THE news that former President Goodluck Jonathan may be nursing serious ambitions to return to Aso Rock in 2027 hit me the way most political gossip from Abuja always hits me ,I filed it as beer parlour speculation and moved on with my day. Even during the build-up to the 2023 elections there were persistent rumours that Jonathan was going to throw his hat in. He didn’t. So forgive me for not rushing to take this seriously.
Then I saw the court filing. Jonathan was challenging the constitutionality of the provision that bars him from taking a second oath of office ,the clause President Muhammadu Buhari signed into law. That changed things for me. Men who are not running for anything do not sue over their eligibility to run. You do not hire lawyers to construct arguments about hypothetical presidential rights when you are perfectly content being a respected statesman travelling the world as an election observer and mediator. That court case told me something. This thing might be real.
Then came the Kabiru Turaki faction of the Peoples Democratic Party the same faction backed by Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde announcing with all the gravity of a Transcorp Hilton press conference that Jonathan had been cleared as its presidential aspirant for 2027. Former Niger State Governor Babangida Aliyu stood before cameras and told the world that the screening committee saw nothing worth screening. He was deputy governor, then governor, then vice president, then president. A waiver was issued. Jonathan, apparently, is now a candidate.
I want to be clear: Jonathan has every right as a Nigerian citizen to contest the 2027 presidential election. That right is not in dispute. That is where my generosity ends.
Let me start with the elephant that has been sitting in the room since all this started. While her husband is busy in courtrooms challenging eligibility provisions, I recall that Dame Patience Jonathan some months ago pledging undying public support to First Lady Remi Tinubu. She did not whisper it. She made a full speech. A whole speech about friendship, loyalty, and how Oluremi Tinubu stood with them long before anyone called her First Lady. “I’m not going back to the villa,” she declared. “If you call me, I will not go.” She even recalled that when her husband contested the presidency in 2011, the Tinubus supported them. She said she has a conscience and cannot abandon her friend. Those are not the words of a woman preparing to return to Aso Rock.
So which Jonathan are we actually discussing? The one whose wife is publicly canvassing for his main opponent’s husband to win a second term, or the one quietly filing court papers challenging eligibility laws? Someone should get that household into the same strategy meeting. Or at the very minimum the same WhatsApp group.
Many people have attributed Jonathan’s renewed appetite to the Donald Trump effect,who lost power, refused to accept it and eventually clawed his way back to the White House in 2024. It is a compelling narrative. But the comparison does not survive contact with Nigerian political reality. Donald Trump had a base so fanatical that two impeachment trials, four indictments, a January 6 insurrection, and one conviction could not put a dent in it. He had billions in funding, an entire media ecosystem, a political movement, and a Republican Party that was essentially too frightened of him to say otherwise. I ask again what does Jonathan have walking into 2027?
The Archbishop Metropolitan and Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Most Rev. Henry Ndukuba, advised Jonathan at the First Session of the 13th Synod of the Diocese of Abuja last month not to contest. The Primate warned that a return to partisan politics risks corroding the statesmanlike reputation and international respect Jonathan currently holds. He reminded the country what Jonathan’s most consequential act actually was conceding defeat gracefully after the 2015 election, picking up the phone, calling Buhari, and sparing this country what could have been catastrophic post-election violence. I agree completely with the Archbishop.
That concession is Jonathan’s real legacy. It is the thing historians will write about. The thing that made him a reference point across Africa. That singular act of democratic grace earned him more international capital than six years in office ever did. He gets invited to observe elections from Liberia to Sierra Leone precisely because of that phone call. Why would any sensible man want to trade that permanent place in history for the spectacle of losing a presidential election badly in 2027?
But let us set sentiment aside and look at the hard numbers, because politics in Nigeria whatever else it may be is a game of structure and votes.
Jonathan’s entire calculation seems to rest on the following logic: he is the only viable southern candidate in a field where the incumbent, President Bola Tinubu, constitutionally can only run once more. So in 2027, there is a southern slot waiting and he wants it. Fine. But what base does he intend to assemble? Let us go region by region.
The South East? Peter Obi has that territory completely locked. The Labour Party candidate who shook the establishment in 2023 and pulled extraordinary numbers from Igbo voters not just in the southeast but across the diaspora and the south is not going anywhere. There is no realistic scenario in which Jonathan peels away a single governorship state from that grip. The idea that Jonathan can muscle into Igbo political consciousness when Obi has been their candidate, their symbol of aspiration, and frankly their collective pride since 2023, is not optimism. It is wishful thinking.
His South South base the region that gave him near-total votes in 2011 is now effectively FCT Minister Nyesom Wike’s territory, and Wike has made absolutely no secret of where he stands. The man openly declares his support for Tinubu’s second term. Wike controls Rivers State politics the way a LASTMA official controls a Lagos junction completely, and with zero apologies. Mind you, I will go further than that: I foresee Peter Obi actually outperforming Jonathan in the South South in 2027. Yes, you read that correctly. The same South South that once treated Jonathan like a son of the soil who made the whole region proud. The only state I can confidently put in Jonathan’s column is Bayelsa. One state. Out of thirty-six.
What about the North Central, which delivered those remarkable numbers in 2011? That coalition is gone. The specific alignment of forces that made Jonathan the consensus candidate for minority north communities in that election was a product of a particular moment in time PDP dominance, zoning arrangements, and a calculation that Jonathan represented a counterweight to core northern hegemony. None of those conditions exist in 2027. The North Central has been reconfigured by the APC years, by the emergence of a Tinubu presidency that has made different calculations with different constituencies. You cannot run a 2027 presidential campaign on a coalition that was assembled in 2010 and has since been dissolved, redistributed and rebuilt.
And then there is the platform problem arguably the most immediate obstacle standing between Jonathan and any serious candidacy. The Turaki-led faction of the PDP is still standing on one leg. The Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC )has not accepted the two-faction arrangement within the party, and there is a very real possibility that INEC will refuse to recognise candidates presented by a rump faction still fighting its own internal civil war in court. Jonathan could go through an entire convention, collect a waiver, accept a party flag and then discover at the point of submission that INEC considers that flag invalid. Then what? He would have spent money, generated headlines and damaged his reputation, all for nothing.
Let me also briefly address the eligibility case in court.Even if the courts rule entirely in Jonathan’s favour, legal clearance does not hand you a political base. It removes one obstacle on a road that has many other obstacles. The structural problems I have described remain untouched by any judge’s ruling.
Like I have said previously on this page, a man can have every legal right to run and still have absolutely no political business running. Rights and wisdom are different things entirely. Jonathan’s advisers whoever they are should be asking one simple question: what is the actual path to electoral votes? Name the states. Name the alliances. Draw the map. Because from where I stand, I cannot draw that map for him.
The Anglican Primate is right. Jonathan’s legacy as a democrat is intact and, by African standards, genuinely remarkable. He left office with his dignity, took a place in continental history for respecting the people’s verdict, and has since been trusted to oversee elections and peace processes across the continent precisely because of that restraint. That is not a small thing. That is rare and precious.
Throwing all of that into the rough and tumble of a 2027 Nigerian presidential campaign with its brutal ethnic arithmetic, PDP factional litigation, Wike calculations, Peter Obi dynamics, and INEC complications is not a comeback story. It is a gamble that risks rewriting his legacy in the worst possible way. The man who gracefully left becomes the man who couldn’t let go. History does not look kindly on that arc.
My advice to the former president is plain: the concession phone call you made to Buhari in 2015 was your finest hour. It is why the world still takes your calls. It is why you matter beyond Nigeria’s borders. Don’t let 2027 become the final scene that overshadows everything else.
- 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.