By Azu Ishiekwene

With the general elections only three months away, opposition politicians are becoming increasingly good at running in circles. They have fancy names for this waste of time: consultations, tours, deliberations and meetings. As soon as one round ends, another begins – all motion, no movement.

It is quite ironic that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which should be at its wit’s end, is the party rallying a broad-based coalition and co-opting elements from opposition parties into a working alliance to retain power.

The trope in opposition circles is that the next general election is between APC and the Nigerian voters. This is a lazy assumption that not only ignores how ruling parties in Nigeria and elsewhere have been defeated, but one that assumes that voters are obliged, without effort, to inherit the opposition’s enemy.

Tinubu as scapegoat

On the contrary, it is President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s allies who are attempting to turn political differences into electoral cooperation even while at an advantage. In the end, there will be no shortage of claims about how the APC won, without genuine reflection about why the opposition lost.

President Tinubu is the number one scapegoat. Indeed, he has always been – from allegations of orchestrating a one-party system to planting the seeds of discord that unsettle the opposition.

He alone is responsible for the shoddy affairs in all political parties except his own, and he alone should be held to account for the blind ambition that threatens the chances of the opposition.

It is also Tinubu’s fault that the dominant APC is the party seeking to forge a rainbow coalition, rather than the other way around.

Perhaps Tinubu is also responsible for confusing the opposition parties on the petrol subsidy and depriving them of the power to offer coherent alternatives to the current economic travails. And since the announcement this week of the first Ebola case in Nigeria after 12 years, it’s already being suggested that Tinubu has weaponised Ebola to either derail or stall the 2027 elections.

Lessons of history

What they conveniently forget is that, perhaps until now, the history of the Nigerian variant of multiparty democracy has been more or less consistent.

When the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) and the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) formed the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) in the run-up to independence, it was not because of ideological cohesion. It was a special purpose vehicle with one overriding aim – to capture power.

By 1964, the NCNC, part of the NNA, dissolved into a counter-group, the United Grand Progressive Alliance (UPGA), to challenge the NPC. Former allies turned into battering rams again to contest for power. The undercurrents of what happened then formed the background to Nigeria’s first military incursion into politics.

The civil-democratic cycles that followed in 1979 and 1999 also reveal shallow ideological inclinations and a greater focus on politics, tending towards regional alliances with a mix of ethnic and religious flavours.

Trend across Africa

Nigeria’s coalition politics is not peculiar; indeed, it is quite a trend across Africa – except that Tinubu’s coalition is unique – initiated by a ruling party co-opting other parties into a power-sharing cooperative.

Kenya’s National Rainbow Coalition, or NARC, brought together opposition forces and defectors from the ruling establishment ahead of the December 2002 election. Its principal components were the National Alliance Party of Kenya grouping and the Liberal Democratic Party/Rainbow Coalition grouping. Under Mwai Kibaki, it defeated the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the party that had governed Kenya since independence in 1963.

The game changer was opposition coordination. In Kenya’s 1992 and 1997 elections, opposition parties collectively received more than 60 per cent of the vote but remained divided. In 2002, the alliance converted previously fragmented support into a winning electoral force.

The wheeling and dealing for the 2027 general elections are therefore not new, except that opposition politicians have, in this instance, opted to be poor students of history. Otherwise, they lack no template from which to borrow, learn, or copy and paste.

Retooling the template

It’s the same template that the ruling APC reworked in 2013 and, by 2015, was able to successfully dislodge and dislocate the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) ambition to rule Nigeria for 60 years. What is more confounding is that many members of the currently fragmented opposition groups were active in politics or played direct roles that supported the APC’s rise to power.

That both the history and the lessons of the past have become a chemical formula that is difficult for the opposition parties to replicate is not just a problem for the political elite but a serious challenge for citizens yearning for credible options on the ballot.

Divided they stand

An opposition whose principal flagbearers are overflowing with political enthusiasm but without a serious plan reduces the quest for alternative leadership through the democratic process to a mere academic exercise.

What, for example, was the point of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) presidential candidate, Peter Obi, taking issue with Diaspora remittances, when his party solicits funds abroad? Or the African Democratic Congress (ADC) candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, hiring lobbyists in the US at great cost when the party’s local faithful can barely rent a campaign tent?

It is not very difficult to see why the opposition is on their way to yielding the gunpowder and the flame to a ruling party struggling to convince an electorate at the very nadir of social dissatisfaction: they are afraid of the ultimate compromise that could lead to individuals giving up personal ambition for an overriding group interest.

To make any headway in the circumstance, the stumbling block of personal ambition must be removed. Self-seeking and self-interest are the mountains the opposition needs to level before they can think of displacing President Tinubu in next year’s elections.

A divided front will never work. The longer it takes them to forge a common front, the more difficult it becomes to have one. Perhaps, the contingency plan is to go into the elections, find faults with the process, get some alibis, go to court and hope for a judgement in their favour.

Merry-go-round

It doesn’t help that the presidential candidates and running mates in the two main opposition parties – NDC and ADC – contradict themselves and have failed to provide clear alternative directions on critical national issues such as security and the petroleum subsidy.

Coalitions mean binding agreements rather than affectionate declarations; pooled resources rather than parallel fundraising campaigns; functioning local coordination rather than competing claims of nationwide popularity; and programmes that explain why and how replacing the government would improve the country.

For now, Nigerians are being treated to a familiar production: the ruling party campaigning for another term while its challengers campaign for the chairmanship of the next coalition meeting.

If this were a book, the perfect title would be 2027: Defeat Made Easy.

Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.