SIMONKOLAWOLELIVE! simon.kolawole@thisdaylive.com, sms: 0805 500 1961
Someone said 24 hours is a long time in politics. So true. It has been one drama after the other in this presidential election season, so much that it is hard to catch our collective breath. On Friday, while we were busy with permutations and calculations, flipping from one TV channel to the other and hopping from website to website for the latest news from the courts (where most political battles take place these days), Mr Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, former chairman of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), took us by surprise by picking the nomination form of the African Democratic Congress (ADC). I didn’t see that coming. Many young Nigerian voters asked: Mohammed Who?
I started my commentaries on the 2027 presidential election months ago thinking it was going to be a three-way fight featuring President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the ADC, and Mr Peter Obi of the Labour Party. Before I knew what was happening, Obi had defected to the ADC and I thought it was now going to be a two-way fight, most likely between Tinubu, as the sitting president, and Atiku, as the moving spirit behind the ADC. When Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso moved from the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) to the ADC, I concluded Tinubu had unintentionally rallied the key opposition figures against himself and was now going to face a big war.
