NIGERIA’s 2027 election is still four months away, but if you have been paying attention this week, you would think the ballots are printing already. From Ilorin to Enugu, from Minna to Calabar, the political class has abandoned any pretence of waiting. They are out in the open, drawing battle lines, counting numbers, and reminding themselves that in this country, elections are won long before Election Day.
Let me start with the North Central. The zone is bracing for what analysts are calling a fierce contest, and mind you, this is not hyperbole. The six states of Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger and Plateau, plus the Federal Capital Territory, are shaping up as one of the most closely watched battlegrounds in the country.
The ruling All Progressives Congress currently governs all six states in the zone, a feat party officials have been quick to celebrate. But governing a state and keeping it are two different sports entirely. In state after state, governors are moving to anoint successors, and in state after state, they are running into resistance from aspirants who feel entitled to their own turn, kingmakers who feel disrespected, and zoning arrangements that everyone agreed to in theory but nobody wants to honour in practice.
Here is what should worry the APC. There was a general feeling, not too long ago, that the 2027 presidential race was already settled, that the party had it in the bag and campaigning was just a formality. Then came the Osun State off-cycle governorship election, and that comfortable assumption took a beating. Suddenly, calculations changed. The APC, sensing the shift, has responded by constituting a Presidential Campaign Council, a show of force meant to tell the opposition that the ruling party is not sleeping on the job. Fair enough. But a campaign council of prominent names is not the same thing as 32 states of satisfied voters, and any strategist who confuses the two is setting the party up for a rude awakening.
Down in the South East, the story is a familiar tune with a slightly different arrangement. The APC, the African Democratic Congress and the Nigeria Democratic Congress have all declared readiness in Enugu State, each with its own theory of victory. The APC is banking on the record of Governor Peter Mbah, pointing to smart schools, primary health centres, an international conference centre and even a new airline as proof that the state has moved from a civil service economy to something more industrial.
The ADC is leaning on grassroots structures and the zoning of its ticket to the Enugu North senatorial zone. The NDC says it is building around an issue based campaign, which, if true, would actually be a welcome departure from the usual theatre.
Then there is Donald Duke, and I confess I did not expect to be writing about him again in 2026. The former Cross River governor, cleared as the Peoples Redemption Party’s presidential candidate, has framed his return not as another ego trip into a crowded field, but as an attempt to force opposition unity. He says the urgency of the moment demanded it, that Nigeria has suffered a leadership deficit since 1979, and that he is prepared to step down for a consensus candidate if the opposition can agree on one. That last part is the interesting bit. Duke told Channels Television he would absolutely support a unity candidate once the opposition settles on who is best positioned to win. It is a generous offer.
The trouble is, generosity has never been the currency of Nigerian opposition politics. Atiku Abubakar of the ADC and Peter Obi of the NDC are both still standing, both still convinced they are the man for the job, and neither has shown any appetite for stepping aside for the other, let alone for Duke.
It is not only the North Central and the South East drawing blood this early. Down in the South West, Oyo State is shaping up as its own theatre, with the three senatorial districts of Oyo North, Oyo Central and Oyo South already witnessing fierce positioning ahead of polls scheduled for January 2027.
Governor Seyi Makinde’s Peoples Democratic Party structure has had to collapse into the Allied Peoples Movement, while the APC continues to manage its own internal rumblings. If a governing party in a state as politically sophisticated as Oyo cannot keep its own house in order months to an election, what confidence should voters have in its capacity to manage the affairs of the state for another four years?
This is where I must be honest, because flattery has never done this page any good. The opposition’s biggest enemy in 2027 will not be the APC’s incumbency or its financial muscle, real as those are. It will be the opposition’s own inability to do simple arithmetic. Duke himself admitted it plainly: the APC controls more than 30 states, and it can still be beaten, but only if opposition parties abandon individual ambition and agree on a common candidate and a common strategy. That is not a new insight. Every election cycle since 1999, someone has made this same appeal, and every election cycle, the appeal has been ignored until the votes are counted and the losers wonder aloud what went wrong. Only in 2015 we saw something different .
Credit where it is due, though. There are signs of a more serious conversation happening this time, even if the egos have not caught up with it. Duke’s willingness to publicly say he would step aside is more than most politicians in his position have ever offered. And the fact that parties are at least gesturing toward issue based campaigns, rather than pure ethnic appeal, is a small but real improvement on the playbook of previous cycles. Nigerians should acknowledge that when they see it, even while holding these same politicians to account for the parts of the playbook that have not changed.
What should Nigerians actually be watching for as this field takes shape? First, whether the opposition can convert talk of unity into an actual mechanism, a primary, a consensus process, anything with teeth, before the election . Talk without a mechanism is just noise timed for the cameras. Second, whether the APC’s dominance in places like the North Central and north east and north west is genuine popularity or simply the absence, so far, of a credible alternative structure.
Those are not the same thing. Third, whether the internal party wars now playing out in some states get resolved through party mechanisms or spill into the kind of defections and litigation that have defined Nigerian politics since the Fourth Republic began. God forbid it becomes another season of courtroom politics instead of policy debate.
I have said it before on this page and I will say it again: rotation, zoning and regional arithmetic will always matter in a country as diverse as ours, and no serious politician can pretend otherwise. But arithmetic alone has never delivered good governance to anyone. The North Central has been governed entirely by one party for a full cycle, and ordinary people in Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger and Plateau are not asking which zone produces the next governor.
They are asking whether their roads will be fixed, whether farmers can return to their land without fear of being kidnapped, whether their children have functioning schools to attend. The same is true in Enugu and across the South East, where infrastructure announcements are being weighed by voters against the daily reality of insecurity and the cost of living.
So as the parties draw their maps and count their numbers, my appeal to both the ruling party and the opposition is simple. Contest the election on what you have done and what you intend to do, not merely on who your godfather is or which zone it is supposedly your turn to produce. Nigerians have watched this movie before, and they know how it ends when the arithmetic is the whole plot. Give them a script with substance this time.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.