By Umar Ardo, Ph.D
The crisis currently convulsing the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is not an isolated phenomenon; it is merely the most visible symptom of a deeper and more troubling pattern in current Nigeria’s political landscape. Across the opposition spectrum, political parties are experiencing eerily similar implosions – leadership schisms, parallel executives, disputed congresses, endless litigation and regulatory uncertainty.
The Labour Party, the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), among others, are all enmeshed in one form of existential crisis or another. Strikingly, only the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) appears untouched, stable, institutionally coherent and voluminously benefiting from the opposition crises.
- This asymmetry is neither accidental nor coincidental. It reflects the classical logic of incumbency venal politics of weakening all alternatives while consolidating the ruling platform. What Nigeria is witnessing is not organic opposition decay, but a pattern of incumbency-induced instability, facilitated by state power, tolerated by regulatory inertia and normalised through administrative indifference.
- In competitive democracies, opposition parties are the primary vehicles for political alternation. Destabilising them, whether through legal harassment, regulatory ambiguity or selective enforcement, is a time-tested strategy for foreclosing electoral competition without openly suspending elections. Tinubu’s Nigeria is drifting dangerously towards this model.
- Prof. Joash Amupitan’s INEC’s handling of party crises has become a critical enabling factor in this process as well. By refusing to take firm, legally grounded positions on internal party disputes, the Commission effectively allows crises to fester indefinitely. Ambiguity becomes policy; delay becomes strategy. The result is predictable – parties remain trapped in perpetual internal warfare, unable to organise, mobilise, select candidates or present coherent alternatives to voters ahead of elections!
- More troubling still is the Commission’s recent blanket refusal to register any new political parties, despite the clear satisfaction of constitutional and statutory requirements by several political associations. The denial of registration to all applicants last Thursday, particularly to the All Democratic Alliance (ADA), represents a decisive blow to political pluralism and a clear signal that the door to democratic expansion has been firmly shut by INEC.
- For many Nigerians, mostly those disillusioned with the existing parties, the emergence of new political platforms represented hope – hope for renewal, ideological clarity, generational inclusion and genuine competition. That hope has now been deliberately extinguished. INEC’s silent action last Thursday has sent an unmistakable message to discerning Nigerians – no new entrants are welcome, regardless of merit, compliance or popular demand!
- This posture directly aids and abets an untoward political strategy of the federal government; one aimed at shrinking the political field to a manageable few, all of them weakened, fragmented or compromised. By Prof. Amupitan’s INEC closing the space to new parties while tolerating the internal disintegration of existing opposition platforms, the political environment is being engineered toward a de facto one-party dominance, even if nominal multiparty labels remain.
- The implications for the forthcoming general elections are profound and deeply unsettling. Elections without viable opposition are not competitive contests; they are rituals of confirmation! When opposition parties are incapacitated and new alternatives are administratively barred, participation becomes illusory and choice becomes cosmetic. Prof. Amupitan’s INEC’s current policy on party registration is therefore not a neutral administrative stance; it is a political act with far-reaching negative consequences. Whether intentionally or through regulatory timidity, the Commission has positioned itself as a gatekeeper against democratic expansion rather than a guarantor of it. In doing so, it has aligned implicitly, but effectively, with the interests of incumbency.
- This is how democracies erode in slow motion; not through tanks on the streets, but through forms stamped “Denied”; not through decrees, but through delays; not through overt repression, but through selective enforcement and procedural obstruction. The space to organise shrinks, the alternatives disappear and the electorate is left with hollow choices.
- If INEC continues on this trajectory, it risks presiding over elections that are procedurally orderly yet substantively empty; elections stripped of their most essential element of meaningful competition. History will not be kind to a Commission that stood by or worse, participated, while Nigeria’s democratic space was methodically narrowed. A democracy cannot survive when incumbency is allowed to weaponise regulation and when its electoral umpire mistakes administrative convenience for constitutional duty. What is at stake is not merely party registration or internal disputes; it is the future of political choice itself that is being threatened in Tinubu’s Nigeria.
Dr Umar Ardo, Governorship candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Adamawa State in the 2023 elections, is now a leading member of the opposition African Democratic Congress (ADC)
