As 2027 Battle Lines Form, Atiku’s Washington Gambit and a Third Party’s Bold Prediction Test How Far Nigeria’s Opposition Will Go
Eighteen months out from Nigeria’s next presidential election, two opposition-adjacent moves this week reveal very different theories of how to beat Bola Tinubu — one banking on Washington, the other betting on a governor’s economic record.
What Atiku is actually doing in Washington
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, now the African Democratic Congress’s presidential candidate, retained the Washington lobbying firm Von Batten-Montague-York in March under a reported 12-month, $1.2 million contract covering advocacy and diplomatic outreach in Washington.
This week, the firm confirmed it has begun distributing a 60-plus-page dossier — titled a chronology of the 1993 US Department of Justice heroin-proceeds forfeiture case — to officials in the Trump administration, congressional offices, and House and Senate committees.
The case at the center of it isn’t new. It stems from a 1993 US civil forfeiture proceeding, United States v. Funds in Account No. 263226700 et al.
The case at the center of it isn’t new. It stems from a 1993 US civil forfeiture proceeding, United States v. Funds in Account No. 263226700 et al., in which federal prosecutors alleged that a Nigeria-linked drug trafficking network moved heroin into Chicago and that roughly $460,000 tied to Tinubu and two associates represented trafficking proceeds. Tinubu was never criminally charged or convicted in the matter; it was resolved as a civil forfeiture.
The case resurfaced during Nigeria’s 2023 election when Atiku and Labour Party candidate Peter Obi asked the Presidential Election Petition Court to disqualify Tinubu over it — the court rejected the argument, finding no criminal conviction had been established. The lobbying firm says the materials are also circulating now because Tinubu is reportedly seeking a meeting with Trump around the UN General Assembly.
Sani’s objection
Former Kaduna Central senator Shehu Sani called the move unconscionable and unpatriotic, arguing that domestic political disputes shouldn’t be exported to foreign capitals where they could damage Nigeria’s international standing.
His position is less about the underlying facts of the forfeiture case — which have been public since the 1990s and litigated in Nigerian courts already — and more a critique of the venue: taking a fight over Nigeria’s presidency to a foreign government and legislature, at a moment when Washington and Abuja are actively deepening a security and defense partnership, risks looking like using a foreign power as leverage against a sitting Nigerian president.
Whether that argument holds depends on how the material actually gets used. Distributing a public-record chronology to congressional staff is a fairly standard, if aggressive, lobbying tactic — it’s not new evidence, and Nigerian courts have already ruled on its legal significance.
The bigger question is what it signals about Atiku’s 2027 strategy: after his coalition efforts have struggled to unify Nigeria’s fractured opposition at home, this is a bet that shaping how Washington and international observers perceive Tinubu could indirectly weaken him domestically, at real risk of a nationalist backlash of exactly the kind Sani is voicing.
The other opposition bet: Makinde
While Atiku plays an outside game, another opposition figure is being talked up through a very different playbook. The Allied People’s Movement (APM) has thrown its weight behind Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde as its 2027 presidential candidate, insisting Makinde will beat Tinubu outright.
Makinde will beat Tinubu outright
The claim came in direct response to presidential aide Daniel Bwala, who reportedly dismissed Makinde and the APM as inconsequential to the 2027 race during a Monday interview. APM’s publicity secretary, Abubakar Yusuf, fired back that history would decide who was truly inconsequential, and leaned on Makinde’s record running Oyo State’s economy as the case for why his model deserves a national audience.
There’s an irony baked into APM’s rebuttal: it invoked Bwala’s own rocky March 2026 Al Jazeera appearance — in which host Mehdi Hasan repeatedly confronted him with past statements calling Tinubu unfit for office, made before Bwala’s defection from the PDP to the APC — as proof the presidency’s messaging can’t be trusted.
Bwala has disputed that framing, saying the interview was selectively edited, and later claimed Al Jazeera privately apologized to him, though he says the network wouldn’t do so publicly.
Reading the odds
APM’s prediction is worth treating skeptically on its face — the party has no national structure remotely comparable to the ruling APC’s, and Makinde, while a sitting governor with a genuine economic track record in Oyo, has not declared for the presidency and remains a member of the PDP, not APM, as of the latest reporting on his political alignment.
A one-party endorsement predicting outright victory eighteen months out is, at minimum, aspirational messaging rather than a considered forecast. What it does confirm is that Makinde’s name is now firmly part of the 2027 conversation, enough that the presidency felt it worth dismissing publicly — and that dismissal is itself what generated this week’s headlines.
The bigger picture
Both stories point to the same underlying dynamic: with 2027 still distant, Nigeria’s opposition landscape remains too fragmented for a single clear challenger to emerge, so multiple camps are testing different routes to relevance — one through international pressure on Tinubu’s past, the other through amplifying a governor’s economic credentials before he’s even entered the race.
Sani’s intervention suggests at least part of the political establishment sees the Washington strategy as crossing a line domestic politics shouldn’t cross; whether voters agree, or simply see it as opposition politics as usual, will likely shape how much traction Atiku’s dossier gets before 2027 arrives.
