Northern political strategists are reading the national mood and seeing a path to reclaim power in 2031 without fracturing Nigeria’s fragile regional equilibrium.
By FAROOQ A. KPEROGI
If the whispers from the smoke-filled inner rooms of northern political conclaves are to be believed, former President Goodluck Jonathan is being courted to return to the ring for the 2027 presidential bout. He may or may not be persuaded.
It is an irony too rich for fiction: some of the same northern political personages who orchestrated Jonathan’s ouster in 2015 now seek his resurrection for their own self-interested political salvation. Nigerian politics, as I’ve said before, is a theatre of paradoxes, with actors whose alliances are often dictated by the weather vane of self-preservation.
Contrary to popular misconception, which I also was once guilty of, Jonathan is not constitutionally barred from running for president in 2027. The 2017 constitutional amendment, which forbids anyone from taking the presidential oath more than twice, is not retroactive.
Jonathan’s tenure began in 2010 when he completed the remaining two years of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s term, then won election in 2011 before losing his re-election bid in 2015. The amendment came two years after his defeat. In law and logic, it does not apply to him.
Why the North is Wooing Jonathan
Northern political strategists are reading the national mood and seeing a path to reclaim power in 2031 without fracturing Nigeria’s fragile regional equilibrium. The consensus in the political weather forecast is that the South is entitled to eight uninterrupted years after Muhammadu Buhari’s northern presidency ended in 2023.
But President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s stewardship has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many northern power brokers. They suspect that, if given a second term, Tinubu will completely erode their political foothold in the federation’s power structures.
Faced with this, the North has two options. The first is to gamble on a formidable northern candidate, likely in alliance with the Southeast.
But Peter Obi remains a towering figure in the Southeast, and the dominant temperament in his political homeland is uncompromising: Obi as president or nothing. The thought of him playing deputy to a northerner is as politically palatable there as vinegar in palm wine.
Even if Obi doesn’t run for president in 2027 (because he seems to have no firm political base at the moment and might not have one even in 2027), it is doubtful that any other politician from the Southeast who is paired with a strong northern politician can produce a powerful counterweight to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The second, and far less risky, option is to back a southerner who is constitutionally shackled to a single term. This would guarantee a northern return to power by 2031.
Peter Obi’s public pledge to serve only one term if elected is seen as an empty promise born out of desperation. Power is intoxicating. Only few people have risen superior to its snares and allures.
Nigerian political history is littered with broken “gentleman’s agreements,” and Obi himself once swore eternal allegiance to APGA before defecting first to the PDP, then to the Labor Party, and most recently, to the African Democratic Congress (ADC). Power has a way of making even the sincerest pledges evaporate in the heat of incumbency and the joys of its perks and privileges. Northern politicians know this better than anyone.