Nigeria’s opposition parties converge on Abuja Monday for a summit meant to build a unified front against President Bola Tinubu in 2027, even as past unity efforts have collapsed within weeks and months. PHILIP IBITOYE examines why Atiku, Obi, Kwankwaso and Amaechi’s competing ambitions — and their restless support bases — could doom the coalition before it starts, and what it would actually take to avoid another 2023.
On Monday, August 31, 2026, opposition parties will convene at the Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja. Those expected include representatives of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Allied Peoples Movement (APM), National Democratic Congress (NDC), a faction of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Their goal is to build a united front to challenge President Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), in the 2027 elections.
The summit is being convened by the G100 opposition coalition, led by ADC chieftain Salihu Lukman. In a recent meeting with the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Frederick Agbedi (PDP, Bayelsa), Lukman said the coalition was formed because divisions among opposition parties could once again split the anti-APC vote, as happened in 2023.
In that election, Tinubu won with less than 37 per cent of the total votes cast. Political observers point to former allies and running mates — Atiku Abubakar, then of the PDP, and Peter Obi, then of the Labour Party (LP) — splitting the opposition vote and clearing Tinubu’s path to the presidency. Atiku scored 29.07 per cent, Obi trailed with 25.40 per cent, and together the two men captured more than 54 per cent of the vote. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, then of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) and now Obi’s running mate on the NDC platform, took 6.40 per cent. Many believe that had the three men joined forces in 2023, the ruling APC would have lost power.
With the 2027 election just over four months away, on January 16, those seeking Tinubu’s defeat fear a repeat of that split. Political analysts say none of the opposition parties can win the presidency on its own. “If the opposition parties think they can run separately and avoid the same fate they suffered in 2023, they are sorely mistaken,” political analyst, Dr Mubarak Jamiu, told Sunday Tribune.
Some of the opposition’s own candidates appear to agree. On Friday, PRP presidential candidate Donald Duke warned that opposition parties risk losing to Tinubu if they stay divided, arguing that only a united front carries the force needed to challenge an incumbent, and that going in fragmented amounts to rigging the contest against themselves. APM presidential candidate Seyi Makinde made a similar case on August 13, at his party’s national convention in Bauchi, arguing that the opposition cannot win without working together.
But amid competing personal interests, hopes for a united opposition remain in doubt, even as the ruling party marches on in near-total unity ahead of 2027.
Will it succeed?
This is not the first attempt to unite the opposition behind one candidate. Past efforts have failed, often over personal ambition.
In July 2025, Atiku, Obi and other opposition leaders, including ADC vice-presidential candidate Rotimi Amaechi, adopted the ADC as a shared coalition platform. Obi formally joined the ADC on March 7, 2026, and Kwankwaso followed on March 30.
Less than two months later, on May 3, both men left Atiku and Amaechi behind in the ADC to adopt the NDC as their platform instead. Their exit came about a week after they had attended a separate opposition summit hosted by Makinde in Ibadan on April 25, where the parties resolved to field one presidential candidate for 2027, agreed and supported by all participating parties. That understanding collapsed the moment Obi and Kwankwaso walked out, sending the opposition back to square one as the election calendar tightens.
For a coalition to work, its leading figures would have to put the country ahead of personal ambition, analysts note. But their conduct over the past several months has done little to build confidence that such sacrifice is coming. “Many of its leading members are strong-willed individuals who may find it difficult to compromise or submit to a unified leadership,” Jamiu observed.
Each of the leading men has reasons — some political, some personal — not to yield ground, and it is worth examining them individually.
What ails the opposition
Beneath the talk of unity lie hard, competing interests. Zoning and regional balance is one: many in the opposition believe power should return to the North after Tinubu’s tenure, or argue the South deserves a second consecutive term, and no formula has settled the question.
Personal ambition is another: several of the leading figures see 2027 as their best or only shot at the presidency, which makes stepping aside for a rival feel like giving up a lifetime’s pursuit. Layered on top of this is the incumbency advantage Tinubu already holds — a governing structure, state resources and backing of more than 30 of the 36 state governors — which raises the cost of opposition disunity and the reward for staying united, without making unity any easier to achieve.
Atiku Abubakar
In a BBC interview published Friday, Atiku insisted he remains the best alternative to Tinubu, brushing aside his age and describing himself as strong enough to serve. That self-belief is the crux of the problem for coalition-builders. Atiku has openly admitted 2027 is his last realistic shot at the presidency, given that he will be 80 around election time, which means, unlike younger rivals, he has no next cycle to fall back on and every incentive to run rather than yield. For seven attempts running back to 1993, he has stayed in the race even after repeated defeats, a persistence that speaks to a man unlikely to walk away quietly now.
That persistence has long been tied, in political circles, to a belief that he is destined to lead. Speculation about Atiku’s reliance on marabouts, spiritual consultants said to have predicted his rise, has followed him for years and resurfaced again on Friday when the Presidency mocked him as a man under their spell.
Whether or not the claims hold any truth, the pattern they point to is real: a candidate who appears to see his pursuit of the presidency as a calling. A man who believes his mandate is preordained is a difficult man to convince to step aside for someone else’s ticket, however sound the math of coalition-building might be.
Moreover, his party seems to believe its candidate is strong enough to take on the APC and win. Speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Friday, Abdullahi said the ADC “does not need a coalition to win the election”. A statement like that makes the ADC an unlikely partner in a coalition if its candidate is not adopted as the consensus choice.
Peter Obi
Since running as Atiku’s vice-presidential candidate in 2019, Obi has built a devoted following that pushed him to contest on his own in 2023. Against popular predictions, he polled more than six million votes as a so-called third force, an unprecedented tally for an outsider candidate.
His weakness, observers note, was thin support in the North, which is why he now runs with Kwankwaso, whom his camp views as the missing piece. Even their combined 2023 tallies would still have trailed Tinubu, but Obi’s team believes Kwankwaso’s Northern standing gives the ticket the credibility it lacked to expand the electoral math in its favour.
Having found what he sees as his missing link, it is difficult to see Obi giving up that arrangement for a coalition that might not centre him. And even if he agreed to run as someone else’s deputy, nothing guarantees he would succeed that person after one or two terms.
Rabiu Kwankwaso
Kwankwaso is widely believed to have joined Obi because the arrangement offers the clearest path to his own long-held ambition. Obi has reportedly promised to serve only one term, as a gentleman’s understanding that power should return North afterward, following four years of Tinubu and a potential four years of Obi in the South.
That arrangement effectively earmarks Kwankwaso, or the North generally, for 2031. Persuading him to fold into a broader coalition that does not guarantee him the running-mate slot and, by extension, that path to 2031 would mean asking him to give up ground he has already secured.
Rotimi Amaechi
If Amaechi’s public statements are any indication, he accepted the ADC’s running-mate slot reluctantly, having wanted the top ticket for himself. A coalition arrangement that offers him neither the presidency nor the vice presidency would likely be a hard sell.
And if he believes a Southern Obi presidency would push his own ambitions even further down the queue, the question becomes whether he has the patience to wait his turn at all.
The place of the supporters
Beyond the principal figures, their supporters are key stakeholders in this coalition debate, not silent observers. Obi’s exit from the ADC was publicly attributed to the party’s legal troubles, but Sunday Tribune understands the more decisive factor was his belief that he would lose the coming primaries had he stayed. He also answers, in part, to the Obidients, a passionate and vocal base that spent much of the past year urging him not to accept a vice-presidential ticket under Atiku. They are not a movement inclined to quietly accept a deal that sidelines their candidate.
Atiku’s supporters, the Atikulated, hold similar sway, and deep mutual animosity between the two camps plays out regularly on social media. Whether these two bases could be brought to back a single ticket, after months of open hostility toward each other, is far from settled.
That resistance to merging structures has already started showing itself. The OK Movement, a platform mobilising support for the Obi-Kwankwaso NDC ticket, on Friday, ruled out any merger with an outside political organisation at a national leadership summit in Abuja.
Kwankwasiyya, for its part, is believed to be wary of working too closely with the Atikulated, who represent a rival claim to the North-for-2031 argument that underpins Kwankwaso’s own long game.
What could make it work
For all the friction, analysts argue a deal is not impossible if the leading figures are willing to make three things happen: real sacrifice, patience from those prepared to wait their turn, and a stronger desire to defeat Tinubu than to personally occupy the presidency. Coalition-building in Nigeria has rarely followed ideology; it has followed necessity, and necessity is precisely what opposition figures say they face going into 2027.
And if they believe in the necessity to unseat President Tinubu, they will prioritise defeating the president over their personal ambitions, according to political analyst, Olawale Afolabi. “A split opposition, as we saw in 2023, only helps the ruling party win. If the opposition is truly all about defeating the president, they will not hesitate to sacrifice their own ambitions for the country, but it seems clear that they do not believe the things they say because as it stands, they are helping President Tinubu,” political analyst, Olawale Afolabi told Sunday Tribune.
Another factor cited by analysts is patience, especially from younger candidates in their 60s who still have years ahead to run. But if current actions are any indication, the major opposition presidential candidates — Atiku and Obi — appear to both share the belief that 2027 is the right moment for their ambition.
Afolabi noted that the problem with that thinking is that they will repeat the 2023 outcome again in 2027 despite having opportunities to avoid a recurrence. “If the opposition genuinely believes the country is being poorly led, then repeating the errors of 2023 by splitting the vote again would be difficult to justify to the Nigerians they claim to be fighting for,” he said.
The stakes of failure
According to analysts, a divided opposition going into 2027 the way it did in 2023 all but guarantees another Tinubu term. Many argue that a fractured opposition cannot stand up to an incumbent president, noting that Tinubu has the backing of over 30 governors out of 36 working for him. If the various camps cannot resolve their differences before the election, the practical effect, analysts warn, may be inadvertently working for Tinubu’s re-election or otherwise handing victory to him on a silver platter.
That raises an uncomfortable question for opposition leaders who describe Nigeria as a country with abundant resources that still fails to work for its people. If they truly believe the country is on the wrong path, the responsibility to fix it falls partly on their ability to set aside ambition long enough to present Nigerians with a real alternative.
In the meantime, G100 has tried to lower expectations for Monday. The convening group has said the summit will not be used to decide the presidential candidate of a possible opposition alliance nor to determine the final form cooperation will take. Its immediate objective, organisers say, is simply to establish a formal structure through which those larger questions can be negotiated collectively, transparently and in good faith, leaving the harder decisions and the sacrifices they demand for another day.
