-By Abdul Mahmud
We are here at last in the decisive year before the 2027 General election; and under a political sky shaped by cooptation, consolidation, realignment and fatigue. The governing order described in the first part of this essay has narrowed the arena of contest and redrawn the boundaries of participation.
Power has been personalised through coordination at the apex of presidential power, while democratic life has thinned across the political spectrum. Against this backdrop, the central question concerns the prospect of change in a system where opposition appears weak, fragmented, and uncertain of purpose. The inquiry matters because politics without credible opposition drifts toward stagnation, and democracy without contest loses its animating force.
The weakness of opposition in contemporary Nigeria does not arise from absence alone. Parties exist. Leaders speak. Platforms circulate. What has faded concerns coherence, imagination, and capacity to mobilise belief. Opposition formations struggle to present themselves as alternative governments rather than displaced elites. Electoral defeat has translated into strategic confusion. Litigation has substituted for organising. Negotiation has replaced confrontation. The result resembles a political field populated by actors who recognise the dominance of the ruling order and seek accommodation within it.
This condition reflects the success of the early Tinubuist regime in redefining politics as alignment. The governing logic rewards proximity and punishes distance. Access to resources, protection, and relevance depends upon acceptance of the prevailing arrangement. Opposition figures face inducements to cross over, remain silent, or fragment their own bases. Party switching acquires normality. Ideological commitment dissolves into tactical survival. Politics loses its moral edge. And within such a landscape, prospects for change appear limited. The absence of a unified opposition weakens the capacity to challenge power electorally. Fragmentation disperses energy. Public cynicism deepens as citizens perceive politics as closed circuit. Many retreat into private life, informal economies, or migration. Democratic participation contracts further, reinforcing the governing logic that thrives on disengagement.
Political history rarely moves in straight lines. Systems that prioritise stability over inclusion accumulate pressures beneath the surface. The early Tinubuist regime has secured coherence through elite consensus, though this consensus carries inherent limits. A governing order sustained through coordination rather than consent encounters stress when coordination fails or consent becomes necessary. The very mechanisms that weaken opposition also generate contradictions that destabilise authority over time. One such contradiction emerges within elite bargaining itself. The expansion of patronage networks strains finite resources. As more actors demand inclusion, distribution becomes contentious. Loyalty purchased through access requires constant renewal. Exclusion breeds resentment among former allies. Factional competition intensifies within the ruling coalition. Unity achieved through accommodation proves fragile when accommodation reaches saturation. Power consolidates by absorbing rivals, then weakens by carrying their ambitions. Another contradiction resides in the language of reform. Economic policies framed as necessity impose social cost that erodes legitimacy. The moral vocabulary of sacrifice wears thin amid widening inequality and visible privilege. Citizens endure hardship without corresponding voice. Over time, endurance transforms into anger or withdrawal. Governance grounded in inevitability confronts limits when inevitability loses credibility. Economic pain acquires political meaning despite efforts to depoliticise it.
Institutional constraint presents further tension. Courts, legislatures, and regulatory bodies adjust to executive priorities, though such adjustment undermines their authority. As institutions lose autonomy, they lose capacity to absorb conflict. Disputes that once found resolution within formal channels spill into informal arenas. Legitimacy drains from procedures perceived as scripted. Law retains form while losing moral force. This erosion weakens the very stability the system seeks to preserve. Media management also carries contradiction. Selective tolerance creates uncertainty rather than silence. Critical voices adapt, migrate, and reappear through alternative platforms. Suppression fragments the public sphere without eliminating dissent. Information circulates through informal networks beyond regulatory reach. Attempts at narrative control encounter diminishing returns as trust declines. Control becomes labour intensive and brittle.
The weakness of opposition thus operates as both symptom and accelerant of systemic tension. Absence of organised challenge removes pressure for responsiveness. Governance drifts toward insularity. Decision making narrows. Blind spots expand. The ruling order begins to mistake silence for consent and stability for legitimacy. In such conditions, disruption often arrives from unexpected quarters rather than formal opposition structures. Civil society offers one such site. Though constrained, social movements adapt through issue based mobilisation. Labour, professional associations, faith communities, and local networks articulate grievances that escape party structures. Their demands concern survival, dignity, and fairness rather than ideology. These movements resist easy cooptation. Their legitimacy derives from lived experience rather than electoral calculation.
Power struggles to absorb them without conceding substance.
Generational dynamics introduce further uncertainty. Younger Nigerians encounter a political order that offers little promise of inclusion. Their relationship to the state remains transactional at best. Digital spaces provide alternative arenas for expression and organisation. Political identity forms outside traditional party structures. When mobilisation occurs, it defies established channels. Authority confronts actors uninterested in elite negotiation. Regional and communal tensions also complicate consolidation. Nigeria’s diversity resists uniform management. Grievances rooted in marginalisation, security, and resource distribution persist beneath the surface of elite consensus. Centralised control struggles to accommodate local realities. When accommodation fails, dissent acquires territorial expression. Stability achieved at the centre confronts volatility at the margins.
These pressures converge within the Tinubu’s Presidency attempt to construct a pan-hegemonic order. The project seeks to draw all significant political forces into a single architecture of power. Opposition becomes junior partner. Dissent becomes noise. Politics becomes administration. This ambition resembles suzerainty, a system of overlordship that tolerates autonomy only within limits defined by the centre. Such arrangements promise order through inclusion, though they contain seeds of collapse. Suzerainty demands constant management of loyalty. It relies on hierarchy without formal equality. Subordinate actors accept dominance in exchange for protection or access. Over time, the imbalance generates tension. Subordinates seek greater autonomy. The centre resists. Negotiation hardens into contest. The system’s stability depends upon continuous expansion or redistribution, both of which encounter limits. In Nigeria’s case, the attempt to fold opposition into a pan-Tinubu order produces contradictions at multiple levels. Political actors absorbed into the ruling coalition carry distinct ambitions and constituencies. Their presence dilutes coherence. Conflicts internalise rather than disappear. The line between ruling party and opposition blurs, weakening discipline. Authority fragments from within.
Furthermore, forced consensus undermines accountability. Without credible opposition, policy failure lacks corrective mechanism. Mistakes compound. Governance loses feedback. Public frustration accumulates without outlet. When pressure releases, it does so abruptly and unpredictably. History records numerous regimes that mistook absorption for stability and silence for assent.
The prospect of change in 2027 therefore does not hinge solely on the strength of formal opposition. It rests upon contradictions embedded within the governing order. These contradictions emerge from the tension between consolidation and inclusion, control and legitimacy, coordination and consent. The Tinubu’s Presidency has privileged the former in each pairing. Over time, the latter asserts its claim. Change may arrive through fracture rather than replacement. Elite alliances may splinter. Institutional actors may reclaim autonomy. Social movements may force recalibration. Economic realities may compel political adjustment. None of these paths guarantee democratic renewal. They do, however, disrupt permanence. The task for those concerned with democracy lies not in romanticising opposition weakness, but in recognising the limits of hegemonic control. Politics suppressed returns in altered form. Democracy hollowed seeks expression beyond formal channels. Power consolidated through suzerainty encounters resistance through contradiction.
The race toward 2027 is now unmistakably underway, and the architecture of power erected in the early Tinubuist phase already circumscribes the realm of political possibility. The attenuation of opposition narrows the immediate field of contest, but it also produces a more dangerous compression of tension within the ruling order itself. In the absence of credible external challenge, conflict is displaced inward. What appears, on the surface, as dominance thus conceals a growing fragility. Efforts to impose a pan-Tinubu hegemonic alignment stretch the system beyond its elastic limits, as the ambition to absorb all forces into a single political orbit generates instability through overreach rather than coherence. At the core of this moment lies a set of contradictions that the Tinubuist project cannot indefinitely evade. A governing order premised on elite coordination and transactional discipline confronts a society increasingly defined by material deprivation, social exclusion, and unmet expectations. Politics treated as administrative management collides with demands that are moral, distributive, and existential, demands that cannot be resolved through calibration alone. Suzerainty endures only so long as consent is continuously renewed and rewards can be credibly dispensed. When subordinates hesitate, defect, or withdraw acquiescence, or when the centre’s capacity to allocate patronage and protection falters, the carefully managed order begins to fracture from within. Power secured without renewal discovers its limits not at the margins, but at the very heart of its own design.
The effort to integrate opposition into a pan-Tinubu order is riddled with inherent contradictions. Efforts to co-opt, manage, and fragment dissent both consolidate power and generate tension. Alliances built on transactional loyalty are fragile, competing interests within the ruling coalition occasionally clash, and the pursuit of centralised control can produce uneven implementation across regions and institutions. These contradictions, if harnessed, contain the potential to weaken the Tinubu project from within. In theory, they reopen space for contestation and expose the limits of authority. In practice, however, the current opposition lacks the capacity to exploit these vulnerabilities. Neither Afiku nor Obi commands the organisational depths to transform these fault lines into a credible challenge for power. Their parties are fragmented, their coalitions brittle, and their ability to mobilise sustained mass support is limited. Meanwhile, the mechanisms of control like patronage, elite coordination, administrative alignment, and resource distribution continue to reinforce the presidency’s resilience. The contradictions that might, over time, undermine the system remain largely latent, their destabilising potentials unrealised, precisely because the opposition cannot translate structural weaknesses into actionable contest. The critical implication is that Tinubu’s project is not inherently unassailable. Its endurance depends on the careful management of these contradictions. Over time, misalignment within alliances, competing ambitions, and the tensions between inclusion and control could erode the foundations of dominance. The presidency’s strength lies not in immunity from these pressures, but in the current incapacity of rivals to convert them into effective resistance. The pan-Tinubu order, then, carries within it the seeds of its own transformation that are fragile, contingent, and ultimately dependent on the interplay between internal contradictions and the emergence of capable challengers.
Happy New Year, folks.