-By Abdul Mahmud
At the last count, eight governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party have defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress, an exodus that has dramatically weakened the country’s principal opposition party.
The most recent name mentioned in this procession is Dauda Lawal of Zamfara State. Senators and members of the House of Representatives have followed the same path. In the National Assembly, the minority caucuses now exist largely in name. What once appeared to be a competitive party system increasingly resembles a political landscape with one gravitational centre to which ambitious politicians inevitably drift.
The change, which is not merely the result of opportunistic defections by individual politicians, reflects the nature of the Nigerian state itself. Power in Nigeria remains intensely centralised, both politically and economically. The federal government controls the commanding heights of national revenue, particularly oil income, and determines the distribution of patronage through appointments, contracts, security structures, and fiscal transfers. In such an environment, political actors quickly learn that proximity to the centre of power is more valuable than ideological consistency or party loyalty. Opposition becomes structurally fragile because it exists at a distance from the primary source of political resources. Governors, legislators, and party leaders, therefore, organise their survival around a system that rewards alignment with the ruling party and punishes prolonged dissent. What appears on the surface as the moral failure of the political class is, therefore, also the logical behaviour produced by an over-centralised state whose institutional incentives constantly pull political actors toward the same centre of gravity.
The deeper consequence of this arrangement is the slow erosion of pluralism within the democratic system.
When power accumulates overwhelmingly around the ruling party, political competition ceases to revolve around competing visions of governance and begins instead to revolve around access to power. Elections still take place, but they increasingly resemble contests under the single umbrella rather than genuine struggles between alternative programmes. Opposition parties weaken not simply because they lose elections, but because the political elite gradually abandons them, hollowing out their organisational capacity and ideological purpose. Over time, the party system itself becomes distorted. The ruling party expands beyond the boundaries of a normal governing coalition and begins to function as a national patronage network, while opposition parties survive only as temporary holding grounds for politicians waiting for the next opportunity to return to the centre. What emerges from this process is not formal one party rule but something subtler and perhaps more dangerous: a political order in which the appearance of competition survives even as its substance steadily disappears.
Before posing the question from which the title of this essay is drawn, it is necessary to explain what I mean by saying that what is emerging in Nigeria is not a formal one-party rule but something subtler and perhaps more dangerous. A formal one-party system is easy to recognise. It is openly declared. The law prohibits competing parties or reduces them to insignificance. Political authority is concentrated in a single organisation whose dominance is institutionalised. Nigeria is not yet at that stage. Parties still exist. Elections are still conducted. Campaigns are organised and ballots are cast. On the surface, the machinery of democratic competition appears intact. The danger lies elsewhere. It lies in the gradual emptying of that competition of its real substance. When politicians across the country increasingly migrate toward the ruling party, when opposition parties are hamstring not merely by electoral defeat but by the steady departure of their leaders and structures, the system begins to change character. The outward forms of pluralism remain, yet the political incentives that sustain genuine opposition begin to disappear. Parties that should serve as alternative centres of political organisation become fragile panoply of personal interests. Elections then cease to be the contests between clearly defined political alternatives and become instead struggles within a single dominant political orbit. What emerges from such a process is therefore not a dictatorship of one-party, but a political order in which the ruling party becomes the inevitable destination of political ambition. Politicians move toward it not necessarily because they believe in its programme, but because it controls the resources and influence that determine survival in the system. Opposition survives only in appearance, often reduced to a transitional space for politicians who are either negotiating their return to power or waiting for a more favourable political moment. In this environment, democracy retains its external rituals while losing the internal balance that gives those rituals meaning.
It is from this troubling development that the question inevitably arises: what exactly has gone wrong with Nigeria’s political class?
The answer cannot be found in the usual language of betrayal, opportunism, or even ambition, though each of these words describes a part of the problem. The deeper difficulty lies in the structure and psychology of Nigeria’s political elite itself. Nigeria does not merely suffer from politicians who defect too easily. It suffers from a political class that has never fully understood the meaning of democratic politics. In mature democracies, political parties represent coherent traditions of thought, ideology, and policy preferences. Parties are not merely vehicles for winning elections. They are institutions that organise political conflict and translate social interests into programmes of government. Even when politicians cross party lines, they usually do so at a cost because parties carry identifiable commitments and historical memories. Nigeria’s political parties are different. They are better understood as electoral vehicles rather than ideological associations.
From the First Republic to the present Fourth Republic, parties have often been organised around personalities, and access to state resources rather than around ideas about how the country should be governed. The result is a political culture in which party loyalty carries very little weight. When politicians move from one party to another, they rarely feel compelled to explain what principles have changed. The migration simply reflects a re–imagination of power. The problem, therefore, is not merely that politicians defect. The problem is that defection has no meaning because the parties themselves stand for almost nothing.
The crisis currently consuming the Peoples Democratic Party illustrates this structural weakness with painful clarity. Once the dominant party of the Fourth Republic, the PDP governed Nigeria for sixteen years and cultivated an image of political invincibility. Still, the party invested very little efforts in building strong institutional foundations. Internal democracy was often sacrificed to elite bargains. Party structures were frequently shafted by powerful governors and financiers. When the party eventually lost the presidency in 2015, it discovered that it possessed neither the organisational discipline nor the ideological coherence required for life in opposition. The present struggle within the party, including the faction aligned with the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, is therefore not merely a quarrel among personalities. It reflects a deeper institutional exhaustion. When the Court of Appeal recently delivered a judgment that effectively strengthened the control of that faction over party machinery, the legal victory merely confirmed a political reality that had already been established. The PDP had been hollowed out from within long before the judgment arrived. But, it would be a mistake to imagine that the ruling party stands on fundamentally different ground. The All Progressives Congress itself emerged in 2013 through a coalition of disparate political groups united primarily by the shared goal of defeating an incumbent president. That coalition succeeded in winning power, but it did not resolve the underlying contradictions within the alliance. The APC remains a broad umbrella that accommodates competing tendencies rather than a party united by a clear philosophical programme.
The consequence of this structural similarity between Nigeria’s major parties is a peculiar form of political convergence. Politicians move between parties because the ideological distance separating them is extremely small. Power becomes the only constant principle. Whoever controls the federal government attracts a steady flow of defectors because the Nigerian state remains the most important source of political patronage and economic opportunity. This pattern reveals another central feature of Nigeria’s political class. Politics in Nigeria is not primarily organised around the representation of citizens. It is organised around the management and distribution of state resources. Access to the state determines access to contracts, appointments, and economic influence. Political survival therefore requires proximity to the centre of power. Opposition becomes risky not because of ideological disagreements but because it threatens access to the networks through which political elites maintain their relevance. What appears to be a multiparty system now functions as a competition among factions seeking control of the same political marketplace.
It is for this reason that the phenomenon I have long described as competitive authoritarianism has now come fully into view. When politics is organised around intimidation and the reckless misuse of power, the so-called democratic field is deliberately tilted to suffocate the opposition. In such an atmosphere, political actors drift toward the dominant centre of power, not out of conviction in its programme, but from the instinct for survival, for in such a system survival itself appears to depend on proximity to power.
The question I pose here is: can Nigeria cultivate a different kind of political class?
History suggests that political cultures are not immutable. They evolve when institutions create incentives for different forms of behaviour. Strong parties emerge when internal democracy forces politicians to negotiate ideas and policies rather than merely share patronage. Legislatures become meaningful when they exercise real oversight rather than operate as extensions of executive influence. Courts strengthen democratic life when their judgments reinforce constitutional principles rather than settle factional disputes.
Most importantly, citizens themselves must demand a higher standard of political conduct. Political elites rarely reform themselves voluntarily. They respond to pressure from organised social forces, independent media, and civic institutions capable of imposing reputational costs on opportunistic behaviour. Nigeria’s political class did not become what it is by accident. It developed within a historical environment shaped by military rule, centralised oil revenues, psychology of power, and weak institutions. That environment produced a style of politics in which loyalty is fluid, and power is pursued as an end in itself. The recent wave of defections from the opposition to the ruling party is therefore not merely a sign of political opportunism, it is a symptom of a deeper institutional disorder.
Nigeria must build political parties that embody ideas rather than function as patronage networks. As long as parties remain hollow platforms for access to power, the spectacle of politicians moving effortlessly from one platform to another will continue to define the country’s democratic experience. The real question confronting Nigeria is therefore larger than the fate of any single party. It is whether the country can cultivate a political class capable of treating politics as a contest of visions rather than a struggle for proximity to power. When that change from the old begins, defections will grow rare, opposition will recover its meaning, and democracy will acquire the intellectual seriousness it presently lacks. The persistent question which continues to confront us, is why does the political class fail? The answer, though unsettling, remains constant: the fault lies not only with the individual actors, but also with the pervasive political culture that molds them.