“Four of Nigeria’s finest writers diagnosed the national disease decades ago.”” With polling day fixed for 16 January and the primaries long closed, the opposition no longer has time for the plan it needed. It has time for the best plan the calendar allows”.
BY BELLO GWARZO ABDULLAHI
In 1864 Pope Pius IX issued his Syllabus of Errors, a catalogue of the doctrines he believed had corrupted an age. Nigeria has never lacked catalogers of its own. Chinua Achebe published A Man of the People in 1966, diagnosed the national disease in The Trouble with Nigeria in 1983, and returned to the wound in 2012 with There Was a Country. His diagnosis fits in a single sentence: the Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility of leadership. Wole Soyinka wrote The Man Died from detention under Gowon, and it reads less as a memoir than as an indictment of the silence that surrounds power. Mahmud Tukur spent a career arguing that Nigeria’s crisis was one of values rather than resources, of what its leadership class chose to serve. Yusufu Bala Usman warned, again and again, that religion, once conscripted into elite competition, stops being faith and becomes an instrument of manipulation.
Read together, these four writers are not ornaments to a political argument. They are the argument. What follows is my attempt to extend their diagnosis into the present moment: first by cataloguing five errors that keep Nigeria’s opposition politics where it is, and then by testing the remedies against a calendar that has already started to run, sorting those that events have overtaken from those that can still be delivered before Nigerians vote.
The first error is the belief that elections are won on election day, by popular enthusiasm alone. Achebe punctured that illusion sixty years ago. In A Man of the People, Odili’s faith in the righteousness of his cause counts for nothing against Chief Nanga’s command of patronage, transport and the machinery of incumbency, and the coup that ends the novel is Achebe’s verdict that structural rot, left alone, resolves itself by force rather than by ballot. The lesson is a practical one. Incumbents survive on institutional dominance, logistical control and mastery of how elections are administered, not on popularity. An opposition that has not built permanent polling-unit structures long before the campaign begins is not unlucky. It is repeating Odili’s mistake of confusing moral clarity with organizational capacity.
Even an opposition that organizes well tends to undo its own work through the second error, the ego of the perennial candidate. The idea that several opposition figures can run parallel presidential campaigns without handing victory to a consolidated ruling party is Nigeria’s most persistent act of self-sabotage. Tukur’s argument bears directly on it. He located the failure of governance not in any shortage of talent but in a leadership culture that places personal ascendancy above the interest of the constituency it claims to serve, and fragmented candidacies are that culture on display. Under a plurality system with strict requirements for geographic spread, a divided opposition guarantees the status quo as surely as if it had campaigned for it.
Unity on paper still has to be carried to the voters, and that exposes the third error: mistaking urban noise for rural mobilization. Digital momentum and city activism are routinely taken for national coverage. Achebe’s There Was a Country is instructive here for a different reason, because it records how quickly an elite lost touch with the material conditions of the people it governed, reading the confidence of the capital and the officer corps as a reading of the whole country. Campaigns make the same mistake when they treat social media enthusiasm and rallies as a national temperature check. Nigerian elections are decided disproportionately in non-urban corridors, where digital reach is thin and where local patronage networks and community structures, not hashtags, determine turnout.
Reaching those voters brings us to the fourth error, the assumption that power must be negotiated through primordial alliance and zoning arithmetic rather than through ideology and policy. This is where Usman’s warning becomes indispensable. His central thesis was that Nigeria’s elites, unable or unwilling to build genuine ideological coalitions, have repeatedly reached for religion and ethnicity as substitutes, manipulating both to manufacture followings that a programme could never have won. Zoning is the secular cousin of that manipulation. Geopolitical balance remains a pragmatic necessity in a federation as diverse as ours, and I do not argue otherwise. But a coalition built only on transactional elite bargains inherits everything Usman warned about. It produces governance without coherence, because it was never assembled around a shared idea of what governance is for.
The fifth error appears after the votes are counted, when political engagement is treated as an episode that returns every four years rather than a continuous operational battle. Soyinka’s The Man Died is at bottom a rejection of that passivity. Written from detention, it argues that silence and disengagement are themselves complicity, and that the citizen or opposition figure who leaves the field between elections cedes it entirely to power. An opposition that abandons the policy space once the results are announced forfeits the legitimacy it fought to win. What Soyinka demanded of the individual conscience, effective opposition politics must institutionalize through shadow cabinets, rigorous policy counter-proposals and continuous public monitoring of state expenditure.
The difficulty is that a roadmap written for a country with time to spare is of little use to one without it. The Independent National Electoral Commission has fixed 16 January 2027 for the presidential and National Assembly elections and 6 February for the governorship and State Assembly polls. Party primaries closed on 30 May, the nomination windows have shut, campaigns for the presidential and National Assembly contests opened on 19 August, and the official register of voters is due on 15 December. From the date of this article, barely sixteen weeks remain. Some of what I would once have prescribed has therefore been overtaken by events, and to pretend otherwise would be to commit the second error again, planning for the election one would like to have instead of the one on the calendar. As an engineer I distrust a diagnosis that arrives without a specification, but I distrust a specification that ignores the schedule even more. The task now is to find the optimum solution within the time left, which means being honest about what is lost, what can be compressed, and what the calendar actually improves.
The first casualty is consolidation in the form I would have preferred. A single, legally integrated political vehicle, with the candidate settled in advance by a transparent process, had to exist before the primaries, and the primaries are behind us. No merger can be engineered in the middle of a campaign, and I would not stake a strategy on whatever room the law and the Commission still leave for the withdrawal and substitution of candidates, which the parties’ lawyers should establish this week and which I would treat as a bonus rather than a plan. What can still be built is consolidation by conduct rather than by merger: a written compact among the opposition parties and their candidates, signed by the end of October, committing them to a common minimum programme, to a single pool of polling-unit agents so that no unit is left uncovered and no party’s money is spent twice on the same unit, to one tabulation system and one legal team, and to a rule of restraint under which they spend their fire on the incumbent rather than on one another. A candidate who cannot be removed from the ballot can still stand down in practice by publicly endorsing another, and the parties should agree now, in writing, on the conditions that would trigger it. The ego of the perennial candidate is not cured by a compact, but it is at least bound by one.
Ground command, the second remedy, cannot be completed in sixteen weeks and should not be attempted as though it could. Well over a hundred thousand polling units cannot be staffed, trained and equipped from a standing start. They can, however, be triaged. The coalition should rank states and local government corridors by the votes still available to it and by the risk that results will be altered there, and it should saturate the highest-value corridors first, with agents trained to do one thing well: witness the count, secure a copy of the polling-unit result sheet, and transmit it to a central tally that the coalition itself controls. Agents named by 15 November and trained by 15 December is a timetable that can be met; a national network by New Year’s Day is not. The rural corridors must come first, for the reason the third error gave: they decide the outcome, and they are where the opposition is thinnest.
The alliance with organized labour and youth, the third remedy, has gained from the calendar, because a campaign is where a programme is tested. A costed programme published in October is worth more than a perfect one published in December, since it can be challenged, corrected and defended before polling day. It should carry binding first-hundred-days commitments on electoral reform, judicial independence and civil service restructuring, alongside costed positions on fiscal reform, security architecture and sub-national economic autonomy. A coalition that can say what it will do, and what it will cost, has answered Usman’s charge that Nigerian politics offers followers a bargain in place of a programme.
Defense of the ballot, the fourth remedy, is the one for which sixteen weeks is enough, and the one the opposition can least afford to skimp. The publication of the register on 15 December offers a natural checkpoint: volunteers and lawyers should be ready to audit it against local knowledge in the days after it appears, and to challenge duplicates and missing names while there is still time to correct them. Independent parallel vote-tabulation networks, run with civil society partners, should be funded and rehearsed in a full dry run before the end of December, and a standing legal team should be ready to challenge irregularities within the statutory windows, with evidence gathered on the day rather than assertions made afterwards. The calendar also offers one consolation. Governorship and State Assembly elections follow on 6 February, so the network built for 16 January need not be disbanded. It can be redeployed within three weeks, corrected by whatever it learned from the first vote, and the investment is spread across two elections rather than one, which is how an engineer would want it.
Sorted against the calendar, the remedies fall into three groups. The single vehicle and the transparent candidate process, which answer Tukur’s charge about a leadership culture of personal ascendancy, are largely overtaken and must be replaced by the compact. Ground command, which answers Achebe’s warning about moral clarity without organization and his account of an elite reading the capital as the country, is compressed and must be triaged. The programme, which answers Usman, and the defense of the ballot are unaffected by the lateness of the hour, and the programme is helped by it. And Soyinka’s charge that silence is complicity is answered by shadow cabinets and continuous policy counter-proposals, the one remedy the calendar cannot touch because it never depended on the calendar. It begins with the campaign and must continue after the result, whichever way the result goes.
Nigeria’s political literature has already done the diagnostic work. Achebe named the disease, Soyinka refused to let it pass in silence, Tukur located it in the values of the leadership class, and Usman exposed the machinery by which that class manufactures consent. What remains is the discipline to act on a diagnosis that has been available, in plain language, for six decades, and the honesty to act on it with the time that is left rather than the time we wish we had.
That discipline can be tested, and this time the test carries dates. By 31 October the opposition should be able to show a signed compact among its parties and candidates and a published, costed programme. By 15 November it should have named agents in its priority corridors. By 15 December it should have those agents trained and its parallel tabulation system funded and rehearsed. If it cannot show all four on those dates, it will have read the syllabus and learned nothing from it. The opposition does not need the perfect plan. It needs the optimum one that the calendar allows.
…Engr. Bello Gwarzo Abdullahi, a political analyst based in Gombe can be reached via bgabdullahi@gmail.com
