Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
- Onuma, a writer, cultural critic, and historian of Nigerian political thought, is a contributing analyst to USAfricaonline.com. He is the co-editor of Times, Thoughts and Ideas, a collection of Anya O. Anya’s papers and speeches. He is the author of the Combing the Dust series on Medium.
On Wednesday, a public holiday here in Nigeria, another heavy May rain came again at dusk, drumming on the rooftops across Lagos. Water rushed through gutters choked with the debris of a city that never rests, carrying accumulated dirt and dust into wherever it sees openings. It washes on, but the streets remain unclean. And it does nothing for the dread sitting in the stomach of every thinking citizen.
This should have be the loud season. Aspirants should be crisscrossing the country. Ward congresses should be filling the air with the raw, messy, magnificent noise of democracy. Instead, a strange quiet has settled in. It is not the calm of peace, nor the hush of people waiting their turn to speak at the ballot box. It is the silence of a morgue. With surgical care, the Nigerian political class has killed the primary election. What we are watching in this damp May of 2026 is not a republic warming up for a defining vote. It is the slow, deliberate murder of political choice — and the weapon is a word so reasonable, so soothing, that it should chill every democrat to the bone: consensus.
I have spent these past weeks driving, commuting and walking in and across neighbourhoods, listening in the buses, sitting in coffee shops and the food shacks. I did not hear arguments about who would make a better president or governor. I heard a tired, knowing murmur. The people already understand. The game was not rigged at the polling booth with thumb-printed ballots; it was rigged behind heavy curtains in Bourdillon, in the Villa, in caucus meetings where godfathers share the nation like a pot of soup. We have crossed a line so dangerous that historians may mark this as the year the Fourth Republic ate its own insides. The fierce, chaotic, genuinely contested primaries that once gave citizens at least a thin slice of participation have been cut clean out of the body politic. A new vocabulary has moved into the empty space — sterile, and quietly authoritarian. We no longer talk of contests; we talk of coronations. We no longer await primaries; we brace for confirmations. The word of the season, the velvet glove on the iron fist, is consensus.
To see the size of the heist, start with the law that made it possible. The Electoral Act of 2026 arrived wrapped in applause, sold to a tired public as the reform that would finally tame our money-soaked nomination chaos. Civil society clapped. Foreign partners nodded. Editorials welcomed a new dawn. But reading the fine print of Sections 84 to 88, I felt a trap close. The Act tore out the old scaffolding of indirect primaries and delegate conventions — a flawed system, yes, but one that at least created a wide marketplace of influence, where hundreds of delegates could now and then surprise the men who paid them. It left just two legal routes: direct primaries and consensus. On its face, that sounds fair.
A direct primary can include every party member; consensus suggests broad agreement. But the devil, as my grandmother liked to say, does not merely live in the details — he owns the whole estate. The real trap lay in what the law removed. It quietly deleted the safeguards that used to govern direct primaries: the required participation of all members, the compulsory ward-level vote, the firm timelines and oversight. By moving those rules out of hard law and into the soft, bendable internal guidelines of the parties themselves, lawmakers handed the party bosses a blank cheque signed in the people’s ink. The message was plain. The elite would pick the candidate behind closed doors and call it consensus; and if some stubborn aspirant refused to bow, the “direct primary” fallback would be run under rules the same elite wrote, refereed, and enforced. The political economist Liborous Oshoma, dissecting the wave of candidate imposition across the parties, called it what it is: a fundamental undermining of the democratic fabric of the nation. When the law itself becomes a tool of elite capture, the citizen is left holding nothing but the theatre of an election.
The irony cuts deepest inside the ruling All Progressives Congress. I remember the heat of the build-up to 2023. The APC primaries of 2022 were a brutal, gaudy, money-drenched spectacle of survival. Titans clashed in the open. Alliances snapped like dry twigs. At the June 2022 convention in Abuja, the whole country watched the then-chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, try to force a “consensus” candidate on the party — and watched the governors and delegates throw it back in his face. We saw Bola Ahmed Tinubu, feeling the machinery of the state turn against him, climb a stage in Abeokuta and deliver that raw, unscripted roar: “Emi lokan” — it is my turn. He spoke of his sacrifices, the party he had built, the betrayal of men he had mentored. It was crude. It was vulgar. It was chaotic. But it was a contest. There was a fight, and inside it, however bent by money, sat a sliver of democratic friction. Now turn to May 2026. The same man who once raged against an imposed consensus candidate has bolted that door behind him with the full weight of incumbency. The APC he leads has hardened from a quarrelsome coalition into a single echo chamber where disagreement reads as treason. Just weeks ago, Vice President Kashim Shettima casually submitted President Tinubu’s nomination forms for the next election — an act both routine and deeply telling, televised with the pomp of a state ceremony. No debate. No rival dared spend ₦50 million on a form to challenge a record that has, let us be blunt, presided over inflation stuck near 15%, a cost-of-living crisis that has turned staple food into luxury, and a currency still losing its sad dance with the dollar. No congress met to weigh three years of governance. It was the smooth, sanitised confirmation of a sitting emperor, sealed off from his own members — a coronation dressed as paperwork. And the question Oshoma’s point forces on us is unanswerable: when a party cannot bear difference inside its own ranks, how can it govern a nation of more than 200 million?
The disease has not stopped at the top. It has spread fast down the APC, swallowing the futures of millions of ordinary members. The party leadership — the national chairman, echoed by Information Minister Mohammed Idris — now pushes consensus to anoint governors and national officers, insisting with a straight face that it reflects “unity, discipline and shared commitment to national progress.” But what the government calls unity, the streets of Owerri, Kaduna, and Benin City call a hostage situation. In at least eleven states, governors have locked in consensus backing, shut out all rivals, and turned themselves into life-tenure rulers whose only real election is their next meeting with the president. And yet the resistance is not dead. In about ten states — among them the heavyweights of Lagos, Rivers, Oyo, and Kwara — governorship aspirants are openly rejecting these endorsements, questioning the imposed candidates and demanding real, direct primaries. Many of them poured a combined sum north of ₦5 billion into forms at brutal prices, and are now waking to a sickening truth: they financed their own disenfranchisement. They paid for a contest; the party took the money and locked the door. The anger is real. In Rivers, the scars of old internal wars stand as a warning of what happens when elites try to smother ambition. In Lagos, the managed consensus around the governor’s chosen heir is fraying, with whispers of an upset in the dark. I spoke with some of these aspirants. One, a businessman who sold assets to chase his dream, told me bitterly, over a glass of water in his Ikeja office: “They told us to buy forms, we bought them. They told us to wait for the primaries, we waited. Now they tell us a consensus has been reached, and our money is gone. This is not politics; this is armed robbery.” He is not wrong. The Nigerian political party has become our most successful Ponzi scheme, and the currency it steals is not only naira but hope.
You might hope the opposition would seize this gaping vacuum and offer something fresh, something to wake the exhausted citizen. You would be wrong. In Nigeria the opposition is often just the ruling party in waiting, reading from the same worn script of entitlement. The big opposition blocs — the warring factions of the Peoples Democratic Party, locked in endless court battles, and the African Democratic Congress, fighting to stay relevant — have also resolved, in quiet meetings that drew little coverage but carry huge weight, to field a consensus presidential candidate. Where the APC uses the brute force of incumbency, the opposition leans on the cash-soaked influence of its perpetual contenders — Atiku Abubakar looming largest — to skip the hard democratic work of finding new leadership. By defaulting to consensus, the PDP and ADC are telling Nigeria’s young people, its professionals, its bright would-be servants, that the opposition ticket is a closed shop, a private estate of old men who have been on the stage since the Second Republic. It is a brutal letdown. Citizens who survived 2023 and the economic beating that followed, who prayed the failures of this government would spark a real, competitive renewal on the other side, are instead handed the same stale candidates reheated from a decade ago. The opposition offers no choice — only a different flavour of elite consensus in a different colour of agbada. The deepest tragedy is this: when the APC says “consensus,” the PDP does not shout “primaries!” It whispers, “us too.”
The ADC offers the sharpest, saddest lesson. In a rare and widely praised move, it tried to run nationwide direct primaries across 8,809 wards to choose its presidential flag bearer. It was bold, almost reckless — an honest experiment in grassroots democracy. For a few bright weeks, members in far villages and city wards actually held ballots. The field included Atiku Abubakar, Rotimi Amaechi, and Mohammed Hayatu-Deen, and for all the usual advantages of fame and money, there was a genuine sense of taking part. Then the results came, and so did the grievances. Allegations of irregularities flew. Amaechi and Hayatu-Deen protested; their camps issued statements thick with disillusion. The leadership swore the process was clean, but the harm was done. The ADC proved something brutal: even the most sincere direct primary will be eaten alive by elite bargaining if the soil itself is poisoned. Within weeks, the opposition was drifting back to the consensus table, having learned exactly the wrong lesson — that primaries are messy, costly, and unpredictable, so consensus is safer. A *Guardian* editorial put it in words I have not been able to forget: Section 84(2) of the Electoral Act has become the most abused clause in our political history, a Trojan horse through which the party oligarchs marched in to tear down the last of internal accountability. That is not hyperbole. It is an autopsy.
So, where is this consensus coup taking us? Straight into a de facto one-party state, where elections are settled in billionaires’ boardrooms and godfathers’ living rooms months — sometimes years — before INEC prints a single ballot. When parties swap primaries for consensus, they are not just choosing a candidate; they are sending the voter a message of pure contempt: your vote in the general election is a rubber stamp on a decision your betters already made. Popular sovereignty becomes a cruel joke at the expense of the masses. Real democracy is messy by design. It is the friction of rival ideas, the clash of visions, the noise of a thousand voices in the square, and the sacred right of the weakest member in the smallest ward to vote for whom they please. Democracy adapts; it lets a society correct course, raise new leaders for new crises, renew itself through competition. But our political class, terrified of that friction and allergic to the surprise of free choice, has picked the rigid, brittle, suicidal road of exclusion. History is a graveyard of empires that chose order and unity over dissent and competition. From the court intrigues that hollowed out Byzantium to the politburo “elections” of the old Soviet Union, the ending never changes: when the circle of deciders shrinks to a tiny elite, the system stiffens, then shatters under its own deafness. The American educator Robert M. Hutchins warned that the death of democracy is rarely an ambush from the shadows; it is a slow starvation from apathy, indifference, and neglect. We are watching that starvation in real time.
These are not dry constitutional debates. The damage is already on the streets, in the form of a deep and frightening apathy. As Nigerians fight a cost-of-living crisis that has made a bag of rice a luxury, as they pay new “Band A” electricity tariffs for sixteen hours of daily darkness, as they drive expressways turned into hunting grounds for kidnappers and armed herdsmen, they look at politics and see nothing of themselves. They watch men raise and spend billions just to buy forms that lead to rigged consensus meetings, while the minimum wage cannot buy a family of four a decent meal. They watch the Vice President smilingly file an uncontested form as the naira slides and factories close. They hear consensus in Abuja, consensus in the state capitals, consensus everywhere — and they read it correctly as a conspiracy of silence against their suffering. Chinua Achebe wrote that the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. But what we face now is worse than failure. It is the deliberate dismantling of the one mechanism that might ever produce a better leader. Shut off the internal revolt, smother the primary challenge, and you have told the citizen: take what you are given, and be grateful. That is the language of serfdom in the borrowed robes of democracy.
The global picture is a chilling mirror. Around the world, scholars describe the rise of “competitive authoritarianism,” where the costumes of democracy — elections, parties, a free press — survive, but the field is tilted so far toward incumbents and cartels that the result is never in doubt. From Orbán’s Hungary to Putin’s Russia, the playbook repeats: capture the process, kill real contest inside the ruling party, co-opt or crush the opposition, then wave the “election” as proof of a mandate. Nigeria is sliding into that grey zone. President Tinubu himself, perhaps sensing the verdict of history, felt the need this year to deny publicly that the country is drifting toward one-party rule; he stressed the value of credible opposition and promised to defend democratic space. But words are cheap. The lived reality, logged by civil society and felt daily by millions, is that the room for internal dissent has all but vanished. When the APC fields an unopposed presidential ticket without a murmur, when eleven governors anoint their heirs in closed rooms, when the opposition answers by trying to do the same, the country is already a one-party-dominant state in everything but name. On this path, the next general election will not be a democratic act. It will be a national administrative formality — an expensive piece of theatre to legitimise the capture of the state by a self-renewing oligarchy. Nigerians, with the dark humour that keeps them sane, already call it “INEC’s coronation ceremony.” It is a joke that tastes of ash.
Even in this gloom, there are sparks worth naming and fanning. The aspirants in those ten states who are refusing consensus, threatening court action, rallying their supporters, demanding the direct primary the law promised — they are the last line of defence for the soul of our parties. In Lagos, the pushback against the governor’s chosen successor is led by young, accomplished aspirants who make an unanswerable point: a party that preaches competition in the marketplace cannot preach consensus in politics. In Rivers, old wounds are reopening as aspirants challenge the party and invoke the memory of 2023’s violence, warning that imposed candidates will only deepen the crisis. In Kwara, the “O to ge” movement — “enough is enough” — that once toppled a dynasty watches warily, its leaders reminding everyone that suppressed popular will has a way of exploding. These are not mere procedural fights. They are the last breaths of democratic life in a system being suffocated. As a veteran Premium Times reporter told me recently: “The consensus politics we are seeing is a ticking time bomb. You cannot keep millions of young, angry, unemployed people perpetually out of the decision-making loop and expect the peace to hold. They may be quiet now, but it is the quiet of gathering thunder.”
Then, from a quiet corner of the map, a fact surfaced — one so well reported, so widely confirmed, that it cannot be waved off as rumour or wishful spin. Daily Post Nigeria broke it under a plain headline: “Only successful aspirants in NDC primaries will pay nomination fees – Dickson.” NigerianEye, Vanguard, and P.M. News soon carried the same story. The Nigeria Democratic Congress, led by Senator Henry Seriake Dickson, has written primary rules that openly defy the way the political class does business.
The rules are simple. Everyone who bought the initial Expression of Interest form is automatically cleared to run. No one pays a nomination fee until they actually win their primary. Only the winners then report to the secretariat to complete their paperwork and pay. That is not a tweak. It rewrites the whole money transaction that now passes for an internal contest. I have read Dickson’s reported words several times, and what stays with me is how quietly radical the move is. In our system, the nomination form has become the single richest income stream for parties that long ago gave up on ideas. The NDC says something else: the fee is payment for a job, owed only when you have won the ticket. Not a tax on ambition. Not a lottery ticket sold to the desperate. It sounds modest. In this season, it feels close to revolutionary. A party is not a business, and it must stop behaving like one. Clear everyone who shows interest, charge nothing until victory, settle the paperwork only after members have spoken — at heart, this is an ethical stand. The party exists to serve its members, not to bleed them.
Trace it downstream and the effect is striking. Picture the familiar aspirant who already knows the machinery will never clear him, because a governor or a godfather has fixed the result and locked the ticket behind a backroom deal. Today he still has to pour a fortune — tens or hundreds of millions of naira — into a form, only to be quietly screened out by a committee whose real job is to weed out the un-anointed. Under the NDC rules, as Vanguard and NigerianEye describe them, he pays nothing beyond that first form. He runs. And if the odds hold, he walks away without the financial wound that usually follows defeat. The bitterness, the long court cases, the angry jump to a rival party just to recover sunk money — much of that is defused before it can start. A commentator on WhatsApp, named Ekene, put it sharply: “What we see today is a situation where political parties open Expression of Interest forms mainly for the purpose of generating massive funds from aspirants they already know may never stand a chance. That culture will continue to spell doom for the political system if it is not checked.” He is right. Selling forms has become the defining racket of our political elite — a confidence trick played on the hopeful. With one rule, Dickson’s party has checked it, disarmed the form, and handed a little dignity back to the simple act of wanting to serve.
Ekene takes it one step further, to a principle every serious party should adopt: refund the losers. If an aspirant runs a fair primary, gets a true shot at the members, and still loses, the party should have the decency to return a real share of what he spent — half, even. The effect would be hard to overstate. A beaten aspirant today carries three burdens at once: the sting of public rejection, the shame of being outplayed by insiders, and the plain ruin of money he may spend a career trying to earn back. So he leaves angry, and his next move is driven less by loyalty than by the need to recover his losses — sometimes into the opposition, sometimes as a quiet saboteur at home. A partial refund changes that math. It tells him his run mattered, that he was not simply drained and discarded, that the party still wants him. It gives him a reason to stay, fall in behind the winner, and wait for the next round. That is how parties are actually built: real competition, honest reconciliation, and fairness that reaches as far as a man’s bank account. The NDC rules offer a fragile glimpse of that future — one where the rage that usually shatters parties after primaries is cooled not by forced silence, but by loyalty freely given.
This is why the experiment is worth watching, and why civil society and the press should hold it up against the APC and the PDP until both are shamed into copying it. It quietly restores a truth we have nearly forgotten: a party exists to win elections, build a lasting structure, and carry the interests of ordinary people — not to chase a revenue target. The current model rots that purpose at the root. A party living on mass form sales to hopefuls it plans to disqualify has every reason to attract as many as it can, then discard them. It becomes an abattoir of ambition, turning hundreds of dreams into rivers of naira and leaving the wreckage by the road. Such a system rewards not skill or popularity or honesty, but cash. Only the very rich, or the godfather-funded, ever make it into the room. The NDC rule, which Daily Post anchors in Dickson’s own words, breaks the link between running and crippling payment, and opens a path for a different kind of candidate: the teacher with deep roots in her community, the loyal lawyer of modest means, the women’s leader whose network is wide even if her pockets are not. Ekene called it a template of transparency, fairness, and diligence, and so far the NDC treats it as working doctrine, not decoration. Whether the brutal pressures of presidential politics eventually drag it back to the old ways, no one can say. But the principle is sound, and it should now be demanded everywhere.
I have come to believe — and each season hardens the belief — that this dry, technical business of fees and payment timing is the very nerve centre of whether our democracy rots or revives. We wear ourselves out debating personalities and manifestos few candidates have read, while the plumbing of the whole process corrodes with money. The moment a party charges fifty or a hundred million naira for a presidential form, it has shut nearly the entire country out of the dream of leading. It narrows the pipeline to a small, intermarried elite who can pay the toll, and reduces the election to a ceremony that merely blesses a cash deal. The NDC’s policy is a direct challenge to that wall. It tells the young technocrat, the union organiser, the community activist: you can step into the ring without selling your inheritance. If public pressure ever forced the APC and the PDP to do the same — refund guarantees, payment only after winning, a real clearing of everyone who shows interest — the character of our 
political class could shift over a generation.
The grip of cash-and-carry politics would loosen, and the primary could begin its long walk back from an auction to a contest of ideas and organisation. Backroom coronations thrive precisely because the cost of entry is so absurd that only the cartel is in the room when the anointing oil is poured. Widen the pool, lower the wall, and that edifice gets harder to hold up, because a larger, more varied field will have both the standing and the means to refuse when told to step down. In that sense, Dickson’s quiet rule change — buried in party paperwork, yet caught by Daily Post and its peers — is a real assault on the logic of elite consensus that has swallowed our politics. It is a demand, written into the rules themselves, for the return of competition that is genuine, messy, unpredictable, and gloriously democratic. And I am here for it, fully and without reservation.
That thunder, I believe, will either be channelled through a forced, radical opening of our politics, or it will sweep the whole structure away. The tragedy of our time is not simply that the political class has stolen the nation’s wealth — they have done that since independence, with tireless creativity. The new wound of 2026 is that they are now stealing the very mechanism by which we might ever take it back. The primary, for all its faults, was once a pressure valve. It let the ambitious challenge the powerful, gave members a fleeting sense of ownership, and now and then threw up a surprise that renewed a little faith. Replace that valve with the sealed chamber of consensus, and you turn the political party into a pressure cooker.
Welcome consensus, goodbye democracy. The slow, methodical killing of political choice is almost complete. And as the May rains keep falling on Lagos, washing the dust but never the despair, I sit and wonder not if but when that pressure cooker will blow. The air is thick with silence, and it is the most terrifying sound I have ever heard. iagbeze@msn.com
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