With the major opposition platforms, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), entangled in intense internal wrangling, the prospects of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) leading the much-anticipated coalition ahead of 2027 have arisen.
This follows former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s resignation from the All Progressives Congress (APC) and his new membership of the SDP.
El-Rufai, a founding APC member, defected to the SDP shortly after he met behind closed doors with former Osun State governor and interior minister Rauf Aregbesola and Pastor Tunde Bakare, a former presidential running mate of former President Muhammadu Buhari.
El-Rufai, who has become a key figure in the opposition coalition movement, also met with Buhari in Kaduna last week during which he was believed to have told the former president about his defection plan.
Other coalition members discussed are former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi, former Minister of Transportation Chibuike Amaechi, and former Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami.
The coalition aims to stop President Bola Tinubu from getting a second term in the 2027 election.
It was learnt that El-Rufai’s move to SDP was to gauge the ruling party’s reaction, after which other opposition members would follow suit.
The Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) was formed by Buhari ahead of his unsuccessful presidential bid in 2011. He was to lead the party into a merger with Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (CAN) ahead of the 2015 election in which Buhari won the presidency on his fourth attempt.
However, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, a key member of the coalition movement, is hesitant about leaving the PDP under which he ran for president in 2019 and 2023.
Even though Atiku has been canvassing an opposition coalition to defeat the APC, he refuted claims that he had dumped the PDP on Sunday, declaring he is still a bonafide member of the main opposition party.
Similarly, Kayode Fayemi, the former governor of Ekiti State, has distanced himself from reports that he had dumped the ruling APC.
Fayemi, in a terse statement, said he remains a card-carrying foundation member of APC and “this position has not changed.”
Former Kaduna governor El-Rufai, who has been estranged from his successor, Governor Uba Sani, hinted at his dumping the APC in a recent interview on Arise TV, saying the APC had left him.
El-Rufai’s meetings with the SDP national leadership since 2023 had fueled speculations of his likely defection from the APC after the Senate rejected his ministerial nomination by President Bola Tinubu, whom he recently blamed for it.
The prospects of a coalition movement have sparked speculations about an El-Rufai and Peter Obi joint presidential ticket in 2027, which some PDP governors are backing.
The PDP Governors Forum, however, refuted this claim over the weekend.
It was also learnt that the SDP was chosen because of its relative stability, even though the party has always been considered a possible alternative opposition platform.
It will be recalled that in the heat of the post-2015 crisis in the PDP, some party leaders had broached the idea of adopting the SDP should the Senator Ali Modu Sheriff-led camp defeat the Senator Ahmed Makarfi group of the PDP.
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