Sadly for me, my fifty years of the study of political science has not helped me much in understanding Nigerian electoral politics. After 27 years of electoral democracy in the Fourth Republic and seven governments, the political process has been completely transformed; to be clearer, it has been largely destroyed. Opposition party leaders are regularly expelled from their parties and the expulsion is made legal by a corrupt judiciary that has no respect for laws but lots of obedience to governments in power. Anti-corruption agencies are given lists of “troublesome” opposition leaders and instructed to persecute, rather than prosecute, them for their sins against the “Great leader.”
The party system has become completely monetised and each party has a core group of paid-for litigants who dash to court the moment anyone in the party criticises the government. Within days, they are offered billions of naira, which they use to bribe judges who throw out the legitimate party leadership and install imposters in their place. Internal party democracy has become a theory that is only spoken about by confused academics who cannot explain why Nigerian political parties are so different from all the others they have learnt about in their previous studies. Clearly, Nigerian politics is modelled on Mars, rather than the democratic model developed on Earth.
Until recently, Nigeria operated a two-party dominant political system, in which the ruling and main opposition parties controlled enormous resources in comparison to the others. This was because the federal system had opportunities of access to power and resources for opposition at the state level and, therefore, at least one opposition party could remain competitive, even at the federal level. At the beginning of the Fourth Republic, only three political parties were registered, but a Supreme Court decision allowed for the liberalisation of the regime and many more parties got registered.
There were three categories of political parties – the two dominant parties, parties with parliamentary representation, and the other small parties, most of which were established as possible platforms for important politicians who lose out in the bigger parties, to access nomination for elective posts. The core problem was that the President and State Governors tightly control political parties and the party leadership structures.
Gone are the days when the party chairmen and executive committees controlled the parties. The President has become the leader of the dominant party. At the state level, although a party Chairman exists, State Governors are the leaders of their parties at that level. The old idea that a President and Governors are servants chosen by the political party to implement a manifesto decided by the party is completely alien to the system today.
One of the strangest things about Nigerian political parties is that they do not stand for anything in terms of the ideological spectrum and their activities are not driven by a party membership that has agency. Competition in Nigeria’s party system is very intense within the ruling and main opposition parties, and less so between the other political parties. This is due to the fact that since 1979, Nigeria has developed the tradition of major blocs of the political elite coalescing into a main political party conceived as a hegemonic party. In elections that are relatively free and fair, namely those in 1959, 1979, 1999 and 2015, the parties that had the highest votes – the Northern Peoples’ Congress, the National Party of Nigeria, the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Peoples’ Congress – failed in their desire to be hegemonic or truly dominant through the polls.
In the subsequent elections of 1964, 1983, 2003 and 2019, they all abused their powers of incumbency to transform themselves into dominant parties. In essence, they used electoral fraud to boost their control of the political process and weaken opposition parties. At the rate we are going, competitive party politics will end in 2027, as the ruling party is determined to run and control every single party in the country. President Tinubu is convinced that he could take over all the parties and do what Abacha failed to do – make all political parties declare him as the sole presidential candidate. At that point, we will discover if there are still people who believe in and are ready to fight for democracy in Nigeria.
The greatest challenge facing Nigerian democracy is the absence of a real and functional party system. Virtually all the parties have very little respect for internal democracy. That is to say that they do not conduct their internal affairs based on the principles enunciated in their constitutions and rules. Party officials and candidates for elections are not elected in accordance with the rules of the game. Party conventions have become occasions in which the president, governors and godfathers simply impose candidates of their choice, rather than have candidates voted for by members and delegates. The lack of internal party democracy weakens the internal coherence of most political parties and creates a situation in which the judiciary becomes the arbiter of who the candidates are rather than delegates. Of course, the judiciary is no longer a neutral arbiter, most judges are corrupt agents who deliver judgements based on the size of the bribes they have been paid by governments and/or individuals.
Since 1999, civil society and development partners have invested vast resources in capacity building for political parties. I know because I have been a resource person in so many such workshops. The United Nations system, European Union, the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), IFES, National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI), the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and others have invested millions of Dollars, Pounds and Euros to raise the capacity of political parties but the impact of the investment has been zero. The main political parties never attend the sessions and the small ones come only for the per diem. The parties have not been growing in terms of their membership, capacity to win seats or democratic practice. Their strengths are established by how much money they have to bribe, deploy thugs, control the security agencies or influence INEC.
Political parties become a marketplace in the six months leading to elections as candidates engage in do or die acts to eliminate rivals by bribing officials, jailing them or even killing them. Armed with the ticket, they then bribe voters to vote them into office. This pathway to power makes nonsense of the normal idea of developing a party with ideology, principles and a good campaign manifesto and campaign strategy.
Were political science principles applicable to Nigeria, I would have said that the pathway to deepening democracy is to engage with political parties to make party membership less ephemeral and more real. Nigerian political parties should develop a good membership base not patrons or clients. The attachment of people should be to political parties not to patrons or godfathers who pay for their engagement in the political process. The mode of participation in political party activities, which is currently mediated by political bosses to whom people owe allegiance, should change. Ambitious politicians should stop jumping from a party when they do not get a position they seek, they should remain in the party and try again next time. The entrepreneurial approach to politics should be replaced by a more democratic one based on a new political ethos rooted in principles and issue-based approach to politics. They will ask me an important question, who does not know that they are from mars and not the world of democratic politics. My response would be to write another column next week.
A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.