My 2027 monologue

It is surprising, isn’t it, that barely two years after election into a 4-year term in the office of the President of Nigeria people are already meeting and making plans for the next election. I can make some guesses why this is so (a) The Nigerian presidency is very attractive because of the enormous powers attached to it (b) Some people might feel that President Bola Tinubu has not performed wonderfully in the two crucial areas namely insecurity and economy that could have made a positive difference to people’s lives (c) Some people might think that every election offers an opportunity for them to try their luck. If they start early to let the public know that they are interested they might get something if not the real thing. One of these reasons might be the reason why there is an early attempt to bring 2027 to the conversation table early in 2025.

President Bola Tinubu

The National Chairman of the ruling APC, Dr Abdullahi Ganduje is reported to have told the presidential candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party, NNPP, Dr Musa Kwankwaso that there won’t be any vacancy in the presidency in 2027. The two of them are former Governors of Kano State but they both have an interest in the presidency one way or another.

But it is certain that Ganduje’s statement is not directed at Kwankwaso alone. I believe it largely goes to all the other politicians who have been criss-crossing the country, holding meetings, covert or overt, or both on 2027 and on the possibilities of cooperation, coalition. Some of these meeting attendees have contested and failed in past elections for that office, and think that another attempt may bring them Mother Luck. Some of them are party deviants who think that mouthing their presidential ambition may draw the attention of the President to their need for some kind of enhanced stomach infrastructure in place of a competition for that office. Some of them are disgruntled party members who think that they have been ignored in the sharing of the booty and to display their nuisance value is the best approach to the matter. They are not really, truly, significant pretenders to the presidential throne.

Dr Ganduje’s no-vacancy statement can be interpreted in two ways namely, literary and legal. In a literal sense there will be no vacancy in 2027 whether Tinubu contests the election or not or whether he contests the election and loses or wins. There will be no gap in the governance of the country because on May 29, 2027 Tinubu will either hand over to Tinubu if he wins or hand over to someone else if he loses. The assumption here is that he is likely to contest in 2027. No gap, no vacancy. However, speaking legally the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria provides for elections to be conducted every four years into the office of the President of Nigeria. In that sense there will always be a vacancy in that office every four years that an election must fill.

Ganduje is not the first person to use this no-vacancy expression in Nigeria. Chief Tony Anenih, chieftain of the PDP used it in 2011 when he was pushing for Dr Goodluck Jonathan who had taken over the presidency when President Umaru Yar’Adua died. Jonathan was to pair up with his Vice President Namadi Sambo to run for a full term. But there was also Adamu Ciroma’s consensus candidate, Atiku Abubakar who apparently thought that since Yar’Adua was a northerner someone from the north needed to take over from him. It didn’t work out that way. Jonathan and Sambo won the 2011 election. That Yar’Adua’s death posed a problem for the proponents of rotational presidency. But problem or not rotational presidency has enormous advantage for a country like Nigeria with linguistic, cultural, ethnic and geographical differences, a country that seeks to be united so as to get the benefits of large scale that its size provides. To achieve that unity all component parts of the country must be ready and willing to make sacrifices in their political and economic decisions. Those who are angling for a northern presidency in 2027 are partisan, desperate and greedy politicians who do not care about the unity and stability of Nigeria. They do not care whether or not their partisan desire will destabilize Nigeria or not. Such people are not interested in nation building. They are only interested in their personal ambition, not in the stability and progress of a very fragile nation like Nigeria.

We saw such people in 2010 when Dr Goodluck Jonathan was Vice President and Yar’Adua was sick. They prevented Yar’Adua from allowing Jonathan to act as President and the nation fell into a constitutional crisis. They prevented the President from observing section 145 of the Constitution which states that: “Whenever the President transmit to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives a written declaration that he is proceeding on vacation or that he is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary such functions shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.” It was the extraordinary decision by the National Assembly to accept the doctrine of necessity that saved the country from calamity and our democracy from disaster.

Those who are interested in taking over from Tinubu in 2027 belong to the existing political parties that constitute the opposition. These are the PDP, Labour Party and NNPP. All three parties have varying levels of strength in the country but none of them is strong enough to dethrone the ruling APC. All three of them have internal problems within their parties and are busy going from one courtroom to another in the attempt to solve those problems. Their strength in terms of accessing the presidency through the 2027 election can be partly measured by their ability to solve their own problems. If they find it difficult to solve their party’s problems, how can they be trusted to have the ability to solve the bigger problems of the country. That is a question they must answer. However, not being able to solve their party’s problems does not mean that they cannot aspire to capturing the presidency. They can do so by seeking to merge with other parties to form a formidable group that can compete with the ruling party which has become attractive for people who want to be covered by the big tent of the APC.

The second thing to say about the parties that seek to overthrow the APC in 2027 is for them to provide viable and sustainable policy options for the two major problems that Tinubu has been contending with: insecurity and economy. These two problems have not been satisfactorily tackled by the Federal Government. Any of the opposition parties that seeks to take over the federal government in 2027 must submit to the people an alternative policy option that convincingly deals with at least the two major problems. Merely criticizing the Tinubu Government’s policies is not enough. What will satisfy Nigerians is the ability to put forward for critical assessment and analysis workable policy options on the major problems of the country.

If they are able to do that satisfactorily the claim by Ganduje that there is no vacancy in Aso Rock in 2027 will be fake.