By HAKEEM BABA-AHMED

Sadly the nation is being forced to watch a fierce and diversionary quarrel over the 2027 elections with just a little under two years to get there. Just see how the Tinubu administration is scraping the shallow bottom of a dented bottom to fish out palliatives and promises and attempting to sell them as achievements in two years. The main opposition is going crazy over what it claims is an engineered exodus. Other politicians are attempting to cobble together another vessel of egos and personal ambitions. The nation watches a desperate frenzy over its troubled future. A people watch, with dejection and anger, as politicians expose the lie that Nigerian democracy is about the people.

With two years to go, the general game plan, if indeed there is one, appears to be to defeat the opposition before the contest commences. APC has turned transactional politics into a grand strategy with a limited goal of mopping up all opportunists. It is the favourite destination for all comers, and those who migrate with a few PDP and LP skulls get choice places, at least for now. PDP screams victimization, hoping the nation will ignore its record in serial self-mutilation. There is nothing of substance in the firmaments, except political skeletons speaking volumes of politicians in a country where power is most addictive. This current picture will change and mutate as politicians play their games and Nigerian voters make up their minds. The journey to 2027 will be eventful and challenging for Nigerians.

The APC appears bent on boosting its appearance only with booty from an anaemic opposition. It has been stampeded into a battle it has no business fighting, with two years of tough governance to go. It has sole responsibility for showing an impressive scorecard while fighting off an opposition sharpening its knives daily with a litany of governance failures. It is making elementary mistakes, including a seeming arrogance over its records; sustaining persistently poor engagement processes; faulty assumptions that feeding on the opposition alone will give it the strength to fight and win the election; creating the most personalized presidency which has every circle of power trembling, and ignoring the widespread perception that it is elevating transactional politics into the highest art form. Its biggest liability is a President who has very poor rating in most parts of the country.

The ruling party could boost its chances if it does not field President Tinubu in 2027, choosing instead to field a younger, healthier and more ambitious politician with fairly clean personal records. This seems very unlikely, such is the larger-than-life presence of President Tinubu in the party. The President himself may not give the idea of grooming a successor and giving his party a new lease of life a favourable thought. If PBAT will be its candidate, the APC has to improve its understanding and exploitation of fault lines into which it will need to pour unheard-of fortunes to buy votes and voters. Ditching northern Muslims for northern Christians will be a risky strategy, but quite possibly the only option in the North. The party is also a poor student in reading the dynamics of opportunistic and transactional politics. Its bursting haul of politicians will be a major threat to its ambition if it fails to appreciate the complexities of managing ambitions and sharing largesse among politicians solely motivated by personal interests. Its assets could become its liabilities at precisely the point where neither transaction nor threat will work.

The North will have a major influence in the outcome of the elections. It is the region that is most vulnerable to exploitation of fault lines and its poverty which trails it all the way to polling booths. The party must work hard to avoid a repeat of 2015 when the ruling party confronted an entire region massed against it. The South West will rally around him marginally if the main opposition fields a Northerner against him, but the ambivalence of this region should cause sleepless nights. The influence of Chief Spoiler Wike will weaken or grow, depending on the opposition?s response to the disarray in the South-South which will likely stabilize around its basic interests, not of an affluent appendage. LP will be decimated without Obi, and squeezed even further with him as its candidate. Obi?s ambition is now bigger than the LP, but he risks serious reduction as a politician if he takes decisions that alienate his followers. Of all the major politicians, none is more a captive of his core constituency than Obi. The South East is eager to recover from its multi-dimensional personality and assume a position in national leadership which reflects its passion for equity. It is likely to be available for a deal which gives it real power, and puts an end to a perennial sulking region on the margins.

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar seems to have the biggest dilemma. He is too weak to take on Tinubu?s second term ambitions, and too big to fit into schemes of other politicians angling for platforms that will actualize their personal ambitions. To leave the PDP (again) and seek a platform elsewhere will involve massive expenditure in energy and resources, assets that will be possessed in greater abundance in camps of those who will resist him as candidate. He could renounce the ambition to run (again) and engineer a reverse stampede into the PDP, as well as spearhead a Nigerian political re-engineering process. Politicians in the mold of the Waziri are very difficult to convince that there are edifying options to aspiring to be President in a country stuck with recycling its politicians.

The PDP is bleeding from massive onslaught of the governing party. Its biggest asset is Atiku, but he is also its biggest liability. His pre-eminent position in the party provides a reason for many real and contrived grievances. It is unlikely that PDP, with Atiku at the helm, will enter into an arrangement that gives it a role as second fiddle. Other parties could join PDP in a coalition of sorts, but some of them could ask for his ambition as a price. If the PDP could fix itself and take on the APC, it would not have bothered with pandering to interests that are at worst dubious, and at best delusional. This party that once bestrode the nation is at risk of history recording it as the largest contributor to APC?s success in 2027.

There are, of course, many other factors that will determine the outcome of the 2027 elections. The terrain is also liable to change dramatically when other key factors enter the fray, and calculations fail to provide the correct outcomes. A few of the factors that will sustain their value, however, will remain significant. First, the perceptions of the record of the APC administration, which still has almost two years to go, will be a critical factor. Second, the nature and resilience of the opposition will be decisive. Third, geo-politics and identity politics will still be strong. Four, integrity of the elections is central. The disturbing encroachment of the executive arm of government?s influence into all in arms and institutions of governance must be curtailed if democracy is to survive in Nigeria. At all cost, the 2027 elections must be credible.

? Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a former presidential aide, first published this piece in Vanguard.

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