By Abdul Mahmud
Nigeria’s 2027 presidential election will be contested over the economy, insecurity, corruption and the record of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, but beneath these issues lies the question that has haunted the Nigerian republic since independence: whose turn is it to occupy the centre of political power, and which communities believe that the presidency belongs to them as a matter of political entitlement?
The question cannot be dismissed as the irrational attachment of voters to ethnic origins. The influential Marxist historian, the late Eric Hobsbawm, provides a more illuminating explanation. His scholarship demonstrates how collective identities acquire political meaning through historical circumstances, institutional arrangements and the interests of those who mobilise them. Applied to Nigeria, his framework suggests that ethnic identity will remain central to the 2027 election because the Nigerian state has repeatedly made access to political power almost the only means of negotiating recognition, distributing resources and settling historical grievances.
In his book, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Hobsbawm challenged the assumption that nations are timeless communities whose political loyalties arise naturally from a shared past. National identities, he argued, must be understood in relation to the modern state, mass politics and the historical circumstances in which collective belonging acquires political force. His argument is particularly relevant to Nigeria, where colonialism consolidated diverse peoples within a single territorial state without resolving the question of how they would share political power and authority.
Independence in 1960 transferred sovereignty to Nigerian leaders, but it did not dissolve the ethnic anxieties that shaped the political arrangements inherited from colonial rule. Subsequent military interventions, the civil war, creation of states and the continuing struggle over federal appointments and public resources have further influenced how ethnic nationalities understand their place in the republic.
Ethnic identity, from this perspective, is neither an immutable political instinct nor an invention that politicians can manufacture at will. Its electoral force depends on the circumstances that make belonging politically consequential. Voters may identify strongly with their ethnic nations in everyday life without allowing ethnicity to determine their political choices. The calculation changes when presidential competition is presented as a contest over collective recognition, historical exclusion or the distribution of public resources.
Studies on Nigerian political behaviour similarly suggest that ethnic identification is fluid and that electoral institutions can intensify its political effects.
Hobsbawm’s concept of invented traditions, developed with Terence Ranger, offers a second way of understanding the approaching contest. Political actors frequently invoke historical narratives to establish continuity between present ambitions and an allegedly unquestionable collective destiny.
In Nigeria, arguments about zoning, regional entitlement, political rotation and the right of particular communities to produce a president draw their strength from historical experiences, but their electoral application also involves political choices about which parts of that history deserve emphasis. The language of fairness can become a powerful instrument of mobilisation when a candidate’s election is presented as the correction of a historical wrong rather than simply a choice between competing programmes of government.
The debate over whether power should return to the South after Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, followed by Tinubu’s emergence in 2023, illustrates this tension. Arguments about rotation are not simply ethnic demands disguised as constitutional principles; they also express the concern that no part of a plural federation should monopolise the presidency indefinitely.
Still, rotation can become exclusionary when political leaders treat the interests of an entire region as inseparable from the ambitions of its preferred candidate. A principle intended to promote inclusion can thus become a mechanism for policing political loyalty.
The 2027 contest will test these competing interpretations of fairness. Tinubu’s re-election bid will invite assessments of his administration’s economic policies, the removal of the petrol subsidy, inflation, insecurity and the consequences of fiscal reform. His supporters will seek to frame continuity as necessary for economic recovery, while opponents will argue that the costs borne by ordinary Nigerians outweigh the administration’s claims of progress.
These arguments will not unfold in an ethnic vacuum. Subnational experiences of economic hardship, perceptions of political representation and the distribution of federal appointments will influence how different communities evaluate the president’s record.
The same dynamics will shape the opposition. Any candidate hoping to defeat Tinubu will need more than a strong subnational base. The candidate must assemble a coalition across Nigeria’s major ethnic and religious communities, while persuading voters that their participation will not simply transfer power from one ethnic national and geopolitical regional interest to another.
The experience of the 2023 election, in which Peter Obi attracted substantial support beyond his Igbo base, demonstrated that ethnic identity does not mechanically determine electoral behaviour. Nevertheless, the sub-national, geopolitical and regional concentration of political support and the fierce disputes surrounding representation showed how readily electoral competition can become a referendum on communal recognition.
Hobsbawm’s Marxist historical perspective also directs attention to the material interests concealed by the language of ethnic solidarity. Nigeria’s political elites frequently invite citizens to understand presidential competition as a struggle between communities, even though the economic interests of political and business elites may diverge sharply from those of ordinary people within their own ethnic groups.
A poor farmer in Benue, an unemployed graduate in Enugu and a struggling trader in Lagos may share more immediate economic concerns with one another than with wealthy political patrons who claim to represent their respective communities. Ethnic mobilisation can obscure these shared interests by persuading voters that the identity of the president matters more than the conditions under which they live.
This is not an argument that ethnic grievances are imaginary or that historical exclusion should be ignored; it is an argument that political elites benefit when legitimate demands for recognition become substitutes for accountability. A community may celebrate producing a president while schools deteriorate, hospitals remain inadequate and youths struggle to find work. Symbolic representation has value, but it cannot serve as a permanent excuse for material deprivation.
The danger in 2027 is that the presidency will once again be treated as a communal possession rather than a public trust. Hobsbawm’s scholarship helps explain why this tendency persists: identities acquire political durability when institutions and political incentives repeatedly make them useful. Nigeria cannot overcome ethnic politics through appeals to patriotism alone.
Electoral institutions must command public confidence, political parties must build credible national coalitions, and governments must distribute public goods according to transparent and defensible principles.
Ethnic identity will almost certainly influence the 2027 presidential election, but its influence is not predetermined. The decisive question is whether Nigerians will be persuaded to vote primarily as members of ethnic communities competing for access to power or as citizens judging competing claims to govern the republic. Hobsbawm reminds us that collective identities are made politically consequential through history. Nigeria’s challenge is to ensure that its history does not become a permanent excuse for the failure to build a state in which every citizen has an equal stake.