Stephen Adewale

Recently, my attention was irresistibly drawn to an opinion article penned by Professor Farooq Kperogi and published in a national daily on April 26, 2025. In his characteristically provocative style, Professor Kperogi, in the piece titled ‘In 2027, Tinubu Won’t Win; The Opposition Will Lose,’ presents a grim diagnosis of Nigeria’s political landscape as the nation marches towards the next general election. He contends, with cutting precision, that President Bola Tinubu’s greatest asset for 2027 is neither soaring popularity nor transformative policies, but rather the chronic disunity, provincial arrogance, and strategic naivety that plague the opposition. With a keen eye, he dissects the opposition’s vulnerabilities. With particular emphasis on the northern politicians and the recent movement into the Social Democratic Party (SDP), he asserts without evidence that the party is no more than a shadow extension of President Tinubu’s political machinery.

What truly caught my attention, and compelled this rejoinder, was the astonishingly misplaced assertion by Professor Kperogi, who referred to the SDP as “Tinubu’s spare car.” I was sorely tempted to dismiss his ignorance as just another example of armchair punditry, the specialty of writers who live comfortably outside Nigeria’s borders, cobbling together grand conclusions from snippets of newspaper gossip. In my quest for the “evidence” behind his bold claim, I diligently read through his column, only to discover that his solitary reference was a 2022 Business Day publication, which merely speculated that Tinubu might have opened backdoor discussions with the SDP in case his primary ambitions faltered. No hard facts, no insider confirmations, just recycled social media chatter dressed up as insight. With such flimsy scaffolding propping up his argument, it is clear that Farooq was not building a case but merely echoing the street-level rumour mill with academic flourish.

Yet, I chose to respond, because as someone who stood firmly in the trenches during the 2023 general election, working hand in glove with the leadership of the SDP and Prince Adewole Adebayo himself, it would be a grave disservice to let Farooq’s false accusations go unchallenged. To stay silent would be to allow the sweat, sacrifices and sleepless nights of those who genuinely toiled to build the party, and who continue to labour relentlessly to make the SDP a formidable, rescuing force for Nigeria, be casually erased by the careless flourish of a professor’s pen especially one who, frankly, ought to know better. If such reckless narratives are left to stand, truth itself risks being buried under the rubble of falsehood, merely because it was inked with academic authority. 

This tired old argument about the SDP being a stooge for Tinubu has been hawked around since 2022, but like all bad merchandise, it has never stood the test of truth. To set the record straight: SDP’s presidential primary was concluded before the APC even managed to choose its standardbearer. At that time, mischief-makers spun wild tales that Prince Adewole Adebayo would miraculously step down for Tinubu, an event that, unsurprisingly, only ever happened in the fertile imaginations of rumour peddlers. Throughout the campaign, we marched boldly on the high road of principle, and neither Prince Adebayo nor the SDP leadership ever stooped to compromise.

When that prediction collapsed like a house of wet cardboard, the charlatans quickly rebranded their fables, claiming that after the election, Adebayo and the SDP leaders would rush into APC’s warm embrace or scramble for federal appointments as a “thank you” gift from Tinubu. Yet here we are, three April later, and not a single such betrayal has occurred. Today, while leaders of other “opposition” parties still parade around with their security details, SDP leaders had their protection stripped away, hardly the royal treatment one would expect for so-called “stooges”. If loyalty to principle is now seen as betrayal, then perhaps it’s the slanderers, not the slandered, who owe Nigeria an explanation. 

Since President Tinubu was sworn into office in May 2023, the lone, unyielding voice consistently echoing through TV screens, radio waves, and newspaper reports with sharp, constructive criticism has been none other than Prince Adewole Adebayo, the 2023 presidential candidate of the SDP. It is no exaggeration to say that the very reason SDP remains on the lips of Nigerians today as a credible force capable of unseating the All Progressives Congress (APC) is because of the tireless, and daily principled interventions of the party. I challenge Professor Farooq to name one, just one other candidate or party from the 2023 race who has matched the SDP’s stamina in challenging Tinubu’s retrogressive policies or proposing sensible alternatives. The silence will be deafening.

It is increasingly disheartening that each time I turn to the musings of some of our so-called enlightened columnists, I am met not with insight, but with disappointment. Take, for instance, Professor Farooq’s latest masterpiece of imagination, where he boldly declares, “Northern opposition politicians like Nasir El-Rufai also don’t seem to realise that the Social Democratic Party (SDP) they have embraced as the vehicle to displace Tinubu is, in fact, Tinubu’s spare car.” That a Professor of his stature could toss around “in fact” while peddling nothing more than a figment of his own creative mind is, quite frankly, the stuff of tragic comedy. 

It seems the good professor has conveniently forgotten that Mallam El-Rufai was not just a card-carrying member of the APC in 2023, but a central figure in the kitchen cabinet that midwifed President Tinubu’s emergence. El-Rufai had front-row access to all the political backroom deals: he knew exactly who the collaborators were, who played double games, and who stood their ground. That he has now chosen to align himself with the SDP is, if anything, a ringing endorsement of the party’s authenticity as a genuine opposition force. How Professor Farooq imagines that El-Rufai, with all his insider knowledge, would blindly leap into the arms of a “stooge party” is a riddle that defies logic. Even more amusing is the idea that the professor fancies himself better informed about Nigeria’s political back alleys than El-Rufai, a man who has swum in the very waters he theorises about from afar, is a claim so bold it deserves its own chapter in the annals of creative writing.

Professor Kperogi took the metaphorical analogy used by Prince Adebayo and twisted it into something far more dramatic than it ever was. He quotes Prince Adebayo as saying: “As for the coalition, we’re listening to them. What we don’t want to be—we don’t want to be a get-away car for a conspiracy and robbery we did not plan. So, if you planned something somewhere and you want to use the SDP as a get-away car, that’s not available.” But instead of grasping the clear meaning, the professor seemingly put on the robes of omniscience and wrongly claimed that Adebayo was referring to Mallam El-Rufai. It’s almost as though Kperogi believes he’s in Adebayo’s head, when in reality, Prince Adebayo was speaking directly to opposition leaders who thought forming a coalition for the sake of defeating President Tinubu would be a magic bullet. What Adebayo was saying, in no uncertain terms, is that such coalitions should be built on genuine national interests, not on the shaky sands of selfish political manoeuvring.

Let’s take a quick stroll down the memory lane to 2015. The opposition parties coalesced under the APC banner, not to fix Nigeria’s problems, but to oust President Goodluck Jonathan. The result? They succeeded in removing the Peoples Democracy Party (PDP), but the policies that followed were indistinguishable from those they had once opposed. Ten years later, under the APC-led government, is Nigeria any better off? Absolutely not. So, Adebayo’s caution to the current crop of opposition leaders is simple: don’t make the same mistakes the opposition leaders made on the road to 2015. Yet, in Professor Kperogi’s view, this perfectly rational advice becomes some grand conspiracy, conveniently ignoring the bigger picture. It’s almost as if he’s turned a metaphor about caution into a melodramatic soap opera.

And this has always been the position of SDP. Our intervention as an opposition party is to emphasise that SDP’s trenchant opposition to the APC and the President Tinubu Administration is principally about bad policies and poor governance instead of personal hatred or grievances. The continuous admonition to the political class is to build a coalition of the people for the people on issues about the people rather than personal grievances of the politicians. That way, the people will buy into the coalition.

However, Kperogi’s lamentation about the opposition’s chronic disunity and how they might yet, through a breathtaking display of selfishness, stumble and bicker their way into political irrelevance rings with painful truth. Those disillusioned opposition leaders should wear this criticism as a gauntlet thrown at their feet and rise to the challenge to prove him wrong. 

Regrettably, the professor’s accusation of the SDP being President Tinubu’s “spare car” is not just wrong, it is a spectacular historical blunder. It’s almost as if, in his bid to deliver what he deems an informed opinion, Prof. Kperogi found himself driving down the winding road of misinformation, swerving past truth and crashing into the wreckage of baseless allegations. His decision to label the only active opposition party committed to building a genuine coalition as a “spare car” for Tinubu is not only inaccurate, it’s a tragic disservice to the very idea of informed commentary.

In his attempt to decry the fragmentation of the opposition, Kperogi somehow managed to splinter his own credibility. He is so focused on sowing division that he inadvertently undermines the effort of the SDP leaders, who have been tirelessly working to unite well-meaning Nigerians. These are individuals who aren’t simply fixated on toppling the ruling party, but on bringing true, people-oriented leadership who actually care about the citizens they govern to power.

By publishing these groundless accusations, Prof. Kperogi has not just done a disservice to himself, he has also done a grave injustice to the Nigerian people, who deserve a truthful, honest assessment of their political landscape. It is not just a misstep, it is a fall from intellectual grace, where the rush to present an opinion has tragically replaced the pursuit of truth. So, while Kperogi’s column may be seen by some as an exercise in free speech, it is indeed an example of how a simple question of ‘what do we really know?’ can often be drowned out by the loud roar of assumptions and conjecture. Let us hope, for his sake and for the country’s, that future contributions aim for a bit more precision and a lot less political fiction.

* Mr. Adewale, former Chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Ondo State, writes from the Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife

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