The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr Peter Obi rounded off year 2025 with his defection to the African Democratic Congress (ADC).
The defection ended months of media speculations on the high profile defection. It also ended the former Anambra governor’s months of dilly-dallying over his next move.
Obi’s defection was predictable, considering the intractable leadership crisis that has fractured the Labour Party, on the platform of which he ran the 2023 presidential race.
The festering leadership crisis in the LP has effectively rendered the platform unserviceable for the 2027 electoral contests at the national and sub national levels.
Not a few analysts did accuse certain LP leaders, said to be acting in cahoots with external forces, contrived the crisis, with a view to frustrating Obi’s possible emergence as the party’s 2027 presidential candidate.
And with Obi out of the party, it’s left to be seen how the LP intends to organise itself for future elections, that is if it does not revert to its pre 2023 obscurity.
Obi Joins Atiku, Amaechi In Race For ADC Presidential Ticket
The scramble for the 2027 ADC presidential ticket is becoming more competitive as Obi joins fromer Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi in the race.
What will be the most intriguing aspect of the contest, is the presence of these formidable aspirants who want the party’s 2027 presidential ticket and perhaps, nothing less. Others may join the race along the line. But the three gentlemen are the contenders in the race for now. None of them is a pushover.
Atiku’s Strengths, Weaknesses
Atiku remains the most experienced of the three. As an old political war horse, he still controls political structures and significant following spread across the geopolitical zones.
His loyalists cut across the social strata and his popularity among a section of the youth population has not waned significantly. The Adamawa born politician still maintains ties with his older generation political associates.
Also, he can still bank on his old ties with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which he officially dumped a few months ago.
Unconfirmed media reports indicate an imminent mass defection of high profile politicians from the PDP and other opposition parties to the ADC in the days and months ahead.
Many of the potential defectors are said to be serving members of the National Assembly whose political parties have been crippled by leadership crises and who are unsure of the survival of their platforms in the 2027 and beyond.
Atiku’s major strength in the all important race, lies in the fact that he spearheaded the revival of the ADC, an otherwise dormant peripheral party operating mainly in the fringes until July 2025 when Atiku and his allies assumed the leadership of the party.
Also, what may give him some leverage in the race, is his public declaration that he would serve a single term of four years if he gets elected as president.
Many expect him to honour his word, because he would be past 84 years by the 2031 election cycle, an age widely considered far down the hill for anyone to run for election at any level.
On the other hand, many are wont to see his emergence as presidential candidate again, in 2027, as an attempt to abridge southern Nigeria’s eight-year tenancy at the presidency.
With the North having occupied the seat for eight years under Muhammadu Buhari, many Nigerians, including liberal northerners, are of the view that the South also deserves eight uninterrupted years that should terminate in 2031.
Not a few analysts recall how the North-South division contributed to PDP’s loss of the 2023 presidential election with Atiku as its candidate. This factor is still lingering and smouldering in today’s political landscape.
If anything, the sentiments still run deep as opposition to Atiku jostling for the 2027 ADC ticket keeps growing by the day. The argument by Atiku and his loyalists that Buhari did his eight years under the APC, is fast losing its appeal among key stakeholders within and outside the ADC.
The counter argument is that the 2027 election is a contest for the President of Nigeria and not for the President of the ADC or the APC.
More so, having run for president and failed in two consecutive election cycles – 2019 and 2023, on the platform of the PDP, many feel it’s high time Atiku yielded the ticket to a compatriot from the South.
Some stakeholders have cautioned against ceding presidential tickets to a single individual in three consecutive election cycles, regardless of the nomenclatures of the sponsor platforms.
According to them, that would create the impression that the North is attempting to hijack the Nigerian presidency.
“This will certainly create a feeling of alienation among our compatriots in the South who might show their resentment by leaving the ADC at a most critical period,” a stakeholder from one of the states in the Northwest observed.
Some critics are of the strong view that fielding Atiku, who will be above 80 years old by the time of the 2027 election, would be a hard sell for the ADC. More so, the party will be challenging an incumbent president who is adept at winning tough electoral battles.
They are quick to recall how Tinubu managed to win the 2023 presidential election despite the array of strong opposing forces within his party, the APC. They fear that winning the 2027 election might be a cakewalk for Tinubu and his APC if the ADC fails to get it right.
But so far, there is no indication that Atiku will back down on his already declared 2027 aspiration. As it were, the former vice president stands the fattest chance of winning if the leadership of the ADC decides to throw the contest for the 2027 ticket open to all comers.
For the ADC, which will be testing its electoral strength for the first time at the 2027 election, the race must start with getting it right with the choice of its presidential candidate.
Recall that Atiku ran a joint presidential ticket with Obi in the 2019 election with a brilliant outing on the platform of the PDP. The contestants and their erstwhile party, the PDP, still believe, rightly or wrongly, that they won, and that Buhari and his APC actually stole the ballot.
Amaechi: His Strengths, His Weaknesses
The former minister is no political neophyte, even though he has never got to contesting election at the presidential level. The closest he came to being in the race was his participation in the June 2022 presidential primaries of the APC.
He came a distant second with 326 delegate votes, against Tinubu’s 1,271 votes in a race that saw seven of the 13 other aspirants stepping down for the former Lagos governor.
A two-term Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly and two-term governor of the state, Amaechi does not command a nationwide political following.
However, he was able to build political bridges across the zones during his eight-year tenure (from 2015 to 2023) as Minister of Transportation that he could rely on for leverage.
But whether the bridges he built can see him through a successful outing in the race for the ADC presidential ticket is a different kettle of fish entirely.
Many of his political associates in Rivers State have either joined the APC or have been pushed to the backwaters of the dying PDP. Some of his displaced allies in the PDP may eventually join him in the ADC as events unfold in the future.
Amaechi has boldly declared that he would rather consider a ministerial appointment than be on the ADC ticket as a running mate to whoever wins the party’s presidential ticket.
The former minister is not likely to dump the ADC if he fails to secure the party’s presidential ticket. Moreso, there may be no other party to run to, as almost all the other opposition parties would have been dead by then, that is if they are not dead already.
Will Obi Play The Second Fiddle?
It’s apparent Obi cannot defeat Atiku in the contest for the ADC ticket. So, will he agree to be Atiku’s running mate in the likely event of losing the ticket to the old political horse?
The horse trading that led to his defection to the ADC may not be known to many of his supporters and members of the public alike.
But it would be naive for anyone to think that Obi joined the party without adequate consultation with key stakeholders in his support base, the Obidient Movement.
Obviously, some of his supporters may consider it infra dig for a man who contested for president in the last election cycle, to accept an offer of a running mate in the next election.
On the other hand, many would also consider the fact that Obi had also been a presidential running mate to the same man in a previous election.
Moreso, partisan politics thrives on compromises where players subsume their individual ambitions under what they consider to be the common good of a larger group.
Obi, who made a brilliant showing as candidate of the LP in the 2023 presidential election, may, or may not enjoy the same vote harvest running as a vice presidential candidate in 2027.
Apart from the fact that there are no other viable opposition parties to join outside the ADC, Atiku’s promise to serve a single term may have informed Obi’s decision to join the ADC. Perhaps.
But when viewed from a different prism, his decision to run with a presidential candidate of northern extraction, against a fellow southern candidate (Tinubu) may not sit well with a sizeable chunk of voters in the South, mainly in Tinubu’s Southwest.
They may consider it an act of betrayal of southern solidarity, even though such a position is largely hinged on ethno-regional sentiments.
Obi’s critics will remind him that it was for the same North-South sentiments that Atiku and many of his allies dumped the PDP in the build up to the 2015 election, when then President Goodluck Jonathan insisted on flying the PDP ticket.
Atiku and his group had insisted that it was the turn of the North and that Jonathan unjustly appropriated the region’s slot.
Also, it was for the same North-South sentiments that Obi dumped the PDP in the build up to the 2023 election when it was apparent that Atiku would get the party’s ticket.
However, political dynamics in today’s Nigeria appeared to have shifted from the sentimental to the pragmatic.
With the growing hardship in the land, occasioned by the harsh economic policies of the Tinubu administration, Nigerians across the board may be hard put to reconsider their choices in the next election.
The prevailing view is that the ruling APC, despite the mass defection of governors and federal lawmakers to its fold, may be quite uncomfortable with an Atiku-Obi ticket.
Recall that the combined votes won by Atiku’s PDP and Obi’s LP in the 2023 presidential election would have nailed Tinubu and his APC’s coffin if they had run on a joint ticket.
Obi, without “structure” had pulled a surprise in the poll by winning all the five states in the Southeast. He won Delta State, where the then Governor Ifeanyi Okowa was Atiku’s running mate.
The then LP presidential candidate also won in Plateau and Edo states. He also garnered significant votes in Benue, Rivers and many of the states in the South-South zone.
Analysts believe that voters in those states will still vote any platform that fields Obi on its presidential ticket, either as candidate or a running mate.
However, 2027 is still quite a distance and given the fluid nature of politics, there are likely to be upsets in the camps of both the ruling party and the opposition as well.
It’s a win-some and lose-some game that either sides can win. So who wins? Who loses? It’s too early to tell.