If or when Nigeria becomes a one-party state, Nigerians should hold today’s opposition politicians and their civil society organisations enablers responsible. That is the concluding thought behind the title of this week’s talking point. That being said, Nigeria is not and does not look poised to become a one-party state as the opposition that continues to advertise its ineptitude laments.

Aside the ruling All Progressives Congress, there are about 20 other political parties in Nigeria. They are mostly marginal parties whose concerns, based on the constituents they appeal to, make them municipal, state or at best regional parties. Labour Party despite all it achieved in the last general election belongs in that group. I have deliberately mentioned LP just in case any politician pretending to a national acceptance chooses to employ it again as a special purpose vehicle as happened in 2023 and even earlier. 

These small parties exist very much in the same way that other political parties exist alongside the Republican and Democratic parties in the US or the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK. But unlike in the US or the UK, Nigeria’s marginal parties posture as ‘national’ parties with eyes set on producing the president while in truth they lack the resources to do that and are no sooner registered than they become moribund. Their case might be a little tenable if we operate a Westminster-style democracy where small parties could go into coalitions with larger ones. Otherwise, once registered, they wait on the sideline to be picked up for self-serving, ulterior purposes by brigand politicians and other carpetbaggers. They were founded as business names or dormant entities to be used, even weaponised by marauding business people (read politicians), whose office address is in their portfolios.

It’s parties like this that would go to court to enforce non-existent rights should, say, the “real-time electronic transmission” of election results run into a judicial cul-de-sac as it sure would if implemented as demanded. To be clear, small parties are an important part of a people’s democratic infrastructure, they are key actors that help deepen a country’s experience of popular politics (not in the sense of the “It’s Nigerians against the APC” nonsense of the opposition) provided they limit themselves to their core mandate and constituents, allowing parties with wider coverage, concerns and constituents to remain so. But that is not the case here, as last weekend’s local councils and by-elections in Abuja, Rivers and Kano states show. 

Emergent political parties in Nigeria increasingly lack the structures and resources necessary to make them key players, not to say winners, in the political process. The average opposition politician, whose sole ambition is to grab power or oust the incumbent whose use or misuse of power they covet, is not a long-term player. They lack the discipline to do the onerous work of opposition- offering alternative programmes, engaging in grassroots mobilisation and building the peoples’s confidence from the ground to the top. They trade pragmatism for idealism and replace dedication with optics and performative politicking. When they lose, they heap the blame on the ruling government. Which is not saying that the ruling party has it all together. But a credible opposition should be seen to have put in the work before it can point its finger elsewhere to explain its failure. That’s not what happened in last weekend’s elections. Let us take the case of the Abuja Municipal Area Council. 

The results are out and it is a thorough spanking of the much-celebrated ADC. Of the six council slots, the APC won five and the PDP won one. As usual, the ADC with its coalition partners from the PDP, NNPP and other renegades from the APC and LP have been infected, it seems, with the LP disease of performative politics. They were very loud online and their so-called big names separately made the rounds across the city centres with whistle-stops in the semi-urban towns that abut the city. We all saw them in the markets, smiling and waving at their gawking supporters when they could spare time from buying and eating agbado and groundnuts on the roadside or ordering a new set of mourning regalia from their road side tailor. Unlike Seyi Vodi, his City Boy friends and their Tinubu cap. Everything done under the klieg lights in performance of humility and solidarity with the poor masses. Where are your programmes- nothing?!! 

Voter-turnout was expected to be high, at least YIAGA Africa, the CSO darling of the opposition that now speaks like a disappointed housewife in its post-election appraisal, told us so. Only 15 per cent of the registered 1.6 million voters showed up on election day. Even while this is an improvement on the turnout for previous years, the lament still went out that voter turnout was too low for the election to count. Just like they questioned Tinubu’s mandate that came from 37 per cent of voters without saying that they scored far less or that Tinubu’s 37 per cent is more than Shehu Shagari’s 33 per cent. Yet, nobody ever questioned Shagari’s mandate. All as if responsibility for low voter turnout rests solely with the ruling party. 

The election, they claim, was also marred by irregularities and violence (wild exaggeration), namely, logistical issues which led to late commencement of voting in some units; cancellation of figures and mutilation of result sheets in some places and, indeed, Nyesom Wike’s provocative tours of polling centres. How does this explain the 28,000-vote difference between the loser and the winner? The first thing to note is that no election is 100 per cent flawless- not even in their “saner clime”. For the records, turnout in the weekend election is the highest since 2013 (16.37%). The figure for the 2022 election is 9.4%. Thus, there is a  six per cent improvement in turnout. What does the opposition have to say about its choice of candidates? 

They attacked the so-called Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket of 2023 and imposed (through the same consensus arrangement they jeer at nationally) a non-indigene (Idoma and Igbo), all-Christian ticket from the Obidient, LP arm of their coalition. This, in a local election with an indigenous population that is overwhelmingly Gbagyi. No surprise there: they are the cosmopolitan, no-man’s land advocates of Nigerian politics.  Most of their polling units were without agents but these apostles of “we nor dey give shishi” expect the children of the poor to inhale hot air as food from dawn to dusk as polling agents. I’ll stop for lack of space. But note: If we have to complain about every little infraction, not only would we have nothing else to do but we would most likely lose sight of the bigger things that require our attention. Let’s talk about these bigger things next week and leave the opposition to their loser’s outrage.