2027: To repudiate or vindicate the APC?

The dilemma some of us will confront when the 2027 general election draws near is what to do with the APC. By “some of us”, I have deliberately excluded the APC’s ride or die voters who will stick to their partisan choices no matter what. Those ones, because they mostly base their vote on religious or tribal sentiments, are not going to give any more thought to voting other than double down on their pre-made decisions. Their choices should be respected, but there is no swaying them. For the rest of us who decide based on the options in front of us, there is the question of what to do with the APC in 2027, when the choices are either nonexistent, narrow, or uninspiring. Casting a vote will not just be about increasing or decreasing the contenders’ tallies. Who we vote for has serious implications, because it will determine whether we want to repudiate or vindicate the incumbent APC’s failures.

If there is something that many of us can easily agree on, it is that the APC has underperformed. Anyone who disagrees with that is either disingenuous or sincerely deluded. There is no one—apart from those who are benefitting from this government one way or another—who can state how their lives have significantly improved since 2015 or 2023. They came into power over-promising and have spent the past three years under-delivering. The basic problems of water, light, food, and housing that Nigeria has faced forever are nowhere near resolution. Add to that list of perennial malignancies the seemingly intractable problem of security, plus corruption, a growing debt profile, and an underproductive economy, and one would almost despair. Everything we complained about under the PDP has not only failed to improve, but is, in fact, worse. Eleven years on, and our lives have not changed significantly.

A while ago, APC supporters would have reminded us that the Muhammadu Buhari and the Bola Tinubu administrations are two different regimes, but no more. With his own mouth, Tinubu himself has admitted that they are continuous. So, what we are looking at is an unbroken sequence of underwhelming administrative capacities. Buhari was a disaster in every form, and Tinubu is hardly an improvement on his many shortcomings. Giving them another four years will not make any difference. This is all there is to the APC; nothing else is coming. In fact, Remi Tinubu said it best when she confessed that the President “has no magic”. If his own wife has enough truth in her to admit that her husband has no capacity for social transformation, why hope against hope?

Part of the problem is that the APC overwhelmingly consists of over-promoted pretenders who launched into national reckoning without enduring enough scrutiny. They started as the “opposition” and were indulged as underdogs. When they boasted about what they would do if given real power, they were not taken to task enough. By the time they started slithering their way to the Federal Government, it was clear that they were way over their heads. Since then, they have gone from a provincial party to a national behemoth, and the result is the multiplication of the factors of their ineffectiveness across all spheres. So, yes, there are many grounds to repudiate a party like the APC by voting against them. To vote for them is to make a firm statement of repudiating incompetence, insecurity, mediocrity, corruption, nepotism, and abuse of power.

Now, the dilemma arises when you start to consider the alternative, the so-called opposition. There are several of them, but the ones that seem to be keeping the APC itself awake are the ADC members. They are not a formidable company; the ADC is—like most of what we call “opposition” parties in Nigeria—more of an ad hoc platform for disaffected politicians displaced from the presidential party. Since there is no binding ideology that cements political parties in Nigeria, some of them are ready to sleep in the ADC tonight and wake up in the APC camp tomorrow morning. That is not because the APC has any superior vision that draws anyone; the main centripetal force that glues party members is either presidential power or access to money until you eventually get presidential power. Also, it is hard to trust that they have not been infiltrated. Recent statements by Bola Tinubu and Gbajabiamila suggest that some characters in the ADC have been planted to cause disarray within the party. If so, voting for them will lead to a repeat of 2023, when the Labour Party reaped the benefits of collective disenchantment with the APC. Rather than step up and consolidate their gains, the LP frittered everything away, further shrinking the space for opposition politics in the country. Given Tinubu and Gbajabiamila’s self-confession, I will not be surprised how much they were involved in the ruin of the LP (and, more obviously, the PDP).

Then there are the problems of a coherent manifesto or even credible characters to drive a reformation agenda, they supposedly tout. Nobody knows for sure what the ADC stands for right now, other than being a major opposition. Some of the people who currently populate the party have been in power at various times, and they did not justify themselves any better than we are currently trying to bring down. What exactly will be different if the ADC takes over from the APC? It is vital to scrutinise them, not just give them the same pass the APC received when it was the so-called opposition. All the while, Tinubu was celebrated as the “builder of modern Lagos”, there was little interrogation of how a city that lacks basic services like potable water or sewage facilities can be called “modern”. We elided all the uncomfortable questions, and today neither Nigeria nor Lagos is better for it. It is 2026, and their solution to waste management in Lagos is to fall back on 20th-century methods of observing “sanitation day”. If they are that bereft of practical and progressive ideas, they might as well bring back the woléwolé system. That is the outcome you get from hyping underachievement and setting the bar low.

That is also why I am wary of overlooking the glaring faults of the ADC just so we can get the underperforming APC out of power. To keep them there longer is to prolong the irreparable harm they can cause. As needed as it is to get rid of an incompetent cohort, there is nothing desirable about replacing them with another set of mediocre politicians who will take us on another wild ride for another four, eight, twelve, or sixteen years before we can finally get rid of their nuisance. After Buhari, I no longer believe in voting “the lesser evil” just to get rid of an incumbent one.

Yet, the APC is not a viable option. To vote for them again is to clearly communicate that mediocrity and underperformance do not matter. Once Buhari won a second term despite his many failures in his first term, it became a telling statement of how much Nigerians had consented to what he was doing to them. The same thing will be true in 2027. If, with our own hand, we vote for people who have made no gains in their first term, we lose the moral right to complain about them during their second term. Giving them a second term takes us from the condition of being the victim of their ineffectiveness to consensual participants in our affliction. So, yes, the choices ahead of us in 2027 are not about choosing between two parties that can foster national development or not, but are sadly reduced to a repudiation or vindication of a mediocre incumbent.