There are political comebacks that look like nostalgia and others that acquire the quality of historical necessity. Mahathir Mohamad’s return to power in Malaysia in 2018 belonged to the latter category. At 92, after having ruled Malaysia for 22 years and left office more than a decade earlier, Mahathir returned to lead an opposition coalition against the political establishment he had once helped build. His comeback was improbable not because he lacked experience, but because experience itself appeared to have become his political currency.
Nigeria’s Atiku Abubakar now presents a strikingly similar spectacle, although the circumstances are not identical. After decades at the center of Nigerian political life, one vice-presidency, several presidential contests and several unsuccessful presidential bids, Atiku has once again positioned himself at the center of an opposition realignment. In May 2026, he secured the presidential ticket of the ADC, setting up another attempt to capture the presidency in 2027.
The deeper similarity between the two political heavyweights is political method. Mahathir understood that defeating an entrenched establishment required something larger than a conventional opposition party. He had to construct a coalition capable of bringing together forces that had previously regarded one another as adversaries. Most dramatically, he reunited with Anwar Ibrahim, his former deputy and political antagonist. The alliance was held together by a larger proposition, which was removing PM Najib Razak and changing the direction of Malaysia. In May 2018, that improbable coalition defeated the ruling establishment and ended its uninterrupted hold on power.
In a historic shift, Malaysia’s opposition coalition, led by 92-year-old former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, has won a majority in the national elections, ending six decades of rule by the incumbent party. This unexpected victory marks the first change of power in the country since independence. Mahathir, once a mentor but now a critic of the outgoing Najib Razak, led the charge against him amid widespread dissatisfaction and a major financial scandal. Najib was accused of attempting to manipulate the election in his favor, but the opposition’s success prevailed.
Atiku’s current project has a recognizably similar logic. Nigeria’s opposition discovered in 2023 that fragmentation can be more consequential than weakness. Atiku won 6.98 million votes, Peter Obi 6.10 million and Rabiu Kwankwaso about 1.5 million. Bola Tinubu won with 8.79 million votes. The figures do not prove that a united opposition would automatically have won, but they reveal the scale of the strategic problem. Three substantial opposition constituencies contested the same political space separately and the lesson is obvious. Nigeria needs an opposition architecture, strategy and structure capable of wrestling power from a party that has mis-philosophized on policy and mismanaged the polity socially, economically and politically.
This is where Atiku’s long career becomes more significant than his age. It is tempting to describe political longevity as an embarrassment despite the fact that Nigeria’s political class is recycling itself. But longevity comes with institutional memory which is something younger politicians increasingly lacks. Atiku has operated across administrations, parties, regions and political alliances. He understands the federal system not merely as an abstraction but as a living network of Nigerians, of governors, legislators, civil servants, business interests, traditional institutions and competing regional aspirations. This experience is most valuable in a country as complicated as Nigeria.
Atiku’s strongest political argument, therefore, is not that he is the newest face in Nigerian politics. It is that he is one of the few national figures whose political biography cuts across Nigeria’s many fault lines. This is what makes the idea of Atiku as a pan-Nigerian politician worth examining seriously. Nigeria’s presidency is not only an executive office. It is an exercise in managing pluralities that are too large, too diverse and too politically decentralized to be governed successfully through the permanent triumph of one region, religion, generation or political network over all others. A successful president must convert difference into institutional cooperation. And this is what Atiku represents even from his immediate family.
Atiku’s political career has given him relationships across those divides. His supporters would argue that this makes him less a politician of one constituency than a product of Nigeria’s complicated political synthesis. He is northern by origin, national in family, ambition and network. Atiku is also commercially experienced, familiar with Nigeria’s political elites and comfortable operating within the federal political establishment.
One may argue that these do not automatically make him a great president. Political networks are not the same thing as policy competence. But, we must remember that experience produces wisdom. A serious assessment of Atiku must acknowledge these.
Yet there is another dimension to the Mahathir analogy. Mahathir’s comeback demonstrated that an older political figure can become the vehicle for political renewal when his experience is redirected against political stagnation. The paradox is important, because sometimes, the person best positioned to dismantle an exhausted political arrangement is someone who understands that arrangement from the inside. Atiku occupies that position in Nigeria in Nigeria today.
He is neither an outsider to the Nigerian establishment nor entirely captive to any single institutional tradition. He has been inside the system long enough to understand its machinery and outside government long enough to campaign against its failures. That combination is already becoming an advantage and will, if further managed tactically, translate into electoral victory and institutional reform.
The most persuasive case for an Atiku presidency, therefore, is not that he would govern because he has waited the longest. It is that his political temperament lends itself to coalition-building, negotiation and institutional balancing. That matters because Nigeria’s next governing challenge will not be solved by rhetoric alone. The country requires institutions capable of coordinating economic reform, security policy, federal relations and social investment without deepening the divisions that already weaken national cohesion.
A genuinely pan-Nigerian presidency would have to make Nigerians feel that government belongs to them collectively rather than to the coalition that happened to win the election. This is where Atiku’s “institutional powerhouse” potential becomes important. His political value lies less in the mythology of the strongman than in the possibility of becoming a broker among institutions. A successful Atiku government would have to be larger than Atiku himself. It must be a presidency that strengthens the civil service, respects legislative independence, improves federal coordination, empowers competent ministers and allows institutions to outlive personalities. That would distinguish a statesman from merely another political survivor.
But the Mahathir experience also supplies a warning. The Malaysian coalition won because its members were united by a common objective. Yet coalition politics can become unstable when the shared enemy disappears. Mahathir’s government eventually fractured, which demonstrated that defeating an incumbent and governing a coalition are two entirely different political tasks.
So, Nigeria’s opposition faces precisely this danger. Atiku’s challenge is therefore not only to assemble politicians around his candidacy. It is also not the declaration of policy reversals. It is to convince Nigerians that his coalition in the ADC and the potential bigger coalition represents a governing philosophy rather than an electoral arrangement. The question is whether its members can subordinate personal ambition to institutional purpose.
This is ultimately where Atiku’s trajectory may become historically interesting. He is not Mahathir and Nigeria is not Malaysia. The political systems, social structures and historical circumstances are fundamentally different. But the analogy illuminates a broader phenomenon of the return of experienced political figures who attempt to transform longevity from a liability into an instrument of national reconstruction.
Atiku’s opportunity is to make that transformation credible. He has actually already persuaded most of Nigeria’s competing interests that his presidency. His presidency is a matter of when, and therefore, must demonstrate to Nigerians in the first day of his tenure, that Nigeria belong equally to all of them by owning to his words of returning actual subsidies.
The real Mahathir template, then, is not simply an old politician returning to power. It is the conversion of experience into coalition, coalition into legitimacy, and legitimacy into institutional renewal. Atiku now has the opportunity to attempt that conversion in Nigeria.
Whether he succeeds will depend less on how many political allies he can gather than on whether he can persuade a profoundly diverse country that Nigerianism itself can be the organizing principle of government. That would be the most consequential version of his presidency. In Atiku, decades of political experience will be converted into the architecture of a more united Nigerian state.
