OBI-KWANKWASO: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS MERGER, BY ANTHONY OBIRE

The Obi-Kwankwaso alliance is failing now, not in some remote future. Now it is falling apart, in public, in real time, and the loudest protests are coming from the backers of the two men themselves.

Whatever new banner the merger flies under, it has already run into the wall every serious observer predicted it would.

Obi’s “Obidient” movement has disowned it. Kwankwaso’s northern base has scorned it. The movement that was supposed to create the merged machine is now fighting over who gets to drive it, with factions already split over a director-general.

The alliance is fighting over its nameplate before any campaign literature has been printed. That’s not coalition.” That is a committee that cannot agree on who has the gavel.

APC former party chairman, Abdullahi Ganduje, has not cared to be polite about it. His judgment that the 2027 NDC bid is dead on arrival is not only self-serving, it is testable. And the early signs are good for that position.

Think about what the rejections are actually saying. Obi’s base, urban, southern, and notoriously hostile to what they call “recycled politicians,” are being asked to coalesce with Kwankwaso, a figure their own movement spent 2023 describing in precisely those terms. Meanwhile, Kwankwaso’s supporters are being asked to subordinate a northern engine to a southern candidate.

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The two camps are not natural partners; they are natural rivals who have a brief shared enemy. And the common enemy they have, Tinubu, is exactly what keeps them in the same room and that is why the room keeps growing lean.
That is the real story of the alliance. It’s not being rejected because it’s too bold an idea. It is being rejected because the people that it pretends to command never wanted it in the first place. A coalition that can’t convince its own followers isn’t a coalition, it’s a negotiation between two disappointed men and the ghosts of their old bases.

The arithmetic is on Tinubu’s side. The opposition was divided in 2023, resulting in a plurality win. By 2026 the divided opposition, now openly feuding, is something worse: it has produced a coalition so tangled in its own internal rejections that it cannot hardly provide leadership within its ranks, a tangible ticket or a message. The incumbent’s best asset in 2027 isn’t the record itself. It is the spectacle of the alternative arguing with itself before the campaign has even started.

Let the strange bedfellows continue to meet. Their supporter’s continued refusal to play the merger game is a free advertisement for the incumbent’s case. Nigerians are not being asked to choose between Tinubu and a united opposition. They’re being shown day by day that the opposition cannot even unite with itself.

That is the debate that Tinubu walks into as the favorite. Not because his challengers are weak men, but because their alliance is a weak thing, spurned by its own base, jeered at by its foes, incapable of answering the only question that counts: if you cannot agree on who leads you, why should Nigeria agree to be led by you at all?

Obire writes from Warri

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