In a fragile democracy, legality is not enough. Timing, perception and public trust determine whether procedure strengthens the republic — or weakens it.

By Philip Obazee

There is always a legal language available for political decisions. Laws have clauses. Constitutions have thresholds. Courts have jurisdiction. Electoral bodies have mandates. Political parties have obligations. In that sense, almost every major institutional act can be dressed in procedural clothing.

But democracies do not live by procedure alone. They live by confidence: confidence that the rules are not being bent toward incumbency, that courts are not being used to narrow political choice, that electoral institutions are not being drawn into partisan arithmetic, and that opposition parties are not being eliminated by administrative timing disguised as constitutional tidiness.

That is why the recent court ordered deregistration of AA, ADC, and other political parties should trouble Nigerians who care about democracy, regardless of party affiliation. The legal argument may be formally intelligible. Nigeria’s law does not treat political party registration as a permanent entitlement. Parties are expected to meet certain electoral performance thresholds. A party that cannot win a seat or demonstrate sufficient electoral support may be vulnerable to deregistration. On paper, this is not an absurd rule. No democracy benefits from an endless multiplication of empty platforms, transactional party shells and political signboards that exist mainly to bargain, spoil or confuse.

But that is not the end of the matter. In politics, timing is not an incidental detail. Timing is part of the substance of the action. A decision taken far away from an election cycle may have one meaning. The same decision taken close to a major national contest may carry another meaning altogether. When legal enforcement arrives at a moment of heightened partisan anxiety, opposition fragmentation and public distrust, citizens are entitled to ask whether the law is being applied as a neutral standard or deployed as a political instrument.

That distinction matters.

Nigeria does not need unserious parties. But it does need serious competition. It does not need a crowded ballot for the sake of clutter. But it does need a political environment in which alternative platforms can organize, contest, fail, regroup and try again. Democracy is not only the right of the strong party to govern; it is also the right of the weaker party to survive long enough to become strong. The discipline of elections should come primarily from voters, not from procedural timing that looks too much like field management.

The problem with deregistration at this stage is not simply that some parties may be removed from the register. The deeper problem is the signal it sends. It tells citizens that the political field may be narrowing before they have had the chance to make their choice. It tells opposition actors that organization may be punished before it matures. It tells disillusioned voters that democratic participation is being shaped somewhere above their heads, through legal mechanisms they may perceive as distant, technical and politically convenient.

Perception is not everything in private life. But in democratic politics, perception is institutional currency. A court order may be legally valid and still politically corrosive if citizens reasonably believe that it advances incumbency advantage. A rule may be textually defensible and still democratically dangerous if its enforcement appears selective. A procedure may satisfy formal legality and still fail the more demanding test of public legitimacy.

This is especially important in Nigeria because the country is not operating in normal civic conditions. It is a large, plural, strained federation, carrying the accumulated burden of insecurity, economic hardship, weak institutional trust, elite defection politics and widespread public frustration. Violence in parts of the country has already stretched the capacity of the centralized security system. The current debate over state police is itself an acknowledgment that the old security architecture has not adequately met the country’s diverse threats. In such an environment, the state should be careful not to manufacture additional grievances through avoidable political misjudgment.

Disenfranchisement is not always a single dramatic event. It often accumulates in layers. A citizen first doubts that votes count. Then he doubts that courts are neutral. Then he doubts that parties can compete. Then he concludes that the democratic game is already settled before election day. At that point, participation becomes performative. Voting becomes ritual. Politics becomes extraction. The citizen either withdraws into apathy or seeks influence outside institutional channels.

That is the danger. A country facing insecurity should not casually add political exclusion to the inventory of grievance. It should not use procedural artifacts in ways that deepen disengagement. The issue is not that every dissatisfied voter becomes violent. That would be an irresponsible claim. The issue is more basic: where peaceful channels of competition look constricted, social trust decays. Where social trust decays, disorder becomes easier to mobilize and harder to contain.

Nigeria should have learned this lesson from the naira redesign crisis during the last presidential election cycle. The currency redesign was defended with a language of policy rationality: curbing illicit cash, reducing vote buying, modernizing money management and improving monetary control. Some of those objectives may have sounded reasonable in theory. But the implementation was disastrous, and the timing was institutionally reckless. A major state intervention was introduced close to a national election in a cash-dependent economy. The result was scarcity, queues, confusion, business disruption, litigation and public anger.

The naira redesign and party deregistration are not the same policy. One belongs to monetary administration; the other belongs to electoral regulation. But structurally, they carry the same warning: when a state introduces disruptive interventions near an election, even formally defensible policies can become democratic hazards. The public does not evaluate such actions in a vacuum. It asks a simpler question: why now?

That question cannot be dismissed as paranoia. In democratic politics, “why now?” is often the most important question. Why enforce this rule at this moment? Why wait until parties are entering a period of alignment and coalition building? Why allow procedural enforcement to overlap with the political calendar in a way that predictably generates suspicion? Why risk turning a legal threshold into a democratic controversy?

The answer cannot simply be: because the law allows it. Law is not a machine that operates outside judgment. Courts, electoral commissions and political actors all exercise discretion, and discretion carries responsibility. A fragile democracy requires not only legal correctness but institutional prudence. It requires public officials to ask whether the predictable effect of an action is consistent with democratic stability.

This is where President Bola Tinubu’s own stated position becomes relevant. He has rejected the idea that Nigeria should become a one-party state and has said, in substance, that multiparty democracy is better for the country. That is the correct standard. A nation as complex as Nigeria cannot be governed healthily through political monopoly. Its ethnic, religious, regional and economic diversity requires organized pluralism. It requires parties that can contest across regions, challenge incumbents, absorb dissent and offer peaceful pathways to power.

But opposition cannot be praised in principle and squeezed in practice. Democracy cannot be celebrated on Democracy Day and narrowed by procedure after the speeches are over. If credible opposition is necessary for democratic health, then the institutional environment must permit opposition to breathe. It must permit parties to organize without fearing that the technical machinery of the state will be turned against them at politically sensitive moments.

This does not absolve Nigeria’s opposition parties of responsibility. Far from it. The opposition has often been unserious, fragmented, personality driven and strategically incoherent. Too many parties have failed to build durable structures, articulate credible policy alternatives or create disciplined internal governance. Too many opposition actors treat parties as vehicles for elite bargaining rather than institutions of democratic representation. Nigeria’s opposition deserves criticism for its own weakness.

But weakness is not a justification for strangulation. A badly organized opposition should be defeated at the ballot box, not removed from the field by timing that invites suspicion. If a party is unserious, voters can punish it. If it has no structure, elections will expose it. If it lacks appeal, it will collapse under the weight of its own irrelevance. But where state backed procedure appears to do the work voters should do, democracy loses something essential.

There is a better path.

If Nigeria must enforce party performance thresholds, the enforcement should be transparent, prospective and predictable. Parties should know well in advance what the standards are, when compliance will be assessed, what evidence will be used and what remedies are available. Deregistration should occur far from major election cycles, not at moments when the political meaning becomes explosive. INEC’s role should be visibly insulated from partisan pressure. The courts should be cautious in remedies that affect political competition close to elections. The entire process should be designed not simply to remove dead parties but to protect public confidence in the democratic field.

That is the democratic standard: strict rules, fair timing, transparent reasoning and even-handed enforcement.

Nigeria does not need deregulation chaos. It does not need ballots crowded with parties that exist only on paper. But it also does not need procedural suffocation. The health of democracy lies between those extremes. It requires a disciplined pluralism: enough regulation to prevent abuse, enough openness to preserve competition, enough prudence to avoid converting legality into exclusion.

The governing party should also understand that a narrowed political field may offer short-term partisan advantage but long-term institutional risk. Dominance achieved through performance is one thing. Dominance achieved through defections, institutional pressure or procedural narrowing is another. The first can strengthen democratic legitimacy. The second breeds suspicion. A ruling party that believes it has earned public support should not fear a competitive field. It should welcome one, because fair competition is what transforms victory from mere possession of power into legitimate authority.

For Nigeria, the deeper issue is not the fate of one party. It is whether citizens can still believe that the democratic game remains open. That belief is fragile. It cannot be commanded by press statements. It cannot be restored by legal grammar. It must be protected through conduct.

When institutions act at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons or with insufficient sensitivity to public perception, they may win the legal argument and lose the democratic one. That is the danger now. The question is not simply whether deregistration can be defended under law. The question is whether this is the right moment, the right method and the right signal for a country already carrying too much political distrust.

Nigeria’s democracy does not need more suspicion. It needs more confidence. It needs citizens who believe that elections are contests, not ceremonies. It needs opposition parties strong enough to challenge incumbents and ruling parties disciplined enough to compete without seeking institutional shortcuts. It needs courts and electoral bodies that understand that their legitimacy depends not only on what they decide, but on whether the public can see fairness in the decision.

The ballot should be narrowed by voters. If political parties are weak, let voters say so. If they are irrelevant, let elections expose them. If they are unserious, let democratic competition discipline them. But a fragile democracy should be very careful when procedure begins to look like pre-election exclusion.

Because once citizens conclude that the game is no longer fair, the damage does not remain inside party headquarters. It travels outward — into turnout, trust, civic patience, social peace and the moral authority of the state itself.

That is too high a price to pay for bad timing.

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Philip Obazee retired as a managing director and head of derivatives from Macquarie Asset Management – a global asset management company with an office in Philadelphia, PA, USA, and currently, he is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymetrics Americas Research.