By Okoi Obono-Obla
In the 2023 presidential election, Bola Ahmed Tinubu polled 341,554 votes in Ogun State to win the state, according to INEC. Atiku Abubakar of the PDP came second with 123,831 votes, while Peter Obi of the Labour Party came third with 85,829 votes.
It was a very tense and challenging political ecosystem in which the then presidential candidate of the APC found himself. Even though he was in the APC and was expectedly primed to enjoy the advantage of incumbency at the federal level, everything was stacked against him.
In Cross River State, where I come from, in my own community of Ugep — the headquarters of Yakurr Local Government Area — which has been an APC stronghold since as far back as 2019, electing candidates on its platform even when the incumbent Governor was in the PDP and the PDP was very formidable there, the dynamic had changed by 2023. The incumbent Governor, Ben Ayade, had defected to the APC in May 2021 and had strengthened the party. However, the situation on the ground on presidential election day in 2023 was as if the APC was in opposition at the federal level. The army squadron deployed to monitor the February 2023 presidential election arrested two APC stalwarts — Honourable Godwin Ettah (former Chairman of Yakurr Local Government and then incumbent Commissioner for Finance) and Honourable Ubi Itam Ettah (former Chairman of Yakurr Local Government) — and whisked them off to Enugu, Enugu State. This demoralized APC supporters. Yet the opposition would want us to believe that the APC federal government at the time supported Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu against the opposition.
But 2023 is gone. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is contesting the 2027 polls as the incumbent President, and the factors and dynamics that shaped the 2023 elections will not be the ones that will shape the 2027 polls.
I project that the votes scored by both Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar in Ogun State in 2023 will largely go to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027. This is because the prevailing sentiment in the South is that it is the turn of the region to continue to govern the country, which may significantly reduce the votes Atiku Abubakar had in 2023. And in 2027, the sentiment amongst the conservative electorate in Ogun State — the heartland of the Yoruba-speaking people of the South-West, where President Bola Ahmed Tinubu comes from — may be to vote massively for him, as he is more likely to win the election than Peter Obi, notwithstanding the claim by the opposition that his reform agenda has brought economic hardship.
I also project that the APC will make a clean sweep of the governorship and State and National Assembly elections, taking advantage of the relatively weak grassroots structures of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), which have never won off-season elections in any part of the country recently.
More so, the PDP, which was the main challenger to the APC in Ogun State, has been significantly weakened by internal strife, and things have reached a crescendo with INEC’s exclusion of its governorship candidate, Oladipupo Adebutu, from the final list of candidates for the 6th February 2027 governorship election. The exclusion was on the ground that the party violated Section 77(5)-(7) of the Electoral Act 2026, which makes submission of party membership registers mandatory — a position reinforced by the Supreme Court of Nigeria in its judgment of 24th September 2026 in INEC v. Zenith Labour Party.
Conclusion:
In essence, while 2023 was contested under a cloud of intra-party sabotage and institutional ambivalence, 2027 presents a different political arithmetic. With the power of incumbency, a consolidated Southern solidarity agenda, a home-base advantage in the South-West, and an opposition fractured by legal disqualifications and weak structures, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the APC are primed for a far more dominant outing in Ogun State than in 2023.
