WEEKLY NIGERIA POLITICAL UPDATE | POLITICS DESK | ROAD TO 2027.
Nigeria’s 2027 Race Turns Hot
A week-by-week accounting of the campaign season across the APC, PDP, ADC, NDC, SDP and the smaller parties, the Nigerian and American court cases now shadowing President Bola Tinubu, and where the leading candidates have actually been.
ABUJA — The Atlantic Digest
With just under a year to go before Nigerians return to the polls, the contest to succeed — or retain — President Bola Tinubu has moved from positioning into open campaigning, and the last seven days have supplied a preview of how ugly and unpredictable it may get. A ruling-party rally in Zamfara State twice produced chants for the opposition’s own candidate rather than the president’s. The leading opposition presidential candidate’s convoy was attacked en route to Benue State. A running mate publicly accused a former running mate of being unfit for the job he himself is now seeking. And in two separate courtrooms — one in Abuja, one in Washington — lawyers spent the week arguing over the president’s academic credentials and his sealed 33-year-old American law-enforcement file. This report gathers what the country’s five largest parties said and did over the past week, the state of both court cases involving Mr Tinubu, and what can be established about where the leading candidates have been.
APC: A CONTESTED PRIMARY WIN AND AN AWKWARD CROWD
President Tinubu was declared the All Progressives Congress’s presidential candidate for 2027 after the party’s primary, in which he polled 10,999,162 votes, according to a State House press release issued by presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga, who described the exercise as proof the APC had “deepened grassroot politics.” The president has since installed a formal campaign structure, naming former Zamfara governor Abdul’aziz Yari as director-general of the 2027 campaign and Ogun State governor Dapo Abiodun as director of fundraising, and the party has been staging state-level launches: at one such event in Adamawa State on August 20, Deputy Governor Kaletapwa Farauta pledged that the APC’s “North-East Door-to-Door Movement” would deliver 10 million votes for the president, declaring, “We will go door-to-door, house-to-house, village-to-village and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to ensure that APC wins overwhelmingly.” Mr Tinubu himself has been touting his economic reform record on the stump, telling supporters, “We have delivered on our campaign promises and set our country on a path of economic progress,” while urging the party machine to “soundly defeat all those forces who plan to take our country backwards.”
But the week’s most-discussed APC moment was not one the party wanted. At a solidarity rally in Zamfara State on September 10 — the second such incident in the state within days, after a similar episode at an APC walk in Gusau — a section of the crowd responded to a call-and-response chant of “Nigeria!” by shouting “Sai Atiku” instead of hailing the president, in front of Governor Dauda Lawal and the newly appointed campaign director-general, Mr Yari. Opposition-aligned outlets seized on the moment as evidence of eroding APC support in the North-West, a zone the ruling party has treated as a stronghold; the APC has not issued a formal response to the chants. Separately, the president’s own travel habits became a live campaign issue this week: an investigation published by Pulse.ng put his foreign-travel record at 52 trips and 261 days abroad since taking office, at a reported cost of roughly ₦37.6 billion, while a September 8 report said the government has since imposed fresh restrictions on foreign travel by ministers and agency heads — a move that follows weeks of opposition criticism, including from Atiku Abubakar, over a three-week European trip Mr Tinubu took in August while Vice President Kashim Shettima was simultaneously abroad on African Union business.
PDP: STILL WITHOUT A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, STILL IN COURT
The People’s Democratic Party enters the campaign season in the deepest institutional crisis of any of the major parties, and has not produced a 2027 presidential candidate as a result. The dispute traces to a disputed national convention held in Ibadan on November 15–16, 2025, at which a faction loyal to Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde elected Kabiru Tanimu Turaki as national chairman and moved to expel Rivers State strongman and former FCT minister Nyesom Wike and ten allies; a rival faction aligned with Wike, backed by Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori and recognised by the Independent National Electoral Commission, instead named Umar Damagum’s successor Mohammed Abdulrahman as chairman, with Samuel Anyanwu as national secretary. The Makinde camp took the matter to the Supreme Court, and on May 1, 2026 the apex court ruled 3-2 to void the Turaki-led Ibadan convention outright, holding that it had proceeded in defiance of a subsisting Federal High Court restraining order issued the day before it opened. Wike declared afterward that “factions no longer exist” in the party, but the ruling in fact left the PDP without a clear national leadership structure heading into 2027, prompting the party’s Board of Trustees to assert a caretaker role, and it has since triggered a fresh wave of departures, including 2023 Kaduna governorship candidate Isa Ashiru and former FCT minister of state Jumoke Akinjide, both of whom quit the PDP this year. Presidential aspirant Gbenga Hashim has spent recent weeks publicly pushing for reconciliation between the warring camps, but no unified national convention to select a 2027 flagbearer has yet been held or scheduled, and no PDP presidential candidate had emerged as of this report.
ADC: ATIKU’S TICKET, AND THE CERTIFICATE SUIT AGAINST TINUBU
Former vice president Atiku Abubakar formally secured the presidential ticket of the African Democratic Congress in May, telling supporters in his acceptance speech that he would run an “accountable” administration, and he has spent the campaign season since attacking the president’s record on the economy, insecurity and the cost of living — most pointedly in an August 30 broadside accusing Mr Tinubu of being “at the airport when the house is on fire,” a reference to the president’s European vacation amid what Atiku called overlapping fuel, food, transport and insecurity crises at home. The ADC’s momentum was visible again this week at the Zamfara rally where APC supporters chanted his name, and ADC-aligned governorship candidates in the North-West have publicly backed Atiku’s call for a restoration of the fuel subsidy. The party’s most consequential activity this week, however, was in court rather than on the stump: Atiku is the lead plaintiff, alongside the ADC, in a Federal High Court suit in Abuja (Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/1888/2026, before Justice Inyang Ekwo) seeking to disqualify President Tinubu from contesting in 2027 over allegations that a National Youth Service Corps certificate he submitted to INEC was forged. On September 8, Tinubu and the APC filed a formal application asking the court to dismiss the suit outright; APC counsel argued in filings and in court on September 11 that “none of the documents Tinubu submitted to the INEC for the 2023 and the coming 2027 presidential elections were forged,” that proving forgery requires a formal disclaimer from the issuing institution — which Atiku has not produced — and that Atiku lacks standing to challenge an APC nomination process he never took part in, since he was neither an APC member nor a contestant in its primary. A former Attorney-General of the Federation gave evidence in the matter on September 11. The suit follows an earlier, separate attempt by Atiku to amend his pleadings, which INEC itself formally opposed, and the court has adjourned the matter more than once already; no ruling had been delivered on either the dismissal application or the underlying forgery allegation as of this report, and the case is expected to continue into further hearings.
NDC: OBI, KWANKWASO, AND AN ATTACK ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Peter Obi, who left the Labour Party for the failed ADC coalition talks earlier this year before emerging on May 29, 2026 as the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress — a party led nationally by Senator Seriake Dickson — has spent the week defending his record and touring with running mate Rabiu Kwankwaso, the former Kano governor who resigned from the New Nigeria Peoples Party to join the NDC ticket, a move NNPP national secretary-general Ogini Olaposi has publicly branded a “betrayal.” The pairing produced the week’s most personal exchange in the campaign: Obi’s own 2023 running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, told Arise News on September 7 that neither Obi nor Atiku Abubakar was capable of fixing Nigeria, prompting a public reply from Obi days later. “I passed through Anambra State, and I improved the state in critical areas of development. And I can do the same thing in Nigeria,” Obi said, adding, “I will fight corruption; I will deal with issues of waste, law and order, and rigging won’t take place under my watch.” Obi and Kwankwaso have otherwise focused their public messaging on the cost of living and insecurity, meeting NDC candidates in Abuja to plan grassroots mobilisation and telling supporters, in Obi’s words, that “nobody’ll intimidate us again.” The most serious incident of the week, however, was physical rather than rhetorical: on or around September 9, Obi’s convoy came under attack while travelling to Benue State, in an apparent attempt to block his entry into Makurdi. Kwankwaso condemned the incident as “another dark day for democracy,” saying, “I am deeply disturbed by the attack on the convoy of our presidential candidate, Peter Obi, as he travelled to Benue State,” and calling on “the Benue State Government” to “ensure that those responsible are swiftly identified and prosecuted,” while separately urging President Tinubu to “caution state governors, particularly those in his party, against any actions that could undermine the sanctity of our democracy.” No arrests had been announced and no state government response had been issued as of this report.
SDP AND THE SMALLER PARTIES
The Social Democratic Party’s Adewole Adebayo has used the week to sharpen an economic message built around energy policy rather than the personal attacks dominating other parties’ campaigns. Speaking on Arise Television’s Prime Time on September 9, Adebayo pledged to install between 11 and 15 kilowatts of solar power “on every Nigerian roof within 11 months” of taking office, arguing Nigeria should build local solar-panel manufacturing capacity — an idea he says he first proposed to the Obasanjo administration in 2001 — rather than continuing to expand the national grid, and that Local Government Areas already have money “that they steal every month” which could instead capitalise the programme. In a separate address, he told supporters that “four years” would be enough to transform Nigeria and vowed the SDP would “alleviate poverty” and eliminate insecurity within that window; the party has also moved to ratify a convention committee this month as it firms up its 2027 structures. Beyond the top five, the week’s notable development was less a policy declaration than an internal defection: the NNPP’s public denunciation of Kwankwaso reflects a party trying to hold its remaining base together after losing its most prominent national figure to the NDC, while the Labour Party — which Obi left earlier this year — has not produced a comparably prominent 2027 candidate or message of its own in the period under review.
THE COURT CASES INVOLVING PRESIDENT TINUBU
Two separate legal proceedings, one in each country, are running in parallel and are frequently conflated in campaign rhetoric, though they concern different questions. The first is the Nigerian certificate case described above: Atiku and the ADC allege Mr Tinubu’s NYSC discharge certificate, submitted with his INEC nomination papers, was forged, while Tinubu and the APC are seeking outright dismissal on procedural and evidentiary grounds. Politically, this is a case brought by the president’s most direct electoral rival and squarely aimed at disqualifying him before the 2027 vote; its likely outcome is difficult to call given Nigerian courts’ history of resolving eligibility disputes on narrow technical and standing grounds rather than reaching the merits, but a dismissal on standing or procedural grounds — as APC lawyers are now explicitly requesting — is widely seen by Nigerian legal commentators as the more probable near-term outcome, which would not resolve the underlying forgery allegation but would end this particular suit.
The second is an American case with no Nigerian opposition party as a plaintiff. US transparency campaigner Aaron Greenspan, joined originally by Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin, has for several years pursued Freedom of Information Act litigation in the US District Court for the District of Columbia (the matter has proceeded before Judge Beryl Howell) seeking FBI, DEA and other federal records related to a 1993 civil forfeiture of roughly $460,000 tied to a Chicago narcotics investigation in which Mr Tinubu was a named party decades before he became president. In April 2025, Judge Howell rejected the agencies’ initial refusal to confirm or deny the records’ existence and ordered them to process the FOIA requests; more recently, the court granted the FBI’s request to review the disputed material privately, in camera, and set a deadline of late August 2026 for the FBI, DEA, Justice Department and Tinubu’s own legal team to file final arguments over whether the records should be released, sealed or redacted. The Nigerian presidency, through spokesman Bayo Onanuga, has repeatedly characterised the matter as “a civil records-disclosure dispute under the United States Freedom of Information Act” rather than a criminal proceeding, noting that a 2003 FBI letter confirmed no criminal arrest record exists for Mr Tinubu in the matter and that no court, in the US or Nigeria, has found him guilty of wrongdoing; lawyers for Nnamdi Kanu, writing separately on the case, have similarly argued the underlying forfeiture “raises moral questions but not criminal guilt.” The case is being driven not by any Nigerian political party but by an American plaintiff invoking US transparency law, and its likely outcome turns on how broadly Judge Howell reads the FOIA exemptions the agencies are invoking: a ruling ordering at least partial release of the FBI and DEA files, with sensitive material redacted, is seen by observers of the litigation as more probable than either a full release or a full sealing, though the timing of any decision remains uncertain following the August deadline for final arguments.
WHERE THE CANDIDATES HAVE BEEN
President Tinubu’s whereabouts have themselves become a campaign issue: opposition figures and Nigerian commentators have highlighted a travel record of 52 foreign trips and 261 days abroad since 2023, including a three-week European trip in August that drew Atiku’s “airport when the house is on fire” criticism, and the government’s own move this month to impose fresh restrictions on foreign travel by ministers and agency heads is widely read as a response to that criticism. Atiku Abubakar has been visible on the domestic campaign trail, most notably at the September 10 Zamfara rally where he was not present but was chanted for, and has continued to press his NYSC certificate suit through his lawyers in Abuja. Peter Obi and Kwankwaso have been travelling together on NDC business, including the trip to Benue State that was disrupted by the September 9 attack on Obi’s convoy and a mobilisation meeting with NDC candidates in Abuja; Datti Baba-Ahmed has been active in Abuja-based television commentary rather than on the road. Adewole Adebayo has likewise been concentrated in the capital, appearing on Arise Television twice within the week under review. No PDP presidential candidate exists to track, reflecting the party’s ongoing leadership vacuum.
