APC and the Two Sides of Dominance

Postscript by Waziri Adio

The All Progressives Congress (APC) is Nigeria’s latest dominant political party. It is not the first and it, clearly, will not be the last.  Since 1999, Nigeria has operated a strain of multi-party system with a dominant party. The number of registered political parties in the 4th Republic has ranged from as few as three to as many as 91. Irrespective of how sparse or crowded the political field is, one party has always towered above the rest. Such intimidating presence confers incredible electoral advantage, which further cements the supremacy of the leading party. But what confers advantage also produces vulnerability. And the vulnerability eventually becomes fatal, though the exact point of fatality is always difficult to predict. Political dominance is thus not eternal.

At the moment, APC looms over the terrain. It is in power in 28 states, with another one, the vote-rich Kano State, only a matter of when not if. There are whispers that three other opposition governors might also be on their way to APC and that a few others would have since migrated there if not that they were blocked by some powerful forces within. It is also an open secret that two other opposition governors are sympathetic to the incumbent president produced by the ruling party. APC now has absolute majority in the National Assembly. The party had some slight advantage at the conclusion of the 2023 general election. That advantage has been consolidated in the last two and a half years, not through fresh electoral victories or widespread affection, but through a gale of defections.  APC’s gubernatorial tally has risen from 20 in 2023 to at least 28 now while it has moved from 59 to 75 seats in the Senate and from 176 to 242 seats in the House of Representatives.

On account of the number of states under its belt, APC is not just the party with the most national spread today, it is also the majority party in all the six geo-political zones of the country. It has total control of the six states apiece in the South South and the North Central zones, and it is at the helm in five out of the seven states in the North West, four out of the six states in the North East, four out of the six states in the South West and three out of the five states in the South East. Since this surge came about largely through defections, it is not organic, is not indicative of popular acceptance and does not guarantee a commensurate performance in the next presidential poll. APC leaders know that their party is unlikely to win , and may even struggle to get 25%, in some of the states where their party has governors and a majority of federal legislators. Nevertheless, APC has secured an overwhelming headstart. All things being equal, the governors and the legislators will be expected to put their individual structures at the service of the party so as not to be swept off in an opposition wave. This multiplies the structural advantage of APC.

The largely unidirectional movement in the political transfer market has prompted postulations and concerns about Nigeria becoming a one-party state. This is a mischaracterisation. Nigeria has never been a one-party state and it is unlikely to become such. Apart from a brief period of experimentation with a decreed two-party system under General Ibrahim Babaginda, we have always run a multi-party system, often fragmented along ethnic and regional (and sometimes ideological) lines. The fragmentations made cross-party alliances necessary both to form governments and to pose credible challenge to incumbents. We saw versions of this in the first and second republics.

A dominant party in a multiparty system is a recent development in Nigeria. As stated earlier, it is one of the prominent features of the 4th Republic and it partly emerged from the consensus among the political class of the need to have a party strong enough to withstand military adventurists who used to truncate our democracy at the slightest excuse. So, at the birth of this republic when we had only three political parties, one of them was so dominant that the two others had to combine to confront it, and without success. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was seen as both the big tent and the anointed party. Besides, it had the national spread that the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and the All People’s Party (APP) could not muster. In the 1999 gubernatorial elections, PDP won in 21 of 36 states while APP and AD won in nine and six states respectively. AD and APP presented a joint ticket to take on the dominant PDP in the presidential election. But PDP’s Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar handsomely defeated the AD/APP duo of Chief Olu Falae and Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi by securing 63% of the valid votes and getting a majority of the votes in 27 states plus FCT.

Obasanjo’s first term was anything but stellar. But by the 2003 elections, his PDP had become more prominent, even when the number of political parties had multiplied to 30. In 2003, PDP increased its share of seats in the Senate from 59 to 76 and in the House of Representatives from 206 to 223; while its tally of states rose from 21 to 28. To get to these dizzying heights, PDP took five of the six South West states from the AD (leaving it with only Lagos), flipped three states from ANPP (Gombe, Kogi and Kwara) and lost Kano to ANPP. This reduced the tally of states governed by the AD to one from six and by ANPP to seven from nine; while PDP’s fortunes soared by a net gain of seven states, a 33% lift of its initial 21 states. The states controlled by PDP dropped marginally to 27 in 2006 after the courts affirmed Mr. Peter Obi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) as the rightful winner of the 2003 elections in Anambra State. Nevertheless, PDP powered on in subsequent elections, losing states either at the polls or through litigations, and gaining others through the polls or defections, maintaining a dominance of more than 20 states until the 2015 elections when the tide shifted.

But through it all, the opposition kept organising, trying and failing, until they were able to assemble a formidable coalition and rally the country to their cause. They were not going about screaming every second about the need to stop Nigeria from becoming a one-party state or blaming the crises in their parties on the ruling party. They got to work, providing a manual that the current opposition will do well to revisit. They did not indulge in lazy assumptions and vacuous scaremongering or bounce about with a sense of entitlement. PDP got so big and secure that it kept boasting that it was the biggest party in Africa and that it would be in power for at least 60 years. It even got cocky enough that it was expelling or deregistering members. The end was long in coming, but it eventually arrived in 2015. On account of our plurality, domination will eventually unravel either by itself or when the others put in the serious work needed to displace it. Every party comes to an end, and the revellers would have to go home or go to another happening place.

The loss of power at the centre in 2015 bumped PDP into a strange territory. It has not recovered from the loss. PDP was never wired to be an opposition party. Its hold on the states also slipped, succumbing to the bandwagon effect of politics. As at today, PDP is still Nigeria’s leading opposition party but it is a grave shadow of the behemoth that previously towered over the landscape, left with only four states, and likely to still lose some or all of them. PDP’s colourful odyssey is both a comfort and a lesson: comfort for those with genuine apprehension about limited options and competition, and lesson for today’s dominant party. Nothing lasts for ever.

Dominance generates a disproportionate electoral advantage in many ways in a developing country such as ours. The control over critical state institutions at scale, the access to state resources and the avenues for patronage further magnify the attraction and the strength of the dominant party. Politicians, business oligarchs and campaign donors flock to the party that promises certainty for whatever excites them, be it getting elected or appointed to prominent positions, or getting favourable policies, access to the corridors of power or opportunities for jobs, contracts etc. While some might stand opposed on principle to the dominant party or invest time in building alternative political structures, most will jump on the ready bandwagon because they want to be on the winning side or they do not have the means or the temperament to be out for long in the political and economic wilderness. The big thus becomes bigger and the small, smaller because size comes with a natural advantage, which is usually further leveraged into building imposing political structures that disadvantage the rest.

But as we have seen with PDP, the permanence of dominance is never guaranteed. Dominance also has downsides. A big party becomes haughty and begins to lose its political reflexes. It starts prioritising power over performance, which opens it up to consistent and credible attacks from those seeking to upstage it. The big tent also stops being cohesive. Precisely because it is all-welcoming to gain electoral market power, it becomes unwieldy and is populated by strange bedfellows and divergent camps who start picking on themselves. The big tent starts looking like a house divided against itself as the competition for its down-ballot tickets becomes intense and rancorous and party discipline begins to fray.

Emerging as the candidate of a dominant party is almost as good as getting elected. The competition within could be stiffer than even for the general election. But not everyone who aspires to the party ticket will get one, and not all will be patient to wait for another time. So, some members will do anti-party or try their luck elsewhere. After living with the same party for a while, citizens and voters pine for change and begin to see the dominant party as the embodiment of everything that is not working for them. When all these come together and there is an organised and formidable opposition in the wings, the end of dominance is nigh.

Such a broad-based and widely appealing opposition was not in place in 2003, when PDP showed obvious sign of vulnerability. PDP not only survived that first scare, it soared. It successfully masked its vulnerability and sustained its dominance over two election cycles. Then, 2015 happened, but by then it had ruled at the centre and dominated the political firmament for 16 uninterrupted years. On its part, APC became vulnerable as early as 2019, but it survived. It had its biggest scare so far in the 2023 presidential election, an open election and the most competitive presidential poll since 1999.

However, APC is approaching the 2027 election with an intimidating structural advantage. The current behemoth is threatening to surpass the record set by PDP, its domineering predecessor. This doesn’t mean that the next election will be a cakewalk for APC. There are many tests ahead, the most critical being whether APC will stay formidable or implode after its primaries. If the latter happens, the opposition coalition, if it survives its own primaries as a unit, will likely be the beneficiary. This may be enough to cause an upset. It may not. Irrespective of what happens at the polls next year, it is certain that APC will one day yield dominance to another party, the same way it displaced PDP. It is only a matter of time.