Feature/OPED
Akintola vs Awolowo, Opposition, and the One-Party Temptation
By Prince Charles Dickson, PhD
Every generation of Nigerian politics likes to imagine that its quarrel is unprecedented, that its betrayals are original, that its intrigue is wearing a crown no earlier intrigue ever touched. But Nigerian politics is an old drummer. It changes songs, not rhythm. The names change. The costumes improve. The microphones get better. Yet the same questions keep returning like harmattan dust: What is opposition for? Is it a moral force, a strategic waiting room, or merely a branch office of the ruling instinct?
To ask that question seriously is to walk back into the haunted chamber of Awolowo and Akintola. What began as a struggle inside the Action Group was not just a disagreement between two brilliant men. It was a collision of political temperaments, ideological direction, ambition, and the larger architecture of power in Nigeria. Awolowo, who moved to the federal centre as opposition leader after 1959, was increasingly identified with a broader ideological project. Akintola, by contrast, came to embody a more conservative, region-focused and business-oriented current, and his openness to working with the Northern-dominated federal establishment deepened the rupture. By mid-1962, Awolowo’s camp had repudiated Akintola; the federal government declared a state of emergency in the Western Region and restored him in 1963. The bitterness of that split, and the wreckage that followed, helped poison the First Republic.
That is why the Awolowo-Akintola feud still matters. It was not gossip in an agbada. It was an early Nigerian lesson that opposition can die in two ways. It can be strangled from outside by a hostile ruling order. Or, more dangerously, it can decay from within, when conviction gives way to access, when strategy becomes personal survival, when party machinery becomes a theatre of ego. The Western crisis was, in that sense, not only about who should lead. It was about whether opposition should remain an instrument of principle or become a bargaining chip in the market of power.
Kano and Kaduna then enter the story like twin furnaces of northern political memory. Kano carries the old radical grammar of Aminu Kano, NEPU, Sawaba, talakawa politics, the language of emancipation rather than patronage. Oxford’s entry on Aminu Kano notes his struggle against corruption and oppression in the emirate order and his commitment to democratizing Northern Nigeria. The PRP’s own profile, lodged with INEC, explicitly roots itself in NEPU’s legacy and recalls that the PRP had two state governments in the Second Republic: Kaduna and Kano. In other words, both states are not accidental footnotes in the story of Nigerian opposition. They are ancestral terrain.
Then came 1999 and the Fourth Republic, with the PDP arriving not merely as a party but as a vast political weather system. Founded in 1998 and quickly becoming dominant, winning the presidency and legislative majorities in 1999 and retained national control for years. Opposition existed, yes, but it was fragmented, regional, underpowered, and often more symbolic than threatening. That era did not abolish opposition. It domesticated it.
The great interruption came in 2013, when the APC was formed through the merger of major opposition forces. That merger worked because it answered a Nigerian truth older than any campaign slogan: power rarely yields to scattered complaint. It yields to a disciplined coalition. The APC emerged from the merger of ACN, CPC, ANPP, and part of APGA, and in 2015, Buhari’s victory marked the first time an incumbent was defeated and the first inter-party transfer of power in Nigeria’s post-independence history. Reuters described it plainly as a historic democratic transfer. For a brief moment, opposition in Nigeria looked like more than lamentation. It looked like a ladder.
But even that victory carried a warning label. The problem with Nigerian opposition is that once it wins, it often stops being opposition in spirit and becomes merely the next landlord in the same building. An academic review of Nigeria’s democratic journey notes that the APC and PDP share many structural defects, and even cites the broader judgment that little distinguishes the two main parties because both are fluid elite networks with weak ideology. That diagnosis is painful because it explains so much. In Nigeria, opposition too often opposes only until the gates open. After that, the vocabulary changes, but the appetite stays the same.
This is where Kano and Kaduna become especially revealing from 1999 till now. Kano has repeatedly shown a willingness to defy neat national binaries, and in the 2023 election, it backed Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP in the presidential race while also electing Abba Kabir Yusuf of the NNPP as governor. Kaduna told a different but equally interesting story: it voted Atiku Abubakar of the PDP in the presidential contest, yet elected APC’s Uba Sani as governor. CDD West Africa described the 2023 election as unusually fragmented, noting that all four major presidential contenders won at least one state and that states like Kano, Lagos, and Rivers split among three different parties. So, Kano and Kaduna have not been passive spectators in the Nigerian democratic drama. They have been laboratories of resistance, fragmentation, coalition, and contradiction.
And now we arrive at the present crossroads, where the phrase “one-party state” is no longer a tavern exaggeration but a live political argument. Reuters reported in May 2025 that the APC endorsed President Tinubu for a second term while the opposition was widely seen as too divided and weak to mount a serious challenge, with high-profile defections strengthening the ruling party. AP later reported Tinubu’s denial that Nigeria was being turned into a one-party state, even as several governors and federal lawmakers had left opposition parties for the APC. By February 2026, major opposition leaders, including Atiku, Peter Obi, and Amaechi, were jointly rejecting the new Electoral Act, calling it anti-democratic and warning that it could help install a one-party order. Tinubu, for his part, has continued to insist that democracy requires room for the minority to speak.
So, is Nigeria now a one-party state? Not formally. Not yet. There are still multiple parties, multiple ambitions, multiple resentments, and multiple routes to elite reassembly. But that is not the only question that matters. A country can avoid the legal shell of one-party rule and still drift into the political culture of one-party dominance. That drift happens when the ruling party becomes the default shelter for frightened politicians, when defections replace debate, when opposition parties become war zones of internal ego, and when citizens begin to see parties not as platforms of principle but as bus stops for the next powerful convoy. The danger is less a constitutional decree than a democratic evaporation.
This is why the ghosts of Awolowo and Akintola are still standing by the roadside, watching us. Their quarrel warned that opposition without internal discipline can collapse into treachery, and that power at the centre always knows how to exploit a divided house. Kano reminds us that opposition can spring from social memory, from the stubborn dignity of people who do not always vote as ordered. Kaduna reminds us that politics is rarely simple, that a state can host both establishment power and insurgent sentiment in the same electoral season. And the Fourth Republic reminds us that opposition in Nigeria only works when it is more than noise, more than wounded ambition, more than a coalition of temporarily unemployed strongmen.
The real Nigerian danger, then, is not that one party will conquer the entire country by brilliance alone. It is that the opposition will continue to fail by habit. If opposition is only a queue for access, then the ruling party will keep eating its rivals one defection at a time. If, however, opposition rediscovers ideology, internal democracy, regional credibility, and the courage to look different from what it condemns, then the old republic may still whisper a useful lesson into the new one.
Awolowo and Akintola were not just fighting over a party. They were fighting over the soul of the political alternative in Nigeria. That battle never ended—May Nigeria win!
By Prince Charles Dickson, PhD
“And Jesus said to Judas… what you are going to do, do quickly.”
There is a hard, almost rude lesson in that line. History does not wait for the timid to finish their committee meeting. Politics, especially Nigerian politics, is not kind to hesitation dressed as strategy. It rewards those who understand timing, nerve, structure, and the brutal arithmetic of power. That is where the Nigerian opposition now stands: not at the edge of impossibility, but at the edge of urgency.
The first truth is the one opposition politicians do not enjoy hearing at rallies where microphones are loud, and introspection is scarce. They are not getting it right. The evidence is not only in Tinubu’s strength, but in their own disorder. INEC said on February 5, 2026, that there were now 21 registered political parties and warned that persistent internal leadership crises within parties pose a serious threat to democratic consolidation. Eight days later, the commission formally released the notice and timetable for the 2027 general elections. In other words, this is no longer the season of abstract grumbling. The whistle has gone. The race is live.
Yet the opposition often behaves like students who entered the examination hall with righteous anger but forgot their pens. Too much of its energy is spent on lamentation, rumours, courtroom oxygen, personality feuds, and that old Nigerian hobby of mistaking noise for architecture. You cannot defeat an incumbent machine by forming a WhatsApp coalition of wounded egos and calling it national salvation. Voters may clap for drama, but they still ask the unromantic question: who is in charge, what is the plan, and why should we trust you with the keys?
Now comes the more uncomfortable truth. The opposition is not facing an ordinary incumbent. It is facing Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a man whose political DNA was forged in opposition. He is not merely benefiting from power; he understands opposition as craft, pressure, infiltration, timing, persistence, and theatre. In his June 12, 2025, Democracy Day speech, he taunted rivals by saying it was “a pleasure to witness” their disarray, while also reminding Nigerians that he once stood almost alone against an overbearing ruling machine. This was not casual banter. It was a warning shot from a politician who knows both the grammar of resistance and the machinery of incumbency.
That is why copying Tinubu’s old template will not be enough. Yes, the coalition instinct is understandable. In July 2025, major opposition figures, including Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, aligned under the ADC banner, presenting themselves as a bulwark against one-party drift, with David Mark as interim chairman. But here is the problem: Tinubu’s own coalition history worked not simply because men gathered in one room and glared at the ruling party. It worked because there was a disciplined merger logic, state-level anchoring, message coordination, and a ruthless understanding of elite bargaining. What the present opposition sometimes offers instead is photocopy politics with low toner: a coalition of convenience trying to frighten a man who practically wrote the Nigerian handbook on political accommodation, defection management, and patient conquest.
This is also why the opposition’s moral complaint, though not baseless, cannot be its only language. Yes, concerns about democratic shrinkage are real. Tinubu himself publicly denied that Nigeria is moving toward a one-party state, even as defections from opposition parties to the APC intensified and his own party welcomed them. But to say “democracy is in danger” is not yet the same thing as building a democratic alternative. Nigerians do not eat constitutional anxiety for breakfast. They want a credible opposition that can protect pluralism and still explain food prices, jobs, security, power supply, transport costs, and what exactly it would do on Monday morning after taking office.
On the government’s side, the picture is mixed enough to make both triumphalism and apocalypse look unserious. Reuters reported this week that the World Bank expects Nigeria’s economy to grow by about 4.2% in 2026, with external buffers improving and the debt-to-GDP ratio falling for the first time in a decade. Inflation had eased to 15.06% in February from roughly 33% in late 2024. Those are not imaginary numbers, and any fair-minded analysis must admit that Tinubu’s reforms have altered the macroeconomic conversation. But the same report warned that the Iran war has pushed fuel prices up by more than 50%, with obvious consequences for transport, food, and household pain. Add the continuing insecurity, underscored again this week by the killing of a Nigerian army general in Borno, and the government begins to look like a man who has repaired the roof but left half the house still flooding. That is not a collapse. It is not a command either. It is a meandering reform under political stress.
So, what must the opposition do, and do quickly? First, it must stop making Tinubu the only subject of the campaign. Anti-Tinubu is not a manifesto. It is a mood. Moods trend; structures win. Second, it must settle leadership questions early and publicly, because no voter wants to hire a rescue team still fighting over the steering wheel. Third, it needs an issue coalition, not just an elite coalition. Security, inflation, youth jobs, electricity, federalism, and institutional reform must become a coherent national offer, not a buffet of press conference talking points. Fourth, it must build from the states upward. Presidential romance without subnational organisation is political karaoke: loud, emotional, and usually off-key by the second verse.
Fifth, it must look seriously at the legal terrain. The Electoral Act 2026 has made party organisation even more central. PLAC notes that the new law tightens party registration rules, removes deemed registration, expands INEC’s regulatory discretion, and preserves the fact that candidates still need political parties as the vehicle for contesting most elective offices because independent candidacy is not permitted. In plain language, parties matter even more now. A fragmented opposition is therefore not just aesthetically untidy. It is strategically suicidal.
Still, there are dangers in the opposite direction, too. A desperate anti-Tinubu mega-bloc could become a cargo truck of incompatible ambitions. If all it offers is the promise to defeat one man, it may reproduce the same habits it condemns once power arrives. Nigeria does not need a ruling party so swollen that democracy gasps for air. But it also does not need an opposition whose only ideology is turn-by-turn revenge. The health of democracy lies somewhere between monopoly and mob. It requires competition with content, not merely competition with bitterness. Tinubu himself, in that same June 12 speech, defended multiparty politics even while mocking the opposition’s disorder. That irony should not be wasted. He has thrown them both an insult and an assignment.
So, yes, the opposition is right to worry. But worry is not a strategy. Outrage is not an organisation. The coalition is not coherent. And history is not sentimental. The man they are up against is ruthless, seasoned, and intimate with the dark arts of democratic combat. He knows the game. Some of his opponents are still learning the rules from old newspaper cuttings.
Which brings us back to the scripture. What you are going to do, do quickly. Not recklessly. Not hysterically. Quickly. Settle your house. Name your purpose. Offer something fresher than recycled indignation. Build a machine that is not merely anti-Tinubu but pro-Nigeria in a way ordinary Nigerians can feel in their pockets and in their pulse. Otherwise, the opposition will keep arriving at battle dressed in borrowed armour, only to discover that the tailor works for the man they came to unseat—May Nigeria win!
By Gloria Onosode
Nigeria is targeting an ambitious $1 trillion economy by 2030. To achieve this, women-led businesses must transition from mere passive observers to primary growth drivers at the heart of the economy and strategic participants in their respective industries.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the increased ownership rate of MSMEs by women represents a significant contribution to economic growth and job creation. Digital empowerment for these enterprises must move from being a social responsibility or gender support initiative to contributing to broader economic development.
To reach the $1 trillion GDP milestone, women-led businesses must be positioned to operate at a macroeconomic scale. This requires moving beyond subsistence trading and into the digital value chain. For instance, a fashion designer in Aba, through digital positioning, can access broader markets and commercial networks and thereby facilitate better record-keeping and data-driven decision-making, supporting improved financial record-keeping, which may be considered in credit assessments by financial institutions.
FairMoney Microfinance Bank (MFB), a bank licensed and regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria, contributes to the digital transitioning of small businesses in Nigeria by providing tools specifically designed for the realities of the Nigerian entrepreneur. For women, whose businesses often fluctuate with seasonal demands or family needs, the ability to protect and grow capital is paramount. FairMoney MFB offers features that empower women to move from informal ‘under-the-mattress’ savings to digitised interest-bearing savings products. By embracing digital transition, tech-based saving platforms can enable business owners to set specific goals, such as purchasing new equipment, saving towards business goals in a disciplined manner, while earning interest at applicable rates.
For that business owner who requires immediate liquidity, our flexible savings feature offers interest while allowing for withdrawal access that is subject to applicable terms and conditions to cover emergency restocks. For longer-term scaling, our fixed-term savings feature allows entrepreneurs to lock away funds for a fixed period and accrue interest based on product terms, subject to terms and conditions. By automating savings and providing interest at applicable rates, FairMoney MFB is designed to support financial planning and resilience over time for women-led SMEs.
Nigerian women are among the most entrepreneurial globally, consistently defying structural barriers to build enterprises from the ground up. According to the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Nigeria has approximately 39.6 million nano, micro, small, and medium enterprises. Charles Odii, Director General at SMEDAN in 2024, also recently shared that approximately 72% of these enterprises are now classified as being owned or led by women. This is a significant jump from previous years, which hovered around 40–43%, largely due to the surge in ‘nano’ and ‘micro’ home-based businesses. These female-led enterprises are the primary engines of job creation and community stability.
Despite this drive, women entrepreneurs face a unique set of structural hurdles that stifle their ability to scale. The ‘financing gap’ remains the most formidable obstacle. The World Bank IFC Nigeria2Equal initiative reports that while Nigeria has one of the highest female entrepreneurship rates globally, the credit gap for these women is estimated at over 2.9 trillion Naira, forcing them into the ‘savings and family’ funding model.
The case for supporting these businesses extends beyond equity; it is rooted in the ‘multiplier effect’. Research demonstrates that women reinvest up to 90% of their income into their families and communities, specifically in education, healthcare, and nutrition. Supporting these enterprises is, therefore, a direct investment in Nigeria’s human capital. By bringing these businesses into the formal sector, the accuracy of economic planning will be improved. When a woman-led SME flourishes, the benefits ripple across the entire socioeconomic landscape.
The future of the Nigerian economy is intrinsically tied to the success of its women. When we prioritise women-led businesses, we are not merely fulfilling a gender quota; we can contribute to unlocking economic potential across sectors. By bridging the digital gap and providing robust financial tools for saving and credit to women-led businesses, Nigeria can begin to support the growth of micro-enterprises over time. A $1 trillion Nigeria is not just a dream; it represents a significant opportunity that can be progressively realised by the resilient women entrepreneurs of our nation.
Gloria Onosode is the Director of Enterprise Sales at FairMoney Business
These days, surviving in Nigeria feels like a full-time job on its own.
Before the month even properly begins, salary has already been divided into transport, fuel, food, bills, subscriptions, and every other expense that somehow keeps increasing. For many 9–5ers, the routine has become painfully familiar: wake up early, battle traffic, survive the stress of work, battle traffic again, and get home completely drained, only to realise even the simple things that help you unwind now have to be carefully budgeted for.
Because in this economy, everybody is cutting costs. People are thinking twice before ordering food. They are postponing shopping plans. They are reducing unnecessary spending. And for many, one of the first things to go has been entertainment.
The same streaming platforms and premium subscriptions people once paid for without thinking have now become part of the “maybe next month” list. Not because people suddenly stopped loving movies, series, football, or reality TV, but because when inflation keeps rising, and fuel costs continue to affect everything, entertainment starts to feel like a luxury.
But that is exactly why affordability in entertainment matters now more than ever and why GOtv continues to stand out as a brand that genuinely keeps everyday Nigerians in mind.
Rather than assuming quality entertainment should only be accessible to people willing to spend heavily, GOtv has consistently positioned itself as a platform built with everyday Nigerians in mind, creating options that allow people to still enjoy premium entertainment without having to break the bank.
Take the GOtv Smallie package, for example.
For as low as ₦1,900 a month, subscribers get access to over 35 channels, including approximately 19 to 21 local channels, sports content, and 15+ channels across news, music, movies, lifestyle, kids, and general entertainment.
And for those who prefer longer payment plans, it is also available in:
-
Quarterly – ₦5,100
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Annual – ₦15,000
What makes this even better is that, despite being the most affordable package, Smallie still offers something for everyone.
It is not one of those basic plans where you pay less and get almost nothing. Whether you are the family member who loves African movies, the sports enthusiast who never wants to miss a match, the parent looking for kids’ content, or the person who just wants background TV after a stressful day, there is something to watch.
And for viewers who want even more variety, GOtv has other packages across different price points:
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GOtv Jinja – ₦3,900
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GOtv Jolli – ₦5,800
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GOtv Max – ₦8,500
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GOtv Supa – ₦11,400
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GOtv Supa Plus – ₦16,800
So, whether you’re going for the most affordable option or something with a more premium feel, there’s always a GOtv package that fits comfortably into different lifestyles and budgets.
At a time when everyday decisions are increasingly shaped by cost, GOtv quietly fills an important gap by keeping quality entertainment within reach for more people, because beyond the hustle, the traffic, the deadlines, and the constant pressure of trying to keep up with life in today’s economy, there is still a need for simple moments of joy and escape. Those small pauses in the day where you can switch off, relax, and just enjoy something light without overthinking it.
And that’s really the point: entertainment shouldn’t feel like another financial burden.
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