The Latin phrase, ‘Civis romanus sum’, translates to ‘I am a Roman citizen’. The idea was that citizens could travel across the Roman Empire and expect to be safe and well treated. In June 1850, British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston invoked the same principle, arguing that British subjects abroad should have the same expectation that the ‘watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong’. And, while fictional, The West Wing’s U.S President Josiah Bartlet invoked the same sentiment when dealing with the idea of ‘a proportional response’.

Nigerians, particularly those in South Africa, might be left wondering what it means to be a Nigerian citizen abroad and what value that holds. Rising xenophobia against African nationals has cost South Africa greatly across the continent. It has affected the support that South Africa received in the World Cup. Ghana postponed a visit from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Countries repatriated their citizens, but even attempts by Nigeria to get compensation for its citizens have been rebuffed—Nigeria’s attempt was emphatically rejected by South Africa, which played on tropes of Nigerians running drug dens. Nigerian citizens look back at a relationship that included the introduction of a Mandela tax to support anti-Apartheid movements, chairing the U.N committee on apartheid and strong diplomatic support globally and rue how it has all changed.

This is the outcome of an increasingly weak and regressive approach to foreign policy. This is not a defence of the attacks in South Africa and an increasingly anti-immigrant posture that appears to focus squarely on fellow Africans. Instead, it looks at Nigeria’s increasingly unambitious approach to foreign policy and a detachment from this important area of statecraft. Nigerian foreign policy has not failed; it has simply revealed what it was built for: preserving elite legitimacy rather than protecting Nigerians. Expecting anything different is an exercise in disappointment.

An Established Pattern

The pattern of xenophobic violence between Nigeria and South Africa spans four administrations, two parties and several foreign ministers.

In May 2008, 62 people died in a wave of attacks on foreigners across South African townships. In April 2015, at least seven people died in the wave of attacks that spread from Durban after King Goodwill Zwelithini remarked that foreigners should pack their bags; Nigeria recalled its envoys for consultation in response. In February 2017, protesters in Pretoria handed the Foreign Ministry a petition against arrogant immigrants, ‘especially Nigerians,’ which saw a number of Nigerian businesses burned. In September 2019, riots in Jeppestown and Johannesburg’s central business district gutted around 50 businesses, mostly foreign-owned. Nigeria’s response was emphatic: Air Peace flew hundreds home for free, Nigeria pulled out of the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, crowds in Lagos stoned Shoprite outlets, and Ramaphosa dispatched a special envoy to Abuja to apologise. All seemed forgiven.

This time there would be no apology. Perhaps because of genuine citizen furore and domestic pressure that could lead to his impeachment, Ramaphosa and his government have declined to confront the movement. From late April, groups affiliated with Operation Dudula and former Durban radio host Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma marched through South African cities, ordering undocumented foreigners to leave by 30 June. In Johannesburg, demonstrators checked nationalities before attacking, and at least two Nigerians—Amaramiro Emmanuel and Ekpenyong Andrew, arrested in Pretoria and later found in a mortuary—died after encounters with SA security forces.

Two more followed in early July—Musa Yunana Joe shot in front of his shop and Emeka Charles Iroegbu, who the Nigerian Foreign Ministry claims died under police interrogation in Pretoria. The SA Police deny these reports and say they were drug arrests. Even these deaths are diplomatically contested.

The first evacuation flight landed in Lagos on 11 June, carrying 262 evacuees. By early July, more than 850 Nigerians had been flown home in four batches, out of over a thousand who registered to leave, alongside a separate stream of 586 whom South Africa’s own Home Affairs processed for deportation, and thousands of Malawians, Ghanaians, Mozambicans, and Ethiopians running the same gauntlet.

The Foreign Ministry summoned South Africa’s high commissioner on 4 May. The next day, the Senate resolved to send a high-level delegation, led by its president, to express Nigeria’s strong displeasure. Foreign Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu invoked the anti-apartheid debt in protest. But every one of these instruments had been used before. It is why South African ministers could brush them aside. In a famous exchange, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, a minister in the SA presidency, pushed back against a Nigerian reporter’s question on compensation for Nigerian victims by asking, instead, to be shown the ‘drug dens’ run by Nigerians.

When the Nigerian Senate reconvened four days after the drug-dens remark, Senator Adams Oshiomhole (APC-Edo) proposed appropriating the Nigerian profits of South African companies to compensate victims and noted, in passing, that the May delegation had never actually been sent. Senator Abdul Ningi (ADC-Bauchi) demanded that diplomatic ties be severed. Senate President Akpabio (APC-Akwa Ibom) persuaded both men to withdraw their motions and instructed the Senate committees to review the implementation of its May resolutions and report back within weeks on the status of the first committee.

Throughout this process, Nigeria had no Ambassador in Pretoria. Tinubu recalled 83 Nigerian ambassadors worldwide in September 2023. This was not the first foreign policy incident that Nigeria faced without functional emissaries in place—in late October 2025, when Trump threatened military action over the killings of Christians, there was no one in Washington DC to respond to the questions. Femi Fani-Kayode only received his letters of credence on 6 July, the same week that Ntshavheni made her curt comment.

Nigerians were being hunted through South African cities by nationality, and there was no representative in the country to deftly manage the crisis because ambassadors had been recalled and the entire foreign policy architecture, from legislators to the ministry itself, proved unable to attend to the crisis. This is not a lapse in the system; this is the system today.

A Giant’s Footprint

Nigeria calls itself the ‘Giant of Africa’. While its foreign policy has not matched this title recently, there was a period when its muscular approach was felt and respected.

To start with, in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War (1967—70), Nigeria co-drove the creation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in May 1975, ensuring that the founding treaty and subsequent headquarters were based in Nigeria. This process ensured the creation of an institution that could, and for a time did, serve as a vehicle for the country’s regional ambitions. Nigerian heads of state have chaired ECOWAS nine times since 1975, more than those of any other member state. This is usually recounted as a tribute. It is better understood as an inheritance: the regional hegemon managing the region’s affairs, in a building it paid for, under a treaty it wrote.

In November 1975, the military regime of Murtala Muhammed recognised the MPLA as the government of Angola, against explicit American pressure. President Ford had written personally to African heads of state urging them to hold the line against the Soviet-backed movement. The letter was hand-delivered in Lagos by Ambassador Donald Easum on 3 January 1976. Nigeria published it, and called it a gross insult. Murtala’s answer, delivered at the OAU’s extraordinary summit in Addis Ababa in January 1976, was the most famous speech in Nigerian diplomatic history and a public charge that the United States had chosen white supremacy over African self-determination, and that ‘Africa should no longer take orders from any country, however powerful.’ Nigeria did not stop at rhetoric; it moved money and material to MPLA and forced the continental body to follow recognition.

In 1979, the Obasanjo regime went further and seized the assets of a superpower’s oil company. On the eve of the Commonwealth summit in Lusaka, with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wavering on majority rule in Rhodesia and British Petroleum (BP) implicated in oil reaching apartheid South Africa, Nigeria nationalised British Petroleum’s 20 per cent stake in its Nigerian joint venture and its entire marketing subsidiary. This was an instrument of pure coercion, deployed at real cost to Nigeria’s own oil sector, that helped concentrate British minds in the run-up to Lancaster House. The nationalised company survives in Lagos as a corporate fossil, itself a metaphor for Nigeria’s foreign policy decline: African Petroleum was renamed Forte Oil in 2010, then Ardova in 2019, and delisted from the Nigerian Exchange in 2023.

The Babangida regime in 1990 was the major donor, troop contributor, and driver in the formation of the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), which played a defining role in stabilising a region that had been bedevilled by coups and unstable government changes. Nigeria provided at its peak around 12,000 of ECOMOG’s 15,000 troops in Liberia, and Obasanjo would later put the bill at $8 billion and at least 500 Nigerian soldiers killed — an accounting no legislature approved or audited.

But Nigeria’s foreign policy successes have mostly followed a single trend that highlights a more fundamental flaw—they occurred during military regimes that were not accountable to an electorate. Gowon, Murtala, Obasanjo, and Babangida all achieved these while overseeing military regimes. There was no legislature to consult and no election to lose.

It is easy to make the connection that democracy stymied Nigeria’s foreign policy ambition; after all, Tinubu’s attempts to forestall Niger’s coup in July 2023 were blocked by a Senate resolution and firm opposition from Northern politicians. But the more uncomfortable diagnosis is that, while Nigeria’s foreign policy ambitions and successes have reflected its sense of position in the world, they were never connected to Nigerian citizens in the first place.

Good for Whom?

Nigeria’s foreign policy doctrine, with Africa as the centrepiece, survived perfectly intact because rhetoric is free. It has been frequently referred to in virtually every inaugural address, foreign ministry mission statement, and Independence Day broadcast since Balewa stated it in 1960.

The machinery, meanwhile, was quietly dismantled when structural adjustment gutted the foreign service’s budgets in the 1980s. The Abacha years converted diplomacy into sanctions evasion, and by the Fourth Republic, the ministry had become what a former foreign minister, Ike Nwachukwu, described in May as “missions struggling to meet basic obligations.” Tinubu’s first foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, stated that the delay in sending ambassadors was due to insufficient funds to staff these missions. A giant without its presence can only rely on the memory of its impact.

Democratic structures might have prioritised other elements of governance, but citizens also bear the brunt of this. No candidate for president has had to declare a foreign policy doctrine or approach because the electorate has not prioritised it. Candidates will refer to the recent SA issue only while it is in the news, and ignore it once the crisis dies down. Foreign ministries can tout ‘victories’ in securing Nigerians’ elections to plum positions in regional and international organisations, but even those engagements lack citizen investment—what does it matter if you are in the AU or ECOWAS if you still face attacks when visiting fellow member states?

The honest objection here is Obasanjo’s second act between 1999 and 2007. He was arguably the most energetic statesman on the continent—midwifing the African Union, co-authoring NEPAD, brokering peace in Liberia, São Tomé, Darfur. But this does not break the pattern; it establishes it. Obasanjo’s shuttle diplomacy was never once an election issue.

It was not a PDP manifesto; his re-election in 2003 was essentially due to incumbency and a bias in exploring his foreign policy chops from his previous stint in power. An argument can even be made that funds to push his engagement came from barely scrutinised budgets at the onset of the return to democracy. When Obasanjo left power in 2007, his activism faded, and the political system did not notice the departure. A capability that leaves with an incumbent is a hobby with a budget.

Who Pays?

The situation in South Africa might be a blip for politicians and businessmen with investments there, but it is costly for citizens who have no direct means of exerting power. South Africa has extensive business with Nigeria—more than 80 million MTN subscribers in its largest market worldwide, millions of DStv households for Multichoice, and, until the parent company’s 2021 exit and the brand’s final wind-down this year, devoted users of Shoprite.

None of this means the state is incapable. In March 2012, South Africa deported 125 Nigerians at OR Tambo airport over allegedly fake yellow fever cards; Nigeria deported 84 South Africans on identical grounds within two days, and Pretoria delivered a formal apology within the week. And where the incentive was revenue rather than citizens, Nigeria has squeezed South African capital harder than any regulator in African history—the $5.2 billion fine imposed on MTN in 2015 for unregistered SIM cards, which was eventually settled at $1.67 billion. Between an apology extracted in a week and a billion-dollar settlement extracted in instalments, Nigeria has demonstrated its ability to protect its citizens abroad when there is an incentive.

Lastly, the effects of a weak foreign policy on its citizens are most visible in the most visceral example—the passport. Senior politicians and appointees can either afford the exorbitant visa costs or use diplomatic passports. But the average Nigerian cannot move as easily. In the April 2026 Henley Index, Nigeria’s ranking improved from 95th to 90th, but the number of places Nigerians could enter without visas dropped from 46 to 44. If Nigeria compares itself with its contemporaries, it would see that Ghanaians can now go to 67 countries and South Africans to 101.

If it wanted to reflect, it would see that ‘small’ The Gambia, whose democracy it helped entrench by removing former dictator Yahya Jammeh, has a passport that can unlock entry to 68 countries. Visa regimes do track migration risk and operate on a reciprocity basis, as Nigeria’s own restrictions cut both ways. But these countries punish Nigerians because they cannot trust the government to document, attend to and, if necessary, repatriate its citizens. The system has never been held accountable, so it continues to run roughshod over expendables.

At No Political Expense

The record shows that Nigeria’s foreign policy was never built to protect Nigerians abroad. The only era when it projected real power was when Nigerians could not vote on it or when it became an expensive interest. In an era of increased interconnectedness, when actions in foreign capitals affect far-off continents, it has become easier for citizens to emigrate rather than hold leaders accountable.

The regret is that there are more casualties than readily acknowledged. Other African countries would rightly expect a country with Nigeria’s population and economic weight to be more assertive in holding South Africa to account. Regional neighbours would hope that a buoyant economy and robust foreign policy would trickle down the Atlantic and also help keep their leaders in check. Even Western capitals would appreciate a partner to collaborate on diplomatic efforts. A region that could use an assertive Abuja, and partners that could use a reliable one, are casualties too. But the sharpest reading belongs at home. What citizens see in an inconsistent and unclear foreign policy approach is the low value placed on their lives.

Elections are only months away, and no candidate has yet been asked a foreign policy question—none expects to be. The president’s successor will most likely deal with the same issues at the same price: none at all.

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The Village

was up at 2 am when this piece finished. If she did not do early edits, we miss our Wednesday deadline for the first time. and sold me dreams on WhatsApp that it was decent and then left me with over 100 comments. But, as always, the piece is better off for it.

This is also The Bellwether’s 20th piece. Thank you to everyone who has read, restacked, shared, commented, insulted, argued and engaged. Here’s to the next 20.

Donald Trump publicly pressuring FIFA into reviewing Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension is probably the most blatant example of host-nation privilege in recent years. In a tournament where the U.S had already barred many fans for arbitrary reasons, effectively fired a referee, and problematically constrained Iran’s performance, this was the peak of a host nation’s political majority really leveraging that position to alter outcomes in their favour or against people they do not like. Hosting tournaments in today’s world cannot be politically neutral; it reveals what nations want to project about themselves.

Morocco will co-host the 2030 Men’s World Cup, which will be the culmination of a concerted effort to build its football capacity and institutional muscle. Once a ‘bridesmaid but never the bride’ in African football, its investment in its football has paid dividends: consecutive Men’s World Cup quarterfinals, the last two Women Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) finals, a U-20 World Cup title and, depending on who you ask, the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). It has hosted the most recent edition of both the men and women’s tournaments and is now a giant of the continental game. This apparent transformation points to something bigger: how hosting propels the presentation of a coherent national story way more than it does infrastructure or sporting success.

Hosting rightly demands excellent infrastructure and investment needed to safely welcome visitors and create a memorable experience. But it also requires honesty and clarity around the identity the nation espouses through its cities selection and through the composition of its team. In other words, it’s a reflection of the narrative being cultivated on a global stage to support broader efforts. It means Nigeria cannot properly host anyone till it reconciles with this persistent and uncomfortable question: what can Nigeria show about itself when hosting? Evidence suggests an uncomfortable answer: the two sporting instruments Nigeria has used to make itself legible as one country—the tournaments it stages and the team it fields—have each reproduced the very divisions they were meant to paper over.

The Optics Behind Hosting

Nigeria’s size and wealth mean it has been extensively approached and bid to host tournaments. It has hosted two African Cup of Nations tournaments (1980 and, as co-host, 2000), two African Games (Lagos 1973 and Abuja 2003), the FIFA World Youth Championship in 1999, and the U-17 World Cup in 2009. Nigeria also maximised home advantage —it won gold at the Lagos 1973 African Games and topped the medals table at the Abuja 2003 edition, won its first AFCON title at home in 1980 and was penalties away from regaining it in 2000, and narrowly lost the final of the 2009 U-17 World Cup in Abuja.

These moments fuelled patriotism and camaraderie as Nigeria made giant sporting strides. After all, what better image for a new democracy a decade after a civil war than Christian Chukwu, captain of the team from the East, receiving the AFCON trophy from Shehu Shagari, president from the North, in Lagos? Such images, demonstrating a perceived unity of the nation, inspired hope and encouraged a generation of young Nigerians to pursue sports as a livelihood.

Its investments also followed considerable economic and domestic growth. The National Stadium in Surulere, which hosted the 1973 Games and the 1980 AFCON Final, was opened in 1972, amid the oil boom that followed the Civil War. The Abuja Stadium, which followed in 2003, was built at a cost of $360 million under the Obasanjo government during another oil windfall, and the Athletes Villages were also designed with an eye to long-term housing. But neither stadium had sustainable thinking behind it. While newly built stadiums around the world are concessioned to local sports clubs or private companies to run and maintain, both national stadiums have been largely abandoned and now require substantial renovation before they can host anything at all. The result is a culture in which such events are no longer seen as viable investments.

These optics might have affected Nigeria’s bid for AFCON 2027. The joint bid with Benin collapsed when the House of Representatives committee on sports pointed out the irony of spending money while citizens were still reeling from the 2023 fuel subsidy removal. Nigeria’s record of failed bids also includes the 2014 Commonwealth Games (which went to Glasgow), the 2030 edition, and, more recently, the 2031 African Games (Kampala). The last defeat, for a Games Nigeria hosted twice, likely owes more to its poor sporting administration. Repeated failures left hosting bids looking less like national ambitions and more like elite political projects, and the public sensed it. This meant the expected scrutiny and accountability that bid officials should have faced never came.

Fields of Dreams

Stadium politics has always been a staple of Nigerian sports and speaks to the importance of location in politics. In 1977, Shooting Stars of Ibadan faced Rangers of Enugu for a place in the African Cup Winners’ Cup Final, the continent’s second-tier club competition. Both teams produced the majority of the national team, and their rivalry worried administrators. Because of their rivalry, it was agreed that both matches would be played in ‘neutral’ Lagos. Later, after a contentious first leg and accusations that the Yoruba-majority Lagos would favour the nearby Ibadan club, it was moved to Kaduna. By 1980, Nigeria was hosting AFCON in Lagos and Ibadan, home to the country’s two best stadiums.

The 1999 FIFA World Youth Championship was the last major event Nigeria staged under military rule, and it was held across the country. Alongside established hosts Lagos and Ibadan, the South-South was represented by Port Harcourt and Calabar; the East by Enugu; and the North by Bauchi, Kaduna and Kano. By 2003, Abuja had received extensive investment and hosted the African Games. By the time the 2009 FIFA U-17 World Cup arrived, Abuja had replaced Port Harcourt, Ijebu-Ode replaced Ibadan, and the other six cities from 1999 resumed hosting duties.

But just as visitors in one’s home are unlikely to be allowed to wander into untidy rooms, host cities are often chosen with an eye to which parts of the country are considered safe enough to showcase. In 2009, despite then-President Yar’Adua’s unconditional amnesty for Niger Delta militants, Warri was removed from the list of host cities over this concern. The absence of host cities in the North East also reflects similar insecurity concerns. Which cities get to represent Nigeria to the world has never been a question of stadium capacity alone, but also about how they would be regarded, including safety. In other words, host-city selection has often reflected political comfort much more than national representation.

There is a question here about hosting ‘etiquette’ and what it demands of hosts who cannot agree on what to put forward. Nigeria’s identity has been in question for most of its existence, and attempts to provide a balanced palette through the host cities for tournaments have only reinforced these distinctions rather than foster cohesion. The infrastructure and investment argument helps paper over gaps in standards between an established metropole like Lagos and virtually every other city in the country. Investment in host cities can and should showcase the range of a country’s people. What it cannot do is conjure a national, collective push that does not exist. Tournaments have often isolated whole swathes of the country as forced chaperones of the party rather than enthusiastic hosts.

A country at odds with itself struggles to present a united front. It is part of why sportswashing, the concept of leaders of ‘problematic’ nations using sports to launder their image, works. Autocrats can performatively present a cohesive state precisely because no one at home is allowed to contradict the performance, and of course, divided countries tend to expose their flawed democracies when they host.

The ‘successful’ hosts of recent tournaments have been governed by leaders who have largely been able to devote resources without any scrutiny or accountability: AFCON’s recent hosts were Morocco and Côte d’Ivoire, for example. Before 2026, FIFA had taken the World Cup to Qatar and Russia. The U.S is the latest example of a country at odds with itself, with the contention over leadership styles and Trump’s involvement in Balogun’s suspension. But that is a country with 250 years of brand management and a curated idea of what it means to be a nation; Nigeria cannot yet agree on what ‘the Nigerian dream’ is.

Bleeding Green

A final case for hosting is the obvious incentive: it might be easier to back yourself at home. If we count Morocco’s current, disputed status as champions, 13 of 35 AFCON hosts have won the title, with three reaching the Final. The number admittedly plummets at the World Cup, where only six hosts have won, most recently being France in 1998. But the fervour of a home crowd and the ability to invest in building momentum around the squad, since qualification is assured, are part of the appeal. However, none of this works if the country will not gather around the team. And if host cities are a question of which places Nigeria is willing to showcase, the squad is an even more intimate curation, since it shows which people get to stand for the country.

Nigeria’s team has struggled to command nationwide support because many people have not felt represented by the team. The men’s national team has not played in the north for over a decade, following a mismanaged World Cup qualifier in Kaduna in March 2016. The North has not just been unvisited, it has also been grossly unconsidered. In 61 years of international football, only 13 players from the north have represented the Super Eagles at an AFCON. Most of that history runs through a handful of names—Garba Lawal, Tijani Babangida, Sani Kaita—before narrowing, by the 2010s, to essentially one player: Ahmed Musa, a Kano Pillars product who became Nigeria’s most-capped international and, eventually, its captain. By the time of the 2023 tournament in Côte d’Ivoire, Musa’s role had become almost entirely symbolic.

He did not start a single match in Nigeria’s run to the Final, and head coach José Peseiro defended his inclusion on leadership and mentoring grounds rather than his ability to contribute on the pitch. Musa, for his part, used the platform that came with wearing the armband to say exactly what the moment called for: that Nigeria stands united beyond tribe and religion, and that the team’s strength lay in coming together. Underneath him, fans were describing the selection process in almost the opposite language. One supporter, reacting to the squad list, called it simple favouritism, asking why players from lesser leagues were picked over stronger options elsewhere. By the following year, Nigerian football writers were warning that Musa’s would-be successors (Jamilu Collins, Zaidu Sanusi, and prodigy Alhassan Yusuf) were each falling out of contention for reasons ranging from injury to a move to America’s lower-profile league, and that the North risked having no Super Eagle at all.

None of this means representation is a prerequisite for support. Nigeria’s last Men’s AFCON victory was in 2013, and no northerner started the game; Musa came on in the 54th minute. But the joy of victory united Nigerians for a moment and showed the power of unifying images.

At the end of the day, there is a question of what supporting Nigeria means, especially when the game is at home. During the ongoing World Cup, Norway’s run to the quarterfinals has seen supporters around the world engage in the famous ‘Viking row’. The irony is that this celebration is relatively new and was simply manufactured by the team, but it has become a way to connect with fans and supporters globally.

Arguments for Norway have often included its homogeneity, whereas Nigeria, like many African states, has to engage with its diversity and multiethnicity. But homogeneity is not the operative difference. Norway could manufacture a ritual because its team already plausibly stood for the whole country. Nigeria’s problem is that there are still questions about what constitutes a truly national identity. Without addressing this, we cannot properly leverage any hosting opportunity.

Extra Time

Put the team and the stadiums side by side, and the same theme appears. The venue list has always run wider on paper than in practice, its inclusiveness dependent on truces, oil windows, and security assessments that expire the moment the tournament ends. The squad has run narrower than the country it claims to represent for its entire history, propped up for a decade by essentially one man performing the unity his own presence was supposed to prove. Both themes are evidence of a recurring issue—making an abstract, argued-over country briefly legible as a single thing. And the institutions in charge of the venues and the national squad have quietly underperformed on that job for six decades, without anyone treating the shortfall as anything more than an administrative detail.

There is an example that Nigeria can learn from. Its women’s team, the Super Falcons, has been able to bridge religious and diaspora representation in its roster. It is the most successful African side, including a memorable comeback in the 2024 WAFCON Final against hosts Morocco. The squad has long drawn from both domestic leagues and the diaspora, yet this blend has rarely provoked the same anxieties about authenticity or allegiance that surround the Super Eagles. Instead, diaspora players are often seamlessly integrated, their presence seen as an extension of Nigeria’s global footprint rather than a dilution of it.

Perhaps most striking is that this relative unity has been achieved despite chronic underfunding, limited media attention, and weaker institutional support. In other words, where the men’s team has often mirrored Nigeria’s divisions, the Super Falcons suggest that a more inclusive and less politicised model of representation is not only possible, but already exists.

None of Nigeria’s recent issues, notably failing to qualify for consecutive World Cups for the first time in history, either proves a lack of talent, pedigree, or a genuine appetite among its citizens to see the country host again. What it demonstrates is narrower and harder to dismiss: that the two sporting instruments Nigeria has relied on to make its own nationhood visible, the team on the pitch and the tournaments it bids to host, have each, independently and for decades, reproduced the same regional imbalance the country has never resolved politically. Perhaps the most vivid image is that of the most successful country in U-17 World Cups failing to deliver on this promise and instead creating the impression of being age cheaters.

The mistake is assuming this is a football problem awaiting a football solution. This is still a national question, with its answer still being debated. That negotiation has been playing out on pitches and stadia, a country trying to prove to itself that it is one thing rather than several. Hosting can paper over some cracks but, like a game of two halves, there’s a much longer and much more consequential segment yet to kick off.

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The Village

The Trade Union has struck again, but that is also because between 1-2 am chats and edits we agreed on a set focus that was a bit more distinct and more ‘Bellwether’.

has an impressive, albeit occasionally annoying, way of providing few comments and turning the piece around—such as losing my preferred intro that fought against hydration breaks, making this a game of four quarters. The title is a subtle protest against this. and panel-beat the piece around the identity question and also forced a more direct voice than I am used to. is still amused by the hilarious African narrative around “mentality” vs poor prep/tactics, qualification, self-infantilisation. He was the perfect eye to take the final brush on this piece, in the middle of his own nocturnal workload.

Special shout-out to Argentina-Egypt for delivering a reminder of why I like this game, and to Colombia-Switzerland for the snoozefest that let me focus on this.

On 22 June 2026, U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was forced by his party to resign as leader and will leave office in July 2026. His troubled term was bookended by his ill-judged pick of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States and his party’s weak performance in local elections, which contributed to his poor approval rating of 23%. This meant fellow Labour MPs were keen to replace him with a leader who would inspire voters and strengthen their bids for re-election.

The immediate comparison for Nigerians is that there is no similar mechanism to replace a leader with low approval ratings—Tinubu’s own rating dropped to 30% as of May 2026. The only options are impeachment, which has never worked at the federal level, and a coup, which reportedly failed recently. The constitutional provisions for impeaching a president are notoriously so prohibitive that they function less as accountability mechanisms than as a leader’s last line of defence.

There is a similar Nigerian comparison for this Starmer moment. In 2015, Nigeria removed Goodluck Jonathan via the ballot box when he lost his bid for re-election. There is an argument that neither was an accountability mechanism so much as a concerted display of elite consensus moving against elected leaders. While Starmer saw a cabinet minister resign from his government and allies move towards supporting an alternative, Jonathan’s defeat was driven by a growing coalition that included the APC, defecting PDP governors, and Obasanjo’s active endorsement of Buhari’s presidency. His biggest sin was less the rising insecurity or corruption than his decision to move against the informal zoning agreement.

Ahead of 2027, the consolidation of governors and leaders within the APC gives the impression that Tinubu’s re-election is a given. The opposition’s struggles also reflect the APC’s effective use of state resources in securing this. The easy question is whether Nigeria should consider a return to parliamentary governance, one that federal lawmakers considered as recently as 2025. The appeal is obvious: parliamentary systems afford swift correction when a leader loses confidence.

The real question is whether the power to select and remove leaders can ever be transferred from the elite that currently holds it to the electorate.

Forward Going Backward

The argument that Nigeria is not culturally suited to the accountability mechanisms required by effective governance systems usually runs in one direction. This “forward” direction presupposes what we expect in politics: ethnic cleavages, the dominance of patronage-driven strongmen over systems and the lack of ideological discipline to function. But this argument has no cultural evidence going “backwards.”

Long before colonial incursion, different cultures embraced ways of holding leaders to account. The Oyo Mesi, a seven-member council of nobles that ruled alongside the Alaafin of the Oyo Empire, held both the power to crown the Alaafin and the power to end his reign. When the council determined that an Alaafin had become tyrannical or unfit, the council’s leader, the Bashorun, would present the king with an empty calabash. The gesture meant ‘the gods reject you, the people reject you, the earth rejects you’. This vote of no confidence resulted in an Alaafin committing suicide and a successor being crowned.

The Oyo Mesi also selected the Alaafin. Selection and removal were therefore practised by the same body that was required to represent interests broader than any single faction. The Ogboni, a separate council of elders sworn to the earth goddess, served as a check on the Oyo Mesi itself. This represented an institutional architecture for distributing power and maintaining accountability that predates, by centuries, the current constitutional arrangements Nigeria has been asked to choose between.

The Benin Kingdom operated on the same logic through a different institutional architecture. The Uzama Nihiron, the hereditary kingmakers of Benin led by the Oliha, held both the authority to crown a new Oba and the institutional standing to check his rule. Alongside them sat two further chief groupings: the Eghaevbo N’Ore, the town chiefs who served as state councillors and political leaders, and the Eghaevbo N’Ogbe, the palace chiefs who managed court administration.

The Nupe tradition, shaped by Islam and geographically centred in what is now Niger State, produced the same structural arrangement through a different cultural vocabulary. The Etsu-Nupe combined political, military, and spiritual authority, but his powers were not absolute. Titled nobles, including the Maku, the Kpotuh, and the Shabi, held formal accountability functions over the Etsu, while provincial heads administered territories downward and answered upward to the same noble hierarchy. A vertical accountability chain ran through the Etsu, who answered to the council; the council answered to established norms of governance; and the provincial chiefs answered to the Etsu.

In the northeast, the Kanem-Bornu Empire—one of the longest-lasting states in African history, spanning nearly a millennium—governed through a council of state known as the nokuna or majilis, typically composed of twelve royal, religious, and military notables. The Islamic tradition of shura, consultative governance, reinforced an already indigenous norm. The nineteenth-century history of Bornu contains its own cautionary instance: al-Kanami, the era’s dominant power, ruled with the help of a council of six but declined to be installed as Mai, knowing that the position required accountability. The official Mai became a puppet; the real power operated informally.

On the Niger Delta coast, the Itsekiri Olu governed alongside the Ojoyes, a council of chiefs led by the Ologbotsere, a hereditary kingmaker whose holder crowned each new Olu and convened the Ojoye council to confirm succession.

The pattern across five distinct Nigerian political traditions is not coincidental; it reflects a convergent solution to the problem of executive power: a vest selection and removal in a constituted council, creation of an effective accountability mechanism and then the establishment of a leader’s legitimacy through council consent and enforced mechanisms rather than through personal mandate alone. This is closer in principle to parliamentary confidence than to fixed-term presidential tenure.

There is another pattern here: these accountability structures were also carried within elites themselves. Most of these positions and titles were hereditary, which meant commoners rarely had access to them. This suggests that, culturally, we have always deferred leadership and accountability to a governing elite. This is evidently something that has been weaponised by elites to manage their evolving relationship with the masses.

These strong accountability mechanisms reinforce the argument that Nigeria’s precolonial traditions have consistently checked poorly performing executives. However, the power to check them has been exercised at the behest of an elite expected to uphold these standards. Even Nigerian military coups followed similar patterns, with heads of state emerging only from the most senior ranks. Protection of the executive from this kind of accountability is a recent invention. It is the newest thing in Nigerian governance despite being treated as the most natural.

The Selection Conduit

To understand how Nigeria’s current selection architecture works, we need to go back to October 1975. Then Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed, inaugurated the 50-member Constitution Drafting Committee that would design the return to civilian rule. His instructions were that the new constitution should “eliminate cut-throat political competition based on a system of winner-takes-all.” Murtala’s demand was that this democracy was not meant to include accountability through a political opposition, but rather to subsume or overwhelm it. The presidential model that came into effect in 1979 was chosen because the lesson military leaders took from the First Republic (1960-66) was to avoid a situation in which a loyal opposition could work to unseat the government at the centre, regardless of the role it played in holding the government to account.

The result was what Rotimi Suberu calls a “hypercentralised” government and one that ensured an elected executive was powerful enough to govern without any real checks. Borrowing from military control, subsequent civilian governments have exploited these powers at their discretion to devastating effect. It gives the impression that Nigerian political culture requires strong leaders to wield such powers at the expense of strong institutions.

The strongest case for parliamentary democracy is that it is akin to our cultural traditions and best exemplifies what we have always done. But there is an equally strong case to be made that the relationship between our cultural and political identities has led to a situation where poor accountability was an eventual outcome.

Ekeh makes this argument in his famous ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa’ paper. Here, he makes the case that because Africans have a stronger link to cultural traditions and practice, which he groups as the ‘primordial public,’ the foreign-imposed ‘civic public’ is always going to come second. The values of the civic public’s institutions and laws are only as effective as they work to serve the cultural values we are used to. As such, whatever external form of government adopted will bend to the will and direction of a cultural position.

To bring in the elite consensus, and understand how poor accountability comes about, we can use Richard Joseph’s theory of prebendalism. He argues that state offices in Nigeria are treated as prizes or revenue sources for the benefit of officeholders and their networks. In other words, elites are able to use these structures to perpetuate their control over managing governance and society. Historically, they might have catered to their own base. But, to adapt to changing times, they have come to form a cross-cultural coalition that preserves their status. They ensure that, despite shifting coalitions, they abide by the same rules and maintain the status quo. It is why disciplining Jonathan, who threatened these arrangements, was necessary but empowering a mass movement for change is not a priority.

The question of which form of governance works well for Nigeria cannot be separated from the original question of if actual power will be wielded by the elite. Because, whatever is practised, whether presidential or parliamentary, will still be operated by these elites. The patronage network that organises around an elected president will also overwhelm a prime minister. If citizens criticise a prime minister, but that choice is convenient for the elite, that person will not leave power. Joseph’s point survives unless we change the underlying selection architecture.

The Translation Conundrum

The throughline from precolonial hierarchies to modern Nigerian political structures places an outsized emphasis on elite management and engagement. It is not uniquely Nigerian, but it lends credence to an evolving focus on a politics organised around governing coalitions rather than on actual mass mobilisation. Few instances, if any, have moved the needle in Nigerian history. None, to date, has resulted in actual leadership change. The evidence for this in Nigerian democracy is even starker.

The 2023 presidential election recorded a voter turnout of 26.72%: the lowest since the return to civilian rule in 1999. Tinubu’s winning mandate, confirmed by the courts, flowed from less than 10% of the electorate and reinforces a consistent decline in voter turnout. But the election also showed what participation failure looks like in practice: the Obidient movement, a mass movement coalesced around Peter Obi’s Labour Party candidacy. It won six million votes nationwide, sent roughly 40 members to the federal legislature, and elected a governor. But it did not produce a president, and the distance between what it generated and what it converted into selection power illuminates the problem precisely.

This situation would not have changed if Nigeria practised a presidential or parliamentary system. What would have been required was active political consciousness that translated to political energy. The infrastructure required to convert momentum and energy into ward-level organisation and ballot box protection does not yet exist at sufficient scale to challenge an elite-oiled machine that has maintained a local presence for decades.

2027 is on track to validate elite alignment. Governors and party leaders that have consolidated around the APC’s hold are pushing the argument against zoning and actively trying to preserve the status quo ahead of an expected transition in 2031. The conditions that made 2015 possible—a unified opposition platform, elite consensus against the incumbent, a candidate with cross-regional appeal, and a northern establishment sufficiently aggrieved to coordinate—are not present. That alone shows the limitation of the contest, especially one that has been reframed as elite alignment, given the overwhelming number of governors who belong to the ruling party. The perfect storm needed to remove a sitting president today requires elite engagement. By current indications, the compact is holding, and the conditions for elite-driven change are not present.

Claude Ake argued in Democracy and Development in Africa that the failure of African democracy was not that the wrong systems had been chosen but that institutional forms had been installed without the political conditions that give those forms their substance. The presidential system protects incumbents and rewards control, while a parliamentary system imposed on the current political economy would be operated by the same elite compact, resulting in parliamentary elite capture. This is not an argument against parliamentary governance in principle, but rather identifies the conditions that the reform debate has consistently refused to address.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The debate about presidential versus parliamentary governance in Nigeria is worth having. There are cases to be made for a return to parliamentary governance, including faster leadership correction, stronger incentives for party coherence, and better accommodation of Nigeria’s genuine regional diversity. If Nigeria’s political conditions were different, if parties had internal discipline, if voters exercised consistent selection power, and if the infrastructure of mass participation functioned as both systems assume it does, then the case for parliamentary governance would be considerably stronger.

But the debate is being conducted on a premise that the evidence does not support: that the form of government is the primary variable determining political outcomes. In Nigeria, the primary variable is who controls the selection process, and that question has not changed across constitutional arrangements, parties, administrations, or the quarter-century of civilian rule the reform debate seeks to improve upon. The elite compact that managed succession in 1999 is managing it in 2026. It has survived two parties, five presidents, and seven elections. It will definitely survive a change of constitutional model unless the change is accompanied by conditions that make the model’s accountability mechanisms actually function. These conditions are political and organisational, not constitutional.

The pre-colonial traditions of governance across this territory understood something that the current constitutional settlement was designed to suppress: that legitimate authority requires accountability to a defined community, that the chain of accountability must run both up and down, and that the power to select and remove leaders is not just a technical question about institutional design but also a political question about where power actually lives. The Oyo Mesi, the Uzama Nihiron, the Nupe nobility, the Kanem-Bornu majilis, and the Itsekiri council of chiefs did not produce a ruler whose tenure was protected regardless of performance. What they produced, and what Nigeria has not yet produced through any of its constitutional arrangements, is a genuine accountability relationship between the ruler and the community being ruled.

Whether the transfer of selection power from the elite compact to the electorate is possible within the current political economy, requires conditions that do not yet exist, or is structurally prevented by a constitutional design explicitly commissioned to suppress organised opposition are questions the evidence cannot yet answer. What it can answer, and what this essay has tried to demonstrate, is that the debate underway is not the one that is needed. Nigeria is arguing about which vehicle to drive when the questions of who holds the keys and whether they are even fit to drive have not been asked. Until those questions are asked, the argument about the vehicle is largely decorative.

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The Village

This piece was originally meant to consider if Nigeria should change to parliamentary governance after Starmer resigned. After a call with , we concluded it was best to go even deeper and unpack the root of the issue: elite involvement in this form of accountability. jumped on the document and helped with edits. beat it black and blue and fought with me on some of the cases. She and have formed a trade union of editors to force pieces under 3,000 words. The score is 1-0.

Mild spoiler alert for readers who have not read the Harry Potter series. The books revolve around a prophecy of a chosen one who is to be born on 7 July to defeat a legendary villain. However, there are two known children born on that date, and the villain, in a bid to avert the prophecy, strikes one of them but fails; that child becomes The Boy Who Lived.

Peter Obi has received the ire, criticism, and relentless attacks from the ruling party machinery because he is the candidate they chose to fight and failed to destroy. His 2023 campaign defied Nigerian political logic because of what he accomplished: proof that a third force could receive mass appeal. More networked politicians have run for president on a third-party ticket; none has garnered as many votes and as much support as he did during his bid. That Obi is as important and influential a candidate today is in response to the fact that many of these attacks largely failed in 2023 and in the years since.

Yet Obi faces an ironic choice ahead of 2027. Having fashioned an effective campaign as the one capable of cleaning the Augean stables of government, he has now resorted to threading a balance between being the definitive outlier and embracing consummate insiders. He has spent the years since 2023 carefully navigating relationships across the Niger, dealing with political pitfalls and seeking to prove his viability in a way that both elites and the masses can feel comfortable with. His recent defection to the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC), his third party in 12 months, is demonstrable proof that he has the stubborn megalomania needed to vie for the presidency of a country like Nigeria. The question is whether his tightrope act will hold before the election—and whether it can carry the number of supporters he needs to upset an incumbent.

Building the Myth

Nigerian politics loves messiahs for three reasons. First, elected officials are surrounded by sycophants who love to sing their praises and ignore their shortcomings. Second, a legacy of Nigeria’s military rule means that much power resides in executive roles, often with little accountability, and we need to believe that office-holders can be used to good effect. Third, politicians themselves need this narrative to be effective candidates, with social media creating the opportunity and the need to craft well-honed narratives. Successful candidates have crafted some of the best stories: Obasanjo’s was prison-to-president, Yar’Adua was the incorruptible leader, Jonathan did not have shoes and was a consistently dutiful ‘Number Two, Buhari was the serial candidate with one last chance, and, at least to his supporters, it was Tinubu’s turn.

Obi’s myth is more organic because suitable elements have become popular, supporting his narrative. Before politics, he was a successful banker. Then he became the first governor to successfully challenge a removal from office and was returned by the courts. He was a personable and accessible governor who demonstrated probity in the use of state funds and was not accused or charged with any corruption-related activities. He was a convenient pick from the oft-marginalised South East when Atiku Abubakar wanted a running mate in 2019. He performed credibly in the vice-presidential debates against Professor Yemi Osinbajo, which was itself no mean feat. At no point has he visibly benefited from his former offices or access to strong friends. During his 2023 campaign, he used the same wardrobe staple of a black kaftan, carried his own bags when moving around and used public airlines, which showed humility. He engaged with the numbers and communicated a clear plan to move Nigeria from ‘consumption to production’, and was more effective in playing an opposition role than any other candidate. Finally, his social media engagement and support for the #EndSARS protests endeared him to many key online activists in the movement. He became the ‘choice of the southern youth’, even if there is no youth monolith.

While most political support in Nigeria is transactional, Obidients embrace their candidate with a devotion that charismatic religious leaders can only dream of. Opposition figures have criticised them for being caustic and dismissive online, and they are, in part, a product of a hyper-partisan era that rewards the binary logic of anybody for us is okay; anybody not for us is not. But a following of that intensity is, elsewhere, raw material that organisers convert into branches, agents, and a machine. Obi’s congregation was real, but the church was never built.

Entering the Matrix

If Obi is the chosen one, then Nigeria’s political environment is the matrix. As a former governor, he was always a consequential figure, but it became clearer when he ran for president and went against history, such as vying from a zone that has not produced a head of state since a six-month window in 1966. It also meant going without the support of state governors: Obi notably won the vote in 11 states and the capital, Abuja, despite not having a governor in any of those states backing him. And, as has been noted, he has dared opponents, the media and citizens to verify his record and has often been vindicated.

But this did not mean Obi was not without certain elements. Obi has rightly been criticised for the litany of parties on his CV; a trait he shares with many politicians he criticises. He was elected governor as a member of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), joined the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), then left for Labour (LP), before jumping to the African Democratic Congress (ADC), and finally left after several months to join the NDC.

None of the men he aspires to follow into power has been elected on a platform they did not control, or at least did not play a role in creating. Obi has tried to register his own party without success, leaving him dependent on vehicles he cannot control. Furthermore, the recent drama over a court order seeking to deregister political parties that did not win an elective seat in 2023, and the tenuous evolving relationship that he is navigating with Kwankwaso and NDC leader Seriake Dickson, is because he is not in control of the party and will have to deal with internal mechanisms that he cannot dictate. It means he will bear the brunt for even the perception of failing, which runs counter to his brand.

The most glaring example is the way his political operation has been managed in the aftermath of the 2023 elections. Obi was in a position that should have made him the obvious candidate for an opposition to rally around in 2027. He is a southerner, which convention dictates should hold the presidency till 2031, and carried six million votes. Instead, Obi had to navigate infighting within Labour, which prevented them from capitalising on his popularity to win the presidential vote in Edo (2024) and Anambra (2025) when they held off-cycle governorship elections. His endorsement and campaign participation barely made a difference.

The next example was the number of Labour Party politicians, many of whom got elected on his coattails, who defected to the APC to shore up their chances of re-election. Most of them have now lost APC primaries and have sought to rejoin him in the NDC. But despite this, his movement has not been able to recruit similar candidates of his ilk to further inspire candidacies down the ballot. The most effective LP politician, Abia’s Governor Alex Otti, declined to follow him to ADC and NDC, which means Obi is functionally back to where he was when he started his campaign in 2022. The popular ones associated with him, such as Aisha Yesufu, failed in the primaries, and their failures have created the impression of a candidate who cannot properly empower his followers but simply expects all attention and effort to be directed towards himself. It would seem that his team has applied the reasoning behind Christians worshipping Jesus, but not being expected to deify the twelve disciples.

As Obi prepares his campaign, he faces a different landscape from 2023. Then, he navigated travails with a relentlessness that really should have led to accusations that he had a clone. Since then, he has spent considerable time cultivating relationships with Northern politicians, resulting in newfound partnerships with Nasir el-Rufai and Kwankwaso—both former opponents. He has also become a staple at key elite events, burials, weddings, and meetings with those who were key figures in the Buhari presidency he had criticised. In short, Obi now has to prove that he is still the outlier Nigerians can trust, despite having become more familiar with the machinery.

This will form the defining question of his candidacy: can a personality like Obi succeed in Nigerian politics without compromising the values that made him appealing in the first place? The implicit contract of his candidacy was that the highest office could be held by someone who had not stolen, had not been charged, and had not accumulated wealth through proximity to power. That contract is now under pressure from his own coalition-building. Obi can argue, not unreasonably, that governing Nigeria requires governing with Nigerians as they are rather than as one might prefer them to be. The question his supporters are asking is whether he has absorbed the lesson or simply surrendered to it.

The Buhari Precedent

It is tempting to read Obi’s situation as unprecedented. It is not. Muhammadu Buhari ran for president in 2003, 2007, and 2011. He had, in the North, a genuine mass following built on his reputation for probity and the memory of his military administration’s war on indiscipline. His three losses were due to a lack of ‘machinery expertise’ needed to convert them into a winning national coalition. Moral authority, it turned out, was not self-converting.

In 2015, Bola Tinubu went to Katsina to bring Buhari out of what seemed like political retirement, then mobilised his allies and South West delegates at the 2014 Lagos convention to secure the primary for him. This coalition involved effective party management and campaigning. However, once in office, Buhari’s aloofness from the very politicians who had delivered his victory produced exactly the disconnected, personalised, non-institutional presidency that his profile had always suggested it would. These included ministers who complained they could not secure audiences, allies who felt abandoned after the election, and a party apparatus that never developed a coherent legislative agenda because the president was not interested in driving one. In the end, Buhari simply existed and aptly disappointed millions who expected messianic-level miracles from a man.

Obi is not Buhari, and the comparison has limits that should be acknowledged. Buhari’s northern base was geographically concentrated and ethnically coherent in ways that made it activatable by a sufficiently organised broker. Obi’s 2023 coalition was deliberately dispersed—he was dominant in South East and South South but also competitive in North Central and carried Lagos—because it was built on the rejection of existing alignments rather than on any single ethnic or regional constituency. That makes it structurally harder to hold and harder to expand; if anything, it requires more institutional investment. The irony is that the very quality that made Obi’s coalition interesting, this cross-ethnic and cross-regional character, is also what makes it most vulnerable to the absence of the organisational infrastructure he has declined to build.

Both men treated the political machine as something beneath them, to be borrowed, when necessary, rather than as something to be built with patience. But while Buhari had Tinubu, Obi, so far, has had no one in that role, and unlike Buhari, he does not appear to have found anyone willing to build the machinery for him on terms he can accept. What he has instead are relationships—El-Rufai, Kwankwaso, Dickson—but not apt substitutes. These negotiations can be reversed, withdrawn, or simply ignored when the political calculus changes. Obi, heading into 2027 on his third party in twelve months, appears to be taking notes in the wrong margin.

The Strategy Problem

There is a second shift in Obi’s approach that has received less analytical attention than his party moves, but may matter more: his position that he will share his governing blueprint when elected, not before. This is a legitimate strategic choice, and one that a number of serious candidates in serious democracies have made. It is also, in Obi’s specific case, a significant departure from what made him different.

His 2023 campaign was built on a detailed, public, relentlessly contested set of ideas about how Nigeria should be governed. He debated, presented numbers and engaged critics, sometimes in real time, in a way that Nigerian presidential candidates rarely do. His supporters were not simply fans of the man but adherents to a programme, or at least to the promise of one. A candidate who now declines to be pinned down on what that programme is risks something more damaging than bad press: he risks confirming the suspicion, growing since 2023, that the programme was always primarily a campaign instrument rather than a governing vision.

The voters Obi needs most are the independents, the first-timers, the young urban citizens who drove the 2023 turnout in his strongholds. They are precisely the cohort least susceptible to party loyalty and most susceptible to apathy. They came out in 2023 because they believed something specific was on offer. They did not turn out in significant numbers for the Edo or Anambra governorship elections that followed, in which Obi campaigned actively and still lost influence. A candidate who gives his most persuadable voters nothing specific to believe in is not merely failing to expand his coalition; he is actively ceding the independent bloc that is, structurally, his to lose. In an election that will again be decided by differential turnout, apathy is not neutral. It is a vote for whoever’s machine turns out its people, regardless.

Even if Obi resolves the machine question and the silence question, there is a third problem that neither charisma nor coalition-building can paper over: he is heading into 2027 without an army. The NDC, as of mid-2026, holds a handful of legislative seats, mostly from defectors who joined the party after it suited them to leave elsewhere. The comparison with what Tinubu built before 2023 is uncomfortable but necessary. Whatever one thinks of the methods, Tinubu spent two decades identifying, financing, and organising candidates across multiple states and multiple electoral cycles. When he eventually ran for president, he did so with a grassroots organisation that had been tested in real elections across the country. His legislative relationships were not assembled in the twelve months before the election. They were the product of a long investment that most people, for most of that time, simply did not see. Obi has made no equivalent investment. His movement, for all its genuine energy, has produced very few electoral victories at levels below the presidency, and the victories it did produce in 2023 have since haemorrhaged to the APC because the organisation needed to retain them was never built.

Obi’s public one-term pledge complicates this further. There are principled reasons for this position, and his supporters have embraced it as further evidence of his unusual relationship to power. But in the grammar of Nigerian politics, a declared one-term president is a lame duck on the day he is inaugurated. Legislators calculate their futures in terms of who will control federal patronage in the next cycle. A president who has announced he will not be seeking re-election removes the most powerful tool of presidential legislative management—the ability to reward loyalty with future support—before the relationship has even begun. Obi, who has demonstrated that he understands Nigerian politics more deeply than his critics credit, must know it.

What the Machine Requires

There is a version of this story in which everything that has gone wrong for Peter Obi since 2023 is external in origin. The story includes a ruling party that used state resources to destabilise Labour, a media environment that held him to a standard it did not apply to others, and a political class united in its interest in preventing someone who threatened its arrangements from acquiring the power to rearrange them. This version is not wrong and rightly highlights that the system is structurally hostile to outsiders and exactly the kind of candidacy Obi represents.

But the system was equally hostile to Buhari, who had the largest independent political base in Nigeria and still could not convert it into a presidency until he acquired a partner who understood the machine. The constraint Obi faces is structural, and it demands that a candidate take the question of political organisation seriously. What makes Obi’s case both difficult and interesting is that the things the system requires of him are precisely what his supporters prefer he not do. His appeal was built on the credible claim that he was not transactional, not beholden, not another iteration of the political class he ran against. To acquire a machine, to do the work of patronage and coalition management, to stop declining press questions…each of these would make him a more viable candidate, but a less distinctive one. The system does not merely demand that he learn its grammar but, at the cost of fluency, that he stops sounding like himself.

Whether that trade is worth making, and whether it is even possible to make it without dissolving the thing that made the candidacy worth following, is the question the 2027 election will answer. Nigerian presidential politics has resisted every candidate who refused its grammar. Obi, heading into his last campaign by his own account, is running out of time to decide which kind of candidate he intends to be. Meanwhile, the machine is not waiting.

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The Village

This was originally ’s idea, and then we expanded the angle and concept until we agreed on the angle and she could go off to school. Then took a stab at making edits. All your praise points are likely the ones she made, and your complaints are likely the ones I rejected. Joachim () also gave some good advice on Obi’s party registration travails.

Nigerian politics and development metrics often preach the sentiment that ‘All politics is local’, but this usually refers to state-level politics and considerations. This is why local governance has often been poorly managed and why most citizens do not know their local government chairs or councillors. Ahead of the 2027 elections, some candidates have based their campaigns on state creation, believing it can lead to their election. The argument is that with direct resource allocation from oil and federal funds, they can ensure proper development is carried out. The truth, however, is that these assumptions are often flawed and overlook a simpler, more straightforward solution—cities, not states, are better vehicles for Nigeria’s political and socio-cultural development. This essay asks why Nigerian governance has spent six decades refusing to acknowledge the unifying role cities can play in politics and development.

Drawn, Not Born

Nigeria’s state-creation saga has been widely covered and unpacked. Tellingly, the biggest issue with this arrangement is that these states were not created organically, but arbitrarily to fit into political narratives. If a military regime wanted to create a state for a new military governor or to allocate funds, it sought to ensure it maintained parity between the North and South. Even the last set of states created—Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Gombe, Nasarawa and Zamfara—reflect Nigeria’s geopolitical zones with one created from each area. But this also meant that some states were carved apart even if they had a clear community identity. For example, a citizen born in 1960 in the Eastern Region could have seen their ‘state of origin’ change to East-Central in 1967, Anambra in 1976, Enugu in 1991, and then Ebonyi in 1996. It’s hard to maintain these bonds when these changes have been rife.

States were meant to bring governance closer to the people, but they have instead cannibalised the third tier—local governments—leaving them defunded, subordinated and highly dysfunctional. The local government has become an extension of a governor’s political machinery rather than a unit of actual service delivery. For any evidence, look no further than the firm grip most governors have had on local government chair elections. Proper development requires proper devolution, and proper governance benefits from actual devotion to the area. This allows people to become more invested and more involved in ensuring its success. The solution has become more evident in recent years.

The Ground Beneath

There are theoretical arguments for city-led development. Jane Jacobs, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), argued that cities, not nation-states, are the real basic units of macroeconomic life. Economic expansion, she showed, is driven by what she called “import replacement”: the organic process by which cities begin to produce locally what they previously imported, building skills, infrastructure, and productive capacity from the ground up. The nation-state is too large and too internally diverse to be the unit at which this process operates, because it applies a single monetary and fiscal policy to what are in fact multiple city economies at different stages of development. Nigeria’s system similarly treats Lagos and Zamfara as instances of the same economic problem, applies the same allocation formula to both, and wonders why neither develops as it should.

Edward Glaeser‘s Triumph of the City (2011) extends the same insight into human capital: cities generate what economists call ‘spillovers’—the economic benefits of density, proximity, and the unplanned collision of skilled people—that rural areas and administrative units cannot replicate by decree. What Nigeria’s state architecture does, systematically, is route the revenue generated by city spillovers away from the cities that produced them, to states that did not.

While Nigeria was building states, its cities were generating coherent, functional, self-reinforcing identities that people actually organised their lives around. Lagos is the clearest example, because it predates every administrative boundary drawn around it—it was a settlement before it was a colony, a colony before it was a region, and a region before it was a state. Its identity as a commercial, cosmopolitan, and culturally influential city does not derive from any government’s decision to designate it as such; it derives from the accumulated decisions of millions of people who built lives there over generations. The city’s identity is large enough to absorb competing identities, which is why there is such vehement opposition to tying it to a single ethnicity.

Another example is Kano, which has been a centre of commerce, Islamic scholarship, and political organisation for centuries. Its character as a city, from its markets to its relationship with the emirate system, predates the colonial boundary, the Northern region, and now Kano State. Government debates about governance often reflect an urban-rural divide, even when they are not framed that way. This shows that the city is the actual political community, and the wider state was simply imposed around it.

Former regional capitals such as Enugu, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, and Calabar also tell the same story. These administrative centres developed strong colonial-era identities, became fixtures in Nigerian history and eventually shaped the territories around them. The boundaries have always been augmented around the city, but have never fully subsumed or replaced it. City politics and the dance with the rural are accidents of geography and not strictly by design.

These cities have now become subservient to state bureaucracies that are not accountable to their citizens, but to the governor. Nigeria can and should actively leverage these cities to build these economies and mobilise communal sentiments. Reform could begin by strengthening local government autonomy and by considering mayoralties for cities that can and should be further developed. Interestingly, this is not a novel idea.

Pre-independent Nigeria had functional mayoral systems in cities like Lagos and Enugu, with the latter notably electing a non-Igbo mayor, Umaru Altine, in 1952. He was returned to office in 1955 and served until 1958. The city’s electoral logic, of looking for someone who could govern Enugu well and understood its local economy and administration, overrode the ethnic calculations that now govern Nigerian politics. Nigerian cities produced civic identities that could elect strangers, but the states built later around manufactured identities have been unable to replicate this.

This emerged from strong town councils that represented different constituencies and helped ensure strong governance and accountability. In a situation where resources from prominent cities are often concentrated to subsidise other parts of the state, this can be reversed to allow cities to build and organically develop their own economic infrastructure, while also enabling other resources to actively build elsewhere in the state.

The case for city governance is not automatically a case for better governance. The same patron-client dynamics that distort Nigerian states can and do operate at the city level. Lagos under Bola Tinubu between 1999 and 2007 demonstrated what city-level machine politics looks like at its most concentrated: a governor who used Lagos’s exceptional internally generated revenue to build a political operation that outlasted his tenure, penetrated federal politics, and eventually took him to the presidency. During the 2023 elections, this structure was weaponised through discourse associating Lagos with a dominant ethnic group. That is city power, but it is not city governance in the sense this essay means.

Abuja offers the opposite cautionary tale: a purpose-built capital designed from scratch as an administrative centre with no organic city identity to anchor it. It is only just beginning to feel more organic as a city, but it is remains beholden to diverse influential stakeholders, such as the indigenous Gbagyi communities, who repeatedly complain when not considered for local positions; citizens who have migrated for work are more invested in their ‘home states’; and a minister who owes no loyalty to the capital works to endear themselves solely to their appointer—the president. Abuja is dealing with city power but is unable to exercise city governance.

The argument for city-led development is that the accountability that cities offer is structural. A city government answerable to the people who actually live, work, and pay taxes in that city is harder to capture entirely than a state government whose primary revenue source is a federal allocation formula designed by people who are not accountable to its recipients. It means there is a fast, clear feedback loop that makes cities work in a way that a cumbersome federal and state bureaucracy does not appear to have.

It also helps to address some of the arguments in the urban-rural divide binary, especially since not all citizens readily identify or live in a city. Much of Nigeria, and indeed the continent, has strong communal and ancestral ties to more rural enclaves than larger cities. This could seem like a case for elite-driven support to these structures, at the expense of rural development. But this is why city-led development is a tool, and not the only approach for actual national growth. It does not mean villages and hamlets are completely ignored, but it allows for federal or state focus on these areas, while cities build themselves. To go back to the Pentecostal church analogy from the Machinery of Ethnicity, in time, parishes grow large enough to plant others. Cities can help catalyse or establish functional developments in surrounding regions.

The current instinct is to create more states, but this often only creates a new metropolitan area and then creates new minorities and agitations that lead to the quest for…more states. The actual solution is not to create more states but to reform local-level governance and management to properly address grievances and foster accountability. It means situating city management within the current tiers of governance in a way that helps build accountability at the local government level, while absolving state governments of the need to focus on urban areas people are already familiar with. It also allows a new generation of citizens to feel more invested and to really identify with different areas in the country in ways that older Nigerians do not.

Rep Your City

The 2026 World Cup offers a useful, if uncomfortable, comparative frame. FIFA did not negotiate hosting agreements with states; it did with cities. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani leveraged the city’s clout to secure discounted tickets for local residents. Chicago and Montreal declined to host matches altogether, not because they lacked stadiums or a fan base, but because their governance structures enabled them to calculate what the terms would cost, and their fiscal independence allowed them to act on that assessment.

Chicago can do this because it has an elected mayor accountable to city residents, the power to levy its own taxes, and institutional independence from the Illinois state government. Nigerian cities have none of these things. A Nigerian city cannot decline FIFA’s terms; it cannot accept them either. It has no seat at the table. Benjamin Barber, in If Mayors Ruled the World (2013), argued that cities share qualities—pragmatism, civic trust, indifference to ideological posturing—that make them structurally better at solving the problems that nation-states produce but cannot fix. His point was not that mayors are wiser than presidents, but that they are accountable to a constituency that exists in a specific place, with specific infrastructure and specific grievances. The World Cup host city framework illustrates exactly this: New York’s mayor is negotiating ticket prices because he is answerable to New Yorkers. A Nigerian governor negotiating a World Cup hosting deal would be answerable, primarily, to the federal allocation formula and the political patrons who got him elected.

If we go back to the original analogy of the Knicks and Arsenal being victorious, Nigeria’s cities have the same cache that its states will never have. Nigeria’s football clubs also mirror this—its last African club champions were Enyimba of Aba, and the name is a nickname of the city itself. State-branded clubs have seldom held as much appeal or even ‘owned the streets’ as in the era when cities boasted clubs; those with active followership now also embrace their cities and hope to extend across the state. It is for the same reason that the Nigerian National Sports Festival, the country’s flagship multi-sport competition, held in the name of national unity, generates almost no national conversation. The readers of this essay, who follow Nigerian politics closely enough to have reached this paragraph, are unlikely to know which state is hosting the next edition or which topped the medals table at the last one. The answer is at the bottom of this piece; the fact that it requires a footnote is itself the argument.

But there is a cultural cachet and argument with how people from cities like Aba, Benin City, Calabar, Enugu, Ibadan, Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Maiduguri, Port Harcourt, Warri, and Lagos actively promote and defend their city’s bragging rights. It is in music and films, in literature and activities. Cultural moments point to Nigerian cities in ways that even artificial capitals like Asaba cannot match. People do not ‘rep’ their states, but they will for their city.

The empirical record confirms what the structural argument predicts. A landmark 2017 World Bank report, Africa’s Cities: Opening Doors to the World, found that African cities are ‘closed to the world’. They trade comparatively little with the global economy and are held back by institutional constraints, opaque land markets, and infrastructure bottlenecks. These are not natural conditions but the direct product of governance arrangements. The report identified the fragmentation of urban authority between national, state, and local tiers as a primary constraint on city productivity: when no single institution is responsible for the city as a whole, and when revenue flows upward to tiers that are not accountable to city residents, the investments that make cities productive do not get made. For a vivid example, neither Nigeria’s commercial nor its political capital has a competitively functional public transport system. Lagos generates a disproportionate share of Nigeria’s non-oil tax revenue and is simultaneously governed by a state bureaucracy responsible for Epe, Badagry, and Ikorodu as well, places with entirely different infrastructure needs and economic profiles.

The city subsidises the state, but the state governs the city. The city has no institutional voice of its own, and the data shows exactly what that arrangement produces: a megacity that punches well below its economic weight because its governance structure is designed to extract from it rather than invest in it.

Whose Land Is It Anyway?

The organic city is, in the end, ungovernable. It cannot be owned by the people who would govern it, because nobody made it. Lagos was not granted its identity by a military decree. Kano did not become a centre of commerce because a constitutional provision said so. The density, loyalty, and cultural productivity that Nigerian cities generate are products of accumulated human decisions over generations and precede every administrative boundary drawn around them. That is exactly why the political class finds cities threatening and exactly why the reform that would actually change Nigeria’s development trajectory has never been attempted.

The opportunity remains for Nigeria to build governance around the national identities that already exist, rather than around the identities it has spent six decades trying to manufacture. The irony is that Nigerian cities do more than anything else to forge legitimacy and a national identity. After all, for people to feel wedded to such cities, they must feel deeply about the entity it is a part of. The way to cater to people is not to create new states; it is to empower existing cities to provide the economic and political safety and accountability that people clearly want.

The reason it has not is not ignorance, because Nigeria’s political class understands perfectly well that cities are the real units of economic and social life. The reason is interest, driven by governing coalitions and economic allocations. A new state creates a new governor, legislature, bureaucracy, and federal character calculations. This new tier of political employment will be distributed among the people who lobbied for the state’s creation and will eventually result in the marginalisation of those unable to break into this new governing coalition. The existing states, for all their dysfunction, serve the class that controls them. Cities threaten that arrangement not because they are more efficient, though they are, but because nobody drew them.

As ‘problematic’ as this statement might be, no politician created Lagos, and no governor invented Kano. The organic city has a life of its own, formed by groups of people who have chosen to live there and united by a common interest that close proximity and city infrastructure afford. This means cities owe their existence to no single individual, so they are not answerable to any single person and therefore cannot be owned. That is precisely what makes it ungovernable under the current arrangement. But it is precisely what makes governing it, genuinely, the only reform that would actually change anything.

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Written by Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by Seyi Adedoyin and ChiAmaka Dike

P.S – Enugu is expected to host the games later this year. Delta topped the last games in Ogun.

In December 2019, retired Major-General Babagana Monguno, then National Security Adviser, sent a confidential memo to President Muhammadu Buhari about his Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari. The memo, which became public in February 2020, accused Kyari of “unwarranted meddlesomeness”. Reportedly, Kyari had been convening and chairing meetings with the heads of defence, security, and intelligence agencies that should ordinarily have been organised by Monguno.

This was not the first time Abba Kyari’s influence had stretched into purviews beyond his control. Notably, his clash with Winifred Oyo-Ita, former Head of the Civil Service, involved the posting and retirement of permanent secretaries—a responsibility Oyo-Ita had as Head of the Civil Service. An investigation led to her retirement and removal from the administration. Neither Monguno nor Oyo-Ita were able to restrain Kyari’s excesses. Likewise, we are left only with anecdotes and thoughts about whether Buhari depended too much on him, or whether he was a ‘plant’ of the shadowy cabal that ran the government. In any case, Kyari’s influence could not outrun death when he passed on due to complications from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is why President Bola Tinubu’s selection of Femi Gbajabiamila as his Chief of Staff was closely watched. To further beef up his senior team, Tinubu picked Nuhu Ribadu, a retired Assistant Inspector-General of police, former chair of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), perennial Adamawa gubernatorial candidate, and 2011 presidential candidate, as his National Security Adviser. Finally, George Akume, a former governor, senator and minister, was named as Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF).

Comparatively, when Abdullahi Mohammed died on 5 November 2025, most obituaries reverted to a dated, black-and-white picture from his military days, and besides Tinubu and former President Olusegun Obasanjo, most tributes came from Kwara State, where he was from and called home. But Mohammed was no ordinary Nigerian—he was a military governor, the first director-general of the National Security Organisation, National Security Adviser to Abdulsalam Abubakar, and was chief of staff to Presidents Obasanjo and Yar’Adua.

These three positions serve at the president’s pleasure—without the need for Senate consent—and can wield as much power as a president allows. Previous occupants have been associated mostly with technocratic performance, but Tinubu’s have been tied to political interference. Gbajabiamila was reportedly in the frame to become Lagos Governor, and his office signed the memo conveying presidential approval for the ₦3 billion COVID-19 Fund release that became entangled in the scandals at Betta Edu’s Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs; he was also reported to have served as her referee during her Senate screening. Akume has been having run-ins with his home state governor and erstwhile protégé, Hyacinth Alia. Ribadu outmanoeuvred Adamawa Governor Umaru Fintiri to ensure his preferred candidate, Ahmadu Tijjani Galadima, emerged as the party’s nominee for governor in 2027. The impression given is less of key administrators and more of empowered political operators.

The standard reading of this arrangement is the capture of an administrative space by political actors. This also gives the impression that this ‘encroachment’ makes governance vulnerable to challenges arising from partisan politics, especially when identity plays a key role. But the more uncomfortable argument is that these offices have not been captured but have adapted to the way Nigerian governance works.

Every administration since 1999 has made these concessions for different reasons and with the same consequences. The sharper point is that this may not be dysfunction at all. These offices were built to make the president effective; in political hands, they often are. The irony is that their effectiveness now runs through partisan weight rather than technical competence—and the better they work this way, the less anyone asks what they were built for.

The Opening Balance

Understanding the different roles and their nuanced positions also involves understanding how Nigeria’s governance has evolved. During the parliamentary era, the prime minister had an aide who functioned as cabinet secretary to the Federal Executive Council and was the senior civil servant coordinating government business. This reflected an era when a robust civil service handled implementation while the political class dealt with crafting policy. Any need for security advice was handled by the relevant cabinet ministries. The nearest thing to a Chief of Staff was a principal parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, but even then, it would be a junior party member responsible for liaising between the prime minister and his members of parliament. Ironically, under Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, this role was held by Shehu Shagari, who would later become president in 1979.

The military era led to a formal demarcation of roles. Military leaders were less experienced in governance and were initially reluctant to admit it. This meant that only senior civil servants were appointed to the increasingly expansive SGF role, and it was less political and more so reflected their seniority within the civil service. To buttress this point, from 1961 to 1986, spanning eight regimes or administrations, every SGF was concurrently Head of Civil Service.

This consolidation was necessary because Nigeria originally had leaders who were chosen by compromise. Balewa emerged after Ahmadu Bello, leader of the majority party, refused to lead his party in Lagos. Aguiyi-Ironsi took power accidentally following the January 1966 coup; Gowon was named because he was a senior northern officer and, conveniently, a Christian; Murtala was chosen after long, arduous meetings with the 1975 coup plotters; and Obasanjo was his deputy, who was given power after Murtala’s death. Even Shagari originally wanted to be a senator before he was convinced to run for president, and Buhari emerged as leader after coupists carried out the grunt work. Babangida was the first to want the top role and get it, and he ushered in an era of leaders who prepared for power and represented informal ‘governing coalitions’. Also, by this time, the senior crop of military leaders were experienced hands from the Murtala-Obasanjo and Buhari eras. And they were prepared to ensure they could really leverage this experience.

This led to Babangida’s Decree 43, which enacted Civil Service Reforms. The decree sought to strengthen political control over the bureaucracy and reduce the influence of powerful permanent secretaries. It also meant that military officers, who often doubled as ministers, would have greater oversight and direct authority over their ministries, and that a direct chain of command would run from the presidency to the ministries. These reforms were widely panned because they weakened the civil service’s neutrality and made it overly politicised. Later reforms would establish a clear distinction between an SGF, who handled government policy and cabinet business, and a Head of Civil Service, who managed career civil servants.

Babangida’s reforms also affected the security structure that had been expanded after Murtala’s death in 1976. The National Security Organisation had become a powerful security structure, but after Babangida divided it into three successor organisations, a coordinating security entity became necessary. The original unit for military intelligence could play this role, but a civilian-directed one would become necessary once the transition to democracy was complete. The presidency’s oversight of the civil service and security affairs meant that these principal aides on these topics would be key to the presidency’s functioning. When Obasanjo returned to office in 1999, his administration would have to reconcile a civil service used to a singular non-partisan structure, a security structure reeling from decades of coup-prone intelligence issues and a political class desperate for relevance and control where necessary. This would have been a tall order for any government.

Adjusted for Inflation

The 1999 transition inherited this architecture and had to navigate a return to democracy. To navigate this, Obasanjo picked Ufot Ekaette, a retired senior civil servant, as SGF ostensibly because he could help manage the tenuous transition. For NSA, he returned to Aliyu Mohammed Gusau, a retired general and intelligence expert who could help quash coup talk and manage intelligence. For Chief of Staff, he picked Abdullahi Mohammed, whose experience would prove invaluable in managing the Villa. Most of the political and partisan efforts were handled separately from governance structures. Obasanjo would wield the axe over his party chairs, but largely left his three intact—Gusau was the only one who left, and that was to run for president in 2007.

When Yar’Adua assumed office in 2007, he dismissed most of Obasanjo’s personnel but, interestingly, kept most of the technocrats who had been around that government. He appointed Ekaette to the cabinet to head the new Niger Delta Ministry, and retained both Mohammed as Chief of Staff and retired Major-General Aliyu Mukhtar, Gusau’s replacement as NSA. He even elevated Obasanjo’s Head of Civil Service, Yayale Ahmed, to SGF after firing Babagana Kingibe.

Jonathan’s elevation began the gradual encroachment of politicians into these roles, partly due to the lack of his own political coalition. He returned to Gusau as his first NSA and only later pivoted to Owoye A. Azazi. He also picked Mike Oghiadomhe, a former deputy governor, to serve as his Chief of Staff. But crucially, he named Anyim Pius Anyim, a former Senate president, as SGF. This image, of the former Number Three citizen in the country, in this role, changed the perception of the role as a mere secretary position.

Buhari’s picks were more uneven but also revealed the system’s limitations. Kyari’s credentials, as presented, were more technocratic—a former bank manager and media editor—but his control and extensive influence relied on his proximity to the president. Babachir David Lawal and Boss Mustapha, his SGFs, had been involved in partisan politics before assuming the role. Babagana Monguno, a retired general, was his NSA and was distinctly not associated with most political discussions. By the time Ibrahim Gambari, a former foreign minister and recognised diplomat, replaced Kyari, he was not seen as influential or as powerful as Kyari. It showed that technocracy has waned at the altar of political expediency.

Tinubu’s appointments are the logical endpoint of a 25-year progression that has seen the limits of technocratic capacity in an increasingly political and partisan space. Previous occupants could focus on governance, but modern-day leaders rely on political value. Gbajabiamila, a former Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives, is not out of sorts compared to Anyim. Akume and Ribadu have been thrust into more active political participation because of a sad but obvious truth—Tinubu will not get re-elected simply by performing, but primarily by politicking. The team simply plays the way it needs to play to get the win, whatever it takes.

The Base Rate

This structure will remain because its causes feed on one another. It begins with the civil service, where there is no sign of any recovery in the capacity to address Nigeria’s issues. For reasons for this assertion, take your pick from an increasingly politicised appointment process, biased and unmeritocratic appointments, and salary compression driving the most capable hands away from governance. Nigeria’s best and brightest are not seeking to stay in the country, let alone in government. Permanent secretary positions, the peak of the civil service, are increasingly politicised and do not always reward the necessary capacity, creativity and industry that good civil servants should display. Instead, it rewards loyalty, pliancy, and sticking to the status quo. This does not provide a strong basis for technocratic appointments to rise to such key positions and earn the confidence of any president to place their political futures in their hands.

Into that vacuum steps politics, because politically partisan positions are an expedient tool in democratic politics. It definitely helps with representation and allotting roles. PDP alternated the SGF and Head of Civil Service between the North and the South. APC went one further and has only named Southern women as Head of Civil Service and Northern men as SGFs. These efforts help with catering to constituencies by giving them a name and a space in the presidency. It also helps with navigating key political needs. Jonathan’s third NSA, Sambo Dasuki, was embroiled in an arms scandal in which funds were allegedly funnelled toward the 2015 elections—allegations he has denied and which remain unproven in court. Monguno’s memo also asserted that Kyari’s mismanagement of security procurement was a means of siphoning dedicated funds, as cheaper items were being bought at higher prices. Tinubu’s team are actively involved in elections in their own states, with Ribadu even named in some blocs as a likely successor. Like other appointed positions, these three have since become platforms for the party to test and promote the future crop of leaders. It is just inconvenient and unfortunate that Nigeria’s political age issue has permeated here, too, even if Gbajabiamila and Ribadu are young by Nigerian politics standards.

Those appointments, in turn, harden the interests that profit from the arrangement, so that any structural reform runs afoul of established interests that profit from precedent. Ribadu’s nomination as NSA was scrutinised and criticised because he was not a retired military officer. Senior civil servants establish strong relationships with politicians and backers to protect them from being deployed to less convenient and less profitable positions. Even tangible reform efforts, such as implementing the proposed mergers and closures of Nigeria’s many government structures based on the Oronsaye Report, have stalled due to the risk of politicians losing access to budget lines and the backlash from constituents losing jobs.

And so the cycle closes on itself because each administration that routes coordination through political authority rather than institutional capacity further weakens the bureaucratic infrastructure that would make a different choice viable. Political appointments deepen the politicisation of permanent secretary appointments. They establish the expectation, inside the system and among the political class, that these offices are political prizes rather than service positions. They make any future president who might prefer a technocratic appointment face a political cost for breaking the norm. The calculation that makes sense for one administration worsens the next administration’s constraints.

The Opportunity Cost

There is a version of this argument that argues that more technocratic appointments, civil service reform and proper separation of political and administrative functions would help fix these issues. But that prescription not only fails to address the root problem of Nigerian politics as it exists in 2026, but also fails to future-proof governance as it appears headed. The current method is not necessarily failing, as Tinubu’s supporters would say when brandishing his successes, but it unnecessarily attracts too much media attention at a time when the work should suffice.

The more honest conclusion is structural. The original political settlement sought to manage a transition between governing structures with different styles and ways of validating success. A military regime simply needed to avoid coups; a democratic administration needs to get re-elected. Competitive democracy brought a set of coordination demands that technical offices were not designed to meet. Each administration has had to balance political weight and governing coordination to mitigate the structural limitations it has met.

A stronger effort to strengthen civil service capacity would also need to determine how parties and presidents balance governing and campaigning. Stronger processes to separate the two would also include ensuring that ruling parties prevent office holders from engaging in overly partisan conduct while in office and that sanctions are imposed for such conduct. Likewise, there will then be a question of how political parties that have proven limited in raising funds and managing their functions without access to public funding through public officials can afford to operate regardless. These are more existential questions around Nigerian politics and governance, but they speak to the root cause of these issues. They also explain why politically exposed partisan folk in technical roles are not an aberration; they are a natural destination.

A president’s confidence in an office holder will always result in more deference to their position and actions. But the flip side to this coin takes us back to the beginning with Monguno and Kyari. Clearly defined structures and organisation help to mitigate against these issues. It is worth sitting with the possibility that the current arrangement is simply working. No one is outwardly complaining; everyone appears to be in their own lane. Some of this may even be by design—there have been reports that Hakeem Muri-Okunola’s appointment as principal private secretary was a way to balance Gbajabiamila, that Ribadu’s expanding profile is grooming him for a higher office, and that a politically tactful president has simply kept his troops in line.

But that is the unsettling part. The failures we can see—Monguno and Kyari, Dasuki and the arms money—are the loud ones, and loud failures get corrected. The quiet success is the more corrosive, because a model that delivers politically has no reason to reform itself and every reason to entrench. The danger was never that politicising these offices would break the government. It is that it works well enough that we stop asking whether these offices still do the job they were built for.

And yet, these offices, designed to make the president effective, have become the clearest measure of what the Nigerian state cannot do. It is not a matter of the people in them, but of a structure that reproduces the same outcome by design—and that now works best when it quietly abandons the very purpose it was created to serve. The technocratic office did not fail in political hands; when it was retired, almost no one noticed.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: ChiAmaka Dike and Hillary Essien

The 2027 elections do not carry the same raw energy as 2023. There is an incumbent widely expected to be returned, an opposition too fractured to mount a credible alternative, and an elite consolidated enough that the outcome, to most serious observers, already feels roughly visible. Fewer citizens seem drawn to the pageantry of a process that has not yet given them reason for confidence. The atmosphere is different, and it is affecting the people who write about it.

An ongoing battle I have not fully resolved is how to manage the looming fear of disillusionment and cynicism that sustained engagement with Nigerian politics produces. I worry it comes across in my writing. I fear it comes across in my speech. I wince when I have to perform some optimism I do not entirely feel. This cycle has only just begun, so what does that mean for the remaining months? And, if I maintain a career in this space, what does it look like over the long run? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions that sit underneath every piece written about a political moment whose direction appears already largely set.

Nigeria approaches its 2027 general elections amid conditions more hostile to serious analysis than at any previous point in its democratic history. This is not a Bellwether essay about who will win in 2027, or a post-mortem on 2023. It is an essay about the act of witnessing: what it means to document a political moment when the audience is fragmenting, the information environment is hostile to complexity, and the structural outcome is already roughly visible. The question is not whether to write. It is what writing is actually for.

The Permanent Campaign

In 1976, Patrick Caddell, a young pollster for then U.S President Jimmy Carter, wrote a memo titled ‘Initial Working Paper on Political Strategy’. This document identified a phenomenon that American politicians were reconciling with at the time, the idea of a ‘permanent campaign’. It argues that because governing was now evaluated alongside public approval, politicians and leaders were subjected to a continuing political campaign.

This idea is not particularly novel. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented a wide range of legislative and executive actions upon taking office as U.S. President amid the Great Depression. His work rate spanned the concept of a leader’s ‘first hundred days’, and has been used as a benchmark for presidents since. The idea of a leader hitting the ground running and performing has become standard, despite acknowledgements that leaders are often less experienced when they come into power.

The permanent campaign presumes an accountability loop. Leaders lead, an electorate evaluates, and the cycle corrects. But that loop requires two things Nigeria’s political history has repeatedly broken. One is a professional bureaucracy capable of measuring performance, and the other is an information environment in which citizens can distinguish what actually happened from what they were told happened. This is largely a symptom of Nigeria’s military regime and its legacy on society, which saw these two things systematically dismantled.

From 1966 to 1979, and then from 1983 to 1999, Nigeria was led by military regimes. Most officers were trained for command and security, and each successive regime weakened the professional civil service. As experienced civil servants were purged and retired, these governments became increasingly dependent on informal networks and patronage. Some military regimes were able to balance the need for technocratic expertise with their authoritarian rule, but for the most part, this created a relationship contract in which leaders were somewhat removed from governance and popular opinion.

Platform By Platform

Widespread access to the internet has changed this, and not uniformly. Each Nigerian election since 2011 has been shaped by whichever platform was at the time reaching critical mass. Jonathan declared his candidacy on Facebook; 2011 became the Facebook election, the first-time citizens felt they were watching results in near real time. By 2015, it was Twitter, and the mood was different. It was sharper, more suspicious, more focused on outcomes than on personalities. Buhari’s win was tracked obsessively across feeds, and there were active efforts to expect and counter manipulation. In 2019, Instagram acquired a political function it was not quite designed for: the visual economy of candidacy, rallies, face time, and the aesthetics of power. At this point, almost every politician had a senior or special assistant on new media or photography. By 2023, TikTok had reorganised the campaign entirely. Those elections were short-form, decentralised, and genuinely grassroots in ways that neither party machinery nor the established commentariat had mapped.

2023 is especially adept because of how it shaped the outcomes of that election. Peter Obi’s Obidient movement was not built on press conferences or mass rallies, but on comment sections and shared video clips that older analytical frameworks struggled to process in time. What the pattern shows is not just that technology might mediate politics, but that each new platform changes what kind of political claims are true.

The question for 2027 is which platform rewards the most, and the early signs are troubling. The platform currently gaining the fastest ground among the relevant demographics is one that rewards virality above all else, and, in Nigerian political culture, virality has become indistinguishable from disinformation.

What does this mean? Well, at its least disruptive, it can be relatively harmless. It can be ‘parody’ or ‘satirical’ accounts reposting that footballers made fun of opponents who lost a Final. Or it can be attempts to associate some popular figures with some unnecessary news items. These can and should easily be subjected to cursory online searches to clarify what is going on. But, in some cases, it is not as easy to conclude. Disinformation about ethnicity-related campaign content, candidate-related rhetoric and even news about policies can be incendiary and lead to violence. And it is often hard to hold someone to account because we saw it on a WhatsApp group chat.

Nigerian politicians are not innocent of these actions. Many have and will use ethnicity, religion and region to divide and conquer in the coming elections. This will distract from the necessary and overdue conversations on economic and foreign policies, on strategies to address rising insecurity and even long-term plans for an impatient and worried young generation. They will weaponise this to market vote-trading practices that help create the illusion of a mandate. Some of these results might even be fraudulently inflated or deflated, depending on the needs of the parties involved. The cycle will continue because it serves those it needs to at any given time.

This is the structural condition the witness writes into. The permanent campaign, transplanted into a context without the accountability infrastructure it requires, produces something specific: an elaborate performance of democratic contest in which the broad outcome is ‘obvious’ to most ‘serious observers’ long before the votes are counted. Some politicians are genuinely trying to offer something different. But the architecture of Nigeria’s politics—the defection patterns, the patronage networks, the party financing, the electoral management—bends reliably toward a small set of possible outcomes. To write analytically about Nigerian politics in 2026 is to document, in careful detail, a system whose direction you can already roughly see. It requires a reckoning with what the writing is actually doing.

The Witness

A Nigerian pastime is whinging about governance and complaining about leaders. The evolved, modern version is ranting and posting online. Many of us are experienced and seasoned; this does not require the expertise or experience that being published in a foreign publication often confers. But it does require introspection about the audience, especially when there is a divide between local and international audiences. For some, there is even a further bifurcation between those informed and those uninformed, often a misnomer for those with easy access to online arguments and those without.

There is a version of Nigerian political engagement that resembles football club loyalty, and it is worth being precise about how. It is not simply partisanship. It is the particular logic of the rival’s failure as its own category of win. When the candidate your group opposes performs poorly, this is registered not as national misfortune but as vindication. This can be seen in how Buharists highlighted Tinubu’s difficulties, Obidients circulated APC failings, and Atiku supporters watched Obi and Labour’s travails and laughed because they felt Obi was a spoiler in their bid for victory in 2023.

This is, to borrow from football, the pleasure of the derby result. It is doing serious damage to the information environment because it means that a significant portion of the audience for political analysis is not actually trying to understand what is happening. They are trying to confirm that the other side is losing.

These forms of loyalty are often unrequited and, in most cases, not even properly acknowledged. These are part of the audiences we write for today, but they are now being trained to filter information through the lens of support and opposition. Sadly, we no longer maintain a balanced media diet but are afflicted by the anaemic tendency to stick to a single source. We are either entirely angry or palatable, defensive or attacking, and worse, invested or switched off. And it is in this context that someone is meant to witness this moment.

This brings the question of how to write in this environment. The practical problem is not access to information; there is more of that than anyone can process, but the collapse of the ‘accepted’ shared ground on which analytical argument depends. A piece that does not confirm an existing view is not wrong, in the partisan reading; it is suspect. It is asking the reader to hold complexity at the exact moment the information environment has organised itself around simplification. Audiences are grouped into camps: those seeking validation, sceptics who have switched off, and an increasingly diaspora audience still unpacking its relationship with Nigeria. Writing across all of these simultaneously is not possible. But writing without acknowledging they all exist is a kind of dishonesty.

Most analysts would have scoffed at the level of support that Obi received in 2023. But most would have also ruled out a Buhari presidency in their lifetime after the 2011 elections. Fewer still would have held out hope for an opposition coalition; even fewer would have bet on a president outside the three main ethnicities; and, 16 years removed from his last elected office, a Tinubu presidency would have been possible only to the most die-hard devotees. Anyone who tells you with certainty that they know who Nigerians will contrive to hand the presidency to in 2031 is either mad or a soothsayer—and the latter group mostly resorts to running their own church.

The temptation, of course, is to stop. To find pockets of joy elsewhere, to japa, to let the situation demand attention from someone less tired of it. The problem is that disengagement is also a choice with consequences—for the writer and for the readers who have not yet checked out but are looking for reasons to do so. Every piece written carefully is, by example, an argument that careful writing is still possible. That is a thin justification. It is also, most days, enough.

The witness’s job, as we understand it, is not to tell people what to think. It is to do the slower work of establishing what actually happened, in enough structural detail that the reader can think more clearly about what is likely to happen next. This sounds modest. In practice, in this environment, it is the most contested act available. To say that the 2027 outcome is largely structurally determined is not defeatism; the strength of the ruling party is obvious from documented patterns of party financing, incumbency advantage, and electoral management. Likewise, to say that the Obidient movement revealed a genuine generational fracture that the established parties have not resolved is not cheerleading but simply a way of highlighting what six million votes told us in 2023. These claims will be received as partisan regardless. The witness writes them anyway, attributes them, shows the work, and accepts that this will not satisfy anyone whose primary need is confirmation. But they also do so because it helps provide greater self-awareness, which is the only way a society can actually self-govern.

Consider what the disinformation environment has already produced. A sitting president accused of being a clone. Another president’s voice was convincingly replicated and circulated as genuine. These are not fringe rumours that the evidence quickly corrected. They persisted, and a significant portion of the population continues to believe them. Every election cycle promises a crossroads; what we have instead is a roundabout, and each lap deposits another layer of sediment over what actually happened. The witness cannot stop the loop. The job is to keep recording what is in the sediment, carefully enough that someone who comes later can work out what was true. That is not a hopeful argument. It is an honest one. And in a country where the capacity to distinguish between the two has become a political act, honesty may be the only form of optimism still available.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

On 21 May 2026, Rivers State Governor Siminalayi Fubara withdrew from the APC governorship primary. For some, this was the final chapter in an ongoing saga that started with his open revolt against Nyesom Wike, his predecessor and the current FCT Minister. This drawn-out battle included impeachment threats, presidential efforts at reconciliation, the declaration of a state of emergency, Fubara’s removal from office and his defection to APC ahead of a failed attempt at re-election. Nigerian politics is notoriously volatile, and Fubara could yet stay on as governor or could return in the future. But at this time, his political ambitions and prospects appear dead.

Fubara’s loyalists were also disqualified at the screening stage, and he is the only serving APC governor denied a second-term ticket. Rivers presents an interesting example of how political party primaries have evolved and changed over the course of this presidential administration.

Ordinarily, they would provide an opportunity for members to replace unpopular leaders and shape how their parties are run. But this has not been the case in the ruling party. It has also not been the case in other opposition parties. This reveals how Nigerian politics collectively distributes power. It also shows who politics currently works for, and how that reflects its priorities.

What Primaries Are Meant To Do

Political scientist Giovanni Sartori defined a political party as “any political group identified by an official label that presents at elections, and is capable of placing, through elections, candidates for public office”. This highlights the importance of candidate selection. Primaries are meant to aggregate competing interests within the party, test candidates against one another and produce a nominee whose selection gets the legitimacy of the party. Scholar Richard Katz and Peter Mair call primaries the “…screening device in the process through which the party in office is reproduced.”

Nigerian political parties have historically struggled to manage this process. Richard Sklar’s Nigerian Political Parties, which looks at the First Republic (1960—66), argues that they were a means of “the crystallisation of emergent class interests.” These parties were elite coalitions first and mass-membership groupings later. Their candidate selection process reflected bargaining among notables and established families, rather than a competitive internal process.

This pattern was also present during the Second Republic (1979—83). In 1979, the NPN’s presidential nomination was effectively decided at a Northern Caucus meeting in Kaduna, where power brokers shortlisted Shehu Shagari, Maitama Sule, and Adamu Ciroma. The formal convention in Lagos ratified what the caucus had already determined: Sule and Ciroma conceded to Shagari before a runoff could take place. In the Third Republic (1992—93), when Babangida launched his transition programme, he created two parties from above —the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC)—with government-provided funding, government-built offices, and government-approved constitutions. The candidate selection process was so tightly controlled that Babangida cancelled the first set of presidential primaries in 1992, banned all 23 candidates, and started again. Even the freest election in Nigerian history, 12 June 1993, emerged from a primary system designed by a military government to produce controllable outcomes.

By the Fourth Republic (1999—date), this was largely maintained through prohibitive candidate form fees, prominent godfathers who handpicked candidates and the rotation of certain positions. Researchers Hamalai, Egwu, and Osori show that the primary process is money-driven and does not reflect internal democracy.

The consensus primary of 2026 is not a Fourth Republic innovation. It is the latest expression of a succession logic that has run through every Nigerian republic: elites managing candidate selection through controlled internal processes, with the democratic form maintained while the democratic function is performative.

Sometimes, this can mean incumbents being tested within their party before a general election. But the growing consensus approach is why Fubara’s primary defeat is highlighted by the fact that others won their primaries. His counterparts in Benue and Kaduna were returned with handy margins. In many more states, notably in the voter-heavy North West, they were returned through consensus and without any primary contest. Even among governors who similarly defected to APC, such as those of Delta, Enugu, Kano, Plateau, Zamfara and Taraba, they largely received automatic tickets. These governors ran against APC candidates in 2023, but they were absorbed and returned.

Fubara could easily, and could very much still, decide to move to another party to contest. Other former PDP governors who ran afoul of Wike’s influence similarly moved to other parties where they could be more assertive. Osun’s Ademola Adeleke moved to Accord, Bauchi’s Bala Mohammed moved to Allied People’s Movement (APM) to seek the Senate, and Oyo’s Seyi Makinde will likely use APM for his presidential bid. These examples also show the limits of some parties: a living party would have been able to see divergent voices persist, pushing back and convincing members of their position in primaries. Instead, they have since left to find vehicles for their ambitions.

The anti-defection provisions of the Electoral Act add a final irony. Serving senators who defected to the APC were denied automatic return tickets, but six governors who made the same journey, from opposition to the APC, were immediately given tickets. The rules apply differently depending on how much power you bring, with the Electoral Act affecting those without the necessary leverage.

The Succession Conveyor Belt

The lifecycle of Nigerian ruling parties has followed a set template: expansion through opposition absorption, consolidation through patronage, and bloating until internal contradictions fracture them. The primaries are where that lifecycle operates in practice. If primaries ratify incumbency and select choices for the governorship, they also manage succession in other positions. Term-limited governors have moved towards Senate seats, following well-established precedent. Governors Fintiri (Adamawa), Yahaya (Gombe), Uzodinma (Imo), Sule (Nasarawa), Abiodun (Ogun), and Buni (Yobe) secured senate nominations. In Ogun and Gombe, this came at the expense of other former governors who have been schemed out. Even other former governors, such as Yahaya Bello (Kogi) and 2023 PDP vice-presidential nominee Ifeanyi Okowa (Delta), were able to parlay their experience into senate bids.

The current 10th Assembly has 15. If the 2026 primary results hold through the general election, the 11th Assembly could include nearly 20 ex-governors, the highest in the Fourth Republic. What began as an occasional career move has become an institutionalised succession route, with the Senate functioning less as an independent legislative body and more as an upper chamber of former state executives.

This move, which might reinforce the preference for executive experience in lawmaking, also represents a reversal of traditional power flows. In theory, because of the independence and absence of term limits, federal lawmakers could build their own power bases. However, the longevity that would have enabled the building of power bases is becoming the exception rather than the rule. One such exception is Ahmed Lawan, who has been in the Senate since 2007. His term will overlap with a fourth state governor when Mai Mala Buni steps down, ahead of his own bid to join him in the Senate next year.

Lawmaker independence has been further negated by the primary process and by the governors’ ability to control it. At least 54 APC members of the National Assembly have lost their bids to return. The implication is a form of federalism in party management. However, this concentrates power at the state executive level rather than distributing it across members. Each governor operates as the effective party leader in their state, controlling nominations, managing succession, and directing legislative representation. The national party handles broader disagreements, but a governor in a ‘drama-free’ state provides the power. This is Sklar’s elite coalition structure updated for the Fourth Republic.

This reversal has been building across election cycles. In 2014, five PDP governors who opposed Goodluck Jonathan’s re-nomination formed a dissident bloc and eventually defected to the APC, taking their state’s party structures with them. In the 2022 APC primaries, governors controlled delegate allocation in their states and delivered them for Tinubu’s emergence. The same machinery is now being used to control gubernatorial and senatorial nominations.

This creates a paradox for national governance. If each state’s nominations are controlled by its governor, then the national party has no independent mechanism for ensuring there is coherence. A national party is limited in its ability to ensure that elected officials pursue a party-wide legislative agenda or even check an errant governor who holds power in the state. A ruling party is not national in any programmatic sense; it is a federation of gubernatorial machines operating under a common label.

Who the System Produces

Primaries can crown potential, but they also end careers. All three of Tinubu’s cabinet members who resigned to run for governor—Yusuf Tuggar (Bauchi), Saidu Alkali (Gombe), and Adebayo Adelabu (Oyo)—lost their primaries. Their successors have already been nominated for their cabinet roles, closing the door they walked through.

The departures that followed tell us more than the defeats. Former Inspector-General of Police Mohammed Adamu resigned from APC and joined the SDP, calling the Nasarawa primary ‘a disgraceful charade that masqueraded as an election.’ Former Chief of Air Staff Sadique Abubakar, who had already moved from APC to ADC, quit politics entirely, bidding ‘goodbye to the murky waters of Nigerian politics.’

These are not marginal figures: Adamu led the entire Nigerian Police Force, Abubakar commanded the Air Force, and Tuggar served as Foreign Minister. While there is no direct correlation between their experience and their political prospect, it is clear that what they lacked was not competence or name recognition, but placement within the gubernatorial machine that controls the primary process.

This raises a question about selection effects. If the primary consistently selects for alignment with gubernatorial machinery rather than for competence, public profile, or policy vision, then it is producing a specific type of political class—one optimised for navigating patronage networks rather than governing effectively. The primary does not channel popular preferences upward, but instead directs elite preferences downward. As a result, the candidates who emerge are not those with the broadest support but those with the right patron. With each successive election, independent-minded candidates are filtered out at the expense of the more compliant. Nigeria might complain about the leadership system, and the main diagnosis is that it is not designed to produce good leaders, but instead rewards loyal ones.

The Opposition Mirror

The assumption might be that the consensus model is an APC phenomenon or a product of ruling-party dominance and the resources that come with it. But opposition primaries have fared no better.

PDP’s governorship primaries, held on 24–25 May, replicated the pattern. The party produced consensus candidates across the board, including third-time nominees in Jigawa (Mustapha Sule Lamido, son of former Governor Lamido) and Katsina (Senator Yakubu Lado), a recycled 2023 candidate in Ogun (Oladipupo Adebutu, sole contestant), and unanimously endorsed candidates in Lagos and Benue. A faction of the party has named Sandy Onor, a one-term senator from Cross River, as its consensus presidential nominee.

The serial candidates are a problem in themselves. The opposition primaries are not refreshing the candidate pool, but are instead recycling it. This challenges the familiar refrain that “all politics is local.” If all politics were genuinely local, and party members in Katsina or Jigawa had meaningful agency in selecting their candidates, then three-time nominees who have lost twice would face serious internal challenges. The absence of challenge suggests that local party structures are not arenas for democratic contests but instruments of control by the same local elites who dominate the broader political landscape.

The consensus model is a feature of how party structures operate at every level. The PDP’s inability to refresh its candidate pool is not separate from the party’s structural death. By recycling losing candidates again, with no clear case for such choices, it is proving its inability to produce an internal politics worth staying for.

The fragmentation compounds the problem. The opposition now fields candidates across three separate platforms—PDP, ADC, and NDC—each attempting the same consensus model and reproducing the same elite selection logic. The Rivers ADC primary descended into a parallel congress dispute, with rival committees declaring different winners. NDC, registered only in February 2026, is still assembling state-level infrastructure. The consistent use of consensus across all parties confirms that this is not a ruling-party problem. It is a structural feature of Nigerian party politics. The spectre of a one-party state is not built only through electoral dominance. It is built by reproducing the same selection logic across all parties. When the opposition uses the same consensus model as the ruling party, the system is not competitive: it is restrictive.

What the Primary Decides

Do primaries in Nigeria galvanise support, test popularity, and select viable candidates? The 2026 evidence suggests they achieve the opposite. They demobilise internal challengers, bypass the question of popularity entirely through consensus, and select candidates whose primary qualification is alignment with the existing power structure.

Katz and Mair’s “cartel party” thesis anticipated this convergence. They argued that modern parties evolve from instruments of the civic public into arms of the state, using state resources and institutional advantages to protect themselves from genuine competition. In a cartel system, parties collude to ensure their collective survival. The primary serves as a mechanism for managing the distribution of power among elites who have already agreed to the terms. The 2026 primaries confirm the thesis not just for the ruling party but across all four major parties: APC, PDP, ADC, and NDC. They all produced predetermined outcomes and reproduced existing power arrangements. The specific mechanics varied: pure consensus in the North West, contested-but-controlled in the North East, absorption in the South South, and succession in the South West. The method might have been different, but the function was identical. The primary formalised what had already been decided in private.

This is not a 2026 anomaly caused by an unusually high number of incumbents seeking re-nomination. The 2022 APC primaries produced the same gubernatorial control of delegate allocation. The 2014 PDP primaries that renominated Jonathan were managed by the same governor-led machinery. Each cycle deepens the pattern. While a consensus model might have been seen as a random and new imposition, it is really more of the status quo.

There is a risk when parties conform to this norm and cater to a certain group. Peter Mair, in Ruling the Void, warned that when parties retreat from civil society into the state, they create “a growing gap between rulers and ruled” that “hollows out democracy from within.” The Nigerian primary system is the institutional expression of that gap. The democratic form, such as primaries, delegates, ballot papers, and vote counts, persists. But the actual democratic function, which includes aggregation of preferences, competitive selection, and accountability to constituents, does not. Citizens actively supported 2023 Labour Party candidates because of a perception that a Peter Obi-led party was a protest vote against the entrenched APC-PDP duopoly. Down-ballot candidates won on that promise. But as elections consolidate, the ideas and fixtures of a political elite continue to grow and appear further removed from society.

In Kwara, the primary season’s sole genuine upset offers a final data point. Governor Abdulrazaq initially endorsed Ambassador Yahaya Seriki as his preferred successor. Factional resistance, rooted in demands for zonal rotation from Kwara North and South, forced the primary’s suspension overnight. When it resumed, Abdulrazaq had switched his endorsement to Speaker Salihu Yakubu Danladi, who won against 15 aspirants. But even here, the governor did not lose control. He repositioned himself on the winning side before the result was declared. The succession machine did not break down. It recalibrated.

The Illusion of Reforms

The legal architecture around primaries does not constrain this system. The Electoral Act 2026, signed into law in February, was designed to address precisely the problems the primary season produced. Section 84(2) abolished indirect (delegate) primaries entirely, restricting nominations to direct primaries or consensus, a reform intended to reduce the influence of money and gubernatorial control over small delegate pools. To improve the process for direct primaries, Section 77 mandated that digital membership registers be submitted to INEC 21 days before primaries to prevent last-minute defections and ensure that only genuine party members could vote. The consensus option was hedged with a requirement that all cleared aspirants provide written consent.

Yet, the primaries revealed the limits of these reforms. Consensus was used in the majority of states, but the written-consent requirement was either met through coerced withdrawal or simply bypassed. The digital registers were reportedly submitted on time, but the registers themselves were compiled by party officials under gubernatorial control, meaning the governor decided who counted as a member. The direct primary option, which was supposed to empower ordinary party members, was used in several states but produced margins (657,917 to 1 in Lagos, 459,393 to 0 in Kaduna) that suggest the electorate was curated rather than consulted.

On 21 May, the same day the APC primaries began, Justice Mohammed Umar of the Federal High Court ruled that INEC lacked the statutory power to prescribe timetables for party primaries or to shorten the deadlines provided under the Electoral Act. The ruling extended the window for membership registers to September 2026, reopening the door for defeated aspirants to defect and contest on other platforms. A second ruling, by Justice Omotosho on 26 May, partially contradicted the first by affirming INEC’s power to set primary timetables while voiding its ability to shorten statutory deadlines for candidate substitution. This inconsistency will surely be litigated. INEC will have to balance these legal issues ahead of key elections. Lastly, a major element of the entire reform, the ability to constrain delegate defection, has currently been weakened.

The consensus republic is not just a political reality. It is a historically produced, legally maintained, and structurally reinforced one. From the NPN’s Kaduna caucus to Babangida’s manufactured parties to the Fourth Republic’s gubernatorial machines, the logic has remained constant: elites select candidates through controlled internal processes. The 2026 primaries simply repeated this logic. The primary is not where Nigerian democracy fails; ironically, it is where it actually works, but for the political class it was built to serve.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Seyi Adedoyin and ChiAmaka Dike

On Tuesday night, Arsenal were confirmed as Premier League champions for the first time in 22 years. Across Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and every Nigerian WhatsApp group with more than three members, fans erupted in jubilation and relief. Rival fans cowered behind outdated facts (who cares who has the most Premier League titles), and neutrals wondered what about this win made so many football fans react so strongly.

Arsenal is well-documented for its multicultural and multiracial history. But three of the names shaping this title victory, at least as a Nigerian, include: Bukayo Saka, Eberechi Eze, and Noni Madueke. Saka is undoubtedly the face of the club. Eze’s transfer last summer was an epochal moment, since he returned to a club that had released him at thirteen. Madueke’s transfer from Chelsea was more contentious, but he has played this season and will be at the parade.

All three have Nigerian names. All three are English. All three play for England. All three are of Nigerian heritage. And all three have been claimed, with varying degrees of accuracy and enthusiasm, as Nigerian victories. Their victory has been cited as evidence that Nigerian talent, even when it grows up in Ealing, Greenwich, or Barnet, finds its way to the top.

It started with Papilo

When Nwankwo Kanu signed for Arsenal from Inter Milan in January 1999, he did not merely join a football club; he recruited a country. Kanu was born in Owerri, raised in the Nigerian football system, and became an Olympic gold medallist with the Super Eagles before he ever wore the cannon on his chest. When he scored that hat-trick against Chelsea, coming off the bench at 2-0 down and winning 3-2, the celebration was as loud in Nigeria as it was in Highbury. Supporting Kanu was supporting Arsenal.

For an entire generation of Nigerians, this was not a choice but a sequence: love the player, love the club. Other Nigerian players have performed this recruiting function elsewhere—Mikel Obi at Chelsea, Ighalo at Manchester United—but none created the bond that Kanu built with Arsenal.

But there is an irony in the fact that the club Kanu made ‘Nigerian’ now fields three players of Nigerian descent who are, by every institutional and biographical measure, English. Saka’s parents are from Kwara and Ogun States. His full name, Bukayo Moses Ayoyinka Temidayo Saka, carries the weight of a Yoruba lineage that predates the English football academy system by centuries. He has acknowledged publicly that choosing Nigeria was a real possibility: “It was the wish of my father,” he said in 2023, “but things happen, and you have to live with your decisions. I feel very much Nigerian, and nothing can change that.” Eze and Madueke are both of Igbo heritage. Both were eligible and, at different points, courted to play for the Super Eagles.

What the claiming reveals

The question this raises is not whether Nigerians are right to claim Saka, Eze, and Madueke. The question is what this pattern of claiming reveals about Nigeria’s relationship with its own diaspora, and about the structural conditions that produce the claiming impulse in the first place.

Start with the mechanism. Kanu went to Arsenal as a Nigerian international. He represented Nigeria at the Olympics, the World Cup, and AFCON. His Arsenal career was an extension of a Nigerian football identity that had already been fully formed. The emotional logic was straightforward: he is ours, therefore they are ours. Ditto Mikel, who also played a key role in Nigeria’s last AFCON win and showed ‘the desire’ required to succeed as a player.

Saka, Eze, and Madueke are a different case entirely. They are products of Hale End, Crystal Palace’s academy, Tottenham’s youth setup, and the broader network of English football development. They were scouted, coached, and developed by English institutions. They chose to represent England at senior level because that is where they grew up, where they were formed as players, and, quite frankly, where the system worked. The Nigerian football federation did not develop them. It did not fund their training. In Saka’s case, it apparently came close to securing his allegiance, but could not close the deal.

What Nigeria contributed was the parents. And the parents contributed everything that precedes football: the names, the food, the language spoken at home, the cultural grammar that shapes how a young man carries himself in the world. These are not trivial contributions. But they are not the same as institutional development, and the distinction matters because it illuminates a pattern that extends well beyond sport.

“Nigerian at Cannes, British at the Oscars”

Consider, in parallel, the case of My Father’s Shadow (d. Akinola Davies Jr., 2025). It is set entirely in 1993 Lagos, told in Yoruba, Pidgin, and English, and stars a predominantly Nigerian cast. Its lead, Sope Dirisu, was born in London to Nigerian parents. The movie premiered at Cannes in May 2025 and won a Special Mention for the Caméra d’Or. It has been ‘owned’ by two cultures: it was the British submission to the Oscars in 2026, which won a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut, while also sweeping the major awards at the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards.

“Nigerian at Cannes. British at the Oscars.” The phrase, coined by Shock, became shorthand for a structural absurdity that the film did not create but could not escape. Davies is British-Nigerian, domiciled in London. The funding came from BBC Film and the BFI’s National Lottery. The post-production was completed in London. Under Academy rules, the film’s eligibility followed the money, not the story.

The AMVCA controversy that followed asked the same question Nigerian football fans implicitly ask every time Saka scores for England: is this ours? The answer, in both cases, is structurally identical. The talent is Nigerian in origin, but the system that developed it is not. The excellence is real, but the ownership is contested. And the reason the ownership is contested is that Nigeria did not, and could not, provide the infrastructure that would have made the question unnecessary.

The Distance Between Feeling and Infrastructure

This is where the comfortable narrative of diaspora pride meets the uncomfortable reality of institutional failure. The reason Saka plays for England is not that he does not feel Nigerian. By his own account, he does. The reason is that England’s football development system identified him at age seven, coached him through an elite academy, and provided him with a professional pathway that the Nigerian football federation—with its factional politics, its chaotic administration, its inability to retain its own athletes—could not.

Similarly, the reason My Father’s Shadow is seen as a British project is not that Akinola Davies does not consider himself Nigerian. After all, its production company, emphatic ground support, and engagement have shown it is mindful of the setting of its story. It is that Nigeria has no public film funding mechanism, no co-production treaty framework, and a distribution system that returned the film a modest ₦16.8 million at the domestic box office despite critical acclaim. The movie will not break into the upper ranks of Nollywood productions that Nigerians have rewarded at the box office.

The pattern is structural rather than incidental: it is difficult for Nigeria to provide finished products. Nigeria produces the raw material: the talent, the stories, the cultural identity, the names that carry generations of meaning. Foreign systems provide the infrastructure that turns raw material into finished products. There is a cognitive dissonance when Nigeria and Nigerians claim the finished product as their own, in a gesture that is simultaneously deeply human and structurally revealing. It is why it can be amusing when Nigerian officials fall over themselves to celebrate other sporting heroes when they succeed abroad—Anthony Joshua, Tobi Amusan, etc.—but fail to build the infrastructure at home that would produce similar stories without the asterisk.

The claiming itself is not cynical. Nigerians are not trying to profit from these stars, but to recognise their potential and take pride in their achievements. This impulse is real, and human, and worth respecting. But it should not obscure the structural deficit that makes the claiming necessary in the first place: the absence of functional domestic institutions that would produce their own Sakas, their own Cannes-premiering films, their own Academy-eligible productions. The pride is genuine, but the gap it papers over is real as well.

The Reversed Relationship

Arsenal, to their credit, understand the commercial and emotional reality of this relationship. Their 2024-25 away kit, designed in collaboration with Labrum London, was an explicit tribute to the club’s African fanbase. It featured pan-African colours, cowrie-shell motifs, a launch video filmed on the streets of Lagos featuring Kanu and Saka side by side, and soundtracked by Ebo Taylor. The club knows that its Nigerian supporters are not casual observers. They are, in terms of volume and intensity, among the most committed fan communities Arsenal has worldwide. The club markets to them accordingly. There is a patch on the stadium’s exterior that celebrates the ‘Nigerian Gunners’. They are featured prominently in adverts.

But there is something worth sitting with in the image of Kanu and Saka in that launch video. Kanu, the Nigerian who went to Arsenal. Saka, the child of Nigerians who grew up at Arsenal. The generational shift is total. In a single generation, the direction of the relationship reversed. Nigeria no longer exports its footballers to Arsenal. Arsenal develops the children of Nigerians who have left.

And on Monday night, when Saka’s grandmother reportedly travelled from Ijomu-Oro in Kwara State to watch him help clinch the title, the image exposed its gap.

What Comes Next

Nigeria’s diaspora identity crisis is not about who feels Nigerian. Saka feels Nigerian. Davies feels Nigerian. There is also the wider question of those who chose to play for the Super Eagles—Aina, Iwobi, Troost-Ekong, Lookman—who acted on that feeling. The crisis is about the distance between feeling and infrastructure, between cultural identity and institutional capacity. It is about a country that produces people the world wants to claim, and that claims them in return, without ever building the systems that would make the claiming unnecessary.

This speaks to a structural issue in how the country builds and forges identity, and to the divides that mean a national identity is still far from certain. The associations with foreign clubs do more to represent ‘cross-cultural’ bonds in a hyper-partisan Nigeria than political parties and labour groups. Supporters of other major clubs, and Manchester United, will no doubt feel the weight of their rivals lifting a major title. And they will see the divide that such euphoria crosses, between political rivals and ethnicities, because of how people associate with these institutions. That a Premier League club can unite Yoruba and Igbo, Muslim and Christian, PDP and APC supporters in a way that no domestic institution currently manages is itself a finding worth sitting with.

The legacy of Nigeria’s ongoing ‘japa’ wave, where tens of thousands of young professionals acquire foreign citizenship each year, will not be felt now, but in decades to come. The pipeline that produced Saka’s parents, Yoruba professionals moving to London in the 1990s seeking opportunity, has not stopped. It has accelerated. And the consequence, a generation from now, might be another wistful celebration of a ‘proudly Nigerian’ talent who was never really Nigeria’s to claim.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

The five tickets told a story of calculated coalition-building. Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba Christian from Ogun, ran with Philip Umeadi, an Igbo Christian from Anambra, for the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) on a ticket that had only Christians and Southerners. Nnamdi Azikiwe of the Nigeria People’s Party (NPP) ran with Ishaya Audu—a Hausa Christian from Kaduna and the Sardauna’s personal physician—a pairing that produced a two-Christian ticket. Waziri Ibrahim, a Kanuri Muslim from Borno, ran with Benjamin Nzeribe, an Igbo Christian from Imo, for the Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP). Aminu Kano, the avowed socialist Hausa Muslim from Kano, ran with the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) with Samuel ‘S.G.’ Ikoku, an Igbo Christian from Imo. The winning ticket was Shehu Shagari, a Fulani Muslim from Sokoto, who ran with Alex Ekwueme, an Igbo Christian from Anambra, for the National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

Two parties featured a same-faith ticket; one went further and fielded a ticket from the same region. The political class accepted that Igbo participation was needed for the country to cross the deepest fault line of the civil war. There was also a political consideration—the 1979 constitution required a candidate to win a quarter of the vote in two-thirds of the then 19 states. But the partnerships that emerged showed a proposed approach to governance that transcended mere power-grabbing. Ibrahim and Nzeribe, GNPP’s ticket, campaigned under the slogan ‘Politics without Bitterness’. Kano chose Ikoku, a fellow socialist with extensive union credentials during the First Republic.

But the elections and their outcomes also laid the seeds for how Nigerian politics would unfold. Shagari and Ekwueme, one of the truly ‘balanced’ tickets, won the elections. Awolowo reportedly could not convince any of his preferred northern running mates to support his ticket. The results were largely decisive in the areas where the parties or their candidates had strongholds—the winning candidates in 13 of the 19 states won with 60% of the votes—showing a strong base despite the approach to balanced tickets. Similar numbers would come about in the 2023 elections. Parties would later avoid such ‘risky business’ in seeking votes and become pragmatic, practical and pitiless in their approach to seeking power.

The 1979 tickets were composed before the rules hardened. They were messier, more improvisational, and more genuinely national for it. What followed was a slow consolidation, in which the pragmatism of 1979 was replaced by the rigid arithmetic that now defines Nigerian elections.

Governing without Origin

Nigerian politics today is dominated by identity. The fixation on identity is driven not merely by a desire for equity, but by a deeper concern: that the Nigerian state, in its current form, is incapable of meeting the needs of all the people it must serve. This is behind the clamour for zoning, representation and accommodation on tickets. It is an acknowledgement that the system has yet to prove itself capable of taking care of the many, rather than a few.

Ethnicity is the most potent political language Nigeria has. Parties, politicians, and platforms lead campaigns that define their candidates’ and opponents’ backgrounds—and why it matters. Notably, in 2023, there was discourse on whether it was fair that Atiku, a Northern Muslim, should succeed Buhari, another Northern Muslim. Or if Bola Tinubu, a Southern Yoruba, should be in power after eight years of a Yoruba vice-president and after the last southern president was another two-term Yoruba. Or if Nigeria had reached a post-civil-war maturity to allow an Igbo man to succeed to the presidency, and if the north would allow him. These questions abound in democratic Nigeria, but there is one area and one time when they did not.

Analysts and historians rightly point to the military era’s institutional damage as the source of Nigeria’s long and difficult path towards democratic consolidation. But the military era also shows that the ethnic question is not so much a question as a fixation. The practice of posting administrators to states different from their home states engaged with this question and forced officers to build infrastructure, manage crises, and earn legitimacy in communities they were not from.

During the 2023 elections, Peter Obi won the presidential vote in Lagos. Tension followed, with blame directed at Igbo traders and residents for supporting Obi over Tinubu, a Yoruba and two-term governor of the state. People cited the claim that Lagos, a former capital, was ‘no man’s land’, and others responded by stating its ancestral Yoruba heritage. This led to concerns around insecurity in Igbo-dominated areas and how Nigeria could be truly national.

Many forget that Lagos has been home to two former Igbo military administrators. Ndubuisi Kanu, born in Abia state, was a naval officer who fought for Biafra during the civil war. Afterwards, he was reabsorbed into the Nigerian Navy and became military governor of Imo at 32. His performance was lauded, and he was redeployed to Lagos. His legacy was such that when he passed in 2021, current Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu hailed him as a ‘detribalised Nigerian’ and named a housing estate in Gbagada after him.

Kanu was succeeded by Ebitu Ukiwe, another Igbo and former Biafran combatant from Abia state. After being reabsorbed following the war, he became the military administrator of Niger in 1977, then of Lagos until the return to democracy in 1979. He would later become de facto vice-president under Babangida.

Cross-posting in the military was systemic and produced administrators whose authority derived from office rather than ancestry. This did not make military rule less authoritarian, but it did create a political culture where Nigerians were expected to govern and be accepted outside their states of origin, in ways that democratic politics now makes difficult. It is ironic that a repressive military era may have done more to create national leaders than democracy has.

How the Rules Locked

There is an argument that the incursion of ethnic and regional zoning in Nigerian politics began with the NPN’s allocation of party and potential government roles ahead of the 1979 elections. The NPN’s success proved that deliberate ethnic allocation was not just equitable but electorally effective. The lesson would be learned too well. But by 12 June 1993, when Nigerians went to the polls during the Third Republic elections, it was clear that a generation of politicians had learned, studied, and now crystallised these norms.

After winning the Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential primaries, M.K.O Abiola, a Yoruba Muslim billionaire from Ogun, needed a northern running mate. Conventional political logic pointed towards a Northern Christian to balance geography and religion. Ibrahim Babangida, then military dictator, reportedly advised Abiola to follow this. The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) reportedly also pushed back against the choice of a Northern Muslim for Abiola and is rumoured to have shared a list of Northern Christians to consider.

Meanwhile, SDP’s Strategies Committee argued for a more pragmatic approach. They argued that the leaders of both chambers of the National Assembly were both Christians and that the National Republican Convention’s (NRC) presidential nominee, Bashir Tofa, a Northern Muslim, was likely to sweep the north if they did not field a northern candidate to appeal to their interests. Their final recommendation was that “MKO Abiola’s running mate should come from the Kanuri ethnic group in the Hausa-Fulani-Kanuri-Nupe grouping and should be a Muslim.” What the NPN had improvised in 1979, the SDP had systematised by 1993. The ethnic arithmetic was no longer a background consideration but the strategy itself. Babagana Kingibe, a Kanuri Muslim, diplomat and party chair, was picked. While the result was never declared, Babangida belatedly acknowledged that their ticket won the election.

The emphatic and national support for a Muslim-Muslim ticket, in a divided country, has often been cited among reasons for 1993 being the ‘freest and fairest election’ in Nigeria’s history. It has been hailed as proof that Nigerians value competence over indigenous interests. Tofa lost his home state, Kano, and neighbouring North West states. But this attempts to underplay the role ethnicity played, even in the way the parties approached selecting their tickets in the first place.

The discussions of SDP’s Strategies Committee easily mirror the NPN’s informal zoning formula and more recent conversations about allocating roles among successive ruling parties in the Fourth Republic. Electoral viability has trumped governance. Parties have struggled to ensure their electoral appeal across as many parts of the country as possible through the composition of their tickets. They have also worked with allocating other senior roles in a prospective government.

But expecting that zoning will cater to certain constituencies has clearly not worked. Under Buhari, the pattern was visible: by 2019, the heads of the army, navy, air force, DSS, and NIA were all northern Muslims. The appointments were technically zoned, but the concentration was stark enough to become a recurring grievance among southern and Middle Belt communities—not because the individuals were unqualified, but because the concentration demonstrated exactly what the zoning convention exists to prevent—power consolidating along ethnic and religious lines rather than being distributed across them. This fixation on representation has reframed the relationship between citizens and leaders into one of ethnic accounting.

The Grand Bargain

The grand bargain of zoning is not a national consensus. It is an elite one. Zoning conventions are not grassroots demands but negotiation mechanisms among a narrow political class. This ‘grand bargain’ of rotation and balancing happens among a narrow political class and is then presented to voters as representation. The zoning is still prohibitive for aspirants who might be within the zoned area but outside the political elite.

The convention also explains nothing about what an elected official does in office. First Republic parties had ethnic bases but also had policies. The Action Group offered free primary education; the Northern People’s Congress championed northern development. Today, party platforms are incidental to the identity settlement. Where parties offer no programmatic reason to support them, many remain vehicles for accessing power rather than institutions for exercising it. Where parties offer no programmatic reason to support them, ethnicity and regional identity become the only campaign points.

Voting patterns reinforce this trap. Parties have long depended on regional, and by extension, ethnic strongholds to remain competitive. The ruling All Progressives’ Congress (APC) has relied on the South West and North West, while the People’s Democratic Party has historically relied on a base in the South South and South East. This creates a feedback loop: parties become responsive to those strongholds’ sectional demands, and this reinforces ethnic mobilisation. This further reinforces the idea that elections must be identity-driven.

As a result, parties that began as genuinely broad coalitions, such as the PDP, narrowed over time into vehicles for rotating sectional access. This means ethnic groups face the choice of adopting their own party, which is often unlikely to gain national control, or joining broad-tent coalitions and seeking favourable zoning at some point. This is the end of the loop: at this stage, when in control, it is best to appropriate and reward kinsfolk, since the next term will see another group or coalition come to power. There is no governance; only rotation.

A Result of Concentrated Power

The identity arithmetic would matter far less if the presidency were not so powerful. Indeed, in the First Republic, while control of the centre was still preferred, many Nigerians were far more affected by their regional governments. But Nigeria’s fiscal and political architecture makes Aso Rock a winner-takes-all prize, and this structural reality is the engine driving the fixation on who controls it.

Key functions, ranging from security control and regulatory authority to key appointments and revenue allocation, flow from the centre. Many states are unable to deliver basic duties without federal support. In 2025, 27 states could not meet salary obligations without their monthly FAAC allocation—their internally generated revenue covered less than 15% of recurrent expenditure. When there is too much control and influence at the centre, communities compete for this existential power. This also compounds ethnic arithmetic because whoever is in control determines where the money goes. It can be the difference between a hospital in your state and one an hour away, good roads in your area and a pothole-ridden main road, and, increasingly, attention to your security issues and the numbers on a fatality sheet. There is a tacit acknowledgement that a president from ‘another part’ cannot realistically be expected to address ‘our’ issues.

The consequence is a telling irony: Ethnic mobilisation dominates both national and sub-national politics— yet even at the state level, where ‘ethnic arithmetic’ should be balanced enough to produce accountability, the scrutiny is yet again absent. Weak institutions, compromised legislatures, patronage systems and limited civic enforcement all deepen this insulation. Barring former military heads of state, all elected presidents in the Fourth Republic have been former governors. The 2023 elections notably featured three frontline candidates who had been former governors, and a fourth who was elected governor but resigned to serve as vice-president. But most governors operate with minimal accountability because the public conversation is fixed upward. Where there is no need for ethnic mobilisation, there is little to no scrutiny.

The Residency Question

The political class has gradually shifted its vocabulary, from targeting specific ethnic groups (as the SDP Strategies Committee did in 1993) to allocating positions by geopolitical zone. The distinction matters more than it might seem. We cannot inherently change our ethnic group, but we can change where we live and invest.

Nigeria’s current system anchors civic identity to the state of origin. This rewards ancestral ties, but not where people live, work, pay taxes, or raise families. A person born and raised in Kano, whose family has been there for generations, is still legally identified under a local government area in Abia State on official forms. An Ijaw woman who has lived in Benue for two decades, married from the area, and raised a family will still face questions if she is appointed to a cabinet or ambassadorial position representing the state. For many Nigerians, intra-state migration remains prohibitive because it is neither rewarding nor affirming.

A solution can look simple: shift the basis of civic identity from the state of origin to the state of residence. The idea is not new. Atedo Peterside argued for it at the 2014 National Conference. In 2025, Deputy Speaker Benjamin Kalu introduced a constitutional amendment that created a pathway to indigene status after 10 years of residency. The Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Council supported it, citing that a Fulani man from Sokoto had become Mayor of Enugu in 1952. But newspapers framed indigeneity as a sacred cultural bond, and the bill was withdrawn. The political class has heard the argument and rejected it.

African cases provide more cautionary but instructive lessons. Côte d’Ivoire, under Félix Houphouët-Boigny, granted ECOWAS nationals living in the country citizens’ rights, such as voting. After his death, his successor, Henri Konan Bédié, weaponised the concept of “Ivoirité”, which aimed to restrict political rights to those with deep ancestral roots in Ivorian territory. This was aimed at disqualifying Alassane Ouattara, a former prime minister who allegedly had Burkinabé roots, from running for the presidency. The result was a civil war. In a country with increased movement and trade, this is a possible outcome if indigene-settler logic is continually prioritised. Tanzania offers a counter-example: in 2014, President Kikwete granted citizenship to 162,000 Burundian refugees who had lived there for forty years, on explicitly residency-based grounds. If Tanzania could extend citizenship to refugees from other countries, Nigeria can ensure the same for its own citizens.

The deeper difficulty is that state residency requires something to attach to. Ethnicities have ancestral ties and cultural norms, but most Nigerian states have existed within older demarcations. Edo, Delta, Adamawa, and Taraba might exist now, but swathes of the population, and literature, are more familiar with Bendel and Gongola states. The absence of actual relationships with the idea of these states is another challenge to this issue.

The obstacles are real. Residency-based rights could accelerate the dominance of already-wealthy states, draining poorer states of population and political influence—solving one problem while deepening another. Any implementation would need to be paired with genuine fiscal decentralisation. But the greater difficulty is that residency requires something to attach to. Most Nigerian states lack the civic identity that would make ‘I am from Plateau’ mean something independent of ethnicity. Until states become places worth belonging to—with cultural institutions, distinct governance traditions, and the fiscal independence to deliver services—residency will remain an abstraction.

In New York, a Ugandan-born Muslim of Indian descent could become Mayor because being a ‘New Yorker’ is broad enough to encompass diverse backgrounds. Few Nigerian states or cities have similar distinct brands or traditions. Ironically, especially in the wake of the 2023 electoral violence, Lagos is one of them. The same city that mourned Ndubuisi Kanu could not extend that grace to Igbo voters who chose the ‘wrong’ candidate. If Lagos, Nigeria’s most cosmopolitan state, cannot yet sustain a civic identity that holds under political stress, the challenge for the rest of the country is stark.

But a system that anchors rights to ancestry gives that tension nowhere to go except deeper entrenchment. A system that begins to prioritise residency does not eliminate it, but it changes the incentive structure, rewarding investment in where people live rather than loyalty to where they came from. Over time, it leads to the gradual dissolution of stranger-settler distinctions that poison federal-state politics and the broader debate over identity and marginalisation. It sees the weakening of federal character provisions and truly promotes meritocracy over representation.

The Unwanted Answer

A country where the most important question in an election is not what the candidate will do, but where they are from and what they worship, is a country that has settled for politics as a rotation of entitlements. The conventions built to manage diversity have now entrenched it. With each passing generation, there is a window to take advantage of millions who were born as Nigerians—and not British subjects or tied to strong ethnic ties—and truly forge a nation. But with each passing contest, an ambitious and ruthless elite narrows the opportunity.

But there is a harder question: where does this road end? When politics becomes rotation rather than governance, and when a ruling party breaks the rotation by consolidating beyond challenge, the system exhausts its own corrective mechanisms. There are instructive parallels between 1979 and 2023: a contentious result, a Supreme Court judgment on its validity, and a new president seen as starting from a fragile position.

If 1979 mirrors 2023, then perhaps we can learn about 2027 by studying 1983. Ahead of the 1983 elections, NPN aggressively secured defections and expanded its base. It moved from seven governorships to 12 and gained some high-profile opposition members. APC has done that and more, achieving a supermajority among state governorships and virtual universal control of the legislature. The 1983 elections were marred by fraud, allegations of rigging and, in some cases, violence. The worrying thing for Nigeria is a recent reminder of what came next. In 1979, five parties looked at the deepest wound in Nigerian politics and chose to cross it. The question is whether 2027 will produce leaders capable of the same, or whether the machinery will keep turning.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Seyi Adedoyin, Temitayo Akinyemi, ChiAmaka Dike and Hillary Essien

The National Council of State, responsible for ratifying the nomination, offered no objection. The Senate, whose majority belongs to the president’s party, offered none. There was no acknowledgement of the irony that Amupitan would oversee an election where Tinubu would be a candidate.

Within six months, Amupitan would run afoul of religious, opposition and activist groups in an assembly of critics that his immediate predecessors had not faced. These controversies bring up the same question: is INEC accountable to the Nigerian people or to the person who appoints its chair?

However, Amupitan should not be considered as the problem, but rather, the problem’s latest expression. The structure that produced him has survived five presidents and three constitutional amendments. This essay is about why this flawed system thrives, and what it would take to change it.

Seventeen Years on a Shelf

Section 154 of the 1999 Constitution gives the president the power to nominate the INEC chairman, subject to Senate confirmation and ratification by the National Council of State, made up of present and former national leaders. A commission that is meant to be independent of the executive is, at its most fundamental level, created by the executive. No administration since 1999 has moved to change this.

In 2007, in response to the aforementioned flawed elections, then-President Umaru Yar’Adua established an Electoral Reform Committee to review Nigeria’s election administration. It was led by former Chief Justice of Nigeria Mohammed Uwais, who had served on the Supreme Court bench for over a decade and commanded wide institutional respect across party lines. His 22-member committee drew from the judiciary, civil society, retired police officers, and academia. Among its members was a political scientist named Attahiru Jega. The committee received 1,466 memoranda, held public hearings across the country, and submitted a 254-page report on 11 December 2008. Nigeria had just endured its worst election since 1999. Yar’Adua had given the committee a full year and a substantial budget, and for once, civil society had reason to believe the recommendations might actually be implemented.

What the committee put on the table was substantial. The power to appoint the INEC chair and commissioners should move from the president to the National Judicial Council. The commission’s budget should be a first-line charge on the Consolidated Revenue Fund. A separate Electoral Offences Commission should be established to prosecute electoral crimes. No elected official should be sworn in until all legal disputes about their election have been resolved. The committee not only listed its proposals but also prepared draft bills covering each recommendation, ready for the National Assembly to act on.

Yar’Adua’s government, to its credit, accepted most of them. The financial autonomy recommendation was incorporated into the 2010 constitutional amendment. The party’s primary requirements, continuous voter registration, and the 180-day tribunal deadline were incorporated into the Electoral Act 2010. But Yar’Adua’s government, through a White Paper, rejected the bid to move the appointment of the chair from the president. In 2012, Uwais himself broke his silence, telling a dialogue on electoral law reform that ‘instead of implementing the recommendations holistically, the Federal Government decided to pick and choose.’

Jonathan did not revive the appointment recommendation either. When he resubmitted the full, unedited report to the National Assembly in March 2010, a gesture that civil society praised, INEC gained financial autonomy under Section 81 and administrative independence under Section 160. The appointment power stayed with the president. The proposed Electoral Offences Commission was never established. The recommendation that no elected official be sworn in until election petitions were resolved was never implemented. The Resident Electoral Commissioner appointments remained the president’s. The legislature took the reforms that cost the executive nothing and set aside the ones that would have cost it something.

Then Buhari won in 2015.

No president had a better reason to know what a captured commission could do. He had lost three elections and wept openly at a press conference after promising he had run his last race. In October 2016, after over a year in office, rather than implement Uwais, he set up an entirely new committee, chaired by former Senate President Ken Nnamani, to review the same ground.

The Nnamani committee submitted its report in May 2017, making similar recommendations to insulate INEC from executive control. Some of its recommendations on electoral technology made it into the Electoral Act 2022: the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the legal backing for electronic transmission of results both drew on that reform momentum.

But these changes did not come with the necessary policy to ensure their effectiveness. The 2023 election showed how those provisions could be undermined in practice without the structural changes the report had also called for. The appointment power was never touched. Between 2016 and 2019, Buhari rejected attempts to amend the Electoral Act on three separate occasions. In 2019, Nnamani himself publicly condemned the INEC appointment process as “faulty” and called for implementing the Uwais recommendations. The president who commissioned that review did not act on it.

Tinubu, who came to power in the most disputed election of the Fourth Republic, oversaw his own amendment to the Electoral Act in February 2026, which included a mandatory transmission via the INEC Results Viewer (IReV) portal and codified BVAS, but left Section 154 untouched. These are not failures of political will. They are choices, made by specific men, about a specific power they wanted to keep.

The Deal

Nigeria is a federation whose political architecture runs on a managed distribution of offices, contracts, zoning arrangements and electoral outcomes across regional, ethnic and religious blocs that have never produced a stable settlement. The president’s control over INEC is not an anomaly within that architecture. It is load-bearing. His ability to hold a coalition together across Northern governors, Southern oil interests, Lagos, the commercial capital, and Middle Belt constituencies depends, in part, on his ability to credibly promise that the next election will not undo the arrangement. A genuinely independent INEC does not just threaten individual politicians. It threatens the deal.

The PDP and APC have held the presidency since the return to democracy, including with National Assembly supermajorities at different points. Both parties, in opposition, argued for reform. Both, in power, ignored it. A 2025 study in World Affairs found that despite the Electoral Act of 2022, INEC’s activities remain “massively influenced by political interferences.” An unnamed APC source told The Whistler in early 2026, without embarrassment:

“The demand for INEC neutrality often depends on political convenience. Political actors push for reforms when they are in opposition, but once in power, they resist the same changes.”

The word “independent” survives all of this because no one is well served by resolving what it means. The “I” in INEC makes gestures legible to the international community that funds them — the AU, the UN, the EU, the State Department — while Section 154 sits untouched. It keeps Nigeria on the invitation list for the Summit for Democracy. The word costs the presidency nothing and buys it the appearance of a democratic state. Everyone with the power to resolve the ambiguity has a valid reason, albeit a selfish one, not to.

But the problem runs deeper than the chair. The same hand that appoints the chairman also appoints the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs), the 37 officers who oversee elections at state level, manage collation centres, and are present when results are announced or disputed. The chair cannot discipline a REC without referring the matter back to the president who appointed them both.

The 2023 Adamawa governorship election showed the limits of a chair’s powers. REC Hudu Yunusa Ari unilaterally declared Aisha Binani, the APC candidate, winner before collation was complete, a declaration INEC’s national headquarters called “null, void and of no effect.” Ari was suspended, and the proper result, a PDP victory, was announced the following day.

In August 2022, a coalition of eight civil society organisations had warned Buhari that his REC nominations included APC members and asked the Senate to reject them. The Senate confirmed them anyway. In April 2025, as Yakubu’s tenure closed, INEC quietly proposed to the joint National Assembly committee on Electoral Matters that this chain of control be broken at least for the RECs, renamed as State Directors of Elections and appointed by INEC itself. The National Assembly did not act on it. The Electoral Act 2026 does not contain it.

What this mirrors is not incidental. Nigeria’s State Independent Electoral Commissions, which conduct local government elections, are even more deeply captured than INEC. Governors appoint their members. In most states, the ruling party has not lost a local government election in the living memory of its constituents. INEC sits at the top of an electoral architecture in which every tier of appointment runs through the executive that the elections are meant to hold accountable. The word “independent” does not change that architecture; rather, it describes a function that does not exist.

The Jega Myth

Besides being a professor of political science, Attahiru Jega was a former ASUU president who earned his activist bona fides by organising against the Babangida government in the early nineties. When Goodluck Jonathan nominated him as INEC Chair on 8 June 2010, the National Council of State, including Buhari, Obasanjo, Babangida, Abdulsalami, Gowon and Shagari, approved unanimously. Previous nominations had not always passed without complaint. Civil society had criticised Maurice Iwu’s 2005 appointment over his perceived closeness to the Obasanjo administration. Jega’s was different. For once, nobody objected.

Jega’s mythos was secured when he became the first INEC chairman to preside over an election in which an incumbent president, who had nominated him to the post no less, lost re-election. On 28 March 2015, Muhammadu Buhari defeated Goodluck Jonathan, who then conceded in a famous phone call; something no incumbent president had ever done before. The electoral observers were satisfied. Buhari, years later, at a leadership award ceremony, would credit the outcome to “the patriotic zeal of President Jonathan, the impartiality of the electoral umpire, INEC, and exemplary conduct of the political parties, foreign pressure and other actors.”

While Jega displayed personal integrity, what Buhari described was not a functional institution. Jega himself understood this. In a 2017 interview with the Africa Research Institute, he praised the Jonathan administration for never deliberately starving INEC of funds. That praise, genuine as it is, tells you more about how fragile the arrangement was than about how well it was designed.

Having acknowledged that the Uwais reforms were important, Jonathan chose to demonstrate his commitment to them by appointing a member of the very committee. We do not know whether Jonathan did this in genuine good faith, or whether giving the reformer the job was a way to contain the reform. What we do know is that his acceptance carried an implicit argument: that character could substitute for architecture. It was also an argument that the Uwais Committee had specifically made against. Jega’s appointment was Jonathan performing the spirit of the report while leaving the crux of it alone. The question Nigeria never asked in the aftermath was, what happens when those conditions do not align again?

After leaving INEC in June 2015, Jega spent years publicly advocating for precisely the reforms that would have changed how the office he just vacated was filled. The man who embodied the system’s capacity for self-correction has spent the decade since his tenure arguing that the system still needs fixing. He is now Special Adviser to President Tinubu on Livestock Reforms.

Buhari, who had just won an election on the back of INEC’s credibility, appointed Mahmood Yakubu, a Bauchi-born professor of political history and former TETFund executive secretary, to succeed Jega. In 2023, Yakubu’s commission deployed the BVAS and the INEC Result Viewing Portal after years of public promises that results would be transmitted electronically in real time. Those of us journalists who sat refreshing the portal through the night of 25 February remember when the updates stopped. INEC announced a technical glitch. Results were collated manually. Tinubu’s legal team argued that the IReV was a viewing portal rather than a collation system, and that INEC’s failure to use it as it had publicly committed to do was not grounds for nullification. Research has since documented glaring discrepancies between the IReV results and the announced results.

Joash’s Inheritance

In 2020, half a decade before Joash Amupitan became INEC chair, he contributed an eighty-page legal brief to a publication arguing that attacks by Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen against Christians in northern and central Nigeria met the legal definition of genocide. He stated that “Fulani ethnic militants and state institutions” were working toward “Islamising Nigeria,” and that the international community should consider referring Nigeria to the International Court of Justice. The Supreme Council for Shari’ah described it on 7 November 2025 as “toxic, provocative and bigoted.” On 28 January 2026, at the Council’s Pre-Ramadan Lecture in Abuja, its president, Sheikh Bashir Umar, declared that Nigerian Muslims would not recognise or legitimise any election Amupitan conducted.

Then, in April 2026, Farooq Kperogi documented in a column that an account bearing the handle @joashamupitan had made several posts supporting APC and Tinubu in the aftermath of the 2023 elections. After his nomination, the handle was changed, relabelled as a parody account, and locked. Kperogi confirmed the original ownership through Grok, X’s AI bot. And while there are concerns around Grok’s accuracy, it demanded a response. INEC’s spokesman, Adedayo Oketola, denied that the account belongs to Amupitan and claimed that a forensic investigation had cleared the chair. Amupitan has not personally addressed it.

The ADC crisis arrived weeks later. When Kwankwaso formally defected from the NNPP to the African Democratic Congress on 30 March 2026, with Peter Obi, David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola in Kano to mark the occasion, the party briefly looked like the vessel the fractured opposition had been searching for. Within days, a leadership dispute erupted. The Court of Appeal ordered all parties to maintain the status quo. On 1 April, INEC announced it was withdrawing recognition from both factions and removing Mark and Aregbesola from its portal. Obi, Kwankwaso, Mark and Aregbesola marched to INEC headquarters. It took a Supreme Court ruling to temporarily resolve this.

On 3 May, Obi and Kwankwaso formally left the ADC for the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC), citing what Obi described as a “toxic environment” shaped by relentless litigation. However, the party they moved to also carries its own implications for INEC. Obi left the ADC, citing INEC interference, and arrived at a party the commission had registered only three months earlier, in violation of its official screening process. Its registration has been challenged in court, alleging the NDC obtained registration without properly applying and without meeting INEC’s own guidelines.

To be fair, none of this makes Amupitan uniquely bad at the job. But the issue remains that his controversial appointment makes a bad situation worse. Academic analysis of INEC’s structure has consistently found the commission’s independence “systemically constricted” across three fronts: the appointment system, the funding pathway, and its reliance on other state institutions. The chair is not necessarily the issue. What has accumulated around this one is.

What Should ‘Independence’ Look Like?

Ghana’s Electoral Commission is worth naming here, not as a model Nigeria should unilaterally copy, but as a demonstration that the problem Nigeria has is not inevitable. Its commissioners are appointed by the president on the advice of the Council of State, a body whose composition includes regionally selected representatives and non-partisan judicial and defence positions. This representation means it properly covers a range of interests, not just serving and former political elites.

Its electoral commission has administered seven competitive elections since 1992; three of them saw incumbents lose. The 2008 election was decided by less than half a percentage point, went to a runoff, and the result held. Ghana’s electoral system has also had its fair share of trials, with electoral disputes and the commission attracting controversy. But bounded executive discretion produces a different starting point than unbounded executive discretion.

Section 154 has survived five presidents, three constitutional amendments, two major reform committees, and the most disputed election in the Fourth Republic. So, we can agree that it is a tough beast to kill. The question is not whether it will change, but what would have to be true for it to change. Which president can willfully decide that the power to pick the umpire is one that they can afford to give up? Which National Assembly majority would have to agree? Neither condition has existed in INEC’s twenty-seven years.

What will forever exist is the meaning of the ‘I’ in INEC. The word has survived everything this country has thrown at it. It is, in that sense, the most independent thing about the commission.

Amupitan will conduct the 2027 election under a legitimacy deficit that no forensic audit has closed. He will do so as the nominee of a president whose political future as a second-term candidate or kingmaker depends on the election’s outcome. Nigeria has had captured commissions before, but it has not always had one whose chairman enters an election year with a major religious body declaring his results illegitimate before a ballot has been cast. What that looks like in practice, the country will find out in January.

The commission will still be called independent. The next chairman will still be a presidential nominee. Mahmood Yakubu managed that arrangement for ten years. He is in Doha.

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Written by: ChiAmaka Dike

Edited by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Corrections (8 May): A sentence concerning Tinubu’s lawyers arguing about IReV was added. Another, citing the possible inaccuracy of Grok, X’s AI, was included. Lastly, the inferred reason for Obi and Kwankwaso leaving ADC was changed from ‘relentless mitigation’ to ‘relentless litigation’.

It has never happened in Ghana. In the few African instances where it has occurred, it has been driven by dominant parties: South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi, and Botswana’s Botswana Democratic Party. It is even rarer in the U.S; Republicans last achieved this in 1988, when Bush Snr. succeeded Reagan. For Democrats, the last instance dates back to 1856.

When voters return candidates from the same party, the assumption is that they prefer continuity. It affords parties to entrench their policies, build institutional knowledge across administrations, and ensure that later governments inherit rather than restart what came before.

Nigeria is the only African country where this has happened twice with different parties. PDP elected Yar’Adua to succeed Obasanjo in the controversial 2007 elections. But APC elected Tinubu to succeed Buhari in the highly contested 2023 polls. In theory, this should have given both parties a rare opportunity to consolidate their governing projects.

But these intra-party transitions have only been surface-level. The radical personnel and policy overhauls that followed each handover reveal that what Nigeria calls a ‘ruling party’ is, in practice, a revolving presidential coalition. When a presidency changes, the coalition is dismantled and rebuilt, regardless of the party label. The consequence is a country that restarts its governing project every four to eight years.

Ready on Day One

If intra-party transitions are supposed to produce continuity, the first place to look is the handover itself. Presidential transitions are among the most consequential moments in governance—when expectations are highest, public goodwill is at its peak, and the incoming team should be building on what came before. In functioning party systems, this is when institutional knowledge transfers. In Nigeria, it is when the demolition begins.

Other systems have built infrastructure for this. The U.S. has the Presidential Transition Act, first enacted in 1963, which mandates cooperation between outgoing and incoming administrations. South Africa’s ANC created a deployment committee to manage governance during leadership changes. These structures exist because parties that intend to govern continuously need mechanisms to transfer knowledge, not just power.

Nigeria has never managed a structured handover. While U.S. presidential campaigns have transition teams ready to run the moment they are projected to win, Nigerian presidents-elect have never effectively prepared for governance. Yar’Adua only named a transition committee in May 2007, barely a month before his inauguration. The next transition, when Buhari succeeded Jonathan, whose succession was dramatic for its unique nature, followed a similar pattern. Buhari did not inaugurate a 19-person transition committee until 29 April 2015—a month after his election and a month before his inauguration. Tinubu would only receive two nomination spots on a presidential transition council, which he filled nearly a month after his declaration as president-elect.

This lack of preparation shows in the lack of structured coordination across key government departments. Nowhere is this clearer than in cabinet formation, the first concrete test of actual governance, which most Nigerian presidents have conspicuously failed. Obasanjo took months to name a cabinet in 1999. Yar’Adua took two months before naming a new team in 2007. Buhari infamously ran his administration without a cabinet for six months. Tinubu took three months. Each was presented as a president being deliberate, but each had months after being named their party’s nominee to prepare. Each was a seasoned politician running multiple election bids. And each had months between being elected and taking office.

If parties were serious governing institutions, there would be structures to prepare and support a nominee to ease into governance. There would be vetting of potential appointees, briefings on ongoing programmes, and continuity plans for key departments. Instead, government appointments become coalition payments, tools for managing patronage, and in some cases, instruments for dismantling whatever the predecessor built. The delay is not deliberation. It is the time required to construct an entirely new governing coalition from scratch.

The Heir He Could Control

PDP was at its height in 2007. Key officials had beaten back Obasanjo’s purported third-term bid. But true to form, despite losing, Obasanjo obtained enough grip to control the selection for his successor, and the party was helpless to stop him. Few people were more aware of how powerful the presidency was and how much a combative successor could dislodge him. He sidestepped more ambitious southern governors such as Peter Odili. He ignored consensus picks such as then-Kaduna Governor, Ahmed Makarfi, because the party was drifting away from his grasp. Yar’Adua was from a well-known family, a moderately popular two-term governor in the north, and was not seeking the presidency.

Obasanjo picking Yar’Adua spoke to the challenge of a big-tent PDP. Neither man had much in common politically. Yar’Adua had not been an active supporter or endorser of Obasanjo’s reforms and had played no role in shaping them. As Governor of Katsina, Yar’Adua was cited as a financially prudent administrator who devoted extensive resources to healthcare, education, and infrastructure. He was widely regarded as an avowed socialist, and one who was less likely to actively curry favour with the business elite that Obasanjo had cultivated. Finally, Yar’Adua’s disposition to governance was collegial, whereas Obasanjo’s was dictatorial. He reportedly refused to name either Bauchi Governor Adamu Muazu or Kaduna Governor Ahmed Makarfi as his chief of staff, so as not to be in a position to dictate orders.

This meant that Yar’Adua’s coalition was not as immediately straightforward. But his key appointments were a mixture of patrician Northern elite and leveraging connections with his fellow governors. Babagana Kingibe, a former ambassador and running mate to Abiola and Yayale Ahmed, former head of civil service, served as his government secretaries. Cabinet members were often nominated by governors, whose opinions he placed a premium on as he developed his team. It meant that, while there was no distinct Yar’Adua group, one quickly emerged to empower those seeking to control the party and the government in the post-Obasanjo void.

Yar’Adua might have given the impression of being weak and quiet, but his term was forged with a steely determination to distance himself from Obasanjo. He retained only three ministers from Obasanjo’s term—Ojo Madueke, Aliyu Modibbo and Abba Sayyadi Ruma—while he moved the long-serving Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Ufot Ekaette, to head the newly formed Niger Delta Ministry. He retained Abdullahi Mohammed, the chief of staff, but dispensed with him after a year and abolished the role altogether.

During his term, prominent figures in the Obasanjo administration, such as El-Rufai, fled into exile. Nuhu Ribadu was unceremoniously removed as head of the anti-corruption agency. Key financial stalwarts were not retained. Finance Ministers Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Nenadi Usman were not named to cabinet, and Central Bank Governor Charles Soludo was not given a second term. Obasanjo’s government had largely been replaced by a new governing coalition that wrestled for power and soon became a distraction from governance.

But beyond the personnel overhaul, it was the change in reforms that showed the divergence between the two men. Yar’Adua cancelled sales that would have privatised refineries and sold shares in oil companies to private owners. He revoked the partial sale of the national telecoms carrier to private hands and reversed privatisation efforts in the power sector. He reintroduced fuel subsidies and was a much more demure personality on the global stage. A different governing coalition was running the country; one that clearly did not share its predecessor’s priorities, regardless of the party label above the door.

The cost of this rupture was tangible. Strong, experienced hands from the Obasanjo era were unavailable to help Yar’Adua hit the ground running—a loss magnified by his extensive health challenges. Some of Obasanjo’s picks, notably Okonjo-Iweala, would return when Jonathan assumed office, but the intervening three years stalled processes Obasanjo had put in place. The party label had not preserved a single governing relationship. What PDP had built under one president, it dismantled under the next.

The Heir Who Didn’t Need Permission

The major difference between 2007 and 2023 was that Tinubu was not Buhari’s choice. There is extensive literature supporting the assertion that Buhari appreciated the role Tinubu played in his eventual electoral victory, but did not want to hand over to a career politician. The irony was that the very thing Buhari never wanted—Tinubu’s extensive political network— was what enabled him to navigate a crowded primary and win.

Unlike Yar’Adua, who owed his candidacy entirely to the outgoing president, Tinubu had his own power base, financial network, and political machinery built over two decades in Lagos. His claim to the presidency predated and arguably exceeded Buhari’s ability to grant or withhold it. APC governors, especially those in the north, were instrumental in his primary victory. They consolidated behind Tinubu at the June 2022 primary, defeating Osinbajo, Amaechi, and several other candidates. Buhari was unable and perhaps unwilling to impose his choice.

Once elected, Tinubu cleared house. Within four days of inauguration, he named Femi Gbajabiamila as Chief of Staff and George Akume as SGF. Both had served as House Speaker and cabinet minister, respectively, during the Buhari presidency. But both are also long-standing personal allies, and neither was considered a strong continuity appointment from the Buhari era. The cabinet followed in August, three months after the inauguration, and it was assembled almost entirely from Tinubu’s own networks. Of Buhari’s approximately 43 second-term ministers, only Festus Keyamo and Heineken Lokpobiri received ministerial appointments. Like all new appointees, they were deployed to ministries entirely different from the ones they had held under Buhari. Muhammadu Dingyadi, Buhari’s Police Affairs Minister, was not added until the October 2024 cabinet reshuffle, over a year into the administration, and he, too, was moved to an entirely different portfolio. Not a single Buhari-era minister was retained in the same role.

The most prominent Buhari-era figures were not merely unrewarded; they were displaced. Rotimi Amaechi, who served as Transportation Minister and director-general of Buhari’s two presidential campaigns, received no appointment. Nasir El-Rufai, the powerful Kaduna governor and key Buhari ally, was initially nominated to cabinet, then rejected, and later became a public critic. Rauf Aregbesola, Buhari’s Interior Minister and a former Tinubu protégé, was not retained. Babatunde Fashola, who had served as Works Minister for eight years and was Tinubu’s own successor as Lagos governor, was not appointed. Several of these figures—Amaechi, El-Rufai, Aregbesola—are now in the opposition ADC. The governing class of one APC administration has reconstituted itself as the opposition to the next.

Policy reversals confirmed what the personnel overhaul suggested. Within weeks, Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy, unified the exchange rate, and reoriented economic strategy away from what Buhari’s team had built. Notably, Tinubu’s fiscal policy has been less strictly artificially propped up and more market-driven. This has meant changing from Buhari’s interventionist and protectionist strategies. These included his border closure, import restrictions and subsidised credit schemes. Tinubu has instead followed a market-oriented strategy, with deregulation, free-floating exchange rates and liberalised trade. These are remarkably different economic policies pursued by consecutive administrations from the same party.

The APC manifesto offered no constraint because it bore little relation to either president’s actual governing priorities, and the two sets of priorities contradicted each other on fundamental questions. The party could not ensure continuity because it had no independent policy position apart from its current president. Tinubu appointees have been at pains to cast blame on their predecessor without alienating his supporters.

Different Parties or Different Coalitions

In both intra-party presidential transitions, there have been no substantial transfers. No personnel were retained. No policy was expanded upon. No institutional knowledge was leveraged. But the second conclusion is more subtle and more damaging to the idea of parties. The greatest policy continuity in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic has not been within parties, but across them.

We are presented with two ideal pairings for continuity. Obasanjo and Tinubu are Yoruba leaders from the South West. Both are market liberalisers who believe in an assertive, Nigeria-first foreign policy. Obasanjo pursued privatisation, attempted downstream deregulation, pursued an active foreign policy, and also attempted to remove subsidies. He was key to the transition to the African Union and helped stop the coup in São Tomé and Príncipe. Similarly, when faced with issues in a state, he declared a state of emergency and removed the governors in Ekiti and Osun.

Tinubu, assuming office 16 years later, has revived and extended reforms that were attempted, but not fully realised under Obasanjo. He also followed through with the subsidy removal. He has engaged foreign policy challenges with similar assertiveness, including the coup in Niger and efforts to counter one in Benin. Like Obasanjo, he has also embarked on extensive state visits and trips in his first term. He also declared a state of emergency and appointed an administrator to replace the governor in Rivers. There is an irony: these two presidents displayed notable mistrust and enmity when Obasanjo was president, and Tinubu was governor.

A major counterfactual is how different the electricity sector would look. Tinubu restarted and extended many Obasanjo-era reform initiatives, such as using the 2023 Electricity Act to decentralise power generation and unbundle state authority. Other attempts, not yet complete, include the attempt to rehabilitate Ajaokuta Steel Mill—a white elephant that has stymied successive governments. An Obasanjo-Tinubu transition would deliver a radically different power dynamic in the country.

The second pairing is Yar’Adua and Buhari. Both were from Katsina and instinctive statists suspicious of market orthodoxy. Both domestically focused and inclined towards state intervention and subsidy as instruments of governance. Yar’Adua reversed Obasanjo’s privatisations, reintroduced fuel subsidies, defanged EFCC and turned inwards. Buhari, five years later, governed similarly: maintained fuel subsidies he once decried, defended multiple exchange rates and closed borders to protect domestic producers.

Where Yar’Adua had ‘rule of law,’ Buhari had ‘anti-corruption’—both were brand identities more than governing programmes. Both were products of and influenced by the famed Kaduna mafia—Yar’Adua through his family connections, and Buhari through his key appointments. Shehu Yar’Adua, the elder, was a major part of the Kaduna mafia and established the family as a major recipient of their support. Similarly, Mamman Daura, a key adviser to Buhari, was also a major part of this group. Both were also sceptical of Lagos-led market liberalism. The irony here is that both men contested the 2007 elections, which Yar’Adua won, and also experienced health challenges in office.

A counterfactual involves the preference both had for state control of strategic assets. Yar’Adua reversed several government asset sales and concessions that Obasanjo had approved towards the end of his term. Similarly, Buhari was resistant to privatisation efforts, which notably contributed to his government’s failure to do so in the power sector. Another shared trait was their comparatively milder approach to diplomacy, especially compared with their southern counterparts.

The pattern is an indictment: parties have not developed genuine policy structures. Obasanjo and Tinubu should not be as ideologically aligned as Yar’Adua and Buhari—they belong to different parties, different generations, different political traditions. Yet, we face the grounded speculation that if Tinubu had succeeded Obasanjo, and if Buhari had succeeded a two-term Yar’Adua, Nigeria would be approaching 32 years of policy cohesiveness and coordination. The party system, as currently constituted, has prevented this.

This leads to another dividing line in Nigerian politics: not by political party, but coalition type. A presidency is determined by the coalition they assemble, the regional base they draw on, the technocratic network they trust, and the ideological background they bring. These are not based on party membership; these are personal traits.

The absence that makes all of this possible is the absence of policy infrastructure—within the party, and increasingly within the civil service that should provide continuity regardless of who holds the presidency.

PDP lacked a policy shop, and APC has yet to articulate what the governors in Sokoto and Ogun have in common beyond wearing the same broom insignia. This lack of planning makes it similarly susceptible to volatile shifts in governance. This lack of continuity also raises the question: What is the point of a party if the people do not share values? If parties are merely ballot vehicles, the case for independent candidacies becomes harder to dismiss — but that is a question for another piece.

The Next Governing Coalition

If the pattern holds, we already know what the next transition will look like. Barring death or incapacitation, Tinubu will be the APC’s presidential nominee in 2027, and the fractured opposition makes re-election likely. Northern politicians will be content to see off a president and prepare for the next poll.

The question is not whether the next president will be a liberaliser or a statist—though that will matter for policy. The question is whether the party label will tell us anything about the answer. So far, it has told us nothing. What will matter, as it has in every transition since 2007, is the governing coalition they assemble, the networks they draw from, and the instinct they bring to office. The party will provide the vehicle. It will not provide the destination.

Could this change? In theory, a party that has held the presidency for three consecutive terms should have had time to develop genuine policy infrastructure. But the APC remains beholden to the constituent wings of the merger that created it. Perhaps that is all it was ever meant to do: serve as a vehicle for revolving coalitions. Buhari and Tinubu have both governed through it, and neither has been constrained by it.

The lifecycle of a Nigerian ruling party, it turns out, is really the lifecycle of a presidential coalition wearing party clothes. The party provides the legal vehicle, but not the governing infrastructure. And the cost of this arrangement is not merely political instability. It is that Nigeria restarts its governing project every four to eight years. No administration inherits institutional knowledge from the last. No policy survives its architect. A country of over 200 million people is perpetually stuck at Year One.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: ChiAmaka Dike and Hillary Essien

Being part of a population of over 200 million should carry some weight. It should have some assurance that the sheer scale of its population translates into the capacity to serve them. Nigeria’s relationship with its own numbers runs counter to this promise. The country does not know, with any reliable precision, how many people it contains. And it has learned to govern as if this does not matter.

Worldometer estimated Nigeria’s population, as of Sunday, 19 April 2026, was 241,478,864. But this figure is not a direct count of people living within Nigeria’s borders. It is a modelled estimate drawn from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division’s World Population Prospects (2024 Revision), a dataset that builds its projections from layered demographic evidence. For Nigeria, those gaps are particularly wide.

Nigeria’s last population census was conducted in 2006. I remember people decked in green vests coming into my home, asking my father how many children he had and asking him to present those who were home. This writer remembers them filling out the forms and watching them stop at her neighbours’ homes to do the same. A literal headcount.

Two decades later, Nigeria still has no official data from its population commission about how many people live within its borders. Nigeria is heading into another election cycle, with campaigns and promises made by people who cannot know how many people they seek to govern.

A Number We Have Never Agreed On

Census-taking makes sense on a basic level. If we know enough about ourselves, we can plan enough for ourselves. According to the United Nations, the population and housing census exercise rests on four core principles: that individuals are counted separately, that the entire population within a clearly defined territory is included, that the count reflects a specific point in time, and that the exercise is conducted at regular intervals, typically every ten years.

Since independence, Nigeria’s census attempts have been marred by controversy, political interference, and logistical challenges. Censuses are important for public planning and allocating resources. Yet, Nigeria’s leaders, past and present, have failed to effectively leverage it as a reliable tool for governance.

In 1962, the Tafawa Balewa government conducted the first post-independence census, counting 45.26 million people. It was accused of manipulation, leading to its cancellation. A second attempt in 1963 put the population at 55.6 million people. Again, southern leaders accused the North of inflating numbers to gain political advantage in the federal system.

General Yakubu Gowon’s military regime attempted the next census in 1973. It counted 79.8 million Nigerians. Once again, the results were cancelled amid allegations of inflation, particularly in northern states. In 1991, under General Ibrahim Babangida, Nigeria recorded a population of 88.9 million. While not free of criticism, this was officially accepted and served as the baseline for national planning until 2006.

The 2006 census, conducted under President Olusegun Obasanjo, recorded 140.4 million people. For the first time, this census incorporated biometric data and gender breakdowns, but it still faced criticism over its methodology and even accusations of undercounting in Lagos and the South East.

Festus Odimegwu, then-chairman of the population commission, publicly declared the 2006 count not credible and warned that the planned 2016 exercise would fail. In the end, the censuses slated for 2016 and 2022 did not take place due to funding issues, insecurity, and political delays. The next census, initially scheduled for March 2023, was rescheduled to 3-7 May 2023, and then postponed indefinitely in April 2023 to allow the incoming Tinubu administration to set a new date.

In short, Tinubu led the third successive administration to operate without an updated census, and governance continued without a clear, authoritative denominator. Election campaigns, contests of policy and promise, had been run on projections built on estimates.

The 2025 inauguration of an eight-member committee to prepare for a national census, alongside the admission that financing remains a major constraint requiring domestic and international support, drives home the institutional fragility and the lack of political will to resolve this.

A Budget Built on Guesswork

A census tells a government how many people live in a given area, and what they need. That information becomes the baseline for everything that follows. A national budget, in turn, is the government’s attempt to translate those realities into numbers: how much to spend, where to spend it, and who that spending is meant to serve. A budget is, ultimately, a plan for the people. If the number of people is uncertain, that plan is guesswork.

On 31 March 2026, the National Assembly passed a ₦68.3 trillion budget—the largest in Nigeria’s history. However, for three consecutive years, Nigeria’s capital budget has outlived its own timeline, with the House of Representatives most recently extending the implementation of the 2025 capital budget to 30 June.

The 2024 capital budget was similarly first extended to mid-year and then pushed further to 31 December 2025. Before that, the 2023 budget also moved from an initial March deadline to June and eventually to the end of the year. Nigeria’s budgetary cycle has effectively shifted from clear, enforceable timelines to operate on a rolling basis.

However, the sheer scale of these figures sits alongside the country’s abysmal record of implementation. By Q3 2025, federal revenue stood at just 61% of the target; only 18% of the capital budget had been spent. These are the funds meant to deliver infrastructure, healthcare, and core development projects.

During the 2026 appropriation hearings, agency heads reported that noted fund releases were so low that they had forced projects into delay, debt, and quiet suspension. The Ministry of Interior told lawmakers it had received minimal to no capital funding in recent cycles, leaving infrastructure upgrades across its agencies stalled. The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare echoed this, reporting that only a fraction of its capital allocation had been accessed, weakening hospital upgrades, equipment procurement, and ongoing public health interventions. In one of the most striking disclosures, Minister Ali Pate revealed that of the ₦218 billion set aside for capital projects in 2025, only ₦36 million—about 0.02 per cent—had been released.

The argument for budget flexibility sets it up as a safeguard against stalled federal projects; the argument against it masks how inefficiently budgets are conceived and executed in the first place. One could also ask whether initial allocations, timelines, and priorities are grounded in realistic data-backed assessments. The likely reality is that they are, from the outset, built on estimates and instead absorb their failure by rolling it forward without resolving the underlying causes.

Nigeria’s budget design is shaped by estimates that are both outdated and inflated in different directions, creating a mismatch between planned scale and implementation capacity.

When it comes to counting people, the cost of not doing so is already measurable. ₦129.5 billion was reportedly already paid to contractors and service providers linked to preparations for the suspended 2023 census. In addition to an unfinished statistical exercise, we are left with significant public expenditure without its intended outcome: no updated population data, no published results, and no clear public accounting of what was achieved beyond preparatory work.

The abandoned 2023 census has become another example of how even the most fundamental governance tools—like knowing how many people are being governed—can be rolled over and absorbed into this broader pattern of incomplete delivery.

Consider the arithmetic. The government spent more money preparing for a census that never happened—₦129.5 billion—than it released to the Ministry of Health for capital projects in an entire fiscal year: ₦36 million, or 0.02 per cent of what was allocated. Nigeria invested more in trying to count its people than in keeping them alive. This is not a gap in governance. It is a portrait of a state that has absorbed the absence of data into how it functions, and found that functioning without a denominator is, for those in power, not a crisis but a condition.

A Population That Moves Faster than the State Can See

Nigeria’s population story is also uneven across the country’s geography. Movement across porous borders, rapid urban migration, and the largely untracked demographics, including the displaced, all mean that population figures shift quickly. At the same time, deaths—road crashes, industry-specific fatalities, natural disasters, violent conflict and insecurity—are recorded unevenly, often fragmented across agencies or underreported entirely.

When population figures are uncertain, planning becomes an exercise in approximation. Schools are built without clear catchment realities. Not that this is a pressing concern for the Nigerian government, as UNICEF estimates 18.3 million to 20 million Nigerian children are currently excluded from formal education. Likewise, hospitals are underfunded, and demand forecasts are inaccurate; infrastructure is designed for populations that may no longer match the numbers on record, as in Nigeria’s 14.9 million-unit housing deficit.

While discussions often focus on federal planning, the same data limitations flow downwards. State governments and local government areas often use the same outdated or estimated population figures, resulting in inefficiencies that are replicated across multiple layers of governance. This multiplies the problem: misallocation is not isolated to Abuja, but embedded across subnational planning systems that all rely on these baselines.

The consequences are unevenly distributed. Fast-growing urban centres—particularly Lagos and Abuja—believed to be undercounted in official planning frameworks, see their populations outpacing infrastructure in the day-to-day realities of these cities.

In urban centres, residents can compensate imperfectly through private transport and expensive housing, informal networks, and a higher concentration of hospitals and services. But in areas with weaker infrastructure and limited governance capacity, these gaps become more severe, as they are overrepresented in projections that no longer reflect migration realities. Clinics are sparsely distributed, transportation is unreliable or unsafe, and health systems operate with little. This makes even routine care difficult to access, let alone coordinated responses to public health emergencies.

In Abuja, the rapid spread of informal settlements on the city’s outskirts, often without water, sanitation, or road access, contrasts with official population figures that underestimate the scale of urban movement.

In 2022, President Buhari noted that the absence of a credible census for over 16 years had created an “information vacuum,” weakening the country’s ability to plan effectively. He described population data as central not only to development planning, but also to targeting social interventions, managing security challenges, and implementing national policy.

One possible counterargument is that modern states rarely rely on a single census as their primary demographic tool; instead, they operate through “administrative data ecosystems” that are continuously updated. Modern census reforms advocate a shift from the decennial exercise to a continuous, data-driven infrastructure, with institutions like INEC, the National Population Commission, the central bank, and other identity management agencies each contributing partial but functional datasets.

But Nigeria is not operating in a complete data vacuum. It holds fragments of population intelligence within existing systems, digital identity frameworks, and banking records such as the Bank Verification Number, Voter Identification Number, and National Identification Number (NIN) databases.

Estimates are not a substitute for a credible, updated census. They may guide policy direction, but they cannot fully resolve questions of precision, distribution, or rapid demographic change at the local level. Why these datasets have not been integrated into a coherent, real-time population model in Nigeria remains an open question.

How Many People is Power Worth?

From population size to revenue assumptions, and from population distribution to expenditure planning, the connection between census and budgeting is direct. One defines the scale of need; the other attempts to respond to it. When the first is missing or outdated, the second becomes less a reflection of reality and more a negotiated approximation.

The same logic extends into elections. In both cases, the state is assuming it knows who it is serving and who it is choosing. Voting presumes a known electorate: how many people there are, where they are, and how they are distributed.

Per the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (as amended), the 360 seats in the House of Representatives are allocated based on population, with each federal constituency designed to represent roughly equal numbers of people. The constitutional principle places the responsibility on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to delineate constituencies that reflect demographic realities across the federation.

In practice, this system would rely on accurate and up-to-date population data to determine how representation is distributed across states and regions.

As of 2026, these allocations are still effectively anchored to the 2006 census, meaning that constituency boundaries and seat distribution have not been recalibrated to reflect two decades of change. As a result? Representation imbalances have shaped and will continue to shape long-standing assumptions about the country. In the absence of current, verifiable data, ideas like the North’s “strength” or the scale and urban density of the South remain inherited truths.

Northern Nigeria, often portrayed as the country’s largest voting bloc, is both a demographic and a strategic category. Recent statements, like Atiku Abubakar’s claim that no northern politician commands more votes than he does, reflect how electoral power is imagined and negotiated through assumed population strength rather than through updated population clarity. In this sense, the “North as voting mass” becomes both an electoral asset and a governing assumption; one that shapes appointments, campaign messaging, and even federal attention to infrastructure and distribution.

We are being unfair to ourselves by not engaging with this directly. Is the Northwest really three times the population of the South-South? Does that ratio justify the allocation of more states, more local governments, and more federal resources flowing in one direction? Or should a region’s political weight rest on figures no one has verified in two decades? These are not abstract questions. They shape how revenue is shared, how constituencies are drawn, and how political power is distributed across the federation.

Taken together, these gaps create a system where, when population figures are uncertain, decisions about who gets what can be adjusted more easily to suit the status quo. At the same time, unclear numbers make it harder to hold the government accountable; if you don’t know exactly how many people should be served, it becomes difficult to say whether enough has been done.

It also raises the question of whether this uncertainty is simply a condition Nigeria is dealing with or something that, over time, has become convenient for the political class to maintain.

Electoral planning in Nigeria rests on a set of numbers that, in themselves, are incomplete reflections of the wider population. In 2023, INEC reported about 93.4 million registered voters, a figure that represents only a portion of Nigeria’s estimated population of over 200 million at the time.

Ahead of the next election cycle, the expectation is that new registrations will further expand this electorate, yet even that growth is difficult to situate within a clear national denominator. Parallel datasets such as the National Identification Number (NIN) enrolment—now at about 127 million records—and the Bank Verification Number (BVN) database (at 68 million) also offer glimpses into the count, but these systems were not designed to function as a unified electoral register or a substitute for a census-based population baseline.

When Migration Outruns Measurement

No census—or any single enumeration exercise—can fully resolve the complexities of a rapidly changing population. A census, even when conducted, is never a perfectly precise account of a society; it is a snapshot in time, subject to undercounting, classification error, and political negotiation. That is a valid methodological limitation in principle. However, the issue in Nigeria’s case is not the absence of perfection, but the absence of update.

That gap does not stop at the border. An estimated 17 million Nigerians live in the diaspora, from the UK and US to Canada, the UAE, and South Africa—though even this figure largely excludes second- and third-generation communities who remain socially and economically tied to Nigeria. These numbers themselves are increasingly fluid, shaped by shifting visa regimes, secondary relocations, and rapidly changing destination patterns, making any fixed count quickly outdated.

In October 2025, the Federal Government announced plans to advance the Diaspora Voting Bill. On paper, it signals a recognition of a population long acknowledged in estimates but structurally excluded from formal political participation. As of now, the bill’s progress through the National Assembly remains stalled—a familiar trajectory for legislation affecting constituencies that cannot yet vote.

This raises a question the data alone cannot answer: what does it mean to be Nigerian when the category itself is both massive and undefined? Nigeria may account for roughly one in every six or seven Africans, but that scale has not produced a coherent national identity so much as a set of overlapping, sometimes competing ones. The diaspora exists in part because the centre could not hold—because japa is not simply emigration but an answer to a country that could not cater to what it contained. And those who remain are not a monolith either.

With over 250 ethnic groups, regional disparities that function almost as separate countries, and a political system that distributes power along lines no one has verified in twenty years, “Nigerian” is less a settled identity than an ongoing negotiation. The number matters not because it would resolve these tensions, but because, without it, even the negotiation lacks a common frame.

Nigeria’s population is scattered across systems, borders, and timeframes that don’t fully align, yet it is still trying to govern it as if they did.

As Nigeria approaches another election cycle, the campaigns will once again be built on promises untethered from verifiable fact. Candidates will speak of constituencies whose boundaries were drawn from a count taken when many of their voters were children or not yet born. Budgets will be proposed for populations that exist only in projections. And a generation that has grown up watching this pattern—watching the state fail to count them, fail to plan for them, and in many cases fail to keep them—will be asked, again, to participate in a system that does not know they are there.

The question is no longer whether Nigeria can afford to conduct a census. It is whether Nigeria’s political class can afford for one to succeed. A credible count would not just update a number. It would disturb the arrangements—the inherited truths about regional strength, the unchallenged allocations, the convenient vagueness—that have allowed governance to operate without accountability for what it delivers. Being one of many should mean something. In Nigeria, it remains an open question what that something is.

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Written by: Hillary Essien

Edited by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja and ChiAmaka Dike

The most recent of these occurred in Plateau. On Palm Sunday, 29 March 2026, armed bandits/assailants on motorcycles attacked Angwan Rukuba in Jos North, Plateau. At last count, at least 26 people were reported dead, including women, children and a pregnant woman. The state is governed by the APC, boasts the APC national chair, and is politically significant within the Middle Belt, which has often been a bellwether for Nigerian electoral results. But when President Bola Tinubu arrived, he briefly remained at the airport while the bereaved and victims were brought to meet him. His spokesperson confirmed an overrun meeting with the Chadian President and a need to leave before sunset due to poor visibility for outgoing aircraft. But the messaging was clear—this was a meet-and-greet packaged as a condolence visit.

Ten months earlier, the Yelwata massacre in Benue reportedly killed between 100 and 200 people, mostly at an internally displaced persons shelter at a Catholic mission. Pope Leo XIV denounced the killings and prayed for the victims. Again, Benue is governed by the APC and boasts of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. Again, Tinubu visited the state, but could not reach the affected community because the roads were impassable. Children were lined up on the pathway to welcome the president. Another meet-and-greet packaged as a condolence visit.

These examples might give the wrong impression that Insecurity is exclusive to the Middle Belt fixture. But Nigeria faces so much chronic insecurity, and there are instances in many parts of the country. What emerges is a system, a machine, defined by who runs it, why it exists, how it is funded, and what it is ultimately used for. It also informs how Nigerians relate to security forces and the deployment of those forces as political instruments rather than protective ones. Sadly, it is also why the question is no longer if your state will receive a condolence visit, but when it will.

Who Runs the Machine?

To understand how the security forces operate, it is worth examining their original intentions. The origins of the Nigerian Police Force can be traced to the Hausa Constabulary, established in 1820 as a 1,200-member armed paramilitary force to protect British commercial interests. Other local police groups followed: Lagos Police in 1896 and the Niger Coast Constabulary in 1894. These were instruments to reinforce colonial control.

Etannibi Alemika, a prominent Nigerian scholar, argues that police brutality and oppression in Nigeria resulted more from the legacy of political authoritarianism and social exploitation. This was especially glaring because many Nigerian cultures and communities had their own forms of law enforcement and dispute resolution. But the colonial police destroyed these, along with the homegrown notions of security and justice. In its place, communities got a system geared towards commercial extraction and the suppression of protest movements. The 1929 Aba Women’s War, where colonial police violently enforced exploitative taxes, and the widespread resistance to Native Authority police in the 1930s and 1940s are part of its foundation.

After independence, the force was centralised further during the Civil War (1967-70), while decades of military rule stunted its institutional development. Nigeria’s postcolonial political class then replaced the colonists as the beneficiaries of a system designed to protect the elite from the masses. Military governments (1966-79; 1983-99) routinely deployed the police and the army to enforce compliance. When democracy returned in 1999, civilian leaders largely inherited this structure, replacing military leaders as its new patrons.

The result is a police force whose institutional culture is oriented toward control rather than service. It also reflects expectations. According to Afrobarometer’s 2023 survey, only 15% of citizens trust the police ‘somewhat’ or ‘a lot’, and only 13% say the police “often” or “always” operate in a professional manner and respect citizens’ rights. This sentiment is reinforced in the sad incident in Angwan Rukuba —residents mistook their attackers for security operatives, ostensibly because they dressed as armed personnel. Police stationed in Yelwata were similarly overwhelmed. It is telling that the most recent and publicised debate on security, at least in the National Assembly, occurred when police orderlies were being withdrawn from ‘VIPS’ due to poor personnel allocation.

Why the Machine prevails

After understanding who runs the machine, unpacking how it works helps explain why this system is sustained. Officials, from military service chiefs to intelligence heads, serve at the pleasure of the president and, by extension, the political leadership. Most presidents ensure that kinsfolk serve in the strategic roles of chief of army staff, inspector-general of police and director-general of the state security services.

The nature of political management of security leadership means there is a clear case of who they are accountable to. There is a similar argument around the Minister of the F.C.T—since they owe their position to the president, there is really no need to cater to citizens as a governor seeking re-election might. If security chiefs owe their careers not just to their political leaders, but also to the places these leaders come from, they become politicised. This also ensures that they become not just defenders, but champions of this system since, in time, they too will become beneficiaries. It also means they are more likely to push for recruitment from their part of the country to shore up ‘loyalty’ in the service.

It is worth noting that the most extensive reform of Nigeria’s intelligence structure was not in response to a spate of attacks or failures, but to worries of coup plotting. The National Security Organisation (NSO) was established under the Olusegun Obasanjo regime in 1976 to consolidate intelligence. But it soon became the embodiment of domestic repression, surveillance of political opponents, arbitrary detention and regime protection. Citizens had long protested and decried it and its efforts. But when it was dissolved in 1986 by Ibrahim Babangida, it was not because of citizen concerns but his own fear. It had become a threat to the military regime’s security.

Its division into three—the State Security Service for domestic intelligence, the National Intelligence Agency for external intelligence, and the Defence Intelligence Agency for military intelligence—was intended to ensure intelligence was dispersed, preventing any one body from accumulating enough leverage to threaten the head of state. Nigeria’s most substantial intelligence sector reform was not a governance solution; it was a coup-proofing one.

The opacity in reviewing the activities of the military and intelligence space, all due to ‘state security’, has made it an authority in itself. It also means there is little extensive research carried out to enable its policymakers to break out of their groupthink and take on board external feedback on their processes. This opacity also extends to one of its more well-known powers—access to restricted government funding.

How the Machine is funded

Nigeria has committed an estimated ₦32.88 trillion to defence over the past fifteen years. In the 2025 budget, security and defence received ₦6.57 trillion—the largest single sectoral allocation. For 2026, President Tinubu proposed a budget of ₦5.41 trillion. These are not trivial sums. At current exchange rates, the 2026 allocation is approximately $3.9 billion. Nigeria spends on security; the question is around what the spending buys.

BudgIT’s breakdown of the 2025 security budget is revealing. Of the ₦6.57 trillion total, ₦4.07 trillion—roughly 62 per cent—went to personnel costs. Capital expenditure accounted for ₦1.50 trillion, and overhead expenses amounted to ₦642 billion. The 2026 defence allocation follows the same pattern: of the Ministry of Defence’s ₦3.15 trillion, ₦2.39 trillion is for personnel and ₦464 billion for capital expenditure. The Nigerian Army alone receives ₦1.504 trillion, of which the overwhelming majority goes to salaries and allowances. Over the last 11 years, 2026 marked the first time the defence and security budget allocation did not increase, and even then, the raw amount was higher than it was in 2024, with a higher budget percentage. But citizens cannot tangibly point to the impact of such investments.

This budget structure tells a story. It is a budget which prioritises maintaining a large standing force rather than building preventive capacity: intelligence networks, rapid-response capabilities, and community-level presence. Capital expenditure—which covers equipment, technology, and operational infrastructure—is consistently dwarfed by recurrent spending. The money sustains the apparatus; it does not redirect it. Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Olufemi Oluyede, said as much: ‘The armed forces alone cannot address all security challenges, and if civilian institutions are not strengthened, military gains in conflict areas cannot be held.’ He is, in effect, describing a system that allocates most of its resources to a hammer while acknowledging that the problem is not a nail.

Meanwhile, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies has documented the diversion of police officers to guard political elites and VIPs—over 100,000 by some estimates—reducing the force available for public safety. The Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar, acknowledged in 2012 that police duties had become “commercialised,” with officers deployed to rich individuals and corporate entities while lacking manpower to provide security for ordinary citizens. The budget feeds the apparatus; the apparatus serves the elite.

What is the Machine used for?

There are arguments that Nigeria’s low revenue, high population density, and significant challenges make it difficult to carry out proactive, decisive security measures. But the evidence supports the contrary. Nigeria has repeatedly demonstrated that, when motivated, it can and will work for whom it wants to work for. The sad, unstated truth is that this system does not often serve the citizens it is meant to protect.

No recent event best exemplifies this more than the Lekki Toll Gate shooting on 20 October 2020. Young Nigerians, gathering peacefully to protest police brutality under #EndSARS, were attacked by the state’s swift, coordinated and lethal response. CCTV cameras were dismantled in advance, electricity was cut, and the Nigerian Army opened fire on unarmed protesters, according to multiple eyewitness accounts and investigations. Amnesty International confirmed at least 12 deaths at two locations in Lagos. The Army denied involvement and then, 34 days later, acknowledged it had deployed servicemen with live and blank ammunition. The ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled against the government in 2024, and several state commissions of inquiry ruled in favour of victims. No one has been prosecuted, and no one has been remotely compensated.

More recently, Nigeria’s most documented intelligence win was stymying the attempted coup of October 2025. This was done as a result of effective coordination between different intelligence services, despite not knowing which officers or departments could be trusted. Service chiefs were reassigned, and suspects were detained swiftly. Information was only confirmed months later, and the services involved have been on a belated celebratory tour in the media. But such ‘swift’ and ‘quick’ action was not applied to either Yelwata or Angwan Rukuba. No masterminds or groups have been detained or arrested months or weeks after. No one likely will.

This use of the machine also extends to the biggest advantage enjoyed by the democratic elite compared to their colonial and military counterparts—election management. Ebenezer Obadare has noted that a former state governor proudly recounted using his commissioner of police to manipulate elections. The police have been deployed during electoral processes not to secure them but to influence outcomes. In the Southeast, the military response to the IPOB/ESN crisis has produced its own cycle of violence, with Amnesty International documenting extrajudicial killings, torture, and extortion by the Tiger Base police unit in Imo State, a unit whose officers now collect bribes via point-of-sale machines. In the Northeast, over a decade of military operations against Boko Haram and ISWAP have consumed enormous resources while the insurgency persists. A pattern has emerged: the security apparatus is deployed where political interests demand it, and withdrawn or absent where only citizens are at risk.

There is only one part where the machine is meant to ‘work for citizens’: the checkpoint. But for most Nigerians, encountering a security operative is not an experience of protection but of extraction. Human Rights Watch documented how police roadblocks, ostensibly established to combat crime, function in practice as toll stations—a “lucrative criminal venture” where officers demand bribes from drivers and passengers under threat of arrest, detention, and physical injury. One civil society group in Anambra State estimated that police collected approximately ₦540 million in illegal tolls from 70 checkpoints in a single year. Former Inspector General of Police, Olukayode Egbetokun, stated that the force “cannot vacate the checkpoints,” calling them a crucial part of “visibility policing.” But what does that say for many who do not trust those who man the checkpoints?

Can the Machine be changed?

A lingering question concerning the relationship between security and citizens is how the recent push for state police will affect the current state of insecurity. As we’ve traced, this is a return to the foundation elements of the Nigerian police. This is what Jimi Disu, Nigeria’s new top police officer, will be expected to deliver on.

The state police debate, which dominates the reform conversation, deserves scrutiny rather than quick endorsement or dismissal. Because security threats are local and nuanced, and communities understand their terrain better than distant command structures, there is merit in decentralising security management. Northern governors who historically opposed state police have reversed their position and called for the constitutional amendment. President Tinubu has publicly urged its passage. The case that an estimated 240 million people cannot be secured from the centre with fewer than 400,000 federal police officers is strong.

But Nigeria’s security has not suffered primarily from its centralised nature. It is because there is barely any accountability. Localisation without accountability replicates the same problem at a smaller scale and creates a space for more direct touchpoints. This is in the wake of what history has already shown us through their use of regional security outfits—Amotekun in the Southwest, Ebubeagu in the Southeast—as political tools. We have also seen community vigilante groups commit abuses. The O’odua People’s Congress, which emerged to challenge federal authority after the 1993 election annulment, became more feared than the criminals it was established to confront.

The concern, which security experts and civil society leaders have raised consistently, is that state police controlled by governors who already manipulate federal police commissioners will simply decentralise impunity rather than improve protection. There is a case of devolving beyond state police to local police at the local government level. Otherwise, there is the risk of replicating the same disconnect between federal and state and between state and local levels.

Who the Machine sees

Everything above flows towards a single endpoint—the earlier categorisation of what citizens are given in exchange for silence about the machine’s failure. Some receive the aforementioned social media posts from presidents and political leaders, decrying the mess and seeking a way out. Others see their dead ones become numbers that are contested because ‘31 freed is better than none’. And yes, some do get presidential condolence visits meant to show how ‘important’ this is to elected officials, not the worry of shoring up votes ahead of elections.

But the biggest issue remains where the messages do not arrive, where there is no contest and where the president or a representative might never visit. The Nigerian experience is filled with instances where security lapses and attacks do not even get documented, where deaths are seldom recorded and where killings do not make top-level news. A major consequence of this recent spate of insecurity is desensitisation to numbers, given how many there are and how often they occur. Numbers blur into one another, and cities become distant memories the farther they appear. But this situation is never truly far away. And the more these experiences become commonplace, the easier it is to affect more people. The easier it is for it to reach you.

Ultimately, this is a question of how the Nigerian state values human life, and the answer is structural rather than sentimental. If true security is reflective of proximity to power, then insecurity is not a bug in the system — it is the system telling you where you stand. It reinforces every division the country already carries: ethnicity, religion, region, and class. The further you are from the centre, the less your life is worth to the state. The condolence visit is not simply a failure of compassion. It is the only product a machine built for elite protection can offer to everyone else. The only variable is where next.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Kunle Adewumi, Temitayo Akinyemi, ChiAmaka Dike and Hillary Essien

APC heads into 2027 with supermajorities across the board. The more troubling question is not how these numbers came to be, but what their imbalance signifies. In the absence of a credible opposition, who holds a struggling government to account? There is no clean answer.

The collapse of Nigeria’s opposition is neither sudden nor accidental. It is the product of decades of institutional erosion, a steady misdirection of political talent, and structural choices in party financing, in the design of government, and in the state’s treatment of organised dissent. Together, these have made viable opposition extraordinarily difficult to build and even harder to sustain.

The Architecture of Opposition

Before asking why opposition in Nigeria has failed, it is worth being precise about what the opposition is actually supposed to do. The easy answer is that it provides an alternative: if citizens dislike the current government, they can choose another. But this is quite a simplistic definition, and it sets the bar too low.

Oppositions perform two distinct functions: they offer an alternative government and constrain the one in power. A party that can replace a government but cannot hold one to account is not performing the full democratic function. As the history that follows shows, Nigeria has occasionally achieved the former while failing almost entirely at the latter.

That failure begins with structure. Nigeria’s First Republic operated under a Westminster parliamentary model, which creates a formal architecture for opposition: a recognised leader, a shadow cabinet, and a built-in expectation that the opposition is a government in waiting. In practice, the three major parties were anchored in regional bases where their majority membership resided, meaning opposition functioned primarily as a coalition of those excluded from federal power rather than as a structured alternative to it.

Awolowo’s Action Group, through his programme of free primary education, industrialisation, and social welfare, came closest to functioning as a genuine national opposition by presenting a serious policy alternative. But when that national project began to threaten the dominant coalition’s hold, the response was not political competition but political destruction. The Western Region crisis of 1962, the state of emergency, the treason charges, all of it ended the only party attempting to build opposition on programmatic rather than ethnic grounds.

The move to a presidential system in the Second Republic of 1979 was meant to correct this by forcing candidates to build national coalitions, rather than rely on regional blocs. It did not. The structural pressure of the presidency, the concentration of resources and patronage at the federal centre, made controlling that centre the primary political objective for every significant actor.

The Unity Party of Nigeria held five southwestern states and advanced a distinct policy platform, but without access to federal patronage, it remained a regional force. The same was true of the Nigerian People’s Party, which drew largely from Igbo political networks in the east without meaningfully expanding beyond them. Organised opposition could hold states; it could not, under this architecture, constrain the centre.

The lesson was clear: opposition that threatened power would not be met with competition, but dismantled. That lesson has never been unlearned.

Opposition Under the Military

Ibrahim Babangida’s governance style explains much of how opposition capacity was dismantled. Babangida earned the nickname ‘Maradona’, not just as praise but as a description of his political style. His most effective tool was not censorship or outright repression, but co-optation, used deliberately and consistently. His administration cultivated relationships with editors and columnists, offering access in exchange for coverage that softened criticism. Technocrats became the public face of controversial policies, giving them a veneer of neutrality that blunted resistance.

Independent student unions, professional bodies, and media organisations were either taken over or broken. Newswatch, The Guardian, and Concord were raided or shut down. Dele Giwa, who co-founded Newswatch, was killed by a letter bomb. The aim was simply to weaken the broader network of institutions that enabled organised opposition. The same approach, drawing critics inward through appointments, contracts, and access, has been used by every government since, though rarely as systematically.

Ironically, it was Babangida’s own transition process, marked by repeated delays and culminating in the annulment of the 1993 election, widely believed to have been won by MKO Abiola, that produced Nigeria’s most significant opposition movement.

The National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) did not emerge spontaneously. Earlier pro-democracy formations had been organising around the question of power shift and democratic reform well before the 12 June crisis. When Babangida annulled the election, and Abacha subsequently seized power from the Interim National Government of Ernest Shonekan, these groups converged into a single, nationwide coalition with a clear objective: the restoration of Abiola’s mandate and the return of democratic rule. Its leadership and membership cut across regions and professions.

The movement drew on a broader ecosystem of support. International pressure from Western governments, diaspora advocacy networks, and foreign-funded civil society organisations gave NADECO both resources and visibility at a moment when domestic institutions were being systematically repressed. The Campaign for Democracy coordinated street protests. The National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers mounted industrial action that placed direct economic pressure on Abacha’s regime. And crucially, the opposition understood that controlling the information environment was as important as controlling the streets.

The pioneers of NADECO operated at considerable personal risk. Alfred Rewane, widely acknowledged as the main financier of the movement, was assassinated. Kudirat Abiola, who was adept at mobilising rallies and was directly involved in the 1994 oil workers’ strike, was killed. James Bagauda Kaltho, a prominent investigative journalist, went missing. Others were imprisoned or forced into exile. NADECO sustained pressure, absorbed cost, and kept the democratic argument alive.

But, in 1998, it was not a decisive opposition victory but Abacha’s sudden death that broke the impasse. The transition that followed was managed by the military on its own terms, through a process it designed and controlled. What NADECO had done was narrow the regime’s options and raise the cost of continued repression. It did not compel the handover. The distinction matters because it means 1999 established a template: not of opposition winning, but of opposition outlasting, and outlasting is a much harder and more fragile form of political success.

Building the Machine

The energy that had sustained the anti-Abacha struggle seemed to fuel active opposition when democracy arrived in 1999. Labour unions, civil society organisations, and an increasingly assertive media, all of which had been forged in the resistance to military rule, became the primary sites of opposition in the early Fourth Republic.

The Nigeria Labour Congress, under Adams Oshiomole, mounted confrontations over fuel subsidy removals and economic policy, demonstrating that opposition could be waged through institutions rather than simply through party structures. The rise of independent newspapers and broadcast outlets, many with direct ties to opposition political figures, gave the opposition a communication infrastructure the PDP could not easily neutralise. Most prominent southwestern politicians owned or were closely associated with media houses. Politicians who understood opposition understood that narrative infrastructure and political infrastructure had to be built together.

What was still missing was a political structure capable of converting resistance into electoral power. Bola Tinubu set out to close that gap. After surviving the 2003 elections as the only opposition governor in the southwest, he rebuilt the Action Congress and pursued consolidation through patient legal strategy and direct financial intervention. After the contested 2007 elections, he financed challenges to disputed results in Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, and Edo, restoring mandates through the courts. Each victory added a state. Each state added resources and credibility.

In the north, Muhammadu Buhari’s failed election bids had produced a constituency that treated his losses as manufactured and his candidacy as a moral cause. That loyalty, accumulated across years of defeat, was not the product of legal strategy or media architecture but was a form of political commitment rooted in personal trust and regional grievances.

This opposition was tested twice, each proving the fallibility of the PDP’s machine. First was empowering Jonathan to assume office when Yar’Adua was sick and unable to constitutionally hand over the presidency. Second was against Jonathan himself when he sought to remove the subsidy. Both showed the organisational capacity that this newfound democratic opposition had built. This coalition included civil society and organised labour and was able to draw international pressure. By the time it coalesced into a functional political party, with its divergent but allied components, it was ready to win.

The Paradox of Winning

The APC’s victory in 2015 was, in structural terms, the worst thing that could have happened to Nigerian opposition politics. The transition brought the entire ecosystem of Nigerian opposition expertise into government in a single transfer, and there was no mechanism to replace it.

Over two decades, the institutional knowledge required to challenge power had been concentrated in a relatively small network of individuals. When the APC won, that network walked into the executive branch, state houses, and cabinet rooms.

Kayode Fayemi, who had built his political credentials through democratic reform networks, became a minister. Adams Oshiomole, whose mastery of mass mobilisation had been forged on the picket lines of the Nigeria Labour Congress, became the APC party chair. Nasir el-Rufai, long a critic of PDP governance, became Kaduna governor. Rotimi Amaechi, who had fought a celebrated legal battle to reclaim his own governorship in Rivers State, became a cabinet minister. The people who had spent careers studying how to challenge power now had power. No architecture remained to challenge them.

Beyond this, the fact that they had perfected the playbook meant they were more adept at countering it. Oshiomhole, who had led several major strikes against the Obasanjo government, was now adept at talking groups down, and he was branded a traitor by a labour union. While many APC leaders had played key roles in opposition protests, they presided over a crushing response to the #EndSARS protests. They even leveraged Buhari’s military background and complacency in managing military promotions to co-opt retired officers, including former army chiefs.

The media followed the same logic. Journalists and commentators who had chronicled, and in some cases actively championed, the opposition cause over the preceding decade found themselves, after 2015, inside the new establishment. Babafemi Ojudu ran for the Senate, and Bayo Onanuga headed NAN before becoming Tinubu’s spokesperson. Some moved into government communications. Others became editors and anchors at outlets now aligned with the ruling party. The media ecosystem that had helped bring the APC to power did not survive the transition as an independent force. It was absorbed.

The PDP, reduced to opposition, discovered it had no usable toolkit. Its membership was largely composed of career incumbents, politicians who had governed rather than organised, whose institutional memory ran to managing state resources rather than contesting them from the outside. Opposition was not a craft they had developed but a condition they had never imagined inhabiting. They did not know how to organise without incumbency, how to fundraise without state resources, how to build alliances that did not rest on shared access to government patronage. They also did not know how to hold governments to account, because they were aware of how the system had benefited them and that accusations could easily be traced to their time in office. And when the distance from power proved too much to bear, many of them simply crossed.

Lastly, civil society organisations pivoted towards institutional capacity-building to benefit from the increasing foreign donor largesse allocated to these efforts. As a result, it became hard for many organisations to actively engage when their criticism of PDP and tacit endorsement of APC also meant they bore some of the responsibility for the government in power. It left the opposition without allies precisely when it needed them most.

APC’s victory came at a moment when it manoeuvred two structural factors that explain the current fragility of the Nigerian opposition, and they are not independent of each other. Current opposition parties have failed to adapt the playbook.

The first is resources. Opposition costs money: for legal challenges, for candidate recruitment, for maintaining party structures between election cycles. Tinubu’s Lagos resources sustained the legal battles that preserved Action Congress gains across the southwest after 2007. Rotimi Amaechi’s Rivers State became a significant source of funding for the 2015 campaign. Without a comparable financial architecture, opposition exists mostly on paper and disintegrates under pressure. Since 2015, the PDP’s wealthiest governors have either left office or defected to the APC, leaving the party's financial base in disarray. The party’s most reliable backer in recent years has been Nyesom Wike, but a single wealthy patron is not a party finance operation. It is an unhealthy dependency.

The second factor is organisational capacity. Effective opposition requires people with transferable skills. It needs lawyers capable of electoral litigation, mobilisers with union or community organising experience, and communicators who can frame political arguments for mass consumption. It needs strategists who understand the patience required to build durable coalitions. It also requires media operations, relationships with editors, the capacity to place stories, and a narrative architecture that can withstand a news cycle hostile to the opposition’s interests. The PDP has had governors, senators, and former ministers in abundance, but it has rarely had any of these things. Its internal elections have been characterised by violence, litigation, and faction warfare rather than competitive politics that produce leadership capable of running a national campaign.

A third factor, unique to opposition politics post-2015, is interference. Every major opposition party currently contesting the APC’s dominance is simultaneously embroiled in internal conflict severe enough to render it functionally impaired, and this is worth examining carefully rather than attributing entirely to self-infliction. Some of it genuinely is. The Labour Party’s post-2023 internal crisis reflects real tensions over resources and political identity that its rapid growth made inevitable. But external pressure has also played a role. A party long in power understands opposition tactics intimately. The mechanisms available to the state are numerous: electoral commission rulings, court proceedings, financial regulation, and the selective deployment of regulatory pressure against sympathetic media outlets. Each can be deployed in ways that are difficult to prove and easy to observe.

Where Today’s Opposition is Failing

The current opposition appears to coalesce around ADC chieftains such as Atiku Abubakar, Rotimi Amaechi, Nasir El-Rufai and Aminu Tambuwal. But Atiku and Tambuwal sought electoral office under the APC, and Amaechi and El-Rufai thrived under Buhari’s presidency. Their ambition is largely seen as self-serving because they’ve been schemed out of the party.

This is why the most instructive opposition role, at least now, belongs to the one person who built the closest movement to previous opposition successes. It is also why his failure to maintain it is the biggest tragedy.

In 2023, Obi built something genuinely rare in Nigerian politics: a multi-ethnic, youth-driven movement that disrupted the traditional two-party contest and delivered a credible third-place finish by official count, with strong evidence of far deeper support across the south and among urban voters. The Obidient movement was not merely a campaign. It was, briefly, the closest thing Nigeria had seen since NADECO to a politically energised popular coalition operating entirely outside the established patronage networks. It also had something NADECO never had: an organic digital media operation, driven by young volunteers who flooded timelines, organised viewing parties, and produced content that outpaced anything the major parties were doing online.

Regrettably, what followed was a masterclass in how not to consolidate a movement. The years between 2023 and 2027 demanded one thing above all else: converting energy into institutions. Obi did not do it.

Instead, he became consumed by legal battles over the election result and by the Labour Party’s increasingly bitter internal feuds, which descended into parallel executive crises and open warfare between factions that had never agreed on much beyond his candidacy. He failed to build on the gains he did have: a Labour Party governorship in Abia, a wave of legislators who owed their seats to his coattails. He neither expanded his legislative footprint through targeted recruitment nor strengthened the loyalty of those already in his camp. Figures who had invested genuinely in his 2023 campaign, among them Valentine Ozigbo, drifted away. The digital energy that had made the Obidient movement so visible dissipated without any institutional structure to channel it. The movement that had looked, briefly, like the seedbed of a new political force was allowed to idle.

To be fair to Obi and the movement he built, that failure is not unique to newer entrants. Even the architects of the 2015 coalition, some of whom now find themselves on the wrong side of the party they helped build, have struggled to apply the lessons of that success to the task of rebuilding opposition.

Obi eventually left the Labour Party, citing fears that the federal government was engineering his exclusion from the 2027 ballot, and decamped to the African Democratic Congress. That choice has since been complicated further: INEC has suspended ADC’s recognition, rendering it, for now, a discontinued political party. Whether Obi’s bet on that platform will pay off through a legal challenge, a reversal, or a further move elsewhere remains deeply uncertain. A man who mobilised millions in 2023 now finds himself negotiating for relevance in a vehicle that is not currently permitted to field candidates, and dependent on the goodwill of allies whose interests do not straightforwardly align with his.

Nigerian politics has a habit of eventually producing what it needs. The APC itself was unthinkable in 2003 and inevitable by 2014. The forces that will eventually challenge the current government are probably already in motion: in state houses where governors are quietly building networks, in courts where lawyers are testing electoral precedents, and in a young, deeply frustrated population that is running out of patience with all of them.

NADECO showed that organised, disciplined opposition can challenge even a military dictatorship. It also showed that such a movement requires more than aggrieved former insiders relaunching themselves under a different banner. It requires a cause that is larger than the ambitions of those carrying it, institutional anchors capable of outlasting any single election cycle, and figures whose authority does not depend on voters forgetting what they were doing five years ago.

The country that produced NADECO still exists. So is the need for another one. Whether the opposition figures currently assembled around the ADC can build that, or whether they will prove to be a gathering of men who understand opposition as theory and cannot quite execute it as practice, is the question that will define Nigeria’s next political chapter.

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Written by: Kunle Adewumi

Edited by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, ChiAmaka Dike, and Hillary Essien

Parties largely achieved the former. APC convened at Eagle Square, Abuja, with 31 governors and over 8,000 delegates on the floor. PDP met at the National Velodrome and notably endorsed Nyesom Wike as its de facto national leader by installing his loyalists in party leadership roles. ADC will convene later in April, but will spend most of this week welcoming defections from Kano, led by former presidential candidate Rabiu Kwankwaso. Elections have virtually arrived, and parties are finalising arrangements ahead of formally confirming nominees before INEC’s May deadline.

But parties failed on the latter point. Neither APC nor PDP utilised their conventions and the public’s watchful eyes to articulate their plans for the future. Tinubu acknowledged the challenges with electricity but remained bullish about the party’s ascendancy. PDP’s Wike notably focused on opposition member Peter Obi, former governors Bukola Saraki and Sule Lamido preached party unity, and Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan christened Wike as the party’s ‘national leader’.

The messaging from these conventions largely reinforces the notion that Nigeria’s political parties, at least in the Fourth Republic, do not function the way they should. They are vehicles for accessing power, not institutions for exercising it.

The Dual Functions of the Party

Parties fulfil two major roles: presenting a vision for society and helping citizens gather around shared political aims. Giovanni Sartori is a well-cited scholar in this field, highlighting that they present candidates for election and are “the institutional channel through which and by which the citizens are represented in modern democracies”. Citizens do not just need parties to win elections, but to provide the outlet to express how they feel society should be run.

By this standard, Nigeria’s political parties used to deliver. In the First Republic, each party had clear ideological aims, even if couched in identity and regionalism. Awolowo’s Action Group had a social democratic programme, pushed forward through free education and regional development. Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons advocated for pan-Nigerian nationalism and a centrist economic policy. Even Bello and Balewa’s Northern People’s Congress had conservatism and federalism at the heart of its campaign. All parties were clear about the responsibilities of the federal and regional governments and proceeded accordingly.

The Second Republic had ideological successors to these parties. Awolowo and Azikiwe led the Unity Party of Nigeria and the Nigerian People’s Party, respectively, with the same beliefs they held in the 1960s. Shehu Shagari was the nominee of the National Party of Nigeria, which had many ties to the NPC government he had served under as a minister. Even the Third Republic created two parties ‘a little to the left and a little to the right’ to highlight these discussions.

These divisions help provide robust debate. Nigeria’s more contentious discussions are not really debates; they are just well-couched presentations for groups to make money. State creation is simply a means of gaining access to the federal purse. State of origin or state of residence is used to manage fears among some groups that they will be ‘overrun’ by others. Religious arguments around laws to carry out are tied to waning fears around influence. The country is deprived of tangible solutions because honest discussions are not had to begin with. Political parties are meant to provide the platforms for these discussions; they have largely failed to do so.

What Institutional Work Looks Elsewhere?

If Nigerian parties have abandoned the dual functions Sartori describes, it is worth asking what it looks like when parties actually do the institutional work. We do not have to speculate. Other African parties have done it—with instructive successes and failures.

There are strengths to how electorally successful Nigerian political parties have been able to function. For starters, it is not easy to establish ward, local, state, zonal, and national structures in a country as large and as populous as Nigeria. It is why PDP can stretch its comatose status—there are many villages and hamlets where there are still PDP signboards from its successful ’99 campaign. These structures make it easy for the political elite to guarantee elections. So what if we retcon them to work for party engagement and effective governance?

APC and PDP have, at some point or another, presented the spectre of a one-party state. What they have not presented is the thinking behind how to really entrench it. The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) governed for an uninterrupted 58 years, from independence in 1965 till it was defeated in the 2024 elections. It did so, winning elections acknowledged as free and fair, because it put in the institutional work to operate. It maintained policy coherence across leadership transitions and invested in independent policy research through the Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis (BIDPA). It governed through well-documented, engaged National Development Plans that were debated. At its core, the tradition of consultative governance is rooted in the kgotla, public forums where leaders actively engage with citizens. The absence of such forums, aside from perhaps town halls during elections, shows how differently Nigerian parties perform their functions. Interestingly, BDP’s failure came from the political environment that it created, which enabled effective opposition efforts.

Other examples, such as Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and Ethiopia’s Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), offer further variations. The CCM embedded itself in a network of local cells and policy committees, giving it a grassroots presence unmatched in East Africa. The EPRDF, despite its authoritarian tendencies, operated an extensive system of internal study groups and cadre development that ensured its members were at least conversant with the party’s developmental state ideology. Its successor, the Prosperity Party, was formed in 2019 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed merged three of the EPRDF’s four constituent parties into a single national organisation, a deliberate break from the coalition’s ethnic federalist structure that the TPLF rejected as illegal, and one of the catalysts for the Tigray war. Much of the EPRDF’s cadre infrastructure has not survived the transition.

These are not models to import wholesale, especially given the different outcomes and consequences of the absence of dissent and engagement. But they share a trait Nigerian parties lack entirely: the party is understood as an institution that does ongoing intellectual and organisational work between elections, not merely as a machine that activates every four years to process ambitions.

Nigeria’s political parties are short-sighted, working only over electoral cycles rather than planning for decades to ensure structured institutional change. This is why, despite 16 years of PDP rule and an upcoming 12-year anniversary for APC, there has been an uneven approach to governance. PDP’s manifesto, as appears on its website, still cites the hope of becoming one of the top 20 economies by 2020—a target that would make it a pioneer in time-travel politics. APC, Nigeria’s ruling party, does not even have a manifesto page on its website; instead, it focuses on its electoral superiority and an AI-generated image of the president. Because there is little accountability, they can afford to remain holding companies for electoral ambition.

The Consequence of Parties Failing

Functioning political parties are important to how democracy works for both citizens and the governing elite. In an article called ‘Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy’, Peter Mair argues that parties in the West have largely abandoned the representative and expressive roles in favour of governing. The masses are no longer engaging with politics, and the elite are moving towards the protected sides of the state.

For the masses, this represents reduced electoral turnout, partisan identification, and greater electoral volatility. They do not see parties or politicians as relevant. For the elite, they create structures that allow them to both maintain access to state resources and avoid electoral competition. The outcome is a ‘hollowed democracy’ where parties retain the illusion of membership but are really just dictated by a smaller group, and there is no real deliberation. This also means there is no real accountability.

If this sounds familiar, consider what this means in a Nigerian context. Historically, and elsewhere, parties have worked because there are internal structures to hold leaders accountable. Resources are owned by the party, not by individuals. Strongholds are the party’s, not an individual’s—there are U.S. states where simply having a Republican or Democratic label beside a candidacy guarantees their election.

But in Nigeria, these are owned by individuals. Wale Adebanwi refers to it as ‘the corporate agency of elites’, where they can negotiate between ethnic groups and the states. Parties are no longer platforms for citizens to express their political engagement; they are ways for elite individuals to do so. There is no bigger example than the recent wave of defections. Instead of parties negotiating, campaigning and gaining followers across states, they simply have to try and flip a governor. Parties have been built on the absorption of elites—we demonstrated it here through the ways APC and PDP were built—and the growing opposition coalition, ADC, is following the same blueprint by hoovering up opposition candidates.

Sadly, the responsibility of functioning political parties is not just on politicians; it is for everyone. The middle class has also withdrawn from the spaces where these decisions and negotiations are made. Ebenezer Obadare and Wale Adebanwi argue that the Nigerian state has lost its restorative and redemptive powers as a result. Party leaders determine the narrow options of candidates we have in elections. But these leaders do not often represent the wide range of experiences and lived conditions in society. The result is parties and politics left to the very people whose interests are best served by keeping the system exactly as it is.

To summarise, Nigerian political parties do not provide citizens with space to express themselves politically. This manifests in three ways: there is little active participation in politics, leading to weak political accountability and, eventually, compromised governance. In a more mature democracy, a party able to leverage these gaps would get rewarded electorally. For 2027, we’ll need to focus on fixing what we currently have.

The Messiah Trap

The oft-cited solution is to pray for a messiah. This is why political movements and defections have often been seen in a bigger light. In 2014, Buhari was seen as the single force capable of leading an opposition not only to defeat Jonathan but also to address corruption and insecurity. In 2018, Obasanjo’s Coalition for Nigeria Movement was meant to help coordinate opposition to Buhari’s re-election. Ironically, it briefly adopted the ADC as its vehicle. In 2022, Obi’s Obidient movement generated mass enthusiasm driven by its digital and decentralised approach in engaging young people. Buhari secured the election but was unable to rise to the demands of the office and the moment. Obi’s movement elected legislators who have since defected to the ruling party. Ahead of 2027, fanfare has erupted over the defections of Atiku, Obi and Kwankwaso to the ADC.

The pattern is always the same: a charismatic figure attracts popular enthusiasm, channels it through an existing party structure, and then either captures the party for personal purposes or is captured by the party’s existing logic. But this means that movements are subsumed by individuals. The ADC’s current coalition is built entirely on the same recycled principals who spent decades rotating through Nigeria’s other parties. If they lose, they will retrace their steps. If they win, they will follow the same pattern we have seen before.

The uncomfortable truth is that this implicates citizens, especially those in the middle class who are in the unique position to engage with both awareness and context. The Nigerian condition means that it is often difficult to combine living conditions and show up at ward meetings, engage, organise and build.

This was not always the case in Nigeria. The Nigerian Youth Movement of the 1930s and 1940s succeeded precisely because educated, professional Nigerians saw party formation as their responsibility. Awolowo’s Action Group was built by lawyers, teachers, and journalists who did the ward-level organising themselves. That tradition has been almost entirely abandoned. The result is that parties are left to the very people whose interests are best served by keeping the system exactly as it is. We produce brilliant analyses of why things are broken while leaving the actual machinery of power to the people who benefit from the breakage.

The System Works As Designed

The instinct, at this point, is to prescribe: mandate costed manifestos, reform party financing, and strengthen INEC oversight. These are reasonable proposals. They have also been stated, in various forms, by every governance reform report and donor assessment of Nigeria for the past two decades. The reason they have not been implemented is not that they lack merit. It is that they threaten the incentive structure that makes Nigerian parties function the way they do.

Nigeria’s federal government controls the vast majority of national revenue, distributing it downward through a federation account that makes governorships the primary mechanism for accessing resources. Elections are winner-takes-all: there is no proportional representation, no coalition incentive, no reward for coming second. In this structure, parties do not need policy platforms because policy is not what wins elections. Patron acquisition is what wins elections. A governor who defects brings his state’s political machinery with him. But a manifesto brings nothing.

This is not a failure of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed. The conventions at Eagle Square and the Velodrome were not empty because politicians are lazy or corrupt, though some are both. They were empty of policy because the political economy does not reward policy. It rewards control.

Ethnicity can operate within this structure, not as a barrier to ideology but as its substitute: where parties offer no programmatic reason to support them, ethnic and regional identity becomes the only available heuristic for voters deciding where their interests lie. The prebendal logic that Joseph identified in 1987 is not a cultural pathology. It is a rational response to an incentive structure that has remained fundamentally unchanged across four republics.

This means that telling Nigerians to simply participate more—to show up at ward meetings, to contest party positions, to demand better candidates—is, by itself, insufficient. It is like telling someone to reform a company whose business model is designed to exploit them. The system needs to change so that participation becomes consequential. The question is what that change looks like.

Where the work is happening

One place to look is not at the parties themselves, but at the spaces where Nigerians are already doing the work that parties should be doing. BudgIT tracks government spending at the state and local levels and makes the data publicly accessible, a function a party’s policy research unit should perform, if any party had one. Tracka monitors whether constituency projects are actually delivered, the accountability role that a functioning party structure would fulfil internally. During EndSARS, the Feminist Coalition crowdfunded over $400,000 for legal fees, medical costs, and logistics, the mobilisation infrastructure a party’s grassroots network is supposed to provide.

In each case, technology enabled citizens to perform functions that parties have abdicated. And in each case, the party system did not absorb the capacity. It either ignored it, co-opted the figureheads, or actively resisted it. This is not accidental. A party that adopted BudgIT’s transparency model would constrain its own ability to distribute prebends.

This is not to suggest that technology is the answer. It plainly is not, at least not by itself. The same digital platforms that enabled EndSARS coordination are also vectors for disinformation, hate speech, and the echo chambers that deepen the ethnic and religious polarisation parties already exploit. Social media can organise a march, but it cannot, on its own, build the institutional architecture—the policy units, the internal accountability mechanisms, the cadre development systems—that parties in Botswana or South Africa built over decades.

The challenge is not to replace traditional party politics with digital activism. It is to recognise that Nigerians are already politically engaged—through their phones, their data, their civic organisations—and to ask why the party system remains structurally incapable of making that engagement matter.

That is the real question for 2027 and beyond. What would a political system designed to make parties accountable to citizens actually look like? Are Nigerians willing to build it, even when it means dismantling the machinery which the current elite, across all parties, depend on? These are questions that conventions should be addressing. Their inability to do so shows their limits.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Temitayo Akinyemi, ChiAmaka Dike, and Hillary Essien

APC’s state control goes against conventional Nigerian and multiethnic African democratic logic: people vote along identity lines, and these are often ethnic, religious and regional. This also runs counter to the results of the last presidential election. In 2023, the frontrunners won the most votes in their home zones. It also means that if a party does well in say, North West, it should not be as dominant or strong in the South East. Yet APC controls governors in zones won by Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu.

It reinforces the idea that identities overlap closely with economic circumstances and political history. This sudden ‘dawn of a one-party state’ reveals a trap to simplify what Nigerians want from their governments and why they vote the way they do.

The Identity Trap

In the earlier Republics, conservative parties, such as the Northern People’s Congress (1960-66) and National Party of Nigeria (1979-83), drew their strength from the North. Similarly, Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (1960-66) and Unity Party of Nigeria (1979-83) pursued a more socialist and relatively liberal programme rooted in the South. Voters could distinguish between parties not just by who led them, but by what they stood for.

This pattern partially resurfaced in the Third Republic. The Babangida regime created two state-created parties that followed expected ideological lines. The National Republican Convention, positioned “a little to the right,” drew from the conservative northern establishment. The Social Democratic Party, “a little to the left”, attracted a broader, more progressive coalition anchored in the South. Yet the distinction was shallow: both parties were imposed from above rather than built around genuine programmatic differences, and the annulment of the 12 June 1993 election ensured the experiment never matured.

Notably, these distinctions have largely disappeared in the Fourth Republic. Sa’eed Husaini argues that Nigeria’s governing parties have converged on centre-right economic positions since 1999, a consensus so thorough that manifestos across parties now read as variations on the same theme.

But this convergence is not truly national; it only happens among the elite. The parties agree at the top; the voters they represent do not. Leila Demarest has shown that Nigerian parties incentivise politicians to direct resources towards party elites rather than to constituents. This weakens the ties between legislators and the citizens who elected them.

The result is a political class that has settled its internal disagreements over economic policy and the basic terms of access to power. However, the ethnic, religious, and regional fractures that shape how citizens actually vote remain unresolved. People know parties less by policies and more by personnel. This gap, between what elites have agreed on and what citizens experience, continues to widen.

This disconnect is part of what shapes the party system. Most established democracies coalesce around two broad tents or positions. In Nigeria, those tents are not ideological: they are the ruling party and everyone else. The pattern has repeated itself: PDP dominated from 1999 to 2015, and the opposition consolidated into the APC specifically to dislodge it. Now that the APC holds the centre, the same gravitational pull draws politicians towards it, not out of conviction, but because proximity to power and resources are the primary incentives.

APC currently has a supermajority. But this situation sits atop every unresolved identity claim, regional grievance, and factional ambition that Nigerian politics has always produced. Context matters in understanding whether this is a true reflection of the country or a temporary alignment that its own contradictions will undo.

The Map vs The Mandate

The biggest mistake the APC would make is to mistake the gale of defections for sudden mass support. The more apt description is that governors have made calculated decisions to protect their careers. That decision means little to everyday citizens, who can still punish leaders seen as distant or out of touch.

The maps above show where votes went in 2023 and where power currently sits in 2026. A party’s strength is better considered by looking at the state of play in these states. After all, a governor’s defection tells us who controls the machinery, but not who is more familiar with it.

Nigeria has also had controversial electoral processes in past contests, including the 2023 election. Election observers documented discrepancies in declared results in several states. This means the reliability of some declared results remains in question.

The maps reveal a consistent pattern. While APC has absorbed new governors, the actual voter dynamics in some states remain uncertain. In states like Adamawa, where Atiku’s political leaning has been influential, and Bayelsa, where Senator and former Governor Seriake Dickson’s newly formed Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) will contest, there may be a stronger contest than expected. This is because consolidations, consultations, and defections do not confirm shifts in the electorate.

A major question APC will have to address is how to manage incumbencies without mandates. It will defend in states where it swept both presidential and gubernatorial seats. These include Borno, Ogun and Kwara, with stalwart governors who have assumed national profiles.

It will also have to contend with the South East and South South zones, where it has governors in states the party has never organically held before. The question will be how to appeal to citizens accustomed to decades of supporting other parties. It might benefit from governors who are seeking re-election, but a handful of them are in states that already voted for another presidential candidate in 2023.

The state of play, in short, looks unassailable. But looking and being unassailable are different things. This gap between the two concepts is where the real story of Nigerian democracy lies today.

Hollow Ground

The mathematics of the APC’s true strength conceals issues that defection headlines have hidden. APC will have ten governors term-limited in 2027, both general and off-cycle, and will have to manage these key succession contests. Some of these will be in states such as Imo, Lagos, and Ogun, with the added issue of managing the different factions and ambitions seeking the post. This will include legacy APC members and those accompanying defectors. Each of these distinct political networks, with different stakeholders, will come with competing claims on the narrow pool of offices and appointments.

Beyond those who are term-limited, some first-term defectors will likely be working with those they defeated in 2023. Reconciling both groups and ambitions will not be easy, and this issue was at the heart of PDP’s own implosion on an even smaller scale. This is without even considering previous ‘next-in-line’ candidates with the preferred successors of newly added governors. The succession ladder will see several rungs replaced, and it won’t be a clean transition.

All these will be conducted under the looming spectre of a presidential and party leadership transition in 2031. Tinubu has deftly managed Lagos APC, but a national party will be a different situation. Northern politicians and platforms have accused the president of supporting and platforming fellow Southerners, in particular Yoruba. To do this ordinarily is hard, but to do this alongside governing, to varying degrees, is a unique and daunting challenge.

APC has so far been able to skirt this challenge because viable alternatives do not seem to exist. APC has at least handled the basic functions of the party, including conducting primaries, litigating when necessary, and coordinating campaigns. Politicians have defected because they can trust that, but this trust can easily run out.

Tinubu’s administration has had to reconcile with the impacts of an uneven fuel subsidy removal, the harmonisation of foreign exchange windows, and years of unresolved fiscal pressure. The result is one of the hardest cost-of-living crises in Nigerian history. Difficult situations sow doubt, and an opposition that can articulate that doubt can reap the benefits.

But the flip side of this economic situation is that it also serves the ruling party. Harsher economic conditions mean the patronage pipeline is narrow, and this favours an incumbent that controls these resources. It results in more would-be defectors staying in line since a half-loaf is better than none.

This situation shows the party is on hollow ground. But there is an even clearer example: the upsets that dotted the 2023 elections. Obi defeated Tinubu in a state he had represented three times, as a senator and a two-term governor. Kwankwaso’s upstart party dislodged APC from Kano’s governorship house. The oft-cited APC-PDP lost the presidential vote in 12 states and the FCT. These were not isolated aberrations. It was proof that Nigerian voters, when given viable alternatives, will exercise genuine electoral agency.

The question hanging over 2027 is whether the energy of 2023 can be replicated. Major opposition figures have since defected to the African Democratic Congress (ADC), making it a major opposition party. Whether this represents a genuinely new political formation or simply another phase of elite realignment remains to be seen.

ADC has not been tested and will need to hit the ground running by uniting, choosing a candidate, and actively courting members to run in down-ballot races. This is what APC did in 2014, on its way to earning the electorate’s trust. This is especially likely if economic conditions continue to test citizens, as the country faces a cost-of-living crisis and electricity shortages. An opposition can leverage this to their advantage if trained carefully.

The hollowness of this one-party-state argument is that it is not composed of strongholds. They do not guarantee inevitability, and there will be opposition politicians who feel confident enough to contest. And while the government can still rely on patronage to help fuel its campaigns, this has never been a durable method for party management.

Nigeria, however, has one example of durable subnational dominance. It looks nothing like what APC has built.

The APGA Model

Only one party has held power at state level for nearly two decades without federal patronage as its primary engine. The All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) has governed Anambra since 2006, with all three of its governors—Peter Obi, Willie Obiano, and now Charles Soludo—winning two terms. Notably, in an off-cycle election that tends to attract more attention, Soludo was recently re-elected, sweeping all 21 local government areas.

Soludo’s victory is especially ironic given that he ran for governor in 2010 as a member of the then-ruling PDP and, after a term as governor of the central bank, still lost to Obi under APGA. Chris Ngige, a former governor and future minister, ran for his old seat in 2013 as an APC member and still lost to Obiano. Senators, Ministers and prominent politicians have sought to dislodge APGA, but have lost to a ‘third party’ that has remained relevant due to its strength in the state.

What APGA lacks in federal support, it makes up for in identity. The party was founded around Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the secessionist Biafran state and former military governor of the Eastern Region. At the 2003 elections, Ojukwu represented the unfulfilled aspirations of Igbo political consciousness. And while he lost that year’s presidential race to Obasanjo, the party has pursued a programme that has appealed to Ndi Anambra. Citizens vote for APGA as a platform and not just for individual personalities. Its strong grassroots campaign, well-vetted candidates, and ability to maximise state resources sustain it. These build trust and ensure citizens back the party’s choice.

It was evident when Soludo’s victory only came once he moved to the party, despite trying and failing before. It was further demonstrated when Obi, who carried the state in 2023, was unable to dislodge the party after endorsing PDP and LP candidates. The platform had outlasted his personality.

This pattern, a platform that outlasts its personalities, is what the APC will meet in several states. The absence of a clear identity continues to haunt the party. After all, it can count former PDP members, Buhari-era conservatives, Tinubu-era progressives and recent political defectors with no clear unifying trait other than a desire to be in power. This shallow unity means that it can be sold out, and there is no similar strength of platform at the expense of the individual.

APGA’s limitations present differently. It has been a consistent force in the South East but has only been able to extend beyond Anambra once, when Rochas Okorocha was elected governor of Imo before he defected to the APC. Moreover, identity-based dominance is durable but also geographically bounded and has a narrow ceiling. APC can operate beyond its networks and cross multiple ethnic lines. But while it is dependent on patronage, APGA survives contact with voters. A successful Nigerian political party will need to move beyond these models to succeed.

The Limits of Ambition

APC survives nationally because it controls what people need access to. The economic pressures already described continue to narrow that access. If and when patronage runs thin, or the presidency favours a faction that did not recruit the current wave of defectors, there is no residual loyalty to fall back on.

A formal one-party state is not the destination Nigeria is heading towards. The PDP’s era of near-total dominance ended because internal contradictions became irreconcilable. Nigeria’s large ethnic blocs, multiple sub-regional interests, an increasing cadre of politicians, and an uneasy political settlement through power alternation make one-party dominance structurally impossible. Because every group believes its turn is due, and that guarantee of unrealised, unbridled ambition will likely lead to splintering.

Citizens, too, have tools beyond the ballot. Despite being weak electorally, Occupy Nigeria’s protests in 2012 against the PDP government drove the then-Goodluck Jonathan to the negotiating table.

What is dangerous is not the number of states APC controls, but the gap between the party’s map and the country’s actual political temperature. APC is consolidating elite control against the direction of voter sentiment. The gubernatorial map shows dominance; the 2023 results and the cost-of-living crisis show discontent. When these two realities collide, as they will in 2027 and beyond, the correction will be significant.

APC has built Muhammadu Buhari House, so it does not have to deal with the empty monument to PDP’s unfulfilled ambition. But it has not built an idea base that makes us understand what it has sought to achieve. It has acquired governors and prioritised them over numbers. APGA survives in Anambra because its voters know who the party is for, and that is why they trust the individuals running it.

The spectre of a one-party state is just that — a spectre. APC’s dominance rests on defections rather than mandates, sustained by patronage rather than ideology, and stretched across regions where it has never organically won voter trust. History offers no precedent for this arrangement surviving. But what should concern Nigerians is not the constitutional question; it is the democratic one. The distance between who holds power and who the electorate would choose grows wider with each defection, each tilted primary, each weakened institution. If that gap continues to widen, it will not matter how many governors the APC claims. What will matter is whether citizens still believe that their vote can close it.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Temitayo Akinyemi, ChiAmaka Dike, and Hillary Essien

There is a timeline in which, today in 2026, the PDP is about halfway through fulfilling Ogbulafor’s prophecy. Instead, the party is down to two state governorships, Oyo’s Seyi Makinde and Bauchi’s Bala Mohammed, and the latter is reportedly negotiating an exit to the All Progressives Congress. After a raft of defections on 12 March 2026, the PDP has been reduced to just eight senators, relegating the former party to third place in the Senate.

That we are even discussing the demise of a party once as dominant as the PDP should be perplexing. With a different set of actions, it could easily have won the 2023 elections and been in power today. Just before its presidential primaries, it lost Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, who secured the Labour Party (LP) and New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) presidential nominations, respectively, and together secured an estimated 7.6 million votes. If we add the roughly 7 million votes that Atiku Abubakar—whom the PDP fielded—gained, all three opposition candidates received well over the 9 million votes attributed to Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

The PDP has become the template for the lifecycle of a ruling party. A combination of poor party administration and complacency in power has left the umbrella unable to provide shelter when it might have been most effective.

The PDP, at least as we know it, is dead.'

The Midwife of the Fourth Republic

Led by former Vice-President Alex Ekwueme (1979-1983), a group of political elders and ex-military officers began coordinating to oppose General Sani Abacha’s attempt to legitimise his rule through a democratic transition. After Abacha’s death in June 1998 and the lifting of the ban on democratic activities, this group—G34—became the PDP and leveraged its national union to provide the most viable political platform ahead of forthcoming elections.

The PDP was a convenient vehicle for the transition because its membership attracted elite agreement and the necessary acceptance of the military regime, and, compared with its rivals, had a genuine national profile. But PDP, from the outset, also struggled with the same issues that would befall many Nigerian political parties: despite having a manifesto, it was unclear which set of ideologies would inform its governance style. It was first and foremost a vehicle to gain political power, which is why two presidential candidates, Abubakar Rimi (PRP) and Alex Ekwueme (NPN), and its founding national chair, Solomon Lar (NPP), could come together under one umbrella despite representing parties with distinct ideological differences in the Second Republic. It also struggled to ensure proper party administration, which would have insulated it from select interests. This second point is best exemplified by Olusegun Obasanjo being sprung from prison and virtually imposed on the PDP as their presidential candidate to satisfy the anxiety of some key officers in the military regime.

PDP owed its victory to its national network, but it maintained loyalty by governing in its stakeholders’ interests. This brought the term ‘zoning’ into Nigerian political lingo. It ensured that geopolitical zones were adequately represented in the government and the party’s top leadership. It even extended this to positions expected to be insulated from such political considerations, such as secretary to the government of the federation and head of the civil service.

Obasanjo’s management of the party and the country demonstrated the confidence of someone who had served before, but also highlighted the limitations of a former military general coming to terms with more oversight and accountability. He carried out at least five major reshuffles during his tenure, merging and splitting ministries at will. He also went through five party chairs, beginning a pattern of inconsistent party leadership. His role in the growth of the telecom sector, the 2005 Paris Club debt relief, the transition of the OAU to the African Union, and even the rebuffing of the 2003 coup attempt in São Tomé and Príncipe showed his strengths in government coordination and foreign policy nous. His roles in the Odi massacre, several states of emergency, and several intra-party issues, such as in Anambra and Ekiti, also saw him push the limits of his powers as president and party leader.

History is full of intriguing ‘what ifs’. One of the most consequential for PDP concerns an oft-cited rumour that Atiku Abubakar, an influential vice-president, once had the leverage to challenge Obasanjo for the party ticket in 2003, leading the president to beg his deputy to enjoy a second term. What followed was a dramatic breakdown in relations between the two men, leading to Obasanjo hounding Atiku out of the party and nearly out of the vice presidency and the 2007 elections.

A Term too far?

A lot has been made of PDP’s inflection point, the exact moment things started going down. And while some will argue about later issues concerning presidential nominee choices in 2015 and 2023, there is a case to be made about 2007. The party had just beaten forces that sought to give a powerful president a third term. PDP’s stature was such that, if it were truly a party move, the constitution could have been changed. This showed the power of officials to check the ambitions of a dominating leader. The right move would have been to consolidate party primacy by further ensuring its control over the nominating process for its next presidential flagbearer. This was key because, again, given PDP’s power, this would likely be the next president.

Instead, Obasanjo fought back and regained control. By most accounts, he determined the Umaru Yar’Adua-Goodluck Jonathan ticket, utilising the financial crimes watchdog to disqualify most of the other candidates. He also overruled the choice of Kaduna Governor Ahmed Makarfi (1999 – 2007), who by several accounts was the preference of the party’s governors to become president, because he “was too smart and would not be easily controlled”. The party’s inability to ensure such a choice contrasts with that of APC governors when faced with a similar choice in 2023.

Yar’Adua would seek to distance himself from Obasanjo’s administration, with little overlap in terms of appointees. But his health challenges negated a proper fight for control of the party. This led to the growth of opposition parties, with increasing court-backed rulings that systematically weakened the PDP. Jonathan’s succession to the presidency after Yar’Adua’s death was another chance for older leaders to fight back through their influence over a ‘weak’ president.

Against the growing disillusionment of northern politicians who felt cheated out of their time in power, Jonathan sought and won a full term in office in 2011. But a subsidy rollout that faced considerable, coordinated civil society opposition sapped him of much of his good luck. He gained control of the party, especially after Obasanjo’s resignation as chair of the board of trustees, but this meant alienating strong party members. This included his ill-advised fight with Rotimi Amaechi, the influential chair of the governors’ forum, and his efforts to ensure a coronation at the primary in 2014.

The emergence of the APC, through the merger of opposition forces, provided the first real alternative to the PDP for many Nigerians, but even its success owed as much to its campaign prowess as to the PDP’s internal dysfunction. There was no clear ideological basis for the party, no think tank or policy pipeline to help communicate and strategise its project. It relied on favourable patronage networks and served as a convenient cover while different factions competed for control in their states and, later, nationally. This ‘hollowness’ meant that reform could achieve little. It also meant that the party drew no real loyalty, allowing pragmatic politicians to discard it when convenient. This would happen in 2015, en route to its defeat in the polls.

Ill-suited for opposition

After leaving power, it became clear that its control of the presidency masked a lot of its challenges. The party barely carried out an effective autopsy of its defeat and, within a year, was embroiled in a battle for control between Ali Modu Sheriff and Ahmed Makarfi, which further complicated its ability to hold the government to account. Obasanjo had resigned his membership and endorsed Buhari before the 2015 elections, which meant that, coupled with Jonathan’s seeming political retirement, the PDP had no former leader to rally around or help lead its transition.

This situation created a vacuum that its governors filled. The party became beholden to the interests of those who controlled any of the states in which it still commanded influence. But it also meant that these governors could easily sacrifice group success on the expedient altar of their personal ambitions. It meant that while they were content to let Atiku run for president in 2019, there were concerns over actions he took that were ‘independent’, such as picking Obi as his running mate. By the time preparations for 2023 came, it was impossible to attend to the ambitions and interests of all the governors who were term-limited.

The irony of PDP’s complicated relationship with Nigerians is that, by 2023, it was actually possible for the party to regain power. Fuelled by nostalgia and anger with the present, Nigerians appeared ready to punish the APC. Because Buhari had ‘taken the turn of the north’, conventional politics dictated that the presidency move south, but there was no clear consensus on how to proceed. Rivers Governor Nyesom Wike schemed to replace the national chair, Uche Secondus, with Iyorchia Ayu from the north, because of a convention requiring that the party chair and the presidential nominee come from different parts of the country. But the Enugu Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi committee, tasked with settling the zoning arrangement, reached a stalemate under pressure from prominent candidates and declined to make a decision.

It meant that by the time the party assembled in Abuja, there was little guidance on what to do and more space for aggrieved participants to point to when seeking recompense. To build on this, Obi and Kwankwaso had concluded that they could not compete within the party and sought tickets from other parties, taking their considerable influence elsewhere. By the time Aminu Tambuwal encouraged his delegates to back Atiku, basically handing him the convention, Wike had begun his claim that the South was being marginalised. This rupture would see him lead five governors against the party and into the hands of Tinubu and the APC.

The third time might be the curse for the PDP as the party appears unable to muster enough strength to compete in 2027. Its unofficial leader, Nyesom Wike, is a member of the APC government and has already endorsed Tinubu’s re-election bid. Erstwhile leaders, including Atiku, Obi and Tambuwal, have chosen the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as the select vehicle for contesting future elections. Its representatives have dwindled in the National Assembly, and it is down to two governors, leaving only the question of who will turn off the lights.

A lot has been made of the wave of defections, mostly in PDP’s former ‘strongholds’ of the South South and South East, and in states that it had carried confidently in previous elections. But there is a point: PDP did not have these strongholds; it had individuals who controlled them and could act through whatever party structure was in place. Because PDP became beholden to governor-godfathers more than other parties, it was most susceptible to defections, which were more impactful.

Lessons from a life

Nigerian politics is interesting enough that this ‘obituary’ could be premature, with a miracle very much in the offing. But while some of the issues that plagued the PDP are fairly existential, others are at the core of the limits of Nigerian political parties.

The PDP’s patronage network relied on individuals, trusting a governor or minister to handle party mobilisation and to ensure members felt the party in their territories. But this dependence meant ambitious or incompetent officeholders could damage structures necessary for contests. It also meant that, because governors were virtually in charge in their states, they could act as godfathers and impose successors. This also affected the party at the national level, since officeholders in key positions fund political parties, and regular membership dues are virtually non-existent. As such, the party became beholden to these individual interests and Wike, who governed one of the country’s wealthier states, was in a position to take control of the party.

Another prevalent issue was the clear lack of party discipline or a reward for member loyalty. Defection was convenient until it was not, and members who stayed were not rewarded. Similarly, anti-party activities only mattered if you were not a prominent party member—it is ironic that Wike and Oyo Governor Seyi Makinde, two men competing for party control, both worked actively against the party and its nominee in 2023. None has been sanctioned or even reprimanded. Longstanding leaders, such as Sule Lamido, were not allowed to contest for the party chair, showing how contributions and commitments have been easily discarded and experience ignored.

No Nigerian institution has successfully solved the problem of grassroots revenue collection at scale — but one comes close. The Pentecostal church, with clear targets for weekly offerings and revenue funnelled up the chain for management, deftly manages these issues. In fact, given the level of reverence and obeisance that politicians show elected officials, it might be a comparable model. But a long-term solution to the financing gap, especially when not in power and without access to state or ministerial allocations, is key for any party seeking to survive. Paired with effective policies that encourage party commitment and investment, members can feel better about devoting time and resources to the party.

The biggest lesson from PDP’s travails is that no one person should be bigger than the party. This fixation on individuals also made it susceptible to encroachment and infiltration from other forces. After all, if all you need to gain influence is close proximity to a governor or minister, then what’s stopping you from parlaying that for tangible stakes elsewhere? At some point, PDP’s control of the centre papered over the necessary separation of state between running a government and managing a party. By the time this was necessary, during a contested election against a better coordinated party, it was unable to rely on its heritage and longstanding support.

In retrospect, PDP had lost its states long before it lost its power. What it had were not party structures, but ‘political managers’. Ironically, its 2019 vice-presidential nominee provides the best proof of this claim. Peter Obi’s ability to get the presidential nomination of another party, with less than a year to the elections, and make it competitive was primarily down to the PDP’s hollow state structures. Most of the states Obi won were gained from PDP, which is more impressive considering he did not move with party members or recognised state leaders. Tellingly, the party’s inability to woo back its members does not show a structure prepared to be competitive in 2027. It confirms that the PDP, at least in this iteration, is dead and will need to be drastically overhauled if it is to perform a miracle and return to relevance, let alone power.

Under the sun and in the rain

Before it was closed due to the party’s infighting and court litigation, PDP’s headquarters at Wadata Plaza remained a hub of activity. Yet the perfect metaphor for the party is the uncompleted building that was meant to house a training institute and think tank when it was the ruling party. That building in Abuja still has the PDP sign above it, but despite producing three presidents and winning four elections, it is unlikely to be completed.

This is the perfect, yet puzzling, symbolism of a party with the potential to dominate, which instead succumbed under the weight of poor planning and discipline. And while it is possible that it was always fated to follow the lifecycle of a Nigerian ruling party, it was also in a unique position to buck the trend.

In consecutive elections since it left power, the PDP was in a position to leverage national frustration against the government and a growing nostalgia for its years in control. Its failure is a warning to other parties, especially its successor as the ruling party, but it should also prompt reflection on the institution of political parties in Nigeria.

In the event that this ‘obituary’ proves premature, a PDP death is not just a casualty for those involved, but for the idea of sustained political competition in Nigeria.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Kunle Adewumi, Temitayo Akinyemi, ChiAmaka Dike and Hillary Essien

APC will mark 12 years in power at the next election, and it will take a brave person to bet against it going at least four more. However, despite difficult economic and security situations, its ‘inevitability’ has been confirmed not through mass support for the government, but through a series of well-laid defections. This is not a new template or pattern: Nigeria’s dominant parties expand through opposition defection, bloat from internal competition, then break up when mega-mergers exploit divisions. If APC is trying to predict its future, it might be best placed to look to the past and the party it replaced.

Three-stage mushrooming cycle

Since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999, its politics has exhibited a predictable three-stage pattern. First, a ruling party consolidates power by eventually absorbing the opposition elite seeking access to federal resources. This often follows a sense of resignation about the prospects of electoral victory.

Second, opposition parties, which are usually strong in one or two zones, go through cycles of trying to merge and form a consolidated opposition to counter the ruling party. This goes through one or two failed attempts before a possible consensus is reached.

Third, this opposition is bolstered by disillusioned elements within the ruling party, as too many factions compete for diminishing patronage, leaving it vulnerable to defeat. There is academic research on how dominant parties in competitive politics consolidate control through appointments, funding, and access to state resources. In Nigeria, the patronage structure means this control is personalised, rather than institutional, flowing through personal loyalty arrangements rather than party structures. PDP fits this pathway.

Opposition parties were often influential only in specific geopolitical zones, and their governors, seeking the cover of federal power, defected to the PDP. Questions around zoning—especially when southern Christian Goodluck Jonathan succeeded northern Muslim Umaru Yar’Adua, who hadn’t completed his term in office, led to claims that the north was being ‘cheated’. Jonathan ran for re-election despite the clamour that it should be a northerner in office, and ambitious party opponents defected to join the successful merger of opposition parties. This led to PDP’s defeat and APC’s ascendancy.

APC is now at risk of the same fate. It relied on the cult of personality around Buhari, which helped it manage some organisational tensions and missteps, including allocation of key roles in government after Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara outmanoeuvred the party’s picks to lead the National Assembly. It was just about able to afford losing Saraki, Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal, and Kano Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, who all contested the PDP presidential nomination, because it remained strong in its northern strongholds.

In the lead-up to the 2023 elections, the PDP governors of Cross River, Ebonyi, and Zamfara moved to the APC, building the momentum it needed to stave off a difficult transition as it prepared to field its second-ever presidential nominee. During the elections, it was even helped by five PDP governors who openly defied their party and supported Tinubu’s election bid. Research on party financing shows that opposition parties are more competitive when they have independent access to funding, with the alternative being a ruling party with sole access to state revenue. This adds to the value that Nigerian governors, with their access to state funds, are uniquely positioned to provide.

After electing a second president under the party’s banner, it has gained more governors through defections and is now facing intense internal competition. Today’s APC includes factions that are at odds with each other: Tinubu loyalists, which include former Action Congress members; Buhari loyalists, which include former Congress for Progressive Change members that have no uniting leader; former PDP members who have and continue to join the party; and new figures moving into politics and hoping to be competitive. There are only so many elective offices and appointments that a president and party can use to manage differing ambitions.

The Mechanics of Defection

In 2025, six governors defected from the PDP, with five joining the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and one joining Accord. This year has already started with three formalising similar moves to APC, two more from PDP and the sole New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) governor in Kano. Except for Bayelsa, all are first-term governors expected to seek re-election. Except for Rivers, all are from states that opposition presidential candidates won in the 2023 elections. On 9 March 2026, Zamfara Governor Dauda Lawal defected to the APC, which now controls 31 states. As of early 2026, no other party in Nigerian history has been as dominant or impervious.

While PDP’s gradual erosion was planned from the then-ACN’s grip on the South West and the strong ANPP presence in the North East and North West, there is barely any opposition ‘stronghold’ for such parties to assail APC from. Of the seven non-APC states, there are two in the South West (Osun, Oyo), two in the South East (Abia, Anambra), two in the North East (Adamawa and Bauchi) and one in the North West (Zamfara), with three governors – Adamawa, Bauchi, and Oyo – leaving office next year. The prospect of an even stronger ruling party, with elite consensus around a likely Tinubu re-election, should make good reading for any APC member.

APC now controls more states than any party has at any point in the Fourth Republic. The current wave of defections recalls the pre-2015 realignments, though its long-term consequences remain uncertain. It is distinct, however, because many of the states affected were long considered PDP states, having produced successive governors from the party. That these governors have decided to pitch their tents elsewhere speaks to the seeming unassailable strength of the APC as a ruling party.

Ahead of the 2003 elections, Anambra and Borno Governors Chinwoke Mbadinju and Mala Kachalla carried out the first defections in the Fourth Republic, largely citing opposition from party leaders and godfathers to their re-election. However, recent governors have tried to explain their reasons beyond just fighting for their political survival. Some defections, especially in Rivers, are still squarely in that camp. But others, such as Governors Peter Mbah (Enugu) and Abba Yusuf (Kano), were strong enough to win re-election, but they defected to further ‘align their states with a strong centre’.

Most governors have cited infighting in the PDP as a major reason, while also expressing support for President Tinubu’s decision to push ahead with subsidy removal, harmonised exchange rates and tax reform proposals. It surely helps that such moves have resulted in the highest financial allocations to states in Nigerian history, which they are the prime beneficiaries of.

They have also made careful efforts to engage stakeholders and move with a large retinue of aides and appointees to secure a foothold in the new party. This is not to cater to the electorate, but to ensure they are well-positioned for internal party contests. Most governors, such as Delta and Enugu, were careful to move alongside predecessors and key party stalwarts who had largely become disillusioned by the lack of effective coordination at the national level. It meant even in states where the party was still naturally strong, the impact of the national schism discouraged loyalty.

This system is also bolstered by Nigeria’s federal structure, where a defecting governor’s influence over appointments and revenue control can flip a state overnight. Most states remain fiscally dependent and rely heavily on federal resources and projects, with a few exceptions, such as oil-producing states or those with historic relevance, such as Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre. As a result, politicians often try to force compliant, loyal successors to ensure they can retain some influence, which usually means there is either a rebellious governor or one affected by their godfather’s political fortunes when a defection occurs.

In a strong democracy, the biggest deterrent against defection would be voters being put off by such moves. But while this does happen in Nigeria, it takes different forms depending on the nature of the contest. Victor Agboga’s work has highlighted that most legislators who defected did so to the opposition, often to run when they were likely to lose party primaries. And, in most cases, they often performed worse than non-switchers. Interestingly, most governors who defect do so to the ruling party. Because governorship positions have largely been won by the APC and the PDP, the effect has been more rewarding. It explains why governors are often not as worried about going back to voters even after defecting.

As dominant parties bloat, they become a coalition of incompatible factions rather than coherent structures. Each new wave of elite defectors moves in numbers to help ensure influence in the new party, aiming to prove their utility instantly in wider contests. They will inevitably make friends and enemies as they navigate party candidates, in the hope of currying favour for future moves. If this move succeeds, their risk is rewarded, and their political acumen is praised. But if they back the wrong horse or fall even further behind peers, they are questioned by allies and followers. Politicians can quickly find their influence wasted if they are unable to deliver instant value for the move, and there are only so many bodies you can hire for a defection rally.

Likewise, when a presidential administration changes, old beneficiaries of the patronage system might feel shut out and consider contesting the party or even leaving it altogether. Several ministers and key aides of former President Buhari have since left the party and have become critics of the Tinubu administration.

The Implications for the current ruling party

APC’s ability to consolidate strong party administrators has been key in keeping most members in line. It has also ensured that governors joining the party are aware of the established hierarchy and their place within it. Mostly, it has also benefited from a fractured opposition. PDP is now a factional party, embroiled in legal battles over its actual leaders. The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has received 2023 runners-up Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, as well as some Buhari ministers, but because it is led and populated by many established politicians with some issue or the other, it struggles to present a clear break from the past—made even clearer when David Mark, its national chair, is a three-term senate president and Rauf Aregbesola, the national secretary, was a Tinubu commissioner, and former APC Osun governor and minister under Buhari. How different can ADC be if many of the same figures from the past are now claiming they can lead Nigeria differently?

Yet if the cycle holds, APC is approaching its peak and will soon have to reconcile with the multiple ambitions of its large, fractious membership. In states where governors have defected to APC, former governorship nominees and party stalwarts have had to reconcile with the new state leadership, which has impacted their ambitions. After 2027, when many become term-limited, the party will have to find a way to handle transitions and keep its ambitious membership in line.

At some point, those within the party who expected to be attended to after ‘surviving’ the Buhari era will wonder why they have not fared any better under Tinubu. And while his likely re-election may be driven by the lack of feasible alternatives with sufficient elite support, the real drama will come when he and the party have to reconcile on who succeeds him in 2031. The many ambitious politicians seeking to move up might see other parties as viable options, and, leading their blocs, they could then merge with other opposition forces, mirroring the APC’s 2013-2015 breakthrough and presenting yet another ruling party.

Northern leaders, who will expect the presidency to move up, will weigh their options, and some might fancy their chances on other platforms. The party will also have to consider which ‘wing’ will produce the next president, since both major figures behind its merger would have finished serving their terms.

Party management was notably different under Buhari, who has been widely described as aloof in this regard, and Tinubu, who has been more hands-on and active. Yet, his firm grip over party structures, evident for years in Lagos politics, was largely absent under the Buhari administration. It is therefore possible that a post-Tinubu APC may struggle to retain the same internal cohesion, even if its strongest competition remains itself.

Vice President Kashim Shettima and National Security Advisor Nuhu Ribadu have been frequently cited in political commentary as likely successors, though no formal succession framework has emerged. The absence of a definite heir apparent leaves room for others to step forward. Likewise, Tinubu’s loyal acolytes from the south will have seen how Buhari’s team was largely chased out and will try to ensure an uncertain future does not affect their prospects.

The longer Nigeria’s democratic practice endures, and the more its political class grows, the less likely it is that someone with the reach and influence of a Tinubu will emerge. And then APC will face its true test: how will it survive Nigeria’s climate, notorious for empowering individuals, over well-structured and well-run parties? It has thrived on the back of two of the country’s best-known politicians, who became president, making it easier for followers to unite around, at least because of electoral prospects. What happens when the party does not have that option?’

The Consequences for Nigeria’s Democracy

This cycling does not provide much optimism about the quality of democracy. If Nigeria’s democratic progress is simply new parties prioritising appointments and resources over service delivery, then voters will never face genuine policy alternatives. Instead, Nigeria’s mushrooming cycle reflects politicians simply seeking power through interchangeable party vehicles.

There might not be a supply, but there is definitely demand. The number of ‘third-party’ candidates who won elections in 2023, and buttressed by Obi’s strong performance in the presidential election without an established party base, shows that Nigerians can break the duopoly and engage with other parties. Voters might want to punish defectors, but party structures and the absence of independent candidacies often leave them unable to do so.

Most times, these efforts are driven by proposals for electoral reform. The idea is that with democratised access to funding, followership, and factions, outsiders and underrepresented groups might feel confident about contesting, especially younger politicians who will fight to avoid ‘their turn’ slipping away. Sadly, without reform actually addressing how parties assume, retain, and lose power, it merely reinforces the pattern: today’s dominant party becomes tomorrow’s hollow opposition, ready to be defeated by the next mega-merger that presents itself as a vessel of hope with the same recycled elite.

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Written by: Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

Edited by: Temitayo Akinyemi, ChiAmaka Dike and Hillary Essien

def:

noun

something that leads or indicates a trend.

Hello, and welcome to The Bellwether.

Before diving into what this is, it’s important to start with a confession.

For the longest time, despite it being recommended reading in different classes and copies dotting the shelves of school libraries, I had not read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I always had the reputation of being a wide reader, a trait my parents built by first forcing and then feeding me newspapers and magazines at a young age, so people naturally assumed I had read one of the most important and significant pieces of African literature (at least for English or Nigerian readers). I did not discourage them from holding on to these ideas, and I continued to look for morsels and hot takes on this most important of books. I watched the play twice as a student, found the dramatisation on YouTube interesting, and deftly managed conversations when they came up.

At some point in university, I read Peter Ekeh’s ‘Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa’. It is regarded as one of the most cited and well-read political science pieces on Africa. The piece argues that colonialism created a distinct political structure in Africa from that in the West. Here, there were two publics – the primordial public, which was governed by kinship, ethnicity and morality, and the civic public, which was the foreign, extractive and colonial imposed state. Africans, he argued, were more attuned and loyal to the primordial public, which is why there was often encouragement to take from the civic public and move to the primordial public that we are more familiar with. It helped his explanation of corruption and ethnic nepotism because the civic state did not acquire legitimacy, and people were more familiar with their ethnic bonds. In short, Ekeh seeks to explain the supposed ‘dysfunction’ that affected African states’ development and shows that it was a rational response to the colonial legacy.

Then I read Things Fall Apart.

Okonkwo is one of the most legendary characters in Nigerian literature because he embodies the tension between roots in culture and tradition and the struggle with an evolving, modernising world. Achebe is masterful at presenting an ‘everyman’ who becomes ‘yesterdayman’, someone who is venerated for his skills and prowess at all things manhood, who is faced with the fast-paced influence of Christianity and the demystification of culture and tradition. Okonkwo’s story is a path, an option for society, but it appears to be a relentless tussle between simple understanding and deep engagement. He chooses one side, for better or worse. But, decades on, we don’t have the luxury of a choice—we have to navigate an ongoing and uneasy balance.

I needed Ekeh to understand Achebe. I needed to get an idea of this binary beyond literature to see both the practical application and the complementary parts that might not have fit into a fiction piece. To see culture and modernity clash, to see the colonial legacy, and to see how that application still plays out today.

Some might have reached this conclusion or path in other ways. Many, probably smarter, did not need this unnecessary detour. That detour is, in a sense, the argument for what follows. In an era where calculated misinformation spreads faster than context, and where debates are shaped by the loudest rather than the most informed voices, there is a need for platforms that do what Ekeh did for me: ground the conversation in the structural context that makes it legible — whether that context comes from a political science text, music lyrics, or a social media trend.

Most knowledge production platforms fight to break the news, but fewer still synthesise it with the necessary background that helps a reader make sense of why yesterday informs today and what that means for tomorrow.

For us, The Bellwether is a couple of different things. First and foremost, it is an aspiration. The word means something that leads or indicates a trend. We hope to spotlight ambitious ideas, daring debates, and necessary conversations that eventually prove prescient and telling in how we engage with Nigerian analysis. It is also a bet that there is a willing public out there looking for depth and rigour over noise and pace. It is a belief that taking the long way, or, as I prefer to call it, the more scenic route, can help people better understand and engage with the key issues that will shape our times. It is a labour of love that seeks to challenge the notion that the Nigerian, and in time African, citizenry is uninterested, apathetic, or simply reactive to the workings of the state.

For us to succeed, The Bellwether will do two things.

One, we will write pieces that can be cited in days and decades to come. Not hot takes, but work grounded in enough rigour and detail that it holds up when the news cycle has moved on. We will platform diverse perspectives and guide conversations toward policy rather than noise. Two, we will challenge how Nigerians engage with the electoral process. Presidents should have to debate in order to earn our votes. Party manifestos should be dissected, not merely published. We will build this through projects and collaborations with like-minded institutions that share a vision of a more informed civic public (we love a callback).

We invite you on a journey today to challenge the more negative stereotypes of our current political environment. This is expressly important because it shapes lives, whether or not we engage. We also seek to show the politics in everything, because it is too important to ignore.

Nigerians are a political people. It is seen in Big Brother Naija, where voters continue to form tribes, herded by campaign handlers to ensure that a housemate emerges as the winner in the country's most uncontroversial and widely accepted democratic process. The absence of any part of the country from the Super Eagles’ starting XI goes unnoticed — unless the team is unsuccessful. It is telling in how particular conversations or public culture discourse, ranging from gender rights in the north or liberal moralism in the south, are segregated and focused on different parts of the country. And when protests erupt, they are framed through the lens of where they are based and where the sitting president is from, rather than a clear conversation about how the state and society are at odds. If there is to be a country, there needs to be dialogue – and the metaphorical handshake across the Niger must take place not just as a matter of political expedience, but as an insistence of mental engagement.

There is another reason why The Bellwether will be important. As a new generation of Nigerians, increasingly divided between the diaspora and geographical home, there is a need for a platform to engage in political discourse with the rigour and diverse contexts required. In the past, many publications catered to specific constituencies – either across geography, class, or ideology. It is the position of The Bellwether that we will, and if we must fail, will relentlessly keep striving to present a fair and honest account of the Nigeria that exists today — and a hopeful record of the Nigeria that can be, tomorrow.

For now, we will present one essay for your consideration every week. We will leave comments on and engage with posts respectfully and clearly. We hope to revisit this in a couple of months and see where we go from there.

We are writers and readers, dreamers and doers, and — honestly — we are scared. Imposter syndrome has delayed this project for longer than it should have. But that dread cannot compete with the fierce urgency of now. We want to build a community of readers, citizens and writers who will take this bell, ring it and make it their own.

In our own small way, we are doing our part to ensure the centre does hold, and things don’t fall apart.

Afolabi Adekaiyaoja

For The Bellwether.