Nigerian presidential campaigns have traditionally treated geography as a test of political endurance. Candidates move from state to state, appearing at rallies, meeting traditional rulers, addressing party structures and travelling in convoys large enough to make physical presence part of the political message. The assumption is that a candidate who can put his campaign before Nigerians in as many places as possible is demonstrating the national reach required to occupy the presidency.
Seyi Makinde is beginning his 2027 presidential campaign with a different proposition.
The Allied Peoples Movement presidential candidate and his running mate, Lawal Daura, have begun taking their “Reset Nigeria” message through the six geopolitical zones in a series of town hall meetings. The campaign began in Katsina for the North-West, moved to Uyo for the South-South, then to Lafia for the North-Central and is scheduled to hold its South-East engagement in Enugu, with the North-East and South-West meetings to follow. The campaign describes the exercise as part of a nationwide consultation and grassroots mobilisation, with the meetings intended to be issue-based and citizen-driven.
The significance of the strategy lies not simply in the decision to hold town halls instead of conventional rallies. It lies in the possibility that Makinde is attempting to change the way a presidential campaign thinks about national reach. Rather than treating every state as a separate destination on an exhausting campaign itinerary, the zonal model treats selected regional centres as potential political hubs from which a broader network can be built.
That is an interesting proposition because the physical scale of Nigeria makes presidential campaigning an expensive exercise in both money and political attention. The traditional state-by-state tour can generate visibility, but visibility is not the same thing as organisation. A candidate can appear before thousands of people in a succession of cities without necessarily creating the local structures, relationships and channels of communication required to sustain political activity when the candidate has moved on. A strategically concentrated campaign, by contrast, has the potential to spend more time listening, refining its message and building relationships with people who can carry the campaign beyond the walls of the meeting venue.
But that potential should not be confused with proof.
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A zonal hub can be a deliberate exercise in political concentration, particularly for a campaign that must operate without the resources and institutional advantages available to an incumbent. It can also expose an organisational weakness if the campaign cannot translate its regional gatherings into a wider network of local structures. The same decision can therefore be read in two completely different ways, and neither interpretation can be settled by looking at photographs from the town halls or counting the number of people who attend them.
The real test is what the campaign is able to build around those meetings.
Katsina, for example, cannot be important merely because it hosts the North-West engagement. Its strategic value would lie in whether the campaign can use that engagement to establish relationships and political structures extending beyond Katsina itself. The same applies to Uyo in the South-South, Lafia in the North-Central and Enugu in the South-East. If these cities become points from which the campaign develops durable networks across their respective zones, the strategy begins to acquire an organisational logic. If they remain places where a candidate delivers a speech, receives applause and leaves with favourable headlines, then the campaign will have changed the format of its publicity without changing the underlying mechanics of presidential politics.
That distinction becomes even more important because Makinde is asking Nigerians to consider a political proposition that goes beyond replacing one administration with another. His campaign is built around what it calls “Reset Nigeria”, and at its North-West engagement in Katsina he presented an agenda covering the economy, education, security and the broader socio-political environment. In Lafia, he said the reset could be accomplished within four years and proposed a transitional government of national unity beginning on May 29, 2027.
There is political force in the promise of a four-year reset because it gives the electorate a defined period within which a government can be judged. Nigerian politics has often allowed administrations to describe difficult reforms as processes whose benefits will eventually arrive, sometimes long after the administration itself has left office. A four-year proposition removes some of that room. If the argument is that Nigeria can be fundamentally reset within one presidential term, then the campaign must eventually explain what that reset actually entails, which reforms come first, how they will be financed, which institutions must change and how the government intends to measure whether it has succeeded.
This is where a campaign slogan becomes a governing test.
Makinde has spoken of a new security architecture, a new direction for education, an economic reset based on data, science and logic, and a transformation of the country’s socio-political environment. Those are large objectives. Their seriousness will ultimately depend not on the language used to describe them but on the machinery proposed to achieve them. A presidential campaign that asks Nigerians to believe that four years is sufficient for such a reset must be prepared to show the sequence of reforms, the institutional responsibilities, the financial requirements and the political compromises that would make the programme possible.
The same scrutiny applies to the proposed transitional government of national unity. The phrase carries an obvious appeal in a country where political divisions often become obstacles to collective action, but the proposal requires definition. Would it mean a formal coalition of parties, the appointment of individuals from different political tendencies, a new governing compact or simply a broader distribution of political appointments? What would distinguish it from the coalition-building that accompanies almost every Nigerian administration? The answer matters because national unity is not created merely by putting different political identities around the same table. It requires a governing arrangement capable of producing decisions and implementing them.
The Makinde-Daura ticket adds another dimension to this calculation. Makinde is a Southern governor seeking a national mandate, while Daura brings a Northern political identity and a long career in the national security establishment. The combination gives the ticket an obvious cross-regional character, and the decision to begin the zonal town-hall programme in Katsina places the Northern question close to the centre of the campaign’s national strategy.
Yet geography on a ticket cannot substitute for political trust on the ground.
A Southern candidate seeking the presidency must be able to build support well beyond the South, just as a Northern candidate cannot assume that geography alone guarantees support across the North. The Nigerian presidency is constitutionally designed to require broad geographic support. Under Section 134 of the 1999 Constitution, a candidate must secure the highest number of votes and at least one-quarter of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of the states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory. In practical political terms, that makes a presidential campaign’s ability to build relationships across regions a structural necessity rather than an optional feature of its strategy.
That is why the zonal town halls deserve to be judged by what they produce beyond the cities in which they are held.
The difficult work of a presidential campaign takes place far from the stage. It involves identifying credible people who can organise communities, maintaining relationships with local political actors, understanding differences within each geopolitical zone and ensuring that a national message survives the journey from the campaign headquarters to the communities where voters actually make their decisions. It also requires the campaign to demonstrate that its consultations are genuinely influencing the manifesto rather than simply providing a more sophisticated setting for presenting policies that have already been decided.
This is where Makinde’s approach encounters the broader problem confronting any opposition campaign in 2027. Dissatisfaction with an incumbent government can create an opening for challengers, but dissatisfaction does not automatically organise itself around one candidate. An opposition campaign has to give that dissatisfaction a political destination, and it must do so while building enough structure across the country to turn a national argument into an electoral operation.
That is a much more difficult task than demonstrating that people are unhappy.
It is also why the campaign’s policy argument matters as much as its organisational strategy. If “Reset Nigeria” is to become more than a compelling phrase, the town halls should help answer the questions that voters will eventually ask about security, jobs, education, public finance, infrastructure, energy and the cost of living. The campaign has presented the consultations as an opportunity for citizens and stakeholders to contribute to the national agenda. The value of that exercise will ultimately depend on whether the listening produces greater precision in the programme and greater credibility in its implementation.
There is a temptation in Nigerian politics to measure campaigns by movement: the number of states visited, the size of rallies, the prominence of political defectors and the amount of media attention generated. Those things can matter, but they do not by themselves establish whether a campaign has developed the organisational depth required for a presidential election.
Makinde’s strategy therefore presents an unusually useful case study in the difference between political visibility and political reach. A candidate does not necessarily have to be everywhere at once to begin building a national campaign, but the regional centres through which he chooses to operate must eventually connect to the communities beyond them. The hub has to become a network, and the network has to become an organisation capable of carrying the campaign’s message into places where the candidate himself may never appear.
That is the opportunity in the strategy, but it is also its greatest vulnerability.
If the zonal meetings deepen consultation, strengthen local organisation, create durable relationships across regional political structures and produce a more detailed and credible national programme, then the campaign will have demonstrated that national political reach can be constructed without simply reproducing the traditional marathon of rallies across the country.
If they do not, the town halls will remain what they were on the day they were held: important political gatherings, but not yet evidence of a national political machine.
That is why the most revealing question about Makinde’s campaign is not how many rallies he can hold before 2027. It is whether the architecture now being assembled in Katsina, Uyo, Lafia and Enugu can eventually reach beyond those cities and connect a national political argument to the local structures through which presidential elections are actually contested.
A campaign can begin nationally through regional hubs. It can conserve resources, listen more deliberately and develop its message through direct engagement with citizens. What it cannot do is remain permanently concentrated in the places where the campaign chooses to gather.
Eventually, the network has to reach the country.
That is the real test of the Makinde experiment. The town halls may provide the hubs, the “Reset Nigeria” agenda may provide the message, and the Makinde-Daura ticket may provide the national proposition. The question that 2027 will eventually force the campaign to answer is whether all three can be connected into an organisation capable of carrying that proposition from the regional capital to the polling unit.
Until that happens, the strategy remains an intriguing architecture under construction rather than a demonstrated national machine.
Stephanie Shaakaa shaakaastephanie02@gmail.com
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