A few prominent names in Nigeria’s failed opposition have issued a statement accusing President Bola Tinubu of presiding over an administration that is determined to make Nigeria a one-party dictatorship. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, they claimed, has been weaponised into hounding opposition politicians, particularly governors, who have been or are being forced to defect to the governing All Progressives Congress. Otherwise, they risk prosecution for financial crimes by the EFCC. The accusation of a partisan EFCC, the politicians claim, is the general perception of Nigerians.
Rather than owning this position with their full chest, as Nigerians would say in common parlance, these estranged members of the political class have disingenuously attributed their claims to the Nigerian people. Many of the politicians in the so-called opposition were at one time or the other members of the APC or some of the other political parties in which they frequently congregate in a tradition that has almost flattened the political space. As true partisans, they want Nigeria’s public accounts between 2015 and 2025 made public, as if that is the only period covered by civil governance. Did locusts eat the PDP years?
In nagging about Bola Tinubu and the APC, they executed a sleight of hand that allows them to say, as they are accustomed to saying, that the 2027 election is a contest, more or less a referendum, between Nigerians and the APC. This, as if members of the opposition are the only true Nigerians and those in the APC are aliens descended from outer space or Upper Mongolia. When it is convenient for them, Nigerian politicians separate themselves from their estranged counterparts and speak in a language that dissolves the difference between them and the underdog majority that have borne the burden of their oppressive rule. It is all a red herring for which Nigerians are no longer falling.
And one might ask: who are the opposition figures that endorsed the statement warning about the APC’s misuse of state institutions in their alleged quest for a one-party state? We have the usual suspects, the duo that lost the last presidential election in 2023, namely: Atiku Abubakar, formerly of the PDP but now of the ADC, and Peter Obi, always a lightweight but for the 2023 miracle, is now politically destitute, a wandering meteor in the political galaxy.
I guess it’s the EFCC that has turned the BOT of his faction of the LP against the NWC? David Mark, two-time President of the Nigerian Senate, is a reconditioned democrat and former one-star General of the Nigerian Army. He was in that class of a soldiery junta that traduced the democratic will of Nigerians with their annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. He demonstrated his disdain for the same Nigerians he now pretends to be friends with by his notorious statement, as Minister of Communication in 1985, that telephones are not meant for the poor. That is an infrastructure that we have in almost 25 years taken for granted. David Mark is the chair of the ADC, a political party that was supposed to be the grand alliance of the Nigerian opposition and nemesis of the APC. The splash that heralded its formation has since tapered into a cold whimper.
John Odigie Oyegun, an otherwise dignified technocrat, a former governor of Edo State and one-time chair of the governing APC, has since fallen into political oblivion. Who else signed off on that statement? Lawal Batagarawa? Of what timbre is he as a politician? One wonders why Rauf Aregbesola, Nasir el-Rufai and Rotimi Amaechi were left out. For Amaechi, could it be connected to his recent assertion to contest for the presidency in his own right and not as anyone’s (Atiku Abubakar?) deputy?
El-Rufai has been hibernating since Donald Trump decided to give the tiresome issue of Christian genocide the kind of close look that could reveal quite a bit about his mistreatment of the Christian population of Southern Kaduna during his time as the Governor of Kaduna. The Janus-faced Nasir who has spoken for and against the Jihadist Islam championed by the Fulani bandits and terrorists responsible for most of the targetted attacks on Christian communities of the North and the Middle Belt sure knows when to hide his head. Aregbesola has been sulking since he was pelted with stones during a run-in with alleged APC thugs in Ekiti.
My point, therefore, is that the so-called senior opposition leaders, as a Vanguard report described them, are expired politicians catching at straws. Otherwise, it is Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi who are complaining, lamenting their inability to gain traction as the country heads into the 2027 election. They only added a few names to give a semblance of gravitas to their complaints.
The truth is that the APC would be delusional to think it can make Nigeria a one-party state even if it cannot see it is neither in its nor Nigeria’s interest. But the country is in no greater danger of becoming a one-party state than it was when PDP controlled 28 states out of 36 at the peak of its reign. APC is yet one state lesser than the PDP was then and, is perhaps, aiming to match the latter’s record.
The likelihood of the APC using the EFCC to hound its opponent is possible, even probable, but it would be following a playbook written by the PDP, beginning with President Olusegun Obasanjo from 2004/2005. In the election that brought Umar Yar’Adua into office, Obasanjo upped the ante, saying the matter was a do-or-die affair, after decimating the opposition parties, especially the camp of Alliance for Democracy governors and even governors of the PDP he wanted out. My advice in those years and in this space is the same advice I’m again offering: the so-called selective prosecution of the EFCC should be sustained for as long as those being prosecuted have a case to answer. The country is better off making corrupt politicians and office holders accountable than allowing them to enjoy the proceeds of their crime. Someday, a Pharaoh would emerge who did not know Joseph and the table would turn. President Bola Tinubu was himself docked by the Code of Conduct Bureau under a PDP government for operating multiple foreign accounts in 2011. The heavens did not fall nor did that stop him from going on to co-found a party that ousted the PDP from power.
The problem with today’s opposition is their refusal, which amounted to a failure of leadership, to do the work of opposition. Like Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, it is too self-indulgent to do more than look for the carefully laid nest to rest its head.
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