Political parties seeking to challenge President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 general elections must translate public dissatisfaction into effective organisation and voter mobilisation, as discontent alone may not guarantee electoral victory, Valentin Bianki, political psychologist and campaign strategist, has said.
Bianki made the observation during the presentation of the English edition of his book, ‘Politics in Nigeria: Elites and Voters’, at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja, where he examined Nigeria’s electoral politics, the distribution of political power and the factors likely to shape the next general elections.
“Dissatisfaction is real; coordination is the scarce resource. Dissatisfaction is an emotion. Opposition is an organisation,” he said, highlighting the importance of political structures and mobilisation in converting public sentiment into votes.
His analysis draws on Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, which he described as the most open contest since the country returned to civilian rule in 1999.
Tinubu won with 36.6 percent of the vote, the lowest winning share recorded in a presidential election since 1999, while four major candidates attracted significant support across different parts of the country.
The findings suggest that the outcome of the 2027 elections will depend not only on public opinion and dissatisfaction with the government but also on the ability of competing political forces to build broad-based coalitions and organise voters across constituencies.
Bianki also stressed the importance of preserving national stability without weakening democratic competition.
“My hope for Nigeria is simple: preserve stability without sacrificing democracy, and preserve democracy without sacrificing stability,” he said.
The book examines the relationship between voting patterns, federal appointments, regional representation and the distribution of government resources, offering a data-driven assessment of how political power is organised in Nigeria.
A major finding concerns the relationship between online political engagement and actual electoral performance.
AAnalysing 5.9 million Twitter accounts and 2.3 million tweets, Bianki found that Peter Obi dominated significant portions of online political discussions during the 2023 campaign but finished third in the presidential election.
The study attributed the gap partly to the geographical concentration of politically active Twitter users, the participation of Nigerians in the diaspora who could not vote, and the limitations of telephone and online polling.
With voter turnout at 26.7 percent, Bianki argued that online popularity did not automatically translate into votes, underscoring the importance of political mobilisation and established networks in determining electoral outcomes.
“Votes are individual. Mobilisation is not,” he said.
The research also examined how electoral support may influence the distribution of political appointments and federal resources among geopolitical zones.
Using a hand-coded dataset of federal ministers appointed since 2010, Bianki identified a correlation between the proportion of votes a presidential candidate received from a geopolitical zone and that zone’s representation in the federal cabinet.
The study further found a relationship between cabinet representation and federal transfers across geopolitical zones, excluding the oil-producing South-South region from that comparison.
Following the 2023 elections, the North-West’s share of cabinet positions declined from 27 percent to 19 percent, while its share of federal transfers fell from 16 percent to 14 percent, according to the research.
The findings raise questions about the relationship between electoral coalitions, regional expectations and the distribution of political influence and federal resources.
Bianki also highlighted a generational shift in the composition of the federal cabinet under Tinubu, with implications for institutional continuity and political decision-making.
According to the research, the average year of birth of ministers in Tinubu’s cabinet was 1966, compared with 1957 under the administrations of former presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari.
Ministers belonging to the generation that experienced the Nigerian Civil War, described in the book as the “Never Again” generation, accounted for 14 percent of the cabinet. Meanwhile, the proportion of ministers born after 1971 rose from three percent to 20 percent.
Bianki argued that as fewer members of the political leadership retain direct memories of the Civil War, stronger institutions become increasingly important to sustaining national stability and democratic governance.
The research also examined the August 2024 #EndBadGovernance protests, noting that demonstrations were concentrated in northern Nigeria while the South remained comparatively quiet.
Yusuf Maitama Tuggar, Nigeria’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, described the work as demonstrating “analytical rigour and a careful, effective use of data driven evidence”, an approach he said remained uncommon in external assessments of African political systems.
