As we disturbingly hurtle towards the 2027 general elections, many Nigerians are increasingly consumed by a deep sense of foreboding over the future of the nation’s democracy. This disconcerting feeling is spurred by the direction governance, election, politics and politicking have taken since 2023, from the blatant rigging of elections and the courts’ affirmation of these sham polls to the brazen and troubling wave of defection from opposition parties to the ruling All Progressives Congress. These defections have triggered uncomfortable discussions about Nigeria’s gradual descent into a one-party state.
Tellingly, these days, the discourse about the state of democracy in Nigeria is as polarising as it is polemical. A coterie of leading figures in the opposition parties has repeatedly raised alarm over the nation’s slide into authoritarianism and a one-party state. The president and his ruling party have dismissed the concerns of the opposition and reiterated their commitment to the strengthening of democracy. Be that as it may, it’s easy for a dispassionate mind and an objective bystander who analyses events in the nation’s political terrain with the binoculars of impartiality to tell where our democracy is headed.
Nigeria’s politicians are migratory in nature and move to where their goals can be realised and their interests can be protected. While a few of them have personal exemplary dispositions and creeds that can’t be compromised on, the majority are influenced by the inordinate quest for power and primitive acquisition of wealth, and where these two can be guaranteed is where you will find them. However, the influx of opposition politicians, especially governors who were elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party into the All Progressives Congress, has set off alarm bells of Nigeria’s impending transformation into a one-party state.
As things currently stand, the APC controls 28 of the 35 states in the country. One of the intrinsic elements of democracy is periodic elections in which multiple political parties take part. This gives the people the opportunity to vote out any political party or elected public officers who reneged on their promises and whose actions while in office are at variance with public interests, whose performance they are dissatisfied with. This electoral luxury and freedom that democracy offers the electorate has come under gradual and systemic erosion over the last two years in Nigeria, as the president Bola Tinubu-led government embarked on an all-out assault on the key components and principles that underpin a democratic setup.
Over the last two years, we’ve seen the ruling party unabashedly violate the constitution — as was the case in the state of emergency declaration in Rivers and the suspension of the its governor and House of Assembly members — undermine key state institutions and other arms of government by turning them into amenable lapdogs and tools of repression that do nothing but dutifully and unquestioningly help in advancing abhorrent and sinister socio-economic and political objectives of the ruling party.
We’ve seen how the ruling party through compromised state institutions and uninspiring judiciary embarked on implicit but vicious emasculation of the opposition parties by orchestrating a crisis in them and in turn arm-twisting their key members and governors into defecting to the APC because you’ve created a condition that makes free, credible and fair elections practically impossible and only those who pledge fealty to Tinubu and swear allegiance to the APC will see their political ambition come to fruition. Either kiss the ring or get kicked out of the ring.
A nation where critical state institutions and arms of government are nothing more than the playthings of the president to be used as he pleases to advance his interests cannot be said to be a democracy, but an electoral autocracy. The gale of defection that has shaken the nation’s political landscape is not rooted in any form of altruism and nationalistic fervour but spurred by self-preservation and inordinate quest for power on the part of the defectors, while for the president and his party, APC, it is a ruthless and dangerous desire to consolidate power and totally render opposition impotent and incapable of mounting any serious challenge against them.
Furthermore, the usual and standard refrain of the governors dumping the PDP for the APC is that they are doing so because the PDP is ravaged by a protracted leadership crisis and it is divided, never mind that many of them were used to ignite the fire of division and chaos that has engulfed the party for months on end. Also, they could easily have joined one of the many other parties that dot our political landscape. The defections have little or nothing to do with the crisis in the PDP, which many of the defecting governors helped instigate, but the need to protect their interests, which has now ostensibly set the nation on the path of a one-party state.
Finally, while Nigeria has not fully descended into the abyss of a totalitarian one-party state, the signs and omens of such a destructive reality are visible to the blind. For a country whose fledgling and shaky democracy has come under relentless assault from a power-hungry and money-seeking political class, the spectre of a one-party state is unnerving and haunting and we need to do everything we can to checkmate and annihilate the bogey before it is too late.
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