News Analysis: Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
Africa’s latest showcase for world democracy is still unfolding. In yet another landmark of African democracy farce, Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazaville has just been re-elected for yet another term. At age 82, the official result of the just-concluded presidential election indicated that Nguesso defeated everybody else by scoring 94.8% of the votes. He has been in office for nearly 40 years. Other contestants and parties boycotted the election. Nguesso won against himself. His party vied and defeated itself. His incumbent government announced the result. The other “would have been” contestants are now either in hiding or have fled abroad. Something not too far from this atrocity was recently committed in Uganda not long ago. The musician main opposition candidate, the popular Bobby Wine, has since fled abroad after receiving the flogging of his life from Museveni’s goons. So much for progress in African democracy.
An unparalled precedent is in preparation as Nigerians prepare for a general election in January 2027. The jury is out in the political whirlwind of the season. For the dwindling body of believers in Nigeria’s shoddy democracy, we are nine months away from a general election. Nigerians will be called out once again to queue up in the ritual of vote casting. Thereafter, an outcome will be expected as to who gets to man this rusty ship for another four years.
The landscape for what is coming is taking shape. Virtually only one party, the ruling APC, is gathering steam on a massive scale. The conceptual opposition is still in untidy rehearsal. Some opposition leading lights have been attacked by gunmen at campaign rehearsals. Governors from the ruling party have warned opposition leaders not to come visiting or campaigning in their states. Some opposition enthusiasts have been arrested for reasons ostensibly not far from political rascality. In a land where violent insecurity is part of the norm, the possibility that all the indices of violence will be deployed to political ends is clear and present. Some people are looking forward to the election. But even far more are afraid of the dangers to life and limbs that lie ahead.
An election presupposes a popular choice limited by party choice. A multiparty democracy presupposes an organized contest among registered parties for the people’s party and candidate preference at the polls. At the last check, there were close to 80 registered parties in INEC’s register. I understand INEC pays people for doing nothing other than registering a party. Anyone who tries to remember the names and symbols of our motley of parties may end up in the psychiatric hospital in Yaba.
In reality, there are in today’s Nigeria only two and half parties. There is the All Mighty APC. There is the fledgling opposition ADC. And there are bits and pieces of a tottering what used to be PDP. In excess of 78 other parties are in INEC’s register. It is of course, in the interest of Mr. Tinubu and the ruling APC to have INEC go through the motion of producing ballots for all the many phantom parties if only to reinforce the appearance of a competitive election among numerous parties.
In most real serious democracies, an election with more than three parties is often a disorderly joke. An endless buffet in the range of political parties diminishes the power of choice in democratic elections. A democratic election is not a grocery shop or supermarket of contending parties. In reality, democratic choice often limits the factor of choice to two- a binary choice in which the public mind is challenged to make a simple choice between two things that are contrasting opposites. We are often challenged to choose one of two options.
In America, you choose between the Democrats and the Republicans in perpetuity. They deliberately add an Independent Candidate for comic relief of those who deliberately reject the two conventional parties and their dueling mascots. In the United Kingdom, you mostly choose between Labour and the Tory Conservative Party. Periodically, a third party, the Liberal Democrats of rebels, those bored of the monotony of Tories and Labour cobble something together to make parliament a bit more of an exciting bazaar floor. Elsewhere, most times in Africa, the ruling party funds other parties in order to create an illusion of a multi-party democracy. The sponsored party entrepreneurs get paid off and they disappear into the crowd.
The strength of a binary choice between two is inbuilt in the nature of human psychology. A choice between two options appeals to most populations. It is either black or white, either something or nothing. People have no time to decipher from among a motley of grey party options, their confusing symbols and political jesters parading as candidates and mascots. In any case, a common problem that has eighty different possible solutions is a nightmarish joke.
On the other hand, a one-party system is easier on choice but a joke on democracy. Devoid of multiple parties or limited to only one party, choice diminishes except among individuals within the lone party. It becomes a choice among individuals wearing exactly the same apron in an overcrowded kitchen.
Forget a single party with any number of contestants singing one monotonous song as in China. Limit the contest to one party and one candidate. You get a periodic referendum limited to an endorsement or rejection of the programmes and performance of just one hegemonic ruler. That may be where Nigeria is headed in January 2027. We may be heading for an election ritual that challenges Nigerians to choose between the APC and itself and between President Tinubu and candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu!
Let us examine the mechanics here at home. In reality, what may happen in January 2027 may end up less than an election. Both the PDP and the ADC may remain in crisis or endless litigations till the day of the proposed election while only the APC approaches the 2027 election as a coherent party. Its singular achievement is its ability to retain its unity, grow its ranks and muster the external aggression to destabilize its adversaries while appearing invincible. It is part of the political dare-devilry of Tinubu and his fellow travelers that they are entering the 2027 election far stronger than they were in 2023.
AS we speak, the APC has gobbled up nearly all state governors, nearly all Senators and over two thirds of the membership of the House of Representatives. Decampment into the APC has become a national bazaar and political fashion. Most of the decampees are not even waiting to be invited into the APC. They are inviting themselves to a free for all buffet and helping themselves to as close to the high table as they can. There is neither strategy nor reason. It is just a stampede at the entrance into a rowdy festival. The presumption is that once you are in the APC, you are automatically on the victory and gravy train. People forget that nearly all the Wike G5 governors who contested the senate elections almost lost woefully and have just managed to gate-crash into Tinubu’s incoherent list of ambassadorial nominees.
If the present APC-dominated party landscape remains fundamentally unchanged, we may end up with a referendum rather than a general election. An election contested virtually by mostly one party may end up as a nationwide choice of one party from itself. The voter turnout may shrink to only those who support and want to vote for the APC.
In effect, the massive escape into the APC may in fact be a voter suppression manoevre perhaps unintended by Mr. Tinubu and his cohorts. The logic of mass psychology may just dictate to most voters that there is no point going out to vote since the outcome of the election is already predetermined. This unfortunate preconception. added to the general distrust of INEC and its electoral machinery may further depress further turnout. Let’s not even talk of the atmosphere of looming insecurity all over the country which is likely keep many voters at home.
Nonetheless, for as long as the other parties are on the ballot, the exercise will still be deemed an election of sorts. Yet the pro-APC vote may be such a landslide that the combined vote tally of all the other contending parties will be a mere fraction of the overall voter turnout. Tinubu’s victory would still be an electoral choice of sorts. The nation will seem to troop out to reaffirm the Tinubu/APC hegemony or popularity. Of course, the other parties will show up on the ballot but only to the extent that they will contest to lend legitimacy and an appearance of electoral contestation to the ritual of electioneering.
Yet we cannot blame Tinubu and the APC for the sorry plight of the other parties. It is not the fault of the APC that a much-touted opposition platform is yet to take roots. It is not Tinubu’s fault that the opposition cannot agree among themselves on basic issues as party leadership, party programme, basis of opposition and strategy for membership attraction. When the beginnings of the APC were hatched, it fed on the weaknesses of the then-ruling PDP. The PDP was meeting at Eagle Square while dissidents walked away and converged at the Yar’adua Centre for an inaugural meeting of what began as New PDP (NPDP). Thereafter, the processes that culminated in the emergence of the APC were unstoppable until the PDP was swept out of power.
Yet it remains part of the responsibility of the ruling party and the incumbent government to ensure that the nation remains a credible multi- party democracy. This obligation is a national obligation which runs against manoeuvres that undermine rival parties. A multi-party political architecture is part of the nation’s sovereign heritage.To this extent, the activities of agents of the Tinubu government and the APC to disintegrate the PDP and the Labour Party in particular must remain condemnable. While a ruling party has no duty to run rival parties and keep them alive in spite of their internal crises, the ruling party has no business investing resources and efforts to destabilize rival parties. In the plight that has befallen the Labour Party and the PDP respectively, Tinubu and the APC must take ultimate responsibility in spite of desperate efforts to shift the blame to the judiciary.
But come the 2027 general elections, the absence of an effective electoral contest by other parties will effectively convert 2027 into a referendum on the first four years of Nigeria under Tinubu’s watch. A foregone majority vote count would be interpreted by the ruling party as a mass endorsement of both the APC as a party and Tinubu as President. A majority vote for the APC in 2027 would amount to an endorsement of mass impoverishment, sustained hardship, high energy costs, inadequate healthcare, dilapidated infrastructure, declining education standards and chaotic foreign affairs. Above all, we will have tacitly endorsed the grab of national political power by a moneyed and state armed cabal.
The vocal civil society and opposition megaphones cannot then have an effective response to challenge the curious turn of events. In effect, a presumed multi-party democracy could end up delivering the electoral outcome of a one-party authoritarian polity.
As 2027 approaches, what was intended as a general election could end up as an unofficial referendum, a plebiscite on the policies and programmes of a typical African autocrat emperor using political jerrymandering and serial blackmail to purchase a dubious mandate. Nigeria’s democracy elephant may end up giving birth to a miserable authoritarian mouse.
