2027: How Tinubu’s Northern Support Base Crumbled, Why He Is Rallying South

By Akinjide Aina, Abuja Bureau Chief

In the run up to the 2027 presidential election, there are credible indications that President Bola Tinubu’s hitherto impregnable huge support base in the North of Nigeria has crumpled.

After massively voting the President in the 2023 Presidential election, the North has withdrawn its support for his re-election in 2027 and now wants the crown itself and are resolute in getting it, that’s, wrestling power from him and by extension, the South in 2027, this magazine can authoritatively reveal

The President’s trip to Kastina last week to confer with his immediate predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, the magazine was informed, was principally to seek his intervention and support in appealing to the Northern political establishment who have sworn to see his back in 2027. Buhari was reportedly non-committal

The North’s disenchantment with President Tinubu, it was gathered, is conditioned by two factors: The brazen Yorubanization of his government and the tax reform bill which the region’s political leaders and intelligentsia insist is skewed against it( the North).

The President himself, the magazine, has been informed, has come to the grim realisation that he has lost the North hence his frantic rallying of the South for support.

“President Tinubu is frantically building a strong southern front as a counterpoise to the lose of Northern support”, a source familiar with the intrigues told this magazine.

He added that “I can tell you that all Southern governors across party lines and virtually all Southern National Assembly members across party line are supporting the President’s re-election. Apart from PDP’s Governor Sheriff Oborevwori of Delta state who recently defected to the All Progressives Congress, APC, one or two more opposition Southern Governors are on their way to the APC too.

“Those who for strategic political reasons will not be defecting to the APC have pledged to support the President 100 percent in his re-election bid.

“The idea is to prove to the so- called Northern political leaders who often boast of the region’s monopoly of choosing and installing presidents that such claim is hogwash”

The North’s opposition to the President Tinubu’s  re-election, blew up in the open last year in the guise of the volcanic EndBadGovernance protests that gripped the region last August.

Late last year, a highly placed source in the presidency who is also an APC stalwart had confided in the magazine that the anti- Tinubu fervour that swept across the core North last August during the End BadGovernance protest was a rude awakening, for the President.The heartbreaking invectives hurled at him and insulting caricatures made of him by thousands of the angry protesters, this magazine was told, convinced him of his loss of support in the region.

Again sometimes in February, President Tinubu’s kitchen cabinet and trusted allies, after reviewing the groundswell of Northern opposition towards his 2027 re- election bid, realised that the president’s hitherto huge support base in the region has tumbled and that the majority of Northerners would outrightly reject him at the polls. It was also discovered that no politcal patronage, no matter how much, would placate majority of Northern elites and political leaders to support his re-election.

The most devastating of it all, The Source was informed,  was the realisation that a number of APC Governors in the Northwest and Northeast and two in the North central  are not in support of his second term but are instead in bed with the emerging mega coalition of opposition spearheaded by former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar.

A highly placed APC source from the North corroborates this: “Virtually all APC governors in the North, particularly North West and North East, are poised to shock Tinubu and the APC. They will defect to the Atiku coalition few months to the 2027 presidential election to replicate and overwhelm Tinubu’s Southern solidarity.  The 2027 presidential election will be the most divisive in the history of Nigeria, it will pit the two halves of Nigeria- North and South against the other”