Party formation, balancing freedom and order in Nigeria, by Dakuku Peterside

Freedom is the lifeblood of democracy, but even freedom needs guardrails. In Nigeria today, the race to form new political parties ahead of the 2027 elections is testing that delicate balance between liberty and order. On paper, this is democracy at its most vibrant: citizens freely associating, fresh platforms emerging, political diversity expanding. However, in practice, it is starting to resemble less a democratic renewal and more a speculative market, where parties are created, traded, and discarded like political commodities. The sheer speed and scale of the current party gold rush raise a pressing question: are we deepening the roots of democracy, or are we choking it with weeds?

This is the paradox of Nigerian politics: proliferation as proof of democratic vitality, and proliferation as a symptom of its fragility. The race to establish new political parties has taken on the character of a gold rush—opportunism masquerading as pluralism, political merchandising in the form of party registration. Many are conceived as negotiation chips, vehicles for regional ambition, or tools for diluting opposition strength. 

With 19 registered political parties already, Nigeria sits among the world’s most crowded electoral fields, trailing only India’s 2,500 and Brazil’s 35, and surpassing Indonesia’s 18. Yet by mid-2025, applications for new parties had exploded past 120, even though in 2019, 74 parties were deregistered by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, for failing to meet constitutional performance benchmarks—a decision upheld by the Supreme Court.

History shows that no matter how many parties Nigeria begins with, the political contest eventually narrows to two main poles. The early 1990s saw General Ibrahim Babangida decree a two-party structure—the National Republican Convention, NRC, and the Social Democratic Party, SDP—arguing that Nigerians’ political psychology tended to converge on two dominant camps. While pro-democracy activists criticised this as state-engineered politics, subsequent democratic cycles seemed to confirm the pattern. From the PDP-ANPP face-offs of the 2000s to the APC-PDP duopoly post-2015, smaller parties have typically served as electoral footnotes rather than game changers. 

So why the present flood? Money is the bluntest answer, intertwined with political strategy. For some, a party is a bargaining tool—offered in trade for alliances, campaign funding, or appointments. Others create “friendly” parties to split votes in key constituencies, often to the advantage of the ruling party. A few are escape vehicles for politicians sidelined in the APC or other major formations. There are, of course, genuine attempts to create platforms for neglected ideas and underrepresented groups—but the sheer volume of opportunistic ventures too often drowns out these. 

The democratic consequences are real. Political pluralism is a constitutional right, but unchecked proliferation can fragment opposition, confuse voters, and reduce competition to ballot clutter. Many of these micro-parties lack ward-level structures, coherent ideologies, or sustained membership drives. Their manifestos are boilerplate documents written for INEC’s filing cabinet rather than the public square. They vanish between election cycles, only to resurface in time for the next round of negotiations. 

Other democracies have faced similar challenges. India’s thousands of registered parties yield only a fraction that are genuinely competitive. Brazil’s hyper-fragmentation has led to unstable coalitions and legislative deadlock, prompting reforms aimed at reducing the number of effective parties. Indonesia allows many parties to register but imposes a four per cent parliamentary threshold to maintain legislative coherence. The lesson is clear: freedom to form parties must be balanced with rules that preserve electoral order through performance-based retention, credible membership verification, and structural requirements. 

Nigeria already has some guardrails—INEC’s power to deregister parties being one. However, the current process is reactive, rather than preventative. Registration conditions remain lax. This is where both INEC and the ruling APC have a responsibility. For INEC, reform could mean stricter membership and funding audits, more demanding geographic spread requirements, and regular revalidation between elections. For the ruling party, it means resisting the temptation to exploit proliferation to weaken opposition—true democratic strength comes from winning genuine competition, not from tilting the field. Reform does not mean closing the democratic space; it means making that space meaningful. Parties should be required to maintain an active presence in at least two-thirds of the states, hold verifiable membership rolls, and submit annual audited accounts. Failure to contest elections for two cycles should trigger automatic deregistration. Mergers should be encouraged through legal incentives, and independent candidates should be given fairer entry, preventing reform from simply cementing a two-party monopoly. 

At the heart of this debate lies public trust. Nigerians are not hostile to new political formations; they are wary of fly-by-night outfits that emerge before elections, cut opaque deals, and vanish after results are announced. If politics remains a seasonal business venture, our ballots will remain crowded, but our choices will be empty. 

The right to form political parties is a hard-won freedom, but rights divorced from responsibility breed disorder. Without meaningful reform, Nigeria risks entering 2027 with a ballot that is too crowded to be clear and a political field that is too fragmented to be functional. Strengthening party formation rules is not about shutting doors; it is about ensuring that those who walk through them are ready to serve, not merely to trade influence. If political leaders, INEC, and citizens can agree on that principle, we can build a system where pluralism thrives without chaos, where parties are more than logos-for-hire and elections are more than a seasonal spectacle. In the end, the health of Nigeria’s democracy will not be measured by how many parties we register, but by how many are capable of lasting, leading, and earning the trust of the people they seek to represent.

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