Opposition’s Secret Plot to Stop Tinubu with 4-Year Single-Term Deal Sparks Firestorm as Experts Warn ‘Nobody Surrenders Power’

A contentious move by Nigerian opposition political parties to unseat President Bola Ahmed Tinubu by fielding a single consensus candidate bound to a one-term, four-year presidency has triggered an intense political firestorm, with legal luminaries, civil society leaders, and analysts dismissing the proposal as a naive illusion.

The proposal was tabled during an opposition summit convened in Abuja by the G-100 political pressure group under the leadership of Mallam Salihu Lukman. Drawing hard lessons from the 2023 general election—where fractured opposition candidates collectively garnered over 13 million votes but surrendered the presidency to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) with less than nine million votes—the summit pushed for a united front. Under the arrangement, participating parties would collapse their ambitions behind an agreed flagbearer to head a “Government of National Competence” under a binding “Single-Term Transition Charter”.

Proponents argue that restricting an incoming president to a single four-year mandate would remove the distraction of re-election politics, allowing the administration to execute urgent national structural reforms. The arrangement was also calculated to assure northern political powerbrokers—who remain wary of another eight-year southern presidency following Tinubu’s tenure—that power would promptly rotate back to the North after four years.

However, the credibility of the summit suffered an immediate blow due to the conspicuous absence of the country’s primary opposition flagbearers. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Peter Obi of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), and Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) all stayed away from the parley, underscoring the deep distrust and clashing ambitions frustrating efforts to forge a common platform. Although other figures such as Donald Duke of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) and Adewole Adebayo of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) attended, critics noted that any coalition that excludes the leading vote-magnets remains an exercise in futility.

Beyond internal friction, legal experts have poked holes in the single-term charter, warning that it stands on shaky constitutional ground. Legal practitioners have emphasized that Section 137 of the 1999 Constitution guarantees an elected president the right to contest for two terms of four years each. Analysts maintain that it is politically unrealistic to expect any politician who gains access to the immense apparatus and resources of presidential incumbency to willingly pack their bags after four years simply because of an unenforceable memorandum of understanding.

Public affairs monitors and pro-democracy groups have also castigated the move as a transparent display of political desperation. Civic groups pointed out that Nigerian political history is littered with broken zoning pledges and discarded power-sharing agreements, cautioning that once an opposition candidate assumes power, the conversation will quickly shift to constitutional entitlements.

Critics have urged the opposition to abandon shortcut power-sharing gimmicks and instead present Nigerians with a compelling policy vision capable of addressing inflation, security challenges, and economic hardship on its own merit.