Seyi Makinde fires a defiant “We will defeat them” as Peter Obi attends APM’s Abuja campaign office inauguration, shaking up Nigeria’s 2027 presidential race.
Seyi Makinde stuns Nigeria’s 2027 race with a bold “We will defeat them” as rival Peter Obi stuns everyone by showing up at APM’s Abuja campaign office inauguration.
Oyo State Governor and APM presidential candidate Seyi Makinde declared “We will defeat them” today, Monday September 7, 2026, at the inauguration of his presidential campaign office in Abuja, with NDC presidential candidate Peter Obi sitting right there in the crowd as a rival who showed up anyway.
NDC presidential candidate Peter Obi attended the inauguration of Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde’s presidential campaign office in Abuja today — in what has been widely described as a spectacular projection of sportsmanship ahead of the 2027 presidential election, given that both men are on the ballot as rival candidates. That alone was enough to shake timelines. And then Makinde opened his mouth.
He did not show up in Abuja to play it safe. He did not come with any of those long, carefully measured speeches politicians usually give when they are scared of offending people. He came to plant a flag. With Peter Obi sitting right there in that room — same 2027 race, different party, same destination — Makinde looked out at the crowd and said it straight. “We will defeat them.” No softening. No qualifier. Just that.
Nigeria has not stopped talking about it since.
Obi said his presence was not driven by political desperation but by a desire to allow Nigerians freely choose their preferred leader. That is already a statement worth sitting with. But he did not stop there. He told the crowd, “We want a Nigeria of unity, inclusion; we have a candidate who is contesting for President today, my dear brother Makinde. Is he qualified to be President? Yes, he is qualified.”
Seyi Makinde
Read that again. A presidential candidate standing up at a rival’s campaign launch and publicly declaring that rival qualified for the very office they are both chasing. That is not something that happens in Nigerian politics. Except today it did, in Abuja, with cameras everywhere and the whole country watching.
Obi is making his second attempt at the presidency in 2027 after coming third in the 2023 election as Labour Party’s candidate, while Makinde is going into the presidential race for the first time on the platform of APM. Two completely different journeys. One destination. And today they shared the same room without throwing a single punch — which, given how Nigerian political gatherings usually go, is almost worth its own headline.
Obi told the gathering, “That’s why I’m here to show solidarity and assure you that we are changing the system, we don’t want politics of quarrel, politics of disagreement.” He went even further than that. “Let our quarrel be to feed our people, we want a Nigeria where the child of nobody can be somebody without knowing anybody,” he said. That last line landed. You could tell by how the room received it.
Makinde said the opposition wants to change politics in Nigeria by uniting to defeat the ruling All Progressives Congress in 2027, declaring that there is no quarrel or politics of disagreement among them. So when he said “we will defeat them,” he was not pointing at Obi. He was pointing at the APC. That context matters — and it changes the whole picture of what today’s event was really about.
Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed, who serves as APM’s National Leader, came with his own version of the same energy. “Whoever disregards us is at his own peril, we are here to reset Nigeria and we are bringing in one of the best human capitals that Nigeria has ever produced at the sub-national and national level, that is Makinde,” he said. Nobody in that building was whispering.
Nobody knows if today will actually lead to anything between Makinde and Obi, but the fact that people are already wondering about a possible alliance tells you something about how the day played out. Obi used the moment to call for unity among all the presidential candidates and told Nigerians to support whoever wins in a free and fair election.
Obi showing up like that comes at a time when opposition figures are already moving around and positioning themselves ahead of 2027. The race is not officially underway but it is already running at full speed — and today in Abuja, Seyi Makinde made sure nobody is sleeping on him. Seyi Makinde
“We will defeat them.” He said it with Peter Obi in the room. Nigeria heard it. Now the country is sitting back and watching to see if he can back it up when it counts. Seyi Makinde
Do you think today signals a coming opposition alliance — and is Seyi Makinde a real force in Nigeria’s 2027 presidential race? Drop your take in the comments and share this with someone who follows Nigerian politics closely.
If It Matters, It’s NewsFlash.
New to our page? FOLLOW us to keep up with all the latest entertainment news
