There are indications of political forces in the country tilting towards the All Progressive Congress, thereby engendering fears of rail-roading the country towards a one-party state. Two significant developments have emerged in this respect. One is the statement by Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the National Chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC) that the party was holding discussions to get some opposition political parties to collapse into the APC.. Two is the appointment of members of the opposition party into the President Bola Tinubu administration, which itself presents the prospect of cross-carpeting in parties.
Ganduje, the immediate past governor of Kano State and the newly appointed National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) tripped off the alarm bell when he said he envisioned the merger of APC with opposition parties and pointed to the development of a blueprint to achieve that. For him, such a move would improve the chances of the party, especially in 2027. In a separate view to this development, Osita Chidoka, a PDP stalwart and former Aviation Minister, warned that his party could become extinct if reforms were not carried out. He noted that: “The PDP is a government that was in power for 16 years. Its instinct is that of a government party; not an opposition party. And it has taken us eight years to begin to realise this. We smell the coffee; that it’s not four years and we are back…or we are coming back the next day…Now, we are beginning to see that PDP itself needs to be reformed. It needs to renew and re-imagine itself to be able to begin to play the role of opposition, knowing full well that we have a politician as president.”
Notably, the PDP ceded some states in the South-east and South-south regions to a reinvigorated Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election.
Following the victory of the APC in the February General elections, losers in search of relevance and perks of officialdom are tilting towards the ruling APC in ways that may swamp existing opposition parties in Nigeria. The strongest indication yet in this direction is the appointment of Nyesom Wike, the leader of a faction of the People’s Democratic Party and two-term Governor of Rivers State as Minister in President Tinubu’s cabinet. Added to this is the appointment of Chiedu Ebie, former Secretary to the State Government of Delta State as the chair of the Niger-Delta Development Commission (NDDC) by the president. Mr Ebie is a known ally Ifeanyi Okowa and James Ibori who are PDP stalwarts.
Wike has indicated a strong inclination to remain in the PDP, but given his role in the sustenance of the PDP when it turned into opposition after losing to the current ruling party in 2015, his exit from the party might signal more difficulty for its survival. The consequence is that the opposition may become rudderless given the fact that only a handful of the existing 20 political parties can muster opposition to the policies of the ruling APC.
This situation is not new. Since the inauguration of the fourth republic in 1999, the winner-takes-all Nigeria’s presidential system has shaped political actors towards moving into the ruling party. At some point, the PDP, hitherto the ruling party in the country almost turned into a behemoth to the extent that its officials boasted that the party would govern the country for two generations.
Similarly, opposition elements of the period that aggregated into the APC had equally raised alarm about the authoritarian trend and the proclivity of the then PDP turning the country into a one-party state. The Former Lagos State governor, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is now the president of the country warned at the time against allowing the country to drift into a one-party state. He noted then that the actions of the National Assembly that was dominated by PDP were drifting Nigeria towards an authoritarian state, particularly, its meddlesomeness in the scheduling of the dates and structure of elections for the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, as an autonomous agency.
Other parties, such as the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) that have similarly raised the alarm that Nigeria was heading towards a one-party state had in 2019 warned Nigerians about the antics of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) of making efforts to turn to a one-party state and riled at the notorious practice in the nation’s polity where politicians shamelessly switch to any ruling party upon defeat in election.
The bane of Nigeria’s democracy is the inability of its political elite to form a political party in the strictest sense of the word. As the late Raheemat Momodu aptly put it: “Parties serve as the singular most important arena, avenue and medium for political participation everywhere in the world. Thus political participation must be channeled through the parties to access power and be part of government… a political party is the door and key to political participation and the engine room of democracy.” Edmurke Burke pointed to its national interest component when he defined a political party, as “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” If Nigerian politicians understand the meaning of political party and are not blinded by avarice, they would perhaps behave differently.
In light of the foregoing, three major points need to be watched against sliding towards a single-party state, namely, the multi-ethnic nature of the Nigerian state, the nature of liberal democracy, and the beauty of opposition in a polity.
The ethnic and linguistic diversity of Nigeria is legendary. Correspondingly, they exude cultural differences and manifest diverse visions of societal development. To undermine these diversities through some hegemonic design, whether using a single party system, or dominance of strategic national institutions, is to kill the national spirit and sound the death knell of the Nigerian state because the dynamics of diversity would, for sure, manifest in separatist impulses. Apart from that, the country loses the benefit of an alternative vision of societal development.
The liberal democracy that the Nigerian elite chose in 1999 would be completely undermined by a drift into a one-party state. Liberal democracy thrives in freedom of association and of free expression, anything less, is a barefaced authoritarian edifice.
Opposition or dissent is important in a democracy. It has the inherent advantage of thwarting authoritarian temptation, and it enriches the national vision by constructive criticism of the power that be. As the Ghanaian scholar, Ansa Asamoa, once noted, the key trait of liberal democracy is the existence of multiparties with diverse beliefs and ideologies, and are a healthy phenomenon for the polity.
It is in the overall national interest to avoid a single-party system in Nigeria. If the African experience is any lesson for us, it is that such a development is the quickest road to rabid authoritarianism, and it must be avoided.
The Guardian
