2027: exhuming Goodluck Jonathan again

August 17, 2025 by Palladium

In April 2022, shortly before political parties began their nomination battles for the 2023 presidential election, a group of supporters visited former president Goodluck Jonathan at his Abuja residence to pressure him to throw his hat in the ring. He was characteristically evasive. His response was a model in both brevity and caution. “Yes you are calling me to come and declare for the next election, I cannot tell you I’m declaring,” he had said soothingly. “The political process is ongoing. Just watch out. The key role you must play is that Nigeria must get somebody that will carry young people along.” Presumably he was that somebody who knew how to galvanise the youth. Months before the parties organise the next nominations for the 2027 presidential election, Dr Jonathan has once more come under pressure to enter the race. Dispensing with the lessons of the 2022 experience, the former president has again adopted his cautious and evasive approach.

This time, he is not facing any hurdle that he didn’t face in 2022. There is still the legal conundrum inserted in the constitution in 2019 forbidding any president who had previously taken oath of office twice from running for the presidency. Responding to the lacuna that arose from the death in office of ex-president Umaru Yar’Adua in 2010, the National Assembly amended the constitution to remove any ambiguity regarding qualification for the presidency. In 2019, the amendment, contained in Section 137(3), came into effect, and it pointedly precludes anyone who completed the term of a previous president and had won another term in office from staking a claim for the office. The lawmakers reasoned that a breach would violate the immutable constitutional provision that no president shall serve more than eight years in office. It is not clear by what legal sleight of hand anyone can still read ambiguity into that amendment or waffle about whether it can be applied retroactively or not.

In 2022, former vice president Atiku Abubakar and other crowds of ambitious aspirants from the southern part of the country helped banish the possibility of Dr Jonathan entering the contest. And so it was that the once exuberant former president suddenly became grimfaced and deflated. Had he calmly considered the circumstances of the race he was being beguiled into, he would have seen that it was a bridge too far. But strangely, he let himself be seduced by the prospect of returning to familiar haunts he had grown to love, a presidency so powerful and immense, but an office he felt somewhat humiliated out of in 2015. He was not alone in displaying that unnatural desire. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo reportedly did not want to relinquish power in 1979, but was coaxed by his fellow generals. He never stopped longing for the office, and when the opportunity came again in 1999, though he at first dissembled, he took it with both hands. In November 2010, Alhaji Atiku became the consensus candidate of the Malam Adamu Ciroma-led Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPFL) in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s presidential primary slated for January 2011. He had defeated Ibrahim Babangida, former military head of state who had ruled for eight years, but still panted after the office more than a decade after he was shooed out.

Sources within the PDP confirm that Dr Jonathan is being pressured to contest the 2027 presidency on the party’s platform. Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed, who was for almost five years Dr Jonathan’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, is believed to be the leading exponent of the Jonathan candidature. He has privately conceded that the legal conundrum barring the former president from contesting could be successfully tackled, and that since Dr Jonathan would then not be entitled to run for a second term should he win, it would pave the way for the return of another northerner, presumably his good self, to take a shot at the presidency. His permutations may be neat, but they are infantile. There are many more leading PDP members lining up behind a Jonathan candidacy, believing that he would stand a better chance than anyone else, including Peter Obi, former Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, of winning. It is not known how reassuring it is to Dr Jonathan that the same party is in some perverse way grooming an alternative in Mr Obi.

The PDP may wish to exhume Dr Jonathan who cold-shouldered the party after 2015 because he felt betrayed by party bosses, or groom Mr Obi who also abandoned them when he thought they were hostile to his ambition, but in reality they may simply be acknowledging how difficult it is to find a suitable presidential candidate with which to beat the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate in 2027. It is also feared that the North and some elements in the PDP may in fact be exhibiting their extreme antipathy towards President Tinubu in particular. Stories of the seductions they have inspired fill the media. But, from all indications, the stories will fizzle out in the coming months, for the forces against them are overwhelming, if not insurmountable. It is true that outside Dr Jonathan and Mr Obi, they do not have anyone of enough heft to champion their cause and put them in battle formation, but to linger too long on the implausible and chimerical candidature of the two runaway politicians is to further deplete their chances and prolong their anguish.

Both Dr Jonathan and Mr Obi are irritatingly cautious politicians, the kind of caution that encapsulates indecisions and hesitations. They are currently perched on the horns of a dilemma and will not throw their hats in the ring without firm assurances of getting the presidential ticket. Yet, no one in the PDP will give that assurance. More unnervingly, no one in the PDP, not even their brightest legal minds, can give them the assurance that the legal conundrums the courted aspirants face can be resolved in their favour. For all his tentativeness, Dr Jonathan fears that Section 137(3) cannot by any conceivable legal interpretation be stretched to accommodate his ambition. His wife, Dame Patience, a more resolute person than he, thinks the family honour should be redeemed by supporting someone else for the contest. Since leaving the throne, both she and her husband have looked far better and rosier than when they held the reins of power and were subjected to the worst kind of vilifications Dr Jonathan himself thought was unequalled in Africa. In addition, the former president’s aides will be secretly appalled that their principal still harbours any thought of returning to the hot seat.

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It is expected that the former president will soon announce his disinterest in the race. Regardless of the allure of office, and notwithstanding his suspicious incapacity for deep reflection, he is thought to understand that he is being courted to be cynically deployed to divide the South and pave the way for a northern victory at the poll. He is also thought to understand that they are courting him not because they respect and love him or appreciate his record in office, but because they hope to use him for their own base calculations to reinforce their long-held belief in the superiority and dominance of the North over the South: that they can enthrone and dethrone at will, and that any southerner in office must labour or function under the weight of northern suzerainty and southern vassalage. Dr Jonathan has not given the impression of retaining a tight circle of advisers capable of disaggregating Nigeria’s complex political dynamics and availing him the best options for his considerations. However, he has proved at key moments in his life a capacity for identifying and listening to his best instincts. Those instincts served him well in 2015 when he lost the election and conceded it despite being egged on by his supporters to foment trouble.

This time, with regard to the 2027 race, he faces far less challenging conundrums than the opposition and election that took him out in 2015. He will see the constitutional impediments to the 2027 race as insurmountable, and the PDP so wracked by internal conflict as to be able to present a formidable force against the enemy. He will also see whatever guarantees they give him concerning the nomination as insufficient to bank on, especially in a party which years of internal dissensions had weakened and disoriented. And finally, he will see the political ramparts and moats upon which the party hopes to erect its defences against the APC as too weak to withstand the ruling party’s cannons, indeed far weaker than the battlements that failed him in 2015. Should he attempt to contest and be given the ticket, he will sense his vulnerability 12 years after he left office much keener than when he ruled supreme and his word was nearly indisputably law. Mr Obi fights common sense and will return to his Labour Party recently retaken from the Julius Abure faction; Dr Jonathan is much calmer, sturdier, and less given to presumptions and oversimplifications. It may take him a little longer to arrange his logic well, but in the end, he will likely resist the witches of Endor bent on summoning his spirit for an ignoble cause.