Peter Obi’s 2027 presidential bid is running into a wall of northern resistance, with critics calling his party invisible, his IPOB links toxic, and his running mate a traitor to his own people.
Peter Obi has a problem, and it lives north of the Niger.
The former Anambra governor’s presidential ambition under the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) is facing fierce resistance across northern Nigeria, with political stakeholders, youth groups, a sitting assemblyman and even his own former running mate forming an unlikely queue to deliver the same verdict: not so fast.
According to findings by Sunday PUNCH, campaign posters for Obi and his newly announced vice-presidential pick, former Kano governor Rabiu Kwankwaso, were torched by angry youths in Ungogo Local Government Area of Kano State. On WhatsApp platforms circulating across the region, the duo are being labelled outright haram — forbidden. A member of the Kano State House of Assembly, Muhammad Tomas, who had only recently defected to the NDC from the APC, quietly turned around and went straight back.
The Arewa Consultative Forum’s spokesman, Prof. Tukur Muhammad-Baba, set the tone when he told Sunday PUNCH that the NDC remains “largely unknown” to ordinary northern voters. Media attention, he argued, should not be confused with political influence.
“There is even doubt about whether Kwankwaso can still hold on to Kano, where he recorded his most impressive performance in the last election. Apart from Kano, his influence in many parts of the North remains uncertain,” Muhammad-Baba said.
He added that northern voters are exhausted by identity politics. “The average northerner is tired of being told that having a northern candidate or a Muslim-Muslim ticket is the solution to Nigeria’s problems. People are no longer impressed by slogans and promises. They want practical solutions.”
The Arewa Youth Consultative Council’s president, Zaid Ayuba, was sharper still, zeroing in on Obi’s perceived sympathy for IPOB as the real albatross around the ticket’s neck.
“A stigma has been trailing Obi’s candidature before his declaration in 2023. He can never be accepted in the North because of two factors. One is that he has openly shown that he is an IPOB sympathiser,” Ayuba said, adding: “There is nothing Kwankwaso or anybody can do to make Obi acceptable in Northern Nigeria. This is a political reality.”
A professor of Political Science in Sokoto, speaking anonymously to Sunday PUNCH, framed it differently — less about rejection, more about invisibility. “Go to other states outside Kano, and you will see that the NDC doesn’t have any presence,” he said, noting the party had no footprint across Kaduna, Jigawa, Katsina, Zamfara, Taraba, Gombe and several other northern states.
Then came the most stinging blow — from Obi’s own 2023 running mate. Datti Baba-Ahmed, speaking on the Symfoni Podcast and monitored by Sahara Reporters, didn’t dress it up: “I think it is very unlikely that the North will support Peter Obi. Very unlikely.” He also used the interview to renew his assault on President Tinubu’s legitimacy, insisting the administration’s security failures stem from the fact that, in his view, Tinubu was never properly elected.
The Northern Youths Assembly delivered perhaps the harshest verdict on Kwankwaso personally, calling his alliance with Obi “the ultimate betrayal” — not of a party or platform, but of the very idea that northern Nigeria could produce a leader genuinely committed to the region’s dignity. “Kwankwaso now stands as the leading political embarrassment and disappointment of the northern region,” their statement, signed by Secretary-General Hafiz Garba and obtained by Sunday PUNCH, read.
Lagos-based cleric Primate Elijah Ayodele of the INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church piled on from a different angle entirely, warning in a statement signed by his media aide that “Kwankwaso has already muddled Obi’s presidential ambition” and is acting purely out of self-interest. “He is not yet mature for the position he is seeking,” Ayodele said of Obi.
Not everyone is writing the ticket off, though. NDC officials in Borno and Jigawa point to thousands of defections, ward-level structures and a fired-up youth base. The Civil Liberty Organisation’s northern director, Steve Aluko-Daniel, was bullish: “If there is any credible election today, the NDC will floor other political parties in the North and across the country.”
Obi himself, speaking at the recent NDC national convention in Abuja where he was formally affirmed as the party’s presidential candidate, made a pointed promise about his partnership with Kwankwaso. “The government we intend to form will no longer be a government where anybody will say that the vice president is a spare tyre,” he declared.
The North, it seems, isn’t buying it — at least not yet.
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