Rainbow over Abuja, rain in the wards

Folorunso Adisa's The Mirror and the Lamp

A coalition is normally announced by the man it exists to serve. The Rainbow Coalition has instead been announced, enlarged, defended and policed by Nyesom Wike, the FCT Minister, who sits in President Tinubu’s cabinet while maintaining that he remains a member of the PDP. After Governor Ademola Adeleke’s recent visit to the President, Wike told journalists in Abuja that Adeleke “belongs to us”, that the meeting was meant to review the coalition, and that there was no opposition left. Adeleke won Osun on the Accord platform, and Wike cites Governor Chukwuma Soludo of APGA as another supporter of the President’s re-election. Whatever else one makes of this assembly, it has an unusual author.

The coalition is real, but it is a coalition for a single office. Wike has been plain about this. He says it exists to support Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the presidential level, and that he never promised the PDP would stand down in governorship, National Assembly or state assembly contests. Everyone whose name will appear on a ballot below the presidential one should read that candour carefully. Support for the President, once a mark of belonging to the APC, has become a position a rival can hold just as comfortably. The coalition has quietly divorced two loyalties Nigerian politics long treated as one: allegiance to the man, and allegiance to the party that carries his name.

The APC’s governors grasped this at once. Hope Uzodimma, chairman of their forum, has said they have struck no formal agreement with any individual or opposition party, and several APC state chapters have urged Wike to defect if his devotion to Tinubu is sincere. Wike replies that the governors’ real anxiety is the next National Assembly, since aspirants denied APC tickets may find other platforms and refuse to back the leaders the governors prefer. That is his account of their motives, and motives are cheap to assign. The structural point survives either version. A party that cannot guarantee its candidates the support of its own President’s allies has a problem no photograph at the Villa can solve.

Wike’s defence deserves a fair hearing, because it rests on something true about Nigerian voters: they split their tickets. In 2023, as Wike tells it, the G5 governors backed Tinubu while the PDP kept its candidates for other offices, and in Rivers the PDP took the National Assembly and state seats. Few people who have watched Nigerian elections up close will find that implausible. The weakness lies elsewhere. A coalition that is honest about dividing the ballot is equally honest about dividing the spoils, and the candidate who treats that honesty as betrayal has misread the market. The name is borrowed from the coalition Jesse Jackson built in the American 1980s around a broad social agenda; this one is built around a candidate. An agenda can hold a coalition together when interests diverge. A candidate can only hold it together while he is winning.

The new geometry is already visible in the reports, though reports are not confirmation. THISDAY, a month ago, reported that Wike is backing the PDP’s Ladi Adebutu in Ogun against Governor Dapo Abiodun’s camp, whose chosen successor is Senator Solomon Adeola, and that similar alignments exist in Gombe, Cross River and Benue, where PDP candidates are said to be favored over sitting governors. The same reporting adds a detail the coalition’s critics tend to omit: several of those PDP candidates are themselves said to support Tinubu.

A governor may therefore enjoy the President’s goodwill in Abuja and meet a Tinubu-friendly challenger at home. In such a system, the President’s friends can be one another’s opponents.

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The oldest political instruction on this subject sits in the Second Book of Samuel. Absalom did not storm his father’s throne. He stood at the city gate each morning and listened to everyone with a grievance, until, in the writer’s phrase, he “stole the hearts of the men of Israel.” The gate is where elections are decided: the ward, the market, the burial ground, the unpaid contractor, the clinic without a nurse. A candidate who spends the years between elections in Abuja or the state capital leaves the gate open to whoever will stand there. National endorsement can fill a rally. It cannot fill the absence of a man his constituents last saw on a poster.

A rainbow visible over Abuja is not thereby visible in Gombe, and the politician who forgets this is campaigning to an audience that does not vote for him. Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, popularly known as Yayi and the APC’s governorship candidate in Ogun, appears to have grasped the point. He has put his energy into making his name a fixture on the lips of ordinary voters instead of resting on the endorsements around him. Dr Kadri Obafemi Hamzat, the party’s candidate in Lagos, has taken the same instinct to doorsteps and hallways, where a candidate is judged by whether he turns up and not by what his campaign leaflet promises. Both men enjoy the backing of the President and of their party’s leadership, which makes their diligence the more instructive. Candidates in other states, with the same advantages and less appetite for the legwork, should study them.

The practical conclusion is unglamorous. An incumbent should treat access as a courtesy and endorsement as a commodity, to be confirmed constituency by constituency before the campaign begins. Visible performance matters more than announced performance, since a completed road that nobody credits to its sponsor is political income left uncollected. Party structure, from the ward chairman to the polling-unit agent, will decide the close races, and no coalition can lend what a candidate has failed to build. The voter who felt ignored this year will not be persuaded by a banner next year.

The President’s own position is the strongest in the equation. A coalition that welcomes defectors, borrows opposition governors and fragments the opposition vote costs him little if it works and little if it wobbles. As a principal architect of the 2013 merger that produced the APC, he also understands better than most how alliances are made and what keeps them alive. That experience gives him a standing none of his lieutenants can claim, for he alone can give the rainbow its terms. Of course, a season of courtship can justify flexibility, but a season of campaigning will demand clarity on who is supporting whom, and where.

In Genesis, the rainbow appears as a covenant, a promise made by one party and binding only on that party. The political version is a promise made by many and binding on few, which is why candidates should read its terms rather than admire its colours. The coalition may well deliver the presidency. Every other vote will be counted where votes have always been counted, in polling units, and no polling unit in Nigeria has ever been located under a rainbow.

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