With barely two years to the 2027 general election, opposition political parties in the country are somewhat in disarray. In this report, ONYEDIKA AGBEDO looks at some of the issues bedevilling them and their possibility of upstaging the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) at the poll.

Two years and three weeks to the 2027 general election, there are glaring signs that the opposition parties in the country are in quandary. From the leading opposition party in the country, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the Labour Party (LP), which came third in the last presidential election and the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), which came fourth, the struggle for the control of the party structures have torn their houses apart and there seems not to be genuine efforts at rebuilding them.

Just last Wednesday, there was chaos at the Board of Trustees (BoT) meeting of the PDP as Samuel Anyanwu and Sunday Ude-Okoye clashed over the position of National Secretary.

Reports had it that the meeting was underway with the Acting National Chairman, Ambassador Iliya Damagum and Anyanwu present when Ude-Okoye arrived. The reports said that as Ude-Okoye entered the hall, the BoT Chairman, Senator Adolphus Wabara, was delivering his speech. Ude-Okoye then bided his time, waited for Wabara to finish before he mingled with those at the high table and deliberately avoided Anyanwu.

However, chaos ensued when suspected thugs forcibly removed Ude-Okoye from the meeting, prompting a confrontation. At this juncture, journalists were instructed to leave the room for a closed-door session.

Meanwhile, Ude-Okoye remained outside while the meeting continued.

The National Secretary position has been a contentious issue since Anyanwu?s departure to contest for the Imo governorship, which he lost. In his absence, the South East Caucus of the party endorsed Ude-Okoye as his successor. Since losing the election, Anyanwu?s attempts to reclaim the position of national secretary of the party have plunged the party into turmoil.

On December 20, 2024, an Appeal Court in Enugu upheld a prior High Court ruling that removed him as the PDP National Secretary, affirming Ude-Okoye as the legitimate secretary. But Anyanwu has filed for a Stay of Execution and Appeal, with Dr. J.Y. Musa.

Musa (SAN) appointed by Damagum as the party?s legal counsel, which has been rejected by some National Working Committee (NWC) members of the party. Eleven out of the 17 members of the NWC publicly disassociated themselves from the appointment, stating that in line with the PDP constitution as captured in Article 42, only the National Legal Adviser is authorised to appoint an external solicitor for the party, not Damagum.

The P?P also has issues to address in many state chapters, especially Rivers State, where the state Governor, Siminalayi Fubara; his predecessor, Nyesom Wike and 27 House of Assembly members elected on the platform of the party, have been at loggerheads for some time now.

Aside from the PDP, the LP and NNPP are also embroiled in leadership crises.

On January 17, this year, a three-member panel of the Court of Appeal, Abuja Division, in a judgment delivered by Justice Hamma Barka, upheld its earlier judgment of November 13, 2024, which recognises Julius Abure as the National Chairman of the Labour Party. The court confirmed that this decision has not been overturned by any other court.

It could be recalled that in February 2024, the party?s national treasurer, Oluchi Oparah, had accused Abure of misappropriating N3.5 billion, a claim the LP chairman denied. The allegation led to calls from party members for Abure?s removal, resulting in a leadership crisis that is now left to the Supreme Court to resolve. On Sunday, January 19, the 29-member National Careteker Committee led by Senator Nenadi Usman, which was inaugurated by Abia State Governor, Alex Otti (the only governor elected on the platform of the party), and the LP presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Peter Obi, in September last year to oversee the affairs of the party announced that they were heading to the Supreme Court over the leadership dispute.

On the part of the NNPP, although not much has come to public domain this year regarding its leadership crisis, a faction of the party led by Agbo Major had in December last year insisted that the presidential candidate of the party in the 2023 presidential election and former governor of Kano State, Rabiu Kwankwaso, remained expelled.

Major, who addressed a press conference in Abuja, had warned Kwankwaso and his Kwankwasiyya group against blackmail and illegal actions that could destabilise the party.

He claimed that the Kwankwasiyya group recently wrote to the Speaker of the House of Representatives seeking to replace the Deputy Minority Leader, Aliyu Madaki, with someone not recognised by the party.

?The action stems from crass ignorance of the internal workings of the revered Green Chamber. Despite having exited our party, they remain desperate to destabilise the National Assembly caucus of the NNPP,? he said .

Against the backdrop of the myriads of crises in the opposition parties with appreciable structure and strength, presidential candidates of the PDP and LP in the 2023 elections, Atiku Abubakar and Obi respectively, last Monday accused the ruling party of instigating discord within opposition parties across the country. The immediate past governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, an APC chieftain who is currently romancing with opposition figures, also took the same position.

Speaking at a the two-day National Conference themed ?Strengthening Nigeria?s Democracy: Pathway to Good Governance and Political Integrity?, organised by the African Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development (LSD) in Abuja, Atiku accused the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led administration of offering N50 million to opposition figures to destabilise rival political parties.

El-Rufai, on his part, said: ?There seems to be a deliberate project to destroy opposition parties. There are internal mercenaries in the PDP, hired and motivated to destroy the party. The LP is also facing similar issues. Peter Obi himself told me, ?I don?t know what?s happening in the party I contested with?.?

Obi also spoke in the same vein. Now the question is: Will the opposition parties be able to put their houses in order to mount a challenge to the APC in the 2027 elections or the crises bedevilling them would fester and hand the ruling party a landslide victory in the elections?

The Chairman of the Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership (CACOL), Mr. Debo Adeniran, told The Guardian that only a coalition of the opposition, supported by an aggressive membership drive, can wrestle power from the APC in 2027.

His words: ?When you look at the ingenious ways that politics is played in Nigeria, you discover that there is no observable line in their ideological leanings. All those that claim to be progressives do not project progressive ideas. Those who claim to be socialists, like the African Action Congress (AAC) and the rest of them do not show it in their behaviours. They do not even have a clear cut agenda for the downtrodden that should ordinarily be their constituency. They do not have principles that bring the downtrodden together, otherwise they would have reached the ordinarily unreached populace and that would have helped them just like the Obedient Movement. But the Obedient Movement is not also ideological; it was just a spur of the moment that threw up that so-called movement. Their principal is not even committed to the cause of such a movement.

?So, it is these capitalist and bourgeoisie tendencies that are breaking them apart; because they all want to control the noose of their purses. And not many of them want to contribute because there is mutual distrust and mistrust among them.

?And when you look at the ruling party, the president especially has kind of traversed all lines of political divide. It is possible that he was part of the formation of most of these political parties. If he was not directly involved, he was close to some of their promoters. So, he could have reached out to some of them.

?Even the former ruling party ? PDP ? has broken into splinter groups. So, some of them are looking for safe havens where they will be recognised and their influence will command some benefits to them. So, they could have infiltrated even parties that could have been united. It is possible that such a thing happened.

?So, towards 2027 which you correctly said is actually here, it is going to be survival of the fittest. Everybody is looking for where he or she would pitch his or her tent that would not be blown off by the storm of the time.?

Adeniran noted that ideally, party formation should be based on clear-cut ideological leaning, regretting that it is not so in Nigeria.

He added: ?If you want to be progressive, you join the progressives; if you want to be conservative you join the conservatives; if you want to be socialist, you join the socialists; if you want to be welfarist, you join the welfarists. Then, everything you do will reflect your ideological leaning and those who will vote for you will know and those who cannot tolerate your ideological leaning will know and won?t join or support such a party. So, what is happening now is because all of them are birds of the same feather.?

According to him, most of the opposition parties know that they cannot win as many votes as they won in the 2023 election in 2027.

?They no longer have deep pockets as they had in 2023. Those who funded them have migrated from where they were to where their bread will be buttered. So, the only thing they can do to help them a bit is to coalesce; just like what the CAN did by pooling resources with other political parties ? Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and part of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and the rest of them. Since they don?t have clear-cut ideological differences, they should pool their resources together and campaign in places where the existing winners of elective seats did not reach during the 2023 elections. If they reach the unreached places, they might be able to gather members and garner votes for themselves. Otherwise, the ruling party will rule for more than 60 years that PDP deceived itself that it would achieve.?

Nevertheless, the founder of APGA, Chief Chekwas Okorie, said the crises in the opposition parties would result in a formidable coalition that may send the APC packing from power.

He said: ?What Is happening is something I had predicted quite a few times. I am sure that if you go through our past interactions you will see something like what I am going to say now.

?I have always said that there will be realignment of political forces leading to 2027 elections. And I had actually projected that this realignment of political forces will become very visible by the second quarter of this year but it does appear that it is happening faster than I had projected. So, what is happening now is nothing for anybody to worry about. Before APC was formed, PDP had a problem of this nature.

?Remember the case of the new-PDP that the likes of Bukola Saraki led. APGA had its own troubles and Rochas Okorocha moved out. ANPP had its own and Buhari left the party and went and formed CPC with other people. So, all these groups left the major parties and eventually came together to form APC. Still some people were not satisfied with APC; they left the party and returned to PDP and that is the Bukola Saraki group; while others remained.

?The same thing has started. Some people believe that they were responsible for President Tinubu?s victory in 2023 and their expectation of participation in that government may not have been met to their satisfaction. They are the ones making these moves that appear that the opposition is fragmented. Some people are going to pull out of the APC; signs are there that the likes of El-Rufai and his allies may quit the party. In fact, the people in the old CPC, which Buhari led into APC, are coalescing again and may have even reached some understanding with the African Democratic Congress (ADC). Atiku and his own group will definitely leave PDP but they have not identified which party they are going to. We already know that these things are happening.

?Now, these parties they are going to use are just like transition parties; they will eventually collapse into one because they know and have confessed it publicly that individually they cannot dislodge the ruling party. So, their option is very clear; I still believe that by the second quarter of this year, all these things will become visible and they will coalesce. So, before the year runs out, the parties would have come out to pose a visible challenge to the ruling party.?

On the accusation that the ruling party was sponsoring crises in the opposition parties, the elder statesman observed that it is normal for such allegations to crop up.

He added: ?The opposition leaders have to give reasons to do what they want to do since the law says that proving that there is crisis in your party is the only ground to decamp to another party, especially if you are an elected person. So, I don?t believe in this idea that the ruling party is behind the crisis in the opposition parties. I think it is mere propaganda.

?The ruling party is watching what is happening. I am not part of them but I do believe that they will not cross their hands and wait to be uprooted like a stationary tree. But whether they like it or not they have a big challenge on their hands.

?The northern political leaders with whom they won that election are not going to provide such support anymore. So, it is for the ruling party to begin to look elsewhere for new alliances. What I am seeing should not give the APC any cause to think that the opposition is in disarray. It is not so! What you are seeing is realignment of forces, which when it crystallises will become a formidable force to contend with. That is what I expect at the end of the day.?

Meanwhile, the APC has dismissed the allegation of sponsoring crises in TV.

In a statement last Tuesday, the party?s National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, traced the crisis in the PDP to Atiku?s political desperation; and urged him to focus on rebuilding his party and offering constructive solutions to Nigeria?s challenges than peddling unsubstantiated allegations.

Morka said: ?Atiku?s allegation that the APC-led administration was paying out N50 million to some opposition figures is simply bogus and laughable. Atiku knows that his political desperation is responsible for the PDP?s catastrophic disintegration. Peddling rumours and unsubstantiated allegations should be beneath anyone in the standing of an elder statesman, a former vice president and a serial contestant for the exalted office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

? The bizarre suggestion by opposition figures like Atiku, Peter Obi, and recently, aggrieved leaders like Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, that our great party may be complicit in the internal corrosion of opposition parties is pitiful, and only an incompetent alibi for their crass failure to manage their own affairs. They cannot govern their parties but tout their ability to govern Africa?s most populous country.

?As discerning citizens, Nigerians know better than to be distracted by the false alarm and hollow allegations of desperate politicians whose only goal is to shore up their political relevance in the build-up to 2027general election.?

As the fireworks between the ruling and opposition parties continue to unfold barely two years to the 2027 elections, all eyes are, without doubt, on the opposition to see how they will manage their affairs towards presenting a credible alternative to Nigerians at the polls. After all, the merger that gave birth to the APC, which wrestled power from the PDP, was birthed on February 6, 2013, exactly two years and eight days to the initial date (February 14) fixed for the 2015 presidential and National Assembly elections; although the elections were later shifted to March 28, 2015. (The Guardian)

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