Governors’ defections: People’s power must trump arrogance of power
President Bola Tinubu is taking no prisoners. He and his party, All Progressives Congress, APC, are going all out to co-opt governors of the opposition parties into their fold ahead of the 2027 presidential election. Recently, Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State defected from the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, to the APC, donning Tinubu’s trademark cap, now a test of loyalty. Governor Douye Diri of Bayelsa State also left the PDP and is, seemingly, headed for the APC. The Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, boasted that the APC will control 30 states by 2026, six states shy of the country’s 36 states. The minister later denied saying that, but the truth is that Tinubu is determined to capture the political space and have most opposition governors in his party or, at least, like Governor Charles Soludo of Anambra State, owing fealty to him.
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But why is President Tinubu going around like a buccaneer poaching other party’s governors, when he should be laser-focused on tackling head-on the grinding poverty and misery in Nigeria? Well, the answer is twofold. First, right from the day he was sworn on May 29, 2023, Tinubu has been fixated on his re-election bid in 2027. Every political move, every political alliance, such as the one with Nyesom Wike, former Rivers State governor and now Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, has been with 2027 in mind. Someone recently described Tinubu as a transactional president, who sees politics in terms of quid-pro-quo deals. The luring of opposition governors, through pressure and inducements, is certainly a transactional arrangement with an eye on electoral fortunes.
The second answer is the reason for this intervention, and it relies on the assumption that state governors determine the outcomes of presidential elections in Nigeria. Of course, given the ability of state governors to manipulate elections in their states, it’s hard to dismiss that assumption. As local kingpins, who sit atop of the political food chain in their respective states, governors can influence election outcomes often through patronage politics and massive rigging. One only needs to consider how in any local government election, virtually all chairmanships and councillorships are won by the party of the incumbent state governor.
“Voters are not genuinely free to vote their preferences, to elect leaders of their choice, thanks to vote-buying, rigging, violence and all other malpractices and irregularities associated with elections in Nigeria.”
Take Rivers State. Last year, the state conducted a local government election under Governor Siminalayi Fubara before President Tinubu suspended him from office. In that election, the party sponsored by Fubara, Action People’s Party, APP, won 22 of the state’s 23 local government areas. But fast forward to this year. Another local government election was conducted, this time under Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas (rtd), the Sole Administrator President Tinubu appointed to run the state. The outcome? Well, APC, which was inconsequential in the 2024 election, won 20 of the 23 LGAs. So, what happened within just one year? Are Rivers people so fickle in their political affiliations? Of course not. The truth is that a new “governor” was in charge, and ensured that the entire electoral process, from voter registration to the voting and collation of results, was totally compromised.
But that’s not how true democracies work. In a true democracy, power belongs to the people, and state governors don’t have oversized influence in elections. The 1999 Constitution describes Nigeria as a republic. But a republic is a state in which supreme power is held by the people, where elected representatives derive their offices from the will and consent of the governed, voluntarily expressed in a free and fair election.
Sadly, that’s not the case in Nigeria. Voters are not genuinely free to vote their preferences, to elect leaders of their choice, thanks to vote-buying, rigging, violence and all other malpractices and irregularities associated with elections in Nigeria. The result is that Nigeria has governors who are products of rigged elections or who are judge-made. And, of course, when those governors, who lack genuine legitimacy, come into power, they become extremely powerful. Yet the exercise of political power must flow from genuine legitimacy, otherwise democracy becomes a sham.
But too many governors in Nigeria exercise power without genuine legitimacy. Take Diri and Mbah, the two defecting PDP governors.
How did they get to power? Well, in Diri’s case, through the perverse judicialisation of elections. The candidate who won the gubernatorial election in Bayelsa State in 2019 was David Lyon of the APC, but the Supreme Court sacked him because his deputy presented forged certificates to INEC. Instead of ordering a new election, the apex court gave the governorship to Diri, who was not the people’s choice? What about Mbah? He won a deeply controversial election in 2023, in which he reportedly secured, according to INEC, 44.9 per cent of the votes against his closest rival’s 44 per cent. Yet, despite their dubious legitimacies, once in power, Diri and Mbah became so powerful that Tinubu now sees them as critical to his re-election in 2027.
In their book, Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know, John Campbell and Matthew Page said that “Nigerian state governors are more powerful than their American counterparts, propelling presidents into power.” Of course, they are right. No American governor is powerful enough to propel an unpopular presidential candidate into power. For instance, in the 2024 presidential election, all the swing states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, that Donald Trump won to secure a non-consecutive second term were controlled by Democratic governors. Yet, those governors could not help their party’s candidate, Kamala Harris, win their states and thus the presidency.
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Why? Well, because when it comes to electing a president, Americans vote based on their perception of a candidate, their preferences and their party affiliations. They do not follow the lead of a governor. But in Nigeria, a society steeped in corruption and clientelism, governors can easily use their patronage power to sway voters, leaving aside the rigging, which is characteristic of Nigerian elections.
But all the above said, 2023 shows the limits of state governors’ influence in presidential elections in Nigeria. Peter Obi, Labour Party’s presidential candidate, won eleven states and Abuja without the support of a single state governor. All the states that Obi won were controlled by governors from other parties, but, like governors of the American swing states, they could not deliver their states for their parties’ presidential candidates. Indeed, even the governor of Lagos State, Tinubu’s home state, could not deliver the state for their leader, as Obi won it. That was people’s power in action. Something similar happened in France in 2016 when Emmanuel Macron, then a junior minister in the government of President François Hollande, formed a brand new party, En Marche!, and defeated the established parties and their famous candidates in the presidential election. It’s called people’s power!
A time must truly come in Nigeria when people’s power routinely prevails over the hubris and oversized influence of state governors in presidential elections, when a presidential candidate can only secure victory by winning the hearts and minds of the people, not by stitching a grubby quid-pro-quo transactional deals with state governors. Truth is, the defecting PDP governors need the APC’s Federal might to guarantee them victory at their next elections or a soft landing after leaving office, while the APC needs the governors to do the hatchet job of “delivering” their states to President Tinubu in 2027. But Nigeria must reject the extractive politics of transactionalism and embrace the true spirits of representative democracy and republicanism, where power genuinely belongs to the people.
