-election implosion. A very large political party could prove difficult to manage and therefore come apart on its own weight.

This is not to under estimate the optimistic projections of Mr. Tinubu’s strategists and planners. On the more optimistic side, it is quite possible that what APC strategists are planning is for a 2027 race with little or no significant internal or external opposition movement. If most political voices were to be drowned inside one party, the choice of candidates, especially the presidential candidate, would be a serial ritual endorsement. In a more or less one party configuration, Mr. Tinubu would literally be returned unopposed as his party’s candidate at every party primary convention and be elected with minimal opposition. In line with that simplistic line of thought, Mr. Tinubu could head effortlessly to a coronation at Eagle Square.

There is a lazy trait in this line of thinking that conforms to Mr. Tinubu’s authoritarian mode of politics and leadership. He has railroaded the National Assembly into becoming a glorified rubber stamp conclave with literally no opposition on vital legislations like the reversion to the old National Anthem,  tax bills, successive national budgets etc.

More worrisomely, Mr. Tinubu has carried on more like an emperor than a democratically elected president. He identifies his interests in the system. He then gets people to convert these interests into legislative bills or projects. He then proceeds to procure a National Assembly rubber stamp or Executive Council approval. It is popularly speculated that each approval sought by the president has a price tag and once the transactional details are fine tuned, the road is clear either to railroad an unpopular legislation or the award of yet another Lagos to Calabar Alaskan highway contract.

The road to a second term coronation for the Tinubu presidency is however strewn with booby traps and political land mines. The assumption that all politically minded Nigerians will end up in the APC by the eve of 2027 is naïve and even a bit foolish. The vast majority of voting Nigerians will hardly become card carrying members of any party.

Irrespective of who is in the parties, the solid majority  of ordinary Nigerians remain the victims of the incompetence of this government. They are not about to join any parties and do not need to do so to reject an unpopular government at the polls. The greater the level of incompetence of the government, the higher their demand for voters cards and the greater their hunger to vote out the fraudulent bunch. We had a foretaste of this in 2023. The combined population of voters for both the Labour Party and the PDP overwhelmed the minority that voted for the APC.

It was the instrumentality of INEC’s dubious complicity and the division in the votes of the PDP and Labour Party that saved the APC thinly from deserved humiliation.

What is likely to abort the infantile projection of a Tinubu coronation in 2027 is therefore the continued rejection of the APC by the majority of the poor, deprived and angry Nigerians who do not care about formal party membership. The challenge of the next election is for INEC to expand its voter portal to accommodate all those who want to vote in 2027. And for the majority of Nigerians, the challenge of 2027 is not the mass migration of members into the APC. Party members are always a negligible variable in voter turnout. It is the mass of non- partisan voters that troop out to make their voice heard that matter most. They will decide who succeeds Tinubu, not the unthinking herd of “follow follow” party migrants.

Ultimately, then, the political destiny of the country still rests with the calibre of opposition coalition that the incompetence of the APC forces into existence. That opposition coalition must be everything that the APC has failed to be. We desire and deserve a credible, competent and coherent opposition with a clear national outlook. It must consist of persons of character with proven records. Above all else, we need a social democratic coalition that can carry the majority of Nigerians along a populist path to create and distribute Nigeria’s wealth for the good of all.