By Mohammed Bello Doka
13 May, 2026.
The graveyard of African political giants is littered with the bones of those who forgot a simple truth etched into the bedrock of every successful revolution: hungry people do not care about your party logo. They do not care about your zoning formulas or your internal party disputes. They care about one thing and one thing only—food on the table and safety on their roads. And if the Nigerian opposition understands this, if it stops debating irrelevant nonsense and starts speaking directly to the northern stomach, 2027 will not be a coronation for the ruling party. It will be a reckoning.
Let me be clear from the outset. The opposition today is a mess. Fourteen opposition political parties signed the Ibadan Declaration in April 2026, a historic summit held at Agodi Government House in Oyo State, where they resolved to field a single consensus presidential candidate. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rabiu Kwankwaso, Rotimi Amaechi, Governor Seyi Makinde and a who’s who of Nigerian politics gathered in one hall and vowed to resist what they called the emergence of a one‑party state. For one brief moment, it looked like the beginning of something transformative.
Then reality intervened. Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso abandoned the platform to move to the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), which has since zoned its presidential ticket to the South for a single four‑year term. The Peoples Democratic Party is locked in a debilitating leadership crisis, with its Board of Trustees forced to assume control following a Supreme Court judgment that nullified the party’s national convention. The same court left the PDP without a clear leadership structure, and the subsequent squabbling has done nothing to reassure Nigerians that the party is ready to govern.
On paper, this fragmentation is a gift to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. A divided opposition usually hands victory to a united incumbent. Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth‑century political philosopher, observed that “the prince who relies on the disunity of his enemies will find that disunity is a fragile shield.” And he was right. When opposition forces waste their energy fighting each other over who gets to be the candidate, the electorate tunes out. They see the same old faces, the same old rivalries, the same old inability to put the nation before personal ambition.
But what Machiavelli also understood, and what the pessimists in our midst forget, is that politics is not mathematics. It is not a predetermined equation where fragmentation automatically equals defeat. There are moments in the life of a nation when the weight of public suffering becomes so immense that it crushes every artificial barrier erected by political elites. And Nigeria, specifically northern Nigeria, is living through such a moment right now.
Consider the security situation. The Arewa Consultative Forum, the most respected northern socio‑political body, has declared that Nigeria’s worsening insecurity has escalated into a “state of war”. The forum warned that the crisis has evolved beyond insurgency, banditry and communal clashes into a full‑scale conflict, calling on the federal government to adopt a wartime approach. In the North‑East, Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists have carried out coordinated attacks on military formations, killing senior military officers and civilians. In the North‑West, banditry has forced thousands from their homes. In the North‑Central, farmer‑herder clashes continue to claim lives. The ACF stated that the scale, persistence and human cost of the violence demand a fundamental shift in national priorities.
Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians have been killed or displaced in states such as Borno, Plateau, Niger and Kwara. And the economic consequences are devastating. The World Food Programme reported that nearly 35 million people are projected to experience acute and severe food insecurity during the 2026 lean season, and that 15,000 people in certain areas of Borno state are in the catastrophe phase—the first time this level has been reached in a decade. The UN warned that funding cuts have pushed 1.2 million people in Northeast Nigeria deeper into hunger. “This is a group that’s one step away from famine,” the WFP’s food security director said. “That does mean that people are dying…people are starving”.
Let that sink in. Fifteen thousand northerners, people like your neighbours and relatives, are one step away from famine. In the twenty‑first century. In a country that pumps millions of barrels of oil every day and whose leaders fly private jets to international summits. The North‑East alone has 3.6 million internally displaced persons. Conflict is destroying agricultural livelihoods, disrupting local food systems and fuelling inflation. Northern states that were once surplus food production areas are now grappling with a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
And the economy? The National Bureau of Statistics reports that 53 percent of Nigerians between the ages of 18 and 35 are either unemployed or working in conditions that do not meet the basic threshold of productive employment. Every year, 4.2 million young Nigerians enter the labour market. The formal economy creates roughly 650,000 new jobs annually—a gap so vast that it defies comprehension. Four million people chasing six hundred thousand jobs. That is not a talent deficit. That is a policy failure of historic proportions.
This is the northern reality. Insecurity, hunger, unemployment. A region that used to feed the nation now cannot feed itself. A region that sent its sons and daughters to the best schools now watches its youth rot in idleness. A region that voted overwhelmingly for the man who now sits in Aso Rock sits back and asks: what have we received in return?
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that in the absence of effective governance, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” That description fits far too many northern communities today. When the state fails to protect its citizens, when it cannot secure the roads or the farms or the markets, the social contract is broken. And when the social contract is broken, people do not look for sophisticated political theories. They look for anyone who promises to fix the problem. Anyone.
And that, right there, is the opposition’s opening. Because fragmentation is only fatal when the opposition parties are fighting over the same small pool of elite voters. But when a nation is on fire, when tens of millions of people are hungry and scared and angry, the pool expands. It expands to include every mother who cannot feed her child, every farmer who cannot reach his field, every graduate who has sent out a thousand applications and received nothing back. These people are not loyal to any party. They are loyal to results. Or rather, they are desperate for anyone who can deliver results.
History offers powerful examples of fragmented oppositions that triumphed by uniting around the core grievances of the people. Look at Ghana in 2000. After nearly two decades of dominance, fatigue with the Rawlings era created an opening. The New Patriotic Party stepped into that space with unity and credibility, speaking to civil society, to the youth, to the average Ghanaian. The people listened—and change happened.
Look at Kenya in 2002. The long shadow of KANU was broken when opposition leaders swallowed their pride and built a rainbow coalition. They agreed on Mwai Kibaki as a compromise candidate, and that unity dislodged a ruling party once thought unbeatable. The lesson is eternal: divided opposition is weak opposition; united opposition is unstoppable. But the unity must be built around something real. It cannot be unity for its own sake, a marriage of convenience arranged by self‑serving politicians. It must be unity of purpose, unity of message, unity around the one thing that every northern voter understands: the status quo is killing us.
Nigeria itself has walked this road before. For 16 years, the PDP seemed untouchable. Then in 2015, opposition leaders did the unthinkable—they merged their structures, set aside their egos, and rode on a wave of public frustration. Muhammadu Buhari became the face of that coalition, and for the first time in Nigeria’s history, a sitting president was defeated. That singular moment proved that disruption is possible, even in our complex political environment. It proved that when the opposition connects with the people’s hunger for change, no incumbent is safe.
But let me address the elephant in the room. The opposition is currently obsessed with zoning. Should the candidate come from the North or the South? Should the presidency rotate? Is it the North’s turn or not? Bashorun Dele Momodu, a chieftain of the ADC, recently described this debate as a distraction from Nigeria’s major problems—insecurity, poor electricity supply and governance failures. He said political discussions had shifted away from issues affecting ordinary Nigerians to arguments over where the presidential candidate comes from. “Instead of us now discussing we have no electricity, security is nil, and so on and so forth, all we’re now talking about is where a man comes from,” he said.
He is absolutely correct. The northern voter does not care whether the candidate comes from the North or the South. What the northern voter cares about is whether the candidate can stop the bandits who raid their villages at midnight. Whether the candidate can bring down the price of food so that a family of six can eat three meals a day. Whether the candidate can create jobs so that a young person who spent five years at university does not have to become a street hawker or, worse, a kidnapper out of sheer desperation. These are the issues that will decide the 2027 election. Not zoning. Not party loyalty. Not the identity politics that our elites have exploited for decades.
The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that “the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” By that measure, Nigeria is gravely ill. But Tocqueville also believed that the American democracy overcame its divisions because its citizens understood something fundamental: that their grievances were stronger than their differences. That is the challenge for the Nigerian opposition today. To look beyond personal ambition, beyond regional loyalty, beyond party affiliation, and to see the common thread that binds the northern voter to the southern voter—the simple, irreducible desire for a government that works.
The opposition does not need to be perfectly unified. It does not need to merge into a single party. It does not need to resolve every internal dispute before the election. What it needs is a shared diagnosis of the national sickness and a shared prescription for the cure. And the diagnosis is not complicated. Northern Nigeria is bleeding. Northern Nigeria is hungry. Northern Nigeria is tired of being taken for granted by a political class that shows up only when it needs votes and disappears until the next election cycle.
In April 2026, the opposition coalition in Ibadan made a start. They signed a declaration, they shook hands, they took photographs. But declarations do not feed children. Speeches do not stop bullets. What the opposition must do now is to take its message to the streets, to the villages, to the displaced persons camps, to the university campuses where angry young people are wondering if their country has any future at all. It must speak in the language of northern hunger—not as a slogan, but as a genuine commitment to reverse the catastrophe that has befallen the region.
And the northern voter must listen. Not as a passive recipient of political promises, but as an active participant in a democratic transaction. The philosopher John Locke argued that the authority of government derives from the consent of the governed, and that consent can be withdrawn when the government fails in its duties. The North gave its consent in 2023. The North gave its votes—millions of them—in good faith. But consent is not a blank cheque. It is a renewable contract, and the renewal terms are simple: security, food, jobs, dignity.
The opposition is fragmented. Yes. But that fragmentation is not the end of the story. Because fragmentation can still win if it speaks to what really matters. And what really matters in northern Nigeria today is not which opposition leader emerges as the candidate. What matters is whether that candidate—whoever it may be—can look a northern mother in the eye and say, convincingly, “I will secure your children. I will feed your family. I will give your young people a future.”
The road to 2027 runs through the North, and the North is ready to listen. But it is also ready to judge. And the verdict will depend not on how many opposition parties sign declarations, but on whether those declarations translate into action. The philosopher Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The North has done nothing for too long. It has endured insecurity, accepted hunger, tolerated joblessness, and turned out to vote for the same political class that has delivered nothing but pain. Enough.
In 2027, the North must vote not for a party or a personality, but for an agenda. The agenda of survival. The agenda of restoration. The agenda of a Nigeria where no child goes to bed hungry, where no community lives in fear of bandits, where no graduate asks what is the point of education. If the opposition can articulate that agenda, if it can convince the northern voter that it means what it says, then the fragmentation will not matter. The people will coalesce around the message, even if the messengers are still arguing.
2027 is not a distant fantasy. It is approaching faster than many realise. And the North is awakening from its long political slumber, rubbing its eyes and looking around at a landscape of despair. It is hungry. It is angry. It is desperate for change. And that hunger, that anger, that desperation—if channeled correctly—is more powerful than any party structure, any incumbency advantage, any electoral manipulation.
The opposition should take heart. The North is ready. But the North is also watching. And it will not be fooled again.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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