By Lanre Ogundipe

Nigeria’s emerging Rainbow Coalition deserves something better than the immediate political reflex with which it is being discussed. It is tempting to dismiss it as another pre election manoeuvre, an ingenious device for assembling political interests around the presidential ambition of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It is equally tempting to celebrate it as evidence that Nigerian politicians are finally learning to look beyond rigid party boundaries.

Neither interpretation is sufficient.

What is emerging around the Rainbow Coalition is more interesting, and potentially more consequential, than either political camp may presently admit. It raises a fundamental question about the architecture of Nigerian democracy: can politicians support a presidential candidate across party lines while retaining their separate party identities and pursuing different interests in governorship and legislative elections? If they can, what does that do to the meaning and authority of political parties?

The question has become unavoidable because Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, has openly declared his support for President Tinubu’s re election in 2027. Wike has also been emphatic that his support for Tinubu does not prevent the PDP from fielding candidates for governorship, the National Assembly and state Houses of Assembly. He describes the Rainbow Coalition as a multi party platform for mobilising support for the President, not as an arrangement with the All Progressives Congress.

That distinction is at the heart of the matter.

The Progressive Governors Forum, representing APC governors, sees the issue differently. Its position is that it will not support an alliance or political arrangement capable of weakening the APC, undermining the President’s re election or adversely affecting APC candidates. That concern is not difficult to understand. A politician could support Tinubu for president while supporting, or even sponsoring, another party’s candidate for governor or the legislature. The President could therefore benefit from a coalition at the presidential level while the APC loses ground elsewhere.

But there is another side to this argument.

The ballot box is not a chain of command.

A Nigerian voter is perfectly capable of voting for one party’s presidential candidate and another party’s candidate for the Senate or House of Representatives. The history of Nigerian elections already contains evidence of split ticket voting. Wike himself has pointed to voters making different choices at different levels of the same election.

The democratic problem therefore cannot simply be that voters might make different choices.

The more serious question is whether those choices are being independently made by citizens or increasingly organised through political arrangements whose terms, financing and objectives remain insufficiently visible to the public.

That brings us to the first unanswered question: what exactly is the Rainbow Coalition?

Is it a loose political association? An electoral alliance? A presidential support platform? A temporary campaign arrangement? A mechanism for negotiating candidates? Or is it gradually becoming a political machine operating across existing party structures?

These are not semantic distinctions. A coalition, an electoral alliance and a party merger have different political consequences. A coalition can allow parties to retain their identities while pursuing a common objective. A merger creates a new political identity. An electoral alliance can involve parties or political actors coordinating around particular contests while remaining competitors elsewhere.

The Rainbow phenomenon appears, at least for now, to sit somewhere in the first category. But the more extensive its political activity becomes, the more important it will be to establish precisely where the boundaries lie.

Rivers State provides an especially useful laboratory.

What began as a political arrangement associated with support for Tinubu has increasingly involved questions about the governorship and the organisation of political forces across party lines. Earlier declarations around Rivers contemplated politicians from different parties working together and eventually settling on a common governorship candidate. If such an arrangement matures, the issue is no longer simply whether politicians from different parties support the same presidential candidate. It becomes a question of how an alternative electoral structure is constructed below the presidency.

Who selects the candidate?

Who determines the platform?

Who finances the campaign?

Who controls the campaign organisation?

Who appoints agents?

Who resolves disputes among the participating parties?

And, perhaps most importantly, who ultimately answers to the voter?

These questions are not accusations. They are the ordinary questions that arise whenever political power begins to move outside the conventional structures through which citizens are accustomed to exercising it.

The APC governors therefore have a legitimate organisational concern. Governors depend heavily on party structures at state, local government and ward levels. They need candidates, organisers, agents, legislators and political networks. A cross party structure capable of mobilising people independently of those structures could become an alternative centre of political influence.

But the governors must also be careful not to confuse party discipline with ownership of the electorate.

The APC may insist that its members should work for APC candidates. That is a legitimate party position. It cannot, however, presume that a voter who supports an APC presidential candidate is thereby obliged to support every other APC candidate on the ballot.

That distinction matters because democracy is ultimately not about making voters obey political arithmetic devised by party leaders. It is about allowing citizens to exercise choices among competing candidates.

The Rainbow Coalition therefore presents both an opportunity and a warning.

It may represent a maturing of Nigerian politics, in which politicians are no longer trapped permanently within rigid party boundaries and can negotiate around specific national interests. But it could equally expose the weakness of Nigeria’s political parties, if politicians increasingly regard party platforms as temporary vehicles rather than institutions with coherent principles, membership obligations and identifiable constituencies.

There is a deeper danger when political coalitions become transactional without their terms being visible to citizens.

Politics has always involved negotiation. Alliances are not inherently corrupt. Political parties everywhere negotiate, compromise and cooperate. The problem begins when the electorate is reduced to the final audience for agreements negotiated elsewhere, with little knowledge of the interests being exchanged.

That is why the question of money cannot be avoided.

If a political structure operates across several parties and materially influences electoral contests, the public has a legitimate interest in knowing how it is financed, who contributes to it, how campaign resources are deployed and through what structures expenditure is accounted for.

This should not be turned into an allegation of illegality. There is no basis for declaring the Rainbow Coalition unlawful merely because it exists or because politicians from different parties support the same presidential candidate. Nor does participation in such a political arrangement automatically amount to defection or loss of an elected office.

The law must be applied to conduct, not political suspicion.

The more interesting institutional question is whether Nigeria’s electoral framework adequately captures political activity that can materially influence elections while operating outside the formal structures of registered political parties.

That question extends beyond Wike and beyond the APC.

Wike himself must answer difficult questions. If the coalition is merely a presidential support platform, how far does its mandate extend? If it is not intended to determine state elections, why does its political influence increasingly intersect with state level contests? If participating politicians retain their party identities, what happens when their presidential objective conflicts with the interests of their respective parties? Who takes responsibility when those interests collide?

The APC must answer questions too.

Can a governing party demand political loyalty from its members while expecting the electorate to accept every candidate it puts forward? Can party discipline become so rigid that legitimate cross party political cooperation is treated automatically as subversion? And can the party distinguish between a genuine threat to its institutional existence and ordinary competition for votes?

There is also a question for the electorate.

Are Nigerians becoming more comfortable with choosing candidates individually rather than voting along party lines? If so, that may be a sign of democratic maturity. But if parties become nothing more than temporary platforms for ambitious individuals and negotiated interests, democracy could lose something more important than party labels. It could lose institutional memory, ideological coherence and accountability.

The central issue, therefore, is not whether Rainbow is good or bad.

It is whether the emergence of such arrangements is telling us something important about the state of Nigerian political parties.

A democracy can accommodate coalitions. It can accommodate independent political calculations. It can accommodate politicians supporting candidates outside their parties. What it cannot comfortably sustain is a system in which formal parties remain on the ballot while the real decisions about candidates, money and political power are increasingly made through informal structures whose rules are not visible to the electorate.

That is where transactional politics becomes dangerous.

Not because political transactions are new, but because democracy becomes weaker when the terms of political transactions are known only to those making them.

The Rainbow Coalition may ultimately prove to be nothing more than a temporary vehicle for securing a presidential victory. It may become a durable political network. It may expand, fragment or disappear before the election. At this stage, any definitive judgment would be premature.

But its emergence has already exposed a fault line that Nigeria cannot afford to ignore.

The old political question was: which party are you supporting?

The new question may increasingly be: which candidate are you supporting, and through what political structure?

That is a significant shift.

If politicians can belong to one party, serve in the government of another and campaign for a president while retaining freedom to oppose his party’s candidates elsewhere, then Nigerian politics may be moving toward a system in which personalities increasingly matter more than party identity.

That may produce flexibility. It may also produce fragility.

The 2027 elections will provide the test. Not simply of whether the Rainbow Coalition can mobilise votes, but of whether Nigeria’s political parties still possess enough institutional authority to organise political competition around identifiable programmes, structures and responsibilities.

The ultimate issue is not whether the colours of Nigerian politics can be mixed. They always have been.

The issue is who is holding the brush, who is paying for the paint, what picture is being created, and whether the people who own the canvas were ever asked what they wanted painted on it.

Lanre Ogundipe, Public Affairs Analyst, former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists, writes from Abuja.