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- Says PDP lost eight governors voluntarily
A political research and advocacy group, the Future Nigeria League, has dismissed criticism of President Bola Tinubu’s description of the 2027 presidential contest as open and competitive, insisting that the difficulties confronting the country’s opposition parties are entirely of their own making.
In a statement issued in Abuja and signed by its Executive Director, Ike Chijoke, the group said the objection raised against the President after his meeting with the leadership of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria did not survive contact with the three-and-a-half-year record of the parties now complaining.
Tinubu had received the CBCN delegation, led by the Archbishop of Kaduna and President of the Conference, Most Rev. Matthew Man-Oso Ndagoso, at the State House, Abuja, on Tuesday, July 28. The President was reported to have said that all was fair in politics and that the opportunity open to every contestant was equal.
The remarks drew objection from sections of the opposition, who read them as a denial of the pressures facing challenger parties ahead of the poll scheduled for January 16, 2027.
The FNL said the President had stated nothing beyond the constitutional position.
“Nigerian law guarantees equal opportunity. It has never guaranteed equal preparation, equal discipline, or equal competence,” the statement said. “Those are earned inside political parties, by the people who run them.”
The group added that between February 2023 and August 2026, the parties that contested the last presidential election had no restriction on registration, no restriction on campaigning, free access to the courts, and control of state governments and legislative seats.
Three years, eight governorships
Central to the group’s argument is what it described as a readiness audit of the two parties that produced the leading challengers in 2023.
According to the statement, the Peoples Democratic Party held 10 governorships in February 2023 and holds two today, with only Bauchi and Oyo remaining. Each departure, the group said, was a voluntary decision taken by the governor concerned.
The FNL further claimed that the PDP’s 2023 standard bearer, Atiku Abubakar, has since left for the African Democratic Congress, that the party is now presenting Senator Sandy Onor, that its national leadership is claimed by rival committees, and that its Ibadan national convention of November 14, 2025 was halted hours before it opened on a suit filed by one of its own members.
On the Labour Party, the group said the leadership dispute that began in 2023 remains unresolved three years later, and that the party’s 2023 candidate, Peter Obi, left in December 2025 and was ratified as the candidate of the New Democratic Coalition on May 30, 2026.
Where the opposition vote was split three ways in 2023, the statement said, it is now spread across four or more platforms.
“Not one of these changes was authored by the Presidency,” the group said. “Every defection was a personal choice. Every split was decided over a ticket its own founders could not agree to share.”
‘Filed by the opposition, against the opposition’
The FNL listed eleven leadership disputes, expulsions, defections and court actions recorded since 2023, and said the origin of every one of them was internal to the opposition.
It said a coalition assembled in March 2025 to consolidate the opposition vote had adopted a common platform by July 2025, only to break into two presidential campaigns by May 2026, with a third party and a fourth platform fielding separately.
“The arithmetic they complain about is the arithmetic they chose,” the statement said.
‘They asked for a referee, now dispute the whistle’
Responding to criticism of the President’s defence of the Independent National Electoral Commission, the group said the commission had been drawn into the disputes rather than volunteering for them.
Where a party splits into two national committees, each writing to the commission as the authentic leadership, the commission cannot decline to decide whose correspondence it accepts, the statement said. Where courts issue conflicting orders, it must follow the order in force, and reverse when an appellate court reverses.
“A body cannot simultaneously be accused of refusing to arbitrate and of arbitrating too much,” the group said. “The parties asked for a referee. They are now disputing the whistle.”
The FNL also cited an argument made publicly in January 2026 by the ADC’s national secretary, that governors do not determine outcomes, noting the ruling party’s performance in the South West in 2023 and its 5.8 per cent showing in the South East. The group said the analysis was sound, and that it equally disposes of the claim that defections to the governing party have predetermined 2027.
“Structure does not vote. People vote,” it said.
On the bishops: ‘not one standard applied twice’
The group said the Conference was entitled to speak and that its concerns deserved a serious answer, while taking issue with four elements of its position.
It noted that the CBCN opposed the governing party’s ticket in July 2022 on the ground of shared faith, and renewed that framing in July 2026, while in the same address asking that the Supreme Court’s ruling of February 10, 2026 on the religious freedom of Muslim students be applied uniformly.
“A standard under which a citizen’s faith cannot limit his rights, but a candidate’s faith can limit his eligibility, is not one standard applied twice. It is two standards,” the statement said.
On the Conference’s warning that political pluralism is narrowing, the group accepted the concern as legitimate on the facts but disputed its direction, saying pluralism had not narrowed because any party was banned, any candidate disqualified or any campaign prevented.
Addressing turnout figures of 23 per cent at the 2023 general election and 7 per cent at the recent FCT council polls, which the Conference cited in its February 26, 2026 communique, the FNL said a voter who watched three opposition platforms produce four presidential campaigns from one coalition was registering doubt about the alternative rather than about the electoral commission.
The group also observed that the same address carried requests for the return of mission schools and a state invitation to the Holy Father, and said a body seeking concessions in the same sitting in which it grades a government’s democratic conduct should expect the two to be read together.
‘No red carpet’
The FNL said the President’s remarks required no retraction, adding that no candidate had been barred and no campaign prohibited.
“What the President declined to offer was a red carpet. He is under no obligation to provide one,” the statement said. “The office is not surrendered by courtesy. It is contested, and it will be contested to the finish.”
Chijoke said the answer available to the opposition was the one available to every opposition in every democracy: build the party, agree the ticket, keep the members, and take the argument to the voters.
“Equal opportunity is a legal guarantee, not a delivery service,” he said. “The law gave every party the same three years. The record shows what each of them did with the time. No amount of commentary on the President’s language changes a single line of that record.”
Efforts to obtain reactions from the PDP, the Labour Party, the ADC and the NDC were unsuccessful as of press time.
