The winds are changing, but is the opposition ready?, By Dakuku Peterside

Politics often creates the illusion that public anger naturally produces political change. It does not. Citizens may be frustrated by rising prices, insecurity, unemployment, corruption or failing public services and still return an unpopular government to power. Governments do not lose elections simply because people are unhappy. They lose when dissatisfaction is organised, when a credible alternative emerges, and when anger is converted into registration, mobilisation, turnout and votes.

Nigeria’s present political moment is defined by a simple reality: the winds of change are blowing, but they do not yet decisively favour the opposition. The winds of change are unmistakably blowing, but they do not yet decisively favour the opposition.

The governing party appears vulnerable. Across the issues that most directly shape everyday life—security, the economy, corruption and electricity—the gap between official assurances and lived experience has widened. Governments may defend policies with statistics, forecasts and promises of eventual recovery, but citizens judge governance differently. They judge it through the price of food, the cost of transport, the safety of the roads, the reliability of electricity and the amount of money left after paying for necessities.

Politics eventually comes home to the kitchen table. Insecurity remains one of the most damaging expressions of this gap. Nigerians continue to confront terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, communal violence and criminality in different parts of the country. Security agencies may record operational successes, but citizens apply a more intimate test: Can I travel without fear? Can farmers go to their fields safely? Can parents send their children to school with confidence? Can families sleep without anxiety?

Where those questions cannot be answered convincingly, official reassurance has restricted political value.

The economy presents an even greater danger because hardship is universal in its language. Economic reforms may be defensible in theory and still become politically ruinous in practice. Citizens do not experience macroeconomic adjustment as policy papers. They encounter it through shrinking purchasing power, higher food prices, expensive transport, school fees, healthcare costs and increasingly difficult household choices.

People can accept sacrifice when they comprehend its purpose, see evidence of progress and believe that the burden is fairly shared. But sacrifice without a visible path to relief gradually becomes resentment.

The deeper problem, therefore, is not simply that Nigerians are impatient. It is that many struggle to see a convincing bridge between present pain and future prosperity. When hardship persists while promised benefits remain distant, reform loses its emotional legitimacy. Citizens stop hearing the language of economic necessity and begin to feel the reality of abandonment.

Perceptions of corruption make that burden harder to defend. Allegations against public officials should never be treated as evidence without credible evidence and due process. Yet politically, perception matters. A government asking citizens to endure austerity must itself be seen to embody restraint, clarity and answerability.

When public officials are associated—rightly or wrongly — with conspicuous wealth or unexplained assets, ordinary citizens inevitably ask why they are being asked to tighten their belts while the political class appears protected from hardship. That question can become more damaging than any opposition campaign slogan.

Electricity completes the picture. Few issues expose the distance between national ambition and daily reality as starkly as unreliable power. Businesses spend heavily on alternative energy. Manufacturers absorb costs that undermine competitiveness. Families devote scarce income to generators, fuel, inverters and other substitutes for a service that should be dependable.

A country may speak confidently about industrialisation, jobs and investment, but without reliable electricity those ambitions remain fragile.

Taken together, these pressures have eroded much of the government’s goodwill, but not yet translated into an opposition advantage because the opposition remains fragmented.

Yet this is where the argument sharpens: the opposition’s own weakness becomes impossible to ignore.
An incumbent’s vulnerability does not automatically become an opposition’s strength.

Nigeria’s opposition possesses formidable personalities. Peter Obi retains substantial support, notably among younger and city voters. Atiku Abubakar remains an experienced national politician with an extensive network. Other opposition figures command influence within significant regional or political constituencies.

But elections are not won by recognisable names alone. Popularity is not organisation. Personal followership is not a national movement. And a gathering of ambitious politicians does not automatically become a credible alternative government.

The opposition’s central weakness remains fragmentation.

Too much attention appears to be consumed by platforms, tickets, rival ambitions and competing political calculations. The public sees negotiations, realignments and manoeuvring, but not yet enough evidence of a disciplined national organisation preparing to take power.

Calls for opposition unity have so far collided with personal ambitions and narrow party interests. Separate political pathways may make sense to individual actors, but collectively they risk dividing precisely the constituency that could threaten the incumbent: Nigerians dissatisfied with the status quo.

The greatest danger of fragmentation is not simply that it divides votes. It weakens belief.

A credible opposition should already be answering fundamental questions. Who leads it? What does it stand for beyond removing the ruling party? What is its programme for security, jobs, inflation, corruption and electricity? How will it resolve disagreements over zoning, power-sharing and candidate selection? How will it protect votes? How will it persuade citizens who are unhappy with the government but distrust political parties generally?

Above all, it must answer the question that eventually confronts every opposition movement: what will actually change the morning after victory?

A coalition built solely around removing an incumbent is inherently fragile. Nigerian political history offers enough examples of alliances united in opposition but fractured by power. Voters therefore need more than an anti-government platform. They need to see an alternative government in waiting—coherent enough to inspire confidence, broad enough to build a national majority and disciplined enough to survive the tensions of power.

Without that, public anger may remain politically homeless.

This is why voter apathy may ultimately prove more decisive than the popularity of any candidate. INEC’s review of the 2023 elections placed turnout in the presidential and National Assembly elections at 27.5 per cent, down from 35.6 per cent in 2019. The figures challenge the comforting assumption that widespread dissatisfaction automatically translates into electoral revolt.

Sometimes anger mobilises citizens. Sometimes it exhausts them.

A disillusioned electorate can therefore become an incumbent’s greatest —if unintended—advantage: low-turnout elections reward organisation. Established party structures, loyal voting blocs, local networks and political machinery become more powerful when millions of frustrated citizens decide that participation is futile.

This creates one of democracy’s cruellest paradoxes: a government can be deeply unpopular and still win comfortably against an opposition incapable of converting dissatisfaction into participation.

The same lesson applies to youth politics. Young Nigerians have demonstrated an outstanding ability to influence national conversation and civic activism. But social media intensity is not electoral organisation. Hashtags do not protect polling units. Viral posts do not register voters. Online outrage cannot replace voter education, community mobilisation, election monitoring and turnout.

Politics remains stubbornly physical even in a technological age.

There is a greater democratic danger too. When citizens begin to believe that election results are predetermined, participation itself starts to lose meaning. Democratic institutions may remain intact — elections may hold, parties may campaign, and results may be announced — while public faith in the system steadily erodes.
A democracy can retain its rituals and lose its legitimacy.

Nigeria’s next major political contest may therefore be less a simple battle between government and opposition than a struggle between organisation and apathy, discipline and fragmentation, hope and exhaustion.

The government can still lose. Hardship, insecurity, distrust and unreliable public services have created genuine political vulnerability. But vulnerability is only an opening. It becomes decisive only when the opposition is ready to convert it into victory.

To turn public frustration into political change, the opposition must become more serious than it presently appears. It must compromise where necessary, unite around a credible purpose, build structures across the federation and offer Nigerians something more compelling than the promise of removing those in power.

It must demonstrate that it seeks not simply power, but a mandate for something.

The winds of change are blowing. They carry anger, hardship, disappointment and a growing rejection of complacency. But winds do not decide elections. Organisation does. If the opposition cannot convert that unease into a credible national force, the moment may pass it by. Nigeria may again be left with frustration strong enough to punish the ruling party, but not strong enough to build the alternative this moment demands.

Nigeria may already possess enough frustration to punish the ruling party. But punishment is not the same as change, and discontent alone does not build an alternative.

The unanswered question is whether the opposition is disciplined, credible and prepared enough to receive the votes of those wanting change—or whether, once again, the opportunity will be lost to fragmentation, apathy and delay.

Dakuku Peterside is the author of Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.