2027: INEC, the judiciary can cripple Nigeria’s wobbly democracy, by Olu Fasan

Hardly anyone should shed tears for the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and the African Democratic Congress, ADC. Both parties are guilty of what lawyers call contributory negligence, being part-architects of their own misfortune. Their internal contradictions, genetic predispositions and inherent inability to cohere are simply being exploited by their ruthless enemy, the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, as well as the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and the judiciary. I made my view of the PDP known in this column in a recent article titled “PDP’s shameful disservice to Nigeria”; my take on the ADC is also public knowledge. 

In July last year, in a birthday interview in this newspaper, I was asked about the emerging coalition under the ADC. I said the coalition was formidable in theory, but, in practice, not surefooted. I cited two reasons. First, the coalition’s main leaders – Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and, later, Rabiu Kwankwaso – controlled 63 per cent of the votes in the 2023 presidential election, so, it could, if those leaders remained united, defeat President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 presidential poll. However, that was, I said, a big “if” because, given the leaders’ conflicting and unyielding presidential ambitions, the coalition might fracture if some of them failed to secure its presidential ticket and couldn’t persuade their followers to support the winner.    

Secondly, I argued, the coalition started off badly by not forming a new party; rather, they hijacked an existing dormant one. The optics were bad as it appeared the coalition simply “rented” the ADC as a “vehicle” for 2027. Of course, in Nigeria, small parties like ADC and Labour Party have always survived from one election to the next by renting themselves out as “vehicles” to disgruntled politicians from the major parties to contest elections. But the coalition’s leaders took a huge, uncalculated risk by coalescing into the ADC without anticipating that their enemies could use aggrieved members of the “old” ADC as agent provocateurs to destabilise the “new” party. 

Truth is, Nafiu Bala Gombe, a former deputy national chairman of the ADC, who accused the coalition of hijacking the party and violating its constitution, and whose legal challenge led to the current rupture in the party, enjoys the sympathy and tacit backing of the APC. It is, indeed, hard not to see “the voice of Jacob and the hands of Esau” situation in the ADC crisis. Yet, it’s also hard not to acknowledge that Esau, by knowingly selling his birthright to Jacob, contributed to his own predicament. Surely, if the coalition’s leaders wanted to colonise the ADC as they did, they should have ensured the party’s prominent natives were happy and fully assimilated. By failing to do that, they opened a crack wide enough for enemy infiltration, which the APC is ruthlessly exploiting!

Yet, herein lies the underlying problem. The hijacking of political parties as “vehicles” for elective offices has its roots in the non-ideological nature of Nigerian politics. It is inconceivable that any serious political party anywhere in the world would simply exist to rent themselves out as “vehicles” to disaffected politicians from other parties, as the ADC has traditionally done. It was, remember, the same party that former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s so-called “Coalition for Nigeria Movement”, CNM, adopted and collapsed itself into in 2018 ahead of the 2019 presidential election. Of course, the fluidity of party loyalty and affiliation in Nigeria means that nothing really distinguishes the political parties; they are merely special purpose vehicles for contesting elections.

Last week, Dr Reuben Abati invited me to a “City Talks” zoom event he hosted with Professor Jideofor Adibe as guest. The theme was “Nigerian Democracy and Threat of One-Party State”. Regrettably, I couldn’t join the event. But had I joined and contributed to the discussion, my starting point would have been that, although Nigeria is, on paper, a multiparty system, it is, in reality, a de facto one-party state. The key feature of a multiparty system is the existence of many political parties, each with distinguishable ideology and policy orientation that offer voters a real choice. In their book Political Systems of the World, Denis and Ian Derbyshire said: “The opportunity of voting for a complete change of policy, and even philosophy, is a vital element in a democratic political system,” adding: “Without it, genuine choice is limited.” 

Sadly, such a real choice, such an ideologically-based political system, is utterly lacking in Nigeria. Elections in Nigeria are, in truth, not a context between political parties but between constellations of constantly shifting networks of elites, who simply use political parties as “vehicles”, hence they “forum-shop” and move seamlessly between parties in pursuit of their political ambitions. So, truth be told, Nigeria is a de facto one-party state: the party is the political class as a collective and political parties merely exist, not as repositories of ideas, norms and values, but as hollow, interchangeable conveyances for the self-serving ambitions of politicians. John Campbell and Matthew Page said in their book, Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know, that political parties in Nigeria are “elite patronage machines for capturing the state with little or no focus on policy or issues”. They are right!

The foregoing shows that Nigeria’s politics is broken and that its democracy is retarded, gripped by what the German sociologist Robert Michels described as “the iron law of oligarchy”, under which a democracy becomes an elite capture. Yet, institutionally, the reality is that: 1) the Constitution explicitly recognises political parties as the only means of securing political power in Nigeria, 2) INEC registers several political parties, and 3) elections are actually conducted in the names of political parties, under which candidates of all hues seek political offices. To those extents, Nigeria could, at least in theory, be described as a multiparty state, although, in practice, as argued above, the system is utterly flawed.      

But flawed as the system is, it’s the duty of the electoral body, INEC, and the judiciary to sustain the semblance of multiparty democracy, the semblance of competitive politics, and resist any attempt by the ruling party to cannibalise or neuter other political parties and render them electorally unviable in a bid to turn Nigeria into an electoral autocracy, if not a de jure one-party state. Unfortunately, the judiciary and INEC are failing to act in the national interest and live up to that sacred responsibility as truly independent umpires intent on maintaining whatever veneer of democracy exists in Nigeria.

Take the PDP. The decisions of the courts and INEC to recognise the Nyesom Wike-led faction panders to Wike’s avowed predilection to hold the PDP down for Tinubu’s re-election bid. Similarly, INEC’s recent decision, purportedly in compliance with a Court of Appeal judgement, to withdraw recognition for the David Mark leadership of the ADC could destroy the party ahead of 2027. Truth is, the courts and INEC risk being complicit in rendering PDP and ADC unable to participate in next year’s presidential election, leaving President Tinubu as the only major candidate.

That would, of course, sound the death knell for Nigeria’s fragile democracy. That’s why every patriotic Nigerian should commend the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, and align with its recent intervention, warning lawyers and the courts not to become willing tools in the hands of anti-democratic politicians.  As for INEC, it has not covered itself in glory. The perception of bias is extremely strong, not helped by recently unearthed old tweets purportedly written by the INEC chairman, Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan, SAN, praising Tinubu and the APC. 

But the situation is febrile. INEC and the judiciary must be utterly neutral and guarantee a truly competitive presidential election. If, by their decisions, President Tinubu faces no serious opponents in next year’s poll, they could tip Nigeria into a civil breakdown and its rickety democracy over the edge. Hence, INEC and the judiciary must do the needful!

*Dr Fasan is the author of ‘In The National Interest: The Road to Nigeria’s Political, Economic and Social Transformation’, available at RovingHeights bookstores.

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