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• Jonathan worried over lingering legal tussle on eligibility
From Fred Itua, Abuja
Former president, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, may have abandoned plans to contest the 2027 presidential election on the platform of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), over the lingering legal tussle on his eligibility to run for office.
Instead, Daily Sun has gathered that the former president may have secretly settled on Peter Obi as its presidential candidate with Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso as his running mate. Sources with direct knowledge of the discussions told Daily Sun that Jonathan participated in a series of discreet meetings in Abuja with another former president and senior NDC leaders before reaching the decision to withdraw from contention.
The meetings, held across several sessions, produced not only Jonathan’s exit but a comprehensive arrangement on how the NDC will prosecute its 2027 presidential campaign. The NDC has zoned its presidential ticket to the South for a single term of four years, with the implicit understanding that Kwankwaso will be positioned to succeed Obi in 2031 if the joint ticket wins.
Sources privately acknowledged, however, that age may become a complicating factor in that succession plan, given Kwankwaso’s age trajectory by 2031.
Senior NDC leaders, prominent PDP figures and a broad coalition of Christian leaders have already begun quiet mobilisation for the Obi and Kwankwaso ticket, according to sources familiar with the arrangement. Sources told Daily Sun that Jonathan’s withdrawal was driven by two overriding concerns that he ultimately concluded were impossible to manage.
Jonathan’s eligibility to contest a second term remains a genuinely contested constitutional question, given that he served out the remainder of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s term before winning the presidency in his own right in 2011 and serving one full term before conceding defeat to late President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015.
He is understood to have concluded after careful consultations that litigating his eligibility publicly carries a reputational risk he is not prepared to absorb. A court ruling against him, even one later overturned on appeal, would constitute a public humiliation capable of permanently denting the carefully managed legacy he has built since leaving office in 2015.
Sources told Daily Sun that Jonathan is acutely aware of what they described as the appetite of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s political circle for opposition candidates who enter the race without adequate structural protection.
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Cabinet members and political operatives, in Jonathan’s assessment, have demonstrated both the willingness and the capacity to make conditions difficult for credible opposition figures through institutional and other means.
Jonathan, conscious of his international standing and post-presidential reputation, was unwilling to expose himself to that pressure. The combination of both concerns, Daily Sun gathered, informed Jonathan’s decision to retreat. Obi and Kwankwaso ran in the 2023 presidential election on separate platforms, Obi under the Labour Party (LP) and Kwankwaso under the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), a split that diluted the combined opposition vote against Tinubu.
“The NDC arrangement consolidates what 2023 kept apart, placing both men on a single platform under a formal ticket with agreed roles and a structured succession understanding.
Obi brings to the ticket his base among South-East and South-South voters, reinforced by the enduring loyalty of the Obidient movement, which mobilised millions of young urban voters across all regions in 2023.
“Kwankwaso brings the deep grassroots structures of his Kwankwasiyya movement, which commands formidable loyalty across Kano and the broader North West. Together, the ticket covers the most critical electoral geography required for a competitive national campaign,” a member of NDC who attended one of the meetings, told Daily Sun.
The involvement of PDP figures in the early mobilisation, Daily Sun further gathered, has already attracted support beyond the NDC’s own structure and may be developing into a wider opposition alignment ahead of the formal campaign season.
For Obi, the development represents a second opportunity to contest the presidency with considerably stronger organisational backing, a more structured platform and the support of a former president who has cleared the field in his favour.
“For the opposition more broadly, the question is whether the momentum now gathering behind the ticket can survive the pressures of open campaigning, primary disputes and the recalculations that inevitably accompany the shift from backroom arrangement to public contest.
“What the Abuja meetings have produced is a ticket, a zoning framework, a succession understanding and a mobilisation process that has already begun. The 2027 presidential race has been materially altered. Jonathan is out. Obi and Kwankwaso are in. The campaign, for all practical purposes, has started,” another member of the NDC, told Daily Sun.
