Postscript by Waziri Adio Nigeria’s next presidential election is now less than six months away. The campaigns, according to the timetable set by the election management body, will not start officially until exactly a month from today. But how the 2027 presidential campaigns will be prosecuted is already visible. Also becoming visible are the assumptions and the calculations that the leading presidential candidates hope will grant them victory. However, there can be only one winner. Here, I will explore and interrogate what I sense are the current strategies of the top three presidential candidates. Before we go into that, I want to address three points. The first is that the fact that we have ended up again with the same cast of frontrunners as we did in the last electoral cycle does not necessarily mean the outcomes for 2023 and 2027 will be the same. They may or may not be. The 2027 presidential contest may or may not be as keen as that of 2023, which is on record for being our most competitive presidential election since 1999 but had a parallel in our first presidential election of 1979. To start with, the contexts for 2023 and 2027 are slightly different. The 2023 poll was an open election because there was no incumbent candidate on the ballot (though there was an incumbent party, which did not wholeheartedly support its own candidate). In 2027, there will be an incumbent candidate, which is both an advantage and a burden, but still a difference worth highlighting, a point we will explore further shortly. There are also other shifts in the political and larger societal environment which may shape how voters decide, with implications for the electoral fortunes of the different candidates. It is thus a non-sequitur that we are necessarily back at 2023 simply because of a similarity in line-ups. The second point is that the failure of the opposition to present a united front against an incumbent is not necessarily fatal. Yes, a major lesson from 2015 is that a united and formidable opposition is the surest path to upstaging an incumbent president in Nigeria. But the predictable fracturing of the opposition does not mean that 2027 is a foregone conclusion. This is the same way that having a united opposition does not automatically mean the incumbent is gone. Either way, there is still a lot to play for, as a lot can still be determined on the margins. The third point is that all the leading candidates are united on the point of strategy. Even if they don’t acknowledge it, they are all trying to do the same thing: assemble a winning coalition that can meet the two conditions for victory in our electoral system—scoring the highest number of valid votes and meeting the spread requirement. There are different paths (either directly to the voters or indirectly through the political brokers), but the tactics appear the same. At the end of the day, it is this ability to wangle that winning coalition in a country with different blocs and types of voters that will separate the eventual winner from the pack. Let’s start the review of the 2027 permutations with Mr. Peter Obi, the revelation of the 2023 electoral cycle and currently the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC). Flying the flag of the Labour Party (LP), Mr. Obi came third with 6.1 million votes, representing 25% of total votes cast in 2023. This was a record for a third-party presidential candidate in Nigeria in terms of a combination of the absolute number and percentage of votes polled. In the current republic, that record previously belonged to Alhaji Atiku Abubabakar, then of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), who came third with 2.64 million votes and 7.5% of votes cast in the controversial 2007 election. In the 1979 election, our most competitive presidential poll till date, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe of the Nigerian People’s Party (NPP) scored 2.8 million votes and 17% of the votes (though he actually got higher votes but a lower proportion in the controversial election of 1983—3.6 million votes amounting to 14% of the total votes). As brilliant infographics from The Cable show, Obi in 2023 broke the record set by Azikiwe and Atiku with a stunning performance that saw him come first in two geo-political zones (South East, 90% and South South, 44%) and a close second in another zone (North Central, 33%). Remarkably, he got the highest votes in Lagos (the political base of Mr. Bola Tinubu, the eventual winner of the election) and Obi blew everyone else out of the water with 61% of the votes in FCT. He was also the only presidential candidate in the 2023 electoral cycle to go above the 80% mark in four states (Ebonyi, 80%; Abia, 88%; Enugu, 94%; and Anambra, 95%). Only Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the United Party of Nigeria (UPN) and Dr. Azikiwe posted such percentages in their home base back in 1979 (Zik got 83% in old Anambra and 85% in old Imo
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