West Africa’s most populous nation kicked off official campaigning for its 2025 general election on Wednesday, setting the stage for an unprecedented contest where incumbent President Bola Tinubu seeks a second term against a deeply fragmented opposition bloc, against a backdrop of soaring public frustration over unmet economic and security promises.
The presidential and parliamentary polls are scheduled for January 16, 2025, with state gubernatorial elections to follow three weeks later on February 6. While 18 opposition candidates have qualified to challenge Tinubu’s reelection bid, political analysts broadly agree the race will boil down to a three-way contest, pitting the incumbent against the two top contenders he defeated in the 2023 election: former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the African Democratic Congress, a veteran candidate who has run for the presidency multiple times, and former Anambra State governor Peter Obi of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, who upended the 2023 race with a groundswell of youth support that upended traditional political dynamics.
Nigeria’s political history has handed incumbents a distinct structural advantage when the opposition vote is split across multiple high-profile candidates, a pattern that played out in Tinubu’s 2023 victory. Back then, he secured the presidency with one of the lowest vote shares for any elected Nigerian leader, a result that laid bare his underlying unpopularity even as he claimed victory.
When Tinubu first took office in 2023, he campaigned on a pledge to build on his predecessor’s work to deliver tangible “democratic dividends” to Nigerian citizens, who had long grappled with deadly insurgent violence, systemic government corruption, and widespread extreme poverty and food insecurity. Two years on, however, critics say the president has failed to deliver on almost all of his core promises, leaving him deeply unpopular among the nation’s majority young electorate.
Tinubu’s signature flagship economic reforms, implemented shortly after his inauguration, triggered a cascade of price hikes that have pushed Nigeria into its worst economic crisis in a generation. Within days of taking office in May 2023, he scrapped a decades-old national fuel subsidy that had kept energy costs affordable for low-income households, and moved to unify the naira’s distorted multiple exchange rates, a policy that ended the currency’s artificial overvaluation and triggered a steep devaluation. While the Tinubu administration argues the reforms stabilized public finances and prevented a potential economic collapse, winning praise from international investors, the policies sent inflation soaring to multi-decade highs, making basic goods and services unaffordable for millions of households.
Security challenges have also worsened during Tinubu’s tenure. Mass kidnappings for ransom and jihadist violence, long concentrated in Nigeria’s far north, have spread to previously peaceful regions of the country, leaving more residents vulnerable to death and displacement and deepening public anger over the government’s failure to keep citizens safe.
The biggest boost to Tinubu’s reelection odds comes from the opposition’s failure to unite behind a single consensus candidate to challenge the incumbent. A planned broad coalition between Atiku, Obi and other major opposition figures formed in 2025 collapsed before it could even launch, leaving anti-incumbent voters split across dozens of candidates.
“Voters are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the administration’s handling of inflation, insecurity and unemployment but because the anti-incumbent vote is split, the president has the edge,” explained Ikemesit Effiong, a partner at Lagos-based risk advisory firm SBM Intelligence.
Tinubu has also solidified his political advantage through a wave of high-profile defections from opposition ranks, which have left 31 of Nigeria’s 36 state governorships in the hands of his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). The shift has sparked widespread concerns from civil society groups that Nigeria could be sliding toward a de facto one-party state, claims the national government has repeatedly denied. But analysts note that sitting and former Nigerian governors wield enormous grassroots political influence, and are frequently accused of colluding with local electoral officials to sway results, meaning the wave of defections is likely to further boost Tinubu’s chances on election day.
Even ordinary voters acknowledge the opposition’s disunity has all but sealed the election’s outcome. “No matter how bad things are, Tinubu will still win because [opposition candidates] are not working together,” Juliet Onah, a resident of Nigeria’s capital Abuja, said.