Since at least late 2024, when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had been in office for barely 18 months, politicians and other Nigerians have been saying that the country is drifting into a one-party state. These warnings have not only grown louder in recent months, they are justified.
As a Daily Trust story speculated last week, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) might well control 30 out of 36 states by September this year when the 2027 elections campaigns would officially commence, as opposition-party governors jostle to defect to the APC one after another. The reverse traffic, meanwhile, is zero, unlike in 2015 when leading politicians were defecting from then ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) to then main opposition APC.
At the same time, the leading opposition parties like the PDP, NNPP, and LP remain ridden by crippling crises that President Tinubu and APC have been accused of instigating. The only opposition party left, the newly formed coalition African Democratic Congress, ADC, is not in crisis, but it does not right now command the attention of Nigerians on social media or in the streets as it did months ago. Even Mr Obi's defection from LP to join them on the last day of 2025 passed almost unnoticed. Perhaps the ADC has already lost its most strategic year, 2025.
In short, Nigeria today looks like a one-party state with the ruling APC as the last man standing. In my view, however, Nigeria is not sliding into a one-party state. It is already a one-man state.
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A one party-state--a country where a single political party dominates the political space--is a form of authoritarian rule, whether as codified in law or in practical effect. In practice, however, there can be significant checks, political pressure and opposition within the ruling one party itself. More importantly, while undemocratic, one-party states tend to be developmental. They typically maintain political legitimacy through rapid industrialisation and all-round national development, as illustrated by the former Communist countries in Europe, including the defunct USSR, and most strikingly by today's Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which lifted more than 600 million people out of acute poverty in under 30 years.
Tinubu's APC is nothing like a one-party state in this sense because the twin scaffolds of legitimacy--a serious national development agenda and internal checks--are wholly lacking. Instead, we have a president who straddles his party and the nation without any effective guardrails to his power. That is not a one-party state; it is, rather, a one-man state whereby nearly all formal institutions of the state, all political parties, civil society, and other informal power brokers no longer provide any meaningful constraints on the will of the president. That is not good for Nigeria, and I am not sure it is something good for the President himself.
Since 1999, Nigeria has never really had a true multi-party or two-party system, with the exception of the two-year period between 2013 to 2015. What we have always had is a pseudo-one-party state whereby a single political party dominates the political space, first the PDP from 1999-2013, and then the APC during 2015-2023. But even during those years of pseudo-democracy, there were at least two important guardrails against presidential power that ensured that our democracy continued to grow and thrive.
First, ruling party politics in Nigeria since 1999 was always characterised by significant political pressure and opposition within the party itself, even in the near absence of an effectively coordinated or strong opposition party. That pressure and opposition came from various factions of the ruling party, or from other centres of power within the party and government. Secondly, there was significant and effective opposition from outside of the party and government, particularly from the media, labour unions and the organised civil society.
The result was that no president was able to win or get everything he wanted all the time. For example, former President Olusegun Obasanjo was the most powerful of Nigerian leaders from 1999 to 2023. But even at the peak of his power, Obasanjo still faced serious pressure and opposition from ruling party chairs, governors, members and leaders of the national assembly, etc, many of whom frequently disagreed or clashed openly with him. Industrial strikes by unions were effective enough to compel the government to backtrack with some of its policies. Newspapers and civil society organisations were firm and stringent in their criticisms of presidential overreach. It was only natural then that Obasanjo's Third Term bid was defeated.
Presidents Umar Yar'Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, and Muhammadu Buhari were all more or less the same, as significant power blocks within and outside the ruling party and government provided significant checks on their power. The Governors' Forum was a powerful wedge on Yar'Adua, and since 1999, the National Assembly was probably most assertive under Buhari's first term. Governors Uzo Kalu of Abia and Attahiru Bafarawa of Sokoto fought tooth and nail against Obasanjo, not to mention Senate President Chuba Okadigbo, Speaker Ghali Na'Abba, and even Dimeji Bankole, just as Governor Ortom screamed at Buhari daily for eight years.
If for nothing else, these pressures were useful for defeating Obasanjo's "third term", for getting Yar'Adua to initiate enduring reforms in our electoral system, for the doctrine of necessity that made Jonathan President, for forcing Jonathan to accept defeat in the 2015 elections, and for making a democrat out of Buhari, all of which--and more--are important moments of progress in our democratic journey. But my broader point is that all of these guardrails of our developing democracy have been blown off, bought up or buried under rubble of President Tinubu's silent corrosion of Nigerian politics, economy and society, leaving us with something worse than a pseudo-one-party state, that is, a one-man state.
Nigeria's National Assembly today is worse than a rubber stamp, because it has neither the rubber nor the stamp. Its only use of its power in nearly three years is to clamp down on a female member. It endorses everything the president asks even before he tables it, without a whimper from even so-called opposition party members. The APC does not really exist as a political party, but as a collection of people in government, all of whom look in one direction to one man. Meanwhile, all the governors are defecting to the APC, including those who are politically and electorally safe in their own home turfs. What are the governors afraid of?
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In my view, those fears are three, and have nothing to do with party politics. The first is the chilling ruling by the Supreme Court that a president can remove an elected governor and their state's legislature by invoking emergency powers, without clarifying what is an "emergency". This directly contradicts an earlier position of the same Supreme Court, but here we are. The second is the snaring fangs of the EFCC, which in recent months has pounced on former, current, or aspiring governors, but still largely sparing those in or want to be in the good books of the government. The third is the fear of the known unknown of this new INEC.
In short, the closed political system is forcing the defection of the governors. Perhaps, all of these are mere coincidences, but I am not yet old enough to believe such things in politics.
Outside of the party and government, the civil society, the media and the unions have all been strikingly muted. Reading the editorial pages of leading Nigerian newspapers now feels like they are entirely different publications from those that existed under President Buhari. Civil society, once vocal and confrontational, now appears hesitant and unsure. Perhaps Tinubu's generally pro-Yoruba, anti-North, and anti-Muslim body language suits them all. And that, I repeat, is how a nation has drifted into a one-man state.
