Datti Baba-Ahmed has said Atiku Abubakar would have won the 2027 presidency if he had backed Peter Obi in the 2023 presidential poll, turning a current television interview into a fresh argument inside Nigeria’s opposition camp. Speaking on Inside Sources on Channels Television, the former Labour Party vice-presidential candidate said he would have been willing to step aside himself in 2027 if Atiku had shown the kind of patience he says the moment required.
Baba-Ahmed went further, saying he would have urged Obi to agree to step down in 2027 if Atiku had supported them in 2023. In his telling, the path was there for a broader opposition deal, but it depended on Atiku putting ambition aside and acting like President Bola Tinubu, whom he credited with giving other politicians room to contest over the years.
That is why Baba-Ahmed’s remarks are landing now: they are not just a replay of 2023 recriminations but a direct claim about how opposition power in 2027 could have been built. He said Tinubu gave Atiku a platform in 2007, offered another one in 2011, and later saw Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 and waited. By contrast, he argued, Atiku did not exercise the same restraint in 2023 and missed a chance to help unify the opposition around Obi.
The sharper edge of Baba-Ahmed’s comments is that he paired his criticism with a warning about the way politicians think once they are absorbed by a presidential run. He said he had cautioned the opposition coalition against getting carried away, added that Tinubu knows the game the coalition is playing, and said the group did not have a Buhari, meaning it lacked the kind of outlier he believes can pull people together. But he also said that once politicians enter that trance, they tend to see themselves as president, which is part of what, in his view, makes them ignore workable deals until it is too late.
The question left hanging is not whether Baba-Ahmed believes Atiku made a mistake; he has made that plain. It is whether the opposition coalition can still learn from the 2023 split before the next cycle turns the same arguments into another missed opportunity.
