By Yesterday, President Bola Tinubu inaugurated a re-election campaign council that includes people who do not belong to his party, the All Progressive Congress. The revised structure names PDP chieftain and FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, Osun Governor Ademola Adeleke of the Accord Party, and Anambra Governor Chukwuma Soludo of APGA as campaign coordinators in their respective territories. Reports had that former Gombe governor Ibrahim Dankwambo, described as a serving PDP senator, was named an adviser to the council.
This cross-party activity is what some supporters call a masterstroke, while critics see it as a threat, a show of anxiety on the side of the president’s party, APC. Notwithstanding, we think both reactions miss the point.
What the coalition is
The “Rainbow Coalition” is Wike’s creation, a vehicle he assembled to mobilise support for Tinubu’s 2027 re-election. He says it is meant to boost the President’s chances, not undermine the APC, and that backing a presidential candidate from outside one’s party is not new in Nigeria. After all, he did the same prior to the 2023 Presidential Election alongside Engineer Seyi Makinde, Samuel Ortom, and other aggrieved governors of the then PDP’s extraction.
Of the truth, nothing we have seen suggests that this arrangement is illegal, and cross-party endorsements are an old feature of politics. In the same vein, Adeleke’s campaign team also says his support for Tinubu rests on the President’s performance and denies any agreement.
The appeal of togetherness is ancient. The scriptural Ecclesiastes observes that “a threefold cord is not quickly broken,” and the Quran also declares that humanity was made into “peoples and tribes that you may know one another.” In practical terms, coalition builders have always borrowed that logic; however, a cord is only as honest as what it binds, and togetherness is only a virtue when the people bound together remain free to disagree.
Legal is not the same as healthy; thus, we see four problems.
1. When a party becomes a rented vehicle
Opposition parties exist so voters have a real choice. That only works if a party stands for something beyond the person carrying its ticket. Osun shows how it can fail.
Governor Ademola Adeleke is the only governor elected on the Accord Party’s platform. He came to Accord from the PDP after internal disagreements. In Osun, Accord is really Adeleke. People voted for him, not for the party. The party leadership aligned with him has adopted Tinubu as its 2027 candidate, and he repeated his support for the President during his own re-election campaign. He never hid where he stood, and that is to his credit.
Others dispute that he speaks for the party. Accord’s presidential candidate, Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, says being the only elected governor does not make Adeleke the party’s leader. He told Channels Television that Adeleke “cannot compel the people of Osun State” to vote for Tinubu.
The point is not that Accord is confused. It is that the party label has become a shirt politicians borrow to win office, then wear wherever their politics take them. Or maybe Governor Adeleke is doing this to recover Osun’s seized allocations from the Local Government. A voter who sees “Accord” on the ballot and expects an independent opposition is buying a name, not a position. The harm is not hypocrisy, because Adeleke was open about it. The harm is that parties stop being institutions and become costumes.
2. “Not an APC structure” does not survive the org chart
Wike has insisted the coalition is separate from the APC. In spite of that, he is now a coordinator in the APC’s own campaign structure for Rivers and the FCT. Vanguard reports that Tinubu chose a consolidated command centre over informal or parallel support groups.
Our reading, which is analysis and not reported fact, is that the coalition is being folded into the party machine. That undercuts Wike’s claim that it stands apart. It also vindicates the governors who complained about it.
3. Appointments and endorsements travel together
Wike is a minister in an APC-led government. On 20 July 2026, Tinubu named former Ekiti governor Ayo Fayose chairman of the Rural Electrification Agency, after Fayose said in 2023 that he would reject any offer from Tinubu. His words then: “I will never accept it.” Tinubu has said he wants a government built on competence, not a unity government.
We do not claim these posts were traded for political support, and we have seen no evidence that they were. However, when public appointments and campaign roles keep flowing to the same circle of cross-party allies, the “competence, not politics” line becomes harder to believe.
4. It is a fight over machinery
The loudest argument has not been about policy. It has been about control.
The Progressive Governors Forum, led by Imo Governor Hope Uzodimma, warned against parallel structures capable of undermining Tinubu’s re-election. Wike answered that he is “not answerable to APC governors” and called them smart but lazy.
The party’s grassroots are split. Imo’s APC chapter says “APC doesn’t need any rainbow coalition for now.” South-East APC leaders called it a “chameleon” coalition, even as one party figure argued that “Wike is an asset to the APC.” In Benue, one faction wants Wike to join the APC, while a rival faction’s spokesman said he should stay in the PDP because “he has helped to destroy PDP for us.” Benue APC leaders have also petitioned the party’s national leadership to suspend a former state chairman over alleged cross-party endorsement.
The stakes are local. THISDAY reports that Wike’s allies are backing non-APC candidates against some APC governors in states including Kwara, Ogun, Benue and Kebbi, while Works Minister David Umahi says there is no such coalition in Ebonyi. We have not confirmed these accounts independently. The Guardian notes that governors’ succession plans are among their concerns. Wike, to his credit, is candid: “Politics is about interest.”
That candour tells us the real subject is who controls which state, and who inherits it. Voters are being asked to see a power-sharing arrangement as national unity.
The oldest warning on this is in the Gospel of Matthew: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” A party at war with itself over who controls its states is poorly placed to present itself as the glue of national unity.
The Opposition that Remains
APC National Chairman Nentawe Yilwatda has challenged opposition parties to publish their plans and debate policy, rather than attack the President. It is a fair demand, but it is harder to answer when opposition governors and a PDP minister sit inside the President’s campaign council. Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and the ADC remain active critics, but they now face a ruling camp that has absorbed part of the opposition’s elected leadership.
Our Verdict
Strip away the slogans and the stated case for the Rainbow Coalition is about votes. In the statements reviewed, its defenders talk about mobilising support and delivering victory, not about policy. That is reasonable for a campaign. It is thin for a project presented as national unity.
The timing does matter also. One report describes the council as an effort to extend the President’s reach beyond the APC machinery, as he faces public discontent over economic hardship and insecurity, and an opposition struggling to unite. In our opinion, a president confident in his record would not need to enlist opposition governors to carry his campaign. This looks like insurance more than conviction.
Chinua Achebe’s famous diagnosis, in The Trouble with Nigeria (1983), was “simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Leadership is persuasion before it is arithmetic.
The cost falls on voters and on oversight. Lord Acton wrote in 1887 that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Nigeria’s presidency is not absolute, but the principle holds that power needs rivals. A governor or minister who has tied his political future to the President’s re-election has little reason to hold him to account. The Roman satirist Juvenal asked, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” He wrote it in satire, but every democracy must answer it. If the opposition is supposed to be the guard, every figure who joins the council makes it a little less able to guard, and the choice at the ballot box a little less clear.
Tacitus has the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus say of Rome: “They make a desert and call it peace.” Nobody here is a Roman legion, but the warning travels. A politics that clears away every rival can still call the result unity. Nigerians are left with fewer real choices, not more, if every colour in the rainbow campaigns for the same candidate. A broad tent is only worth building if there is still somewhere outside it to stand.
