Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Chudi Okoye, PhD., is a contributor to USAfricaLIVE.com
I think that Nigeria is sliding into a Hobbesian state and the major opposition parties face a Hobson’s choice: remain fragmented and ineffectual, or adopt ‘cooperative strategies’ involving an outright merger or formal electoral alliance, to wrest power from a fumbling but formidable ruling APC party.
Barely 22 months after the controversial April 16, 2011 presidential election in which Goodluck Jonathan was declared winner, and about 13 months after the Supreme Court affirmed the victory of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate by dismissing a petition filed by the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) which had challenged the result, three of the 19-odd opposition parties that contested but lost the election – CPC, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), and All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), along with breakaway factions of PDP and All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), announced that they had formed a new political party known as All Progressives Congress (APC).
The new party was formed on February 6, 2023, following several months of negotiation, implying that an opposition party merger had been mooted much earlier, probably soon after the devastating apex court ruling over a year before.
Leaders of the new party stated quite clearly that they merged because it had become more urgent to take power from a blundering PDP, the ruling party which had “won” all previous four presidential elections in the 4th Republic, and that a formidable party platform was needed to pull this off.
The creation of APC was an incredible feat of political engineering; the more so because of its parsimony. The architects did not, it seems, invite too many of the extant opposition parties to participate in the project; just the handful needed to create a winning coalition. It was text-book precision: exactly as prescribed by the late American political theorist, William H. Riker, who had died 20 years earlier in 1993 but was noted for his application of math and game theory to political science. In his groundbreaking 1962 work, The Theory of Political Coalitions, Riker invoked a “size principle” and suggested that rational political actors would seek to form only “minimum winning coalitions;” in other words, that rational “participants create coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger.” This appears to have been exactly what the architects of APC did.
In line with its bold (or bald?) ambition, in the very next presidential election held on 28 March 2015, about two years after its formation, the new party, APC, swept PDP from power. The 2015 election was not without the usual controversies attending Nigerian elections. But APC’s accession was an incredible feat, a historic defeat of a national ruling party in Nigeria. It was all the more remarkable because the new party had won with 53.96% of the votes, a 14-point swing from the 39.81% secured by its three main formative parties in the previous, 2011 election.
It is important to recall this history to juxtapose it against what looks to be confusing and incoherent moves by the PDP and other opposition parties towards evolving a cooperative strategy, after incurring an avoidable loss in the 25 February 2023 presidential election, largely due to their own error of strategic fragmentation. It is coming up to 10 months since that election, though not quite two moons since the Supreme Court ruling on the election. But the opposition parties appear to be at sea as to what to do in preparation for the next presidential election.
The opposition parties are still probably trying to shake off the loss, which must be particularly bitter because of the controversies surrounding the management of the election and the judicial rulings that affirmed APC’s victory. It has to be especially galling to be deemed to have lost to a failing party that fielded a fantastically flawed candidate, Bola Tinubu. Above all, it must really hurt to consider that the main opposition parties had in fact secured a combined share of the votes enough to have comfortably defeated the ruling party.
To state it as starkly as we can, if we reduced the cardinality, or the competitive set, in the 25 February 2023 election to a matrix of three players – (1) the ruling party, (2) the three major opposition parties: PDP, the Labour Party (LP) and the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP); and (3) all other parties, we can state, based on the official results, that the vast majority of those who went to the polls in fact voted against the ruling party; only that misguided fragmentation dissipated the opposition payoffs (to use game theory language) and thus saved the ruling party from being voted out. APC managed only a miniscule 36.61% of the votes, compared to the 60.7% won by the main opposition party but frittered away due to platform fragmentation.
This is not to deny the allegations of electoral fraud and judicial shenanigans leveled by the opposition against the ruling party, the electoral umpire and the courts. But the margin of the splintered opposition votes was high enough to have overcome the effects of such misconduct.
The 2023 election outcome might be disappointing, but it is still promising for the main opposition parties in terms of the next presidential election. The results show that if the opposition parties can manage to prevent a severe erosion of support, they might have a better chance than did the formations that merged to become APC. Their 60.7% vote tally in 2023 is nearly 21 percentage points higher than the combined votes secured in 2011 by the parties that eventually combined to form the APC. This presents a compelling logic for a merger of today’s major opposition parties, and therefore for the parties to explore this option.
All the more reason, then, to marvel at the seeming confusion of the opposition parties about the next steps. Last week, news emerged that members of some opposition parties led by a PDP chieftain, former senator Dino Melaye, had met to commence dialogue on party cooperation, under the auspices of what they called the “Conference of Opposition Political Parties in Nigeria” (COPPIN). This followed an earlier statement by Atiku Abubakar, PDP’s flag-bearer in the February election, calling for a united opposition front against what he saw as an emerging one-party dictatorship under the ruling APC.
It is unclear at the moment how seriously to take the opposition’s moves. In October, when Atiku invited other major opposition figures to join his investigation of Tinubu’s US record, nothing came of it, perhaps because it wasn’t clear what Atiku wanted with his invitation. Later in November when Atiku called for the opposition parties to work together to prevent a creeping one-party dictatorship under APC, the Labour Party seemed initially keen on the idea, only to recant shortly after. This time, when Dino Melaye convened his conference last week, Labour sent a mid-ranking functionary; APGA sent some junior members; and other invited parties sent their apologies.
These apparent lurches notwithstanding, as I argued in a previous piece shortly after Atiku floated the idea, a main opposition concert – whatever form it takes: whether an outright merger or some form of electoral alliance – will be imperative to unseat the ruling APC in the coming presidential election.
Given the current impunity pervading the Nigerian political system, an opposition pushback could be an important step – but certainly not the only one – to demonstrate the ability of our democratic system for self-correction, and in this way stave off any yearning for non-democratic intervention.
At the press event after their meeting, the speakers, especially Melaye, indicated that the goal of COPPIN was not party merger but to promote electoral and judicial reforms needed to save Nigerian democracy. But therein lies the rub. With the current configuration of the National Assembly, it is uncertain what would be the legislative prospects for any extensive reforms such as it seems the opposition parties are contemplating.
Certainly at the moment, despite all appearances and the alarmist squawking, APC does not completely dominate the legislature: the party controls 49% of House of Representatives seats (176 of 360) and 54% of Senate seats (59 of 109). This is not an unusual level of legislative control in democracies, though some might worry that the party also controls 60% of state assembly seats (598 of 991) and over 55% of the governorships (20 of 36). In the UK parliament, for instance, the ruling Conservative Party controls 54% of seats in the House of Commons (350 of 650), and 34% of seats in the House of Lords (269 of the current 784). In any case, APC is no more dominant today than PDP had been when it bestrode Nigeria like a Colossus, bragging that it would rule the country for at least 60 years. And yet the party was defeated on first challenge by a merged opposition front.
While there isn’t, strictly speaking, a reality of one-party dominance in Nigeria, an APC that hasn’t been shy of playing dirty politics should be taken to be in a position, purely as a matter of self-preservation, to water down or even filibuster any legislative proposal that might remotely favor the opposition. It would not be impossible to push through such proposals, but it would be harder for a fragmented opposition.
This then is the second compelling reason (in addition to the 2023 presidential election vote tally discussed above) for an opposition concert, an intentional “cooperative strategy,” as game theory would recommend.
Ultimately, even if significant electoral and judicial reforms are successfully legislated, for there to be any meaningful electoral impact, there’ll have to be some consolidation of the major opposition parties. If not, the logic of fragmentation that impaired opposition chances in the February 2023 election will persist into 2027 and probably beyond.
It is something of an immutable law of politics that you win elections through political alliances and mass mobilization. You don’t win elections by dissipating your forces. APC understood that, hence the alliance that brought the party into being in 2013, which enabled it to defeat the then-ruling party, PDP. It beats me why the extant opposition parties thought they could defy the law of political gravity in 2023, and why they persist in thinking so even now.
I understand that it may be early days yet, and that there’ll have to be several confidence building steps before the opposition parties can escalate to a merger or some form of integrative alliance. But I would argue that the earlier they began to explore the options the better.
Certainly President Tinubu, though imbued with incumbency advantages, will have acute vulnerabilities in 2027. He is running a listless administration that’s also proving to be financially undisciplined and insensitive about the social condition. If, as some expect, this administration fails to turn the economy around, alleviate the current suffering or improve security by the time of the next presidential election, and if we compound these with Tinubu’s reputational baggage lingering from the last election which will surely be re-litigated in the next, then I believe he will be vulnerable.
On the other hand, however, the major opposition parties have a lot of issues to work at, if they engage, to be able to develop a cooperative strategy for the next election. These issues, centering in part on personal ambitions and geopolitical concerns, had led to PDP fragmentation towards the last election. They became magnified in the course of the campaigns and have since been compounded by other issues causing further ruptures within the previously splintered platforms. Some of these post-election issues will create room for opportunistic incursion by the ruling party which will seek to denude the opposition’s support base. There are already reports of high-level overtures and actual defections.
The opposition parties will need a long lead-time to work through all these complex dynamics; the better the earlier, therefore, that they engage in serious talks.
Nigeria isn’t in imminent danger of becoming a one-party state. But under APC rule the country is sliding into a Hobbesian state. A Hobson’s choice thus faces the major opposition parties demanding cooperation. It is a political imperative to save Nigerian democracy.
