When Jonathan Blinks, Tinubu Chokes, And In 2027, The Entire APC May Be Gasping For Its Last Breath

by Mohammed Bello Doka 

18 May, 2026.

In the twenty-nine months since Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office, Nigeria’s democracy has experienced a systematic strangulation unseen since the dark days of military rule. The President’s political machinery has functioned less like a government and more like a siege engine, deploying legal maneuvers, state patronage, and brute force to dismantle any threat to his consolidation of power. By April 2026, credible reports confirmed that Tinubu and his All Progressives Congress had adopted a “scorched earth stratagem” aimed at ensuring that no serious opposition candidate gets on the 2027 ballot at all. Former Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal has accused the ruling party of orchestrating a “dangerous and undemocratic agenda,” forcing opposition states into the APC through intimidation rather than credible elections, warning that Nigeria could be drifting towards “one-party dominance by design”. The weaponization of executive power reached its zenith in March 2025 when Tinubu declared a state of emergency in Rivers State, suspending Governor Siminalayi Fubara, his deputy, and all elected members of the Rivers State House of Assembly for an initial period of six months, a move that opposition leaders condemned as an unconstitutional power grab designed to destabilize a key opposition stronghold.

Across the country, this was seen as a stab in the back and a threat to democracy, and it galvanized a formidable coalition of Atiku Abubakar, Abubakar Malami, David Mark, Rauf Aregbesola, Rotimi Amaechi, and Nasir El-Rufai to formally launch a unified front against the President’s overreach. But Tinubu, undeterred, continued his strategy of infiltration. The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has urged the National Assembly to launch a credible investigation into allegations that the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Amupitan, operated an X account posting partisan support for the APC, with critics pointing to digital footprints that raise legitimate questions about the commission’s neutrality.

The President’s agenda has not spared his own political base in the North, where he has deliberately fomented crises between sitting governors and their predecessors to weaken independent power blocs. In Kano State, the longstanding cold war between former Governors Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Abdullahi Umar Ganduje has been deliberately inflamed by the presidency. After Governor Yusuf defected to the APC in January 2026, bringing along twenty-two lawmakers, sources within the party revealed that Ganduje had openly expressed his “dissatisfaction with what he described as a lack of consultation by the presidency on Kano party matters,” blaming Abuja for deepening the rift. The crisis degenerated into a bitter emirship tussle and a struggle over the deputy governor’s position, effectively paralyzing governance in Nigeria’s most populous northern state.

In Kaduna, the situation has turned into open political warfare. Former Governor Nasir El-Rufai, once a key Tinubu ally, has been locked in a bitter war of words with his successor, Governor Uba Sani. El-Rufai’s explosive allegations that the Sani administration paid one billion Naira to bandits led to a fierce rebuttal from the state government, which accused El-Rufai of being driven by “envy” over Sani’s success in fostering religious unity. Political watchers see this as a carefully orchestrated move by the presidency to keep Kaduna destabilized and prevent El-Rufai’s northern power base from coalescing against Tinubu. 

In Kebbi State, the chaos is equally telling. Governor Nasir Idris has directly accused former Attorney-General Abubakar Malami of economic sabotage and a hidden “terrorism agenda” followed by series of arrests, intimidation and imprisonment. Amid heightened political tensions ahead of 2027. 

The APC’s strategy of coercion has been most evident in its relentless campaign to force state governors into its fold. Since April 2025, a wave of defections has handed the APC control of previously opposition-held states. Governor Sheriff Oborevweri of Delta defected in April 2025, followed by governors from Akwa Ibom, Enugu, Bayelsa, Plateau, and Taraba states. In January 2026, Kano’s Abba Yusuf completed his long-expected move from the NNPP to the APC, bringing lawmakers and local government chairmen with him. Most recently, in March 2026, the defiant Zamfara State Governor finally surrendered, crossing over to the ruling party. The party now claims control of 31 states out of the country’s 36, with a Progressive Governors Forum meeting in Lagos bringing together 31 APC governors ahead of the party’s primaries. But this is not the result of organic support; it is the product of a systematic campaign of intimidation, where state resources were withheld, corruption cases were weaponized, and governors were given a simple choice: join the APC or face political annihilation. As one analyst put it, the pattern, the timing, and the absence of principle reveal a nation drifting toward a one-party state by design. Tinubu has publicly denied this, insisting he has no plan to impose a one-party system, but even his own words betray the reality. On Democracy Day 2025, he told the National Assembly that he was content simply watching the opposition “self-immolate,” a telling phrase that captures the administration’s hands-off approach to dismantling dissent from within. 

Yet the opposition has not merely self-destructed; it has been systematically weakened by legal maneuvers, defections, and the unprecedented use of emergency powers to suspend elected officials, as seen in Rivers.

Beyond the defections, Tinubu’s grand strategy for 2027 has been to unite the South under a single banner while leveraging the minority Christian vote in the North to fracture his opposition. Political analysts note that Tinubu’s overall strategy shifted dramatically after 2023; while he previously aligned with northern Muslims to win the presidency, he is now pivoting to align with northern Christians to secure his re-election. The President has assured Christian communities in the North of his administration’s “sincerity and commitment to equitable governance,” even as his policies have disproportionately favored the South-West. 

Meanwhile, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in the North has claimed that persecution has reduced under Tinubu, a narrative that the President has aggressively promoted to court this crucial demographic. But the northern political elite is not fooled. They see the heavy investment in southern infrastructure and the lopsided federal appointments as part of a calculated plan to condition people into thinking that the country is on the verge of collapse and that only Tinubu’s leadership can prevent it. The strategy is designed to create a permanent southern voting bloc that, when combined with a fractured Christian minority in the North, can deliver victory regardless of the North’s wishes. However, this strategy has blown up in his face, as the South itself is now irreparably fractured.

The perception of Yoruba hegemony has become impossible to ignore. Critics point to the appointment of Bashir Bayo Ojulari, a Yoruba Muslim from Kwara State, as the Group Chief Executive Officer of the NNPC, Nigeria’s cash cow, as evidence of a “pan-Yoruba ethnic project” designed to position Yoruba kinsmen in every strategic lever of power. Even the Pan-Yoruba socio-political group Afenifere has been forced to kick against what it called a “clandestine plot to sabotage the administration by describing it as a Yoruba government”, with Afenifere leader Olaitan declaring that “Nigerians must stop Tinubu before he becomes an emperor”. 

The grand design to impose a one-party state has only accelerated this disintegration. Since late 2024, political commentators have warned that Nigeria is drifting inexorably toward a one-party state, with President Tinubu employing tactics reminiscent of the late Gen. Sani Abacha, who forced political parties to unanimously endorse him in a sham election. Tambuwal has been the most vocal, warning against a return to a “one-party dominance by design” and accusing Tinubu of adopting Abacha’s exact playbook. However, the weapon fashioned against the opposition has now turned against the APC itself. The attempt to impose “consensus” candidates in APC primaries has triggered a full-scale internal crisis threatening to rip the ruling party apart.

As things began to fall apart, Nigeria’s political elite finally saw the threat and began to unite. Coalition talks set in motion the most formidable opposition alliance in a decade. On April 25, 2026, major opposition parties, including the PDP and ADC, met in Ibadan and adopted the Ibadan Declaration, pledging collective action to “rescue” the nation from what they termed the “oppressive and anti-democratic grip of the APC”. The declaration passed a vote of no confidence in the INEC chairman, alleging bias, and committed to fielding a single presidential candidate to face Tinubu. For a moment, it seemed the opposition had finally found its footing. But then the old demons resurfaced. Peter Obi, commanding the loyalty of millions of Obidients and a strong power base in the South-East and among younger urban voters, refused to be subsumed into a coalition dominated by old-guard politicians. He walked away, and alongside Rabiu Kwankwaso, quit the newly formed coalition, citing legal wrangles and internal divisions. The south fractured.

Seyi Makinde, the ambitious governor of Oyo State, then openly declared his own presidential ambition under the platform of the Allied Peoples Movement at a rally in Ibadan, refusing to step aside for any consensus candidate. A faction of the Peoples Democratic Party led by Kabiru Tanimu Turaki is screening former President Goodluck Jonathan as its sole presidential aspirant for the 2027 elections, with a 14-member committee including former Vice-President Namadi Sambo and former Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang overseeing the exercise. Talks are ongoing to draft Jonathan, Peter Obi, and Makinde into the race, a move that would produce three Southern candidates on the ballot splitting the southern vote three ways. Meanwhile, in the North, Atiku Abubakar has declared that 2027 will be his final attempt at the presidency. The African Democratic Congress has emerged as the main opposition platform, with Atiku and former transportation minister Rotimi Amaechi all seeking its presidential ticket, and the struggle for the ADC presidential ticket has become a deeply divisive internal crisis.

As it stands, Tinubu faces a set of impossible choices, each one worse than the last. He could use the courts and security agencies to further destabilize his opponents, but that will only make more enemies and accelerate the opposition’s unification. The President could allow his opponents to contest freely, but that would mean facing a fractured south where votes will be split between Jonathan, Obi, and Makinde, making it impossible for any single candidate to win. However, that same fragmentation would also mean that Tinubu has already lost his core northern base which will advantage Atiku if he eventually gets the ticket. 

Everywhere Tinubu turns, there is a crisis he cannot solve. The Ibadan Declaration ensures that regardless of what happens, the opposition will have a candidate on the ballot, and that candidate will be singularly focused on defeating Tinubu. The declaration, even if it cannot produce a single candidate, has created a framework for collaboration that will be catastrophic to Tinubu.

Another thing that sealed Tinubu’s fate is the amendment to the Electoral Act that capped moving to another party after submission of the voter register to INEC. In previous cycles, a sitting president could simply sponsor a prominent northern politician to defect to a rival party in the final stretch, thereby splitting the opposition’s vote. That weapon has been taken out of Tinubu’s arsenal. As it stands, the only person who could have helped Tinubu navigate this treacherous terrain was Nasir El‑Rufai. How he could have done that is a topic for another day. Unfortunately, Tinubu has slammed that door shut, and El‑Rufai is now among the team that is determined to send Tinubu back to Lagos — or to prison. 

If Tinubu goes into the election with three southern candidates and a single northern candidate, the opposite of what he intended will happen and he will lose. The arithmetic is brutal. Three southerners on the ballot will cannibalize the southern vote that Tinubu had hoped to consolidate under a single bloc. Meanwhile, a united northern candidate will sweep the North, a region that has historically voted en bloc when presented with a clear choice. The President’s strategy of using a fractured North to leverage minority Christian votes has backfired because the northern political establishment, from Atiku loyalists to the Atikulate movement to aggrieved APC governors, has coalesced around a single mission: to remove the man from Lagos who they believe has betrayed their interests. The North remembers that Tinubu won in 2023 on the back of northern votes, and they feel abandoned by a president who has since showered federal appointments and infrastructure dollars on his own Yoruba kinsmen.

The President has painted himself into a corner. His party is breaking apart. His opposition, though fragmented, is more determined than ever. His own northern base, the pillar upon which all Nigerian presidents rest, is in open revolt. The very instruments he fashioned to destroy his enemies consensus, defection deadlines, judicial intimidation have now been turned against him by a political class that has finally recognized the existential threat he poses to their survival. 

When Jonathan blinks, Tinubu chokes. And in 2027, the entire APC may be gasping for its last breath.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]