By Ikechukwu Amaechi
It was Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, the French critic, journalist, and novelist, who, in 1849, coined what has become an enduring proverb: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same. In matters of governance and power in Nigeria – military or civilian – nothing can be truer.
As editor of the Sunday Diet newspaper, I was in Maiduguri in April 1998, yes the selfsame Borno State capital that has become a killing field, to cover the national convention of the Grassroots Democratic Movement, GDM. Borno was the home state of Alhaji Gambo Lawan, the national chairman of the GDM, one of the five political associations that included the United Nigeria Congress Party, UNCP; Congress for National Consensus, CNC; Democratic Party of Nigeria, DPN; and the National Centre Party of Nigeria, NCPN, formally approved by the electoral umpire – National Election Commission of Nigeria, NECON – in September 1996 for the politics of that era.
The convention was pivotal because it had become obvious that the dark-goggled General Sani Abacha was bent on just replacing his starched khaki uniform with overflowing babaringa while staying put in Aso Rock. The only obstacle to his vaunting ambition was the left-leaning GDM, which along with the UNCP, had reportedly voted in February 1998 to reject Abacha as the consensus candidate of the five parties.
And to ensure that the GDM presented a candidate in the presidential poll scheduled for 1999, Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko Yusufu, a former Inspector-General of Police, enthusiast of the maverick Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who frequented African Shrine, and another leftist politician, Dr. Tunji Braithwaite, a lawyer who was called to the bar in 1961 and founded the Nigeria Advanced Party, NAP, in 1983 declared their interest to run for the presidential primaries. So, despite the fact that the party was a creation of the junta, Nigerians held out hope that its Maiduguri convention would produce an effective counterpoise to Abacha’s tyrannical exploits.
Sadly, it didn’t. The convention was underway when the dreaded Major Hamza al-Mustapha, Abacha’s Chief Security Officer, reportedly arrived Maiduguri. Even when he tactically stayed away from the convention ground, chaos erupted at the El-Kanemi Warriors Sports Centre convention ground while Braithwaite was making his speech. At the end, the April 18, 1998 GDM convention which many hoped would produce an alternative presidential candidate to Abacha despite immense pressure from the ruling military council to make him the sole candidate for all parties, ended in his high-pressure endorsement as the party’s sole presidential candidate, having purportedly received 1,368 votes as against Yusufu’s 408 votes.
A defiant M.D. Yusufu rejected the outcome of the convention, insisting that he was the GDM candidate and called on Abacha to resign. Expectedly, he paid for the temerity. On May 28, 1998, one month after the convention, his campaign offices were stormed and vandalised by political thugs, his supporters threatened and campaign posters torn. The charade ended when Abacha died on June 8, 1998 and a month later, his successor, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, chopped off the five leprous fingers from the country’s withering hand.
Sadly, 27 years after that inglorious political stunt, Nigeria is back to ground zero as the powers-that-be are hell-bent on ensuring that President Bola Tinubu emerges the sole presidential candidate in the 2027 election. Indeed, the more things change in Nigeria, the more they stay the same.
The attempt to hollow out the opposition is too obvious. Yet, it is a settled fact that a robust and constructive opposition is a sine-qua-non for a functional democracy, without which transparency and accountability fly out of the governance window. The administration is conjuring every trick in its political tool bag, in cahoots with a supine National Assembly and a genuflecting judiciary, to ensure that the man in Aso Rock goes into the 2027 polls as a consensus candidate of the motley crowd of 21 political parties. And the question is: If General Sani Abacha, a despot, was wary of opposition in 1998, why would a self-acclaimed democrat, be similarly afraid in 2027 after four years in office?
In his article, “How Nigeria’s presidential election in 2027 could be un-contested,” Chidi Odinkalu, a human rights law professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, decried the mischief inherent in the 2026 Electoral Act.
“Among other things, the Act, which became law on February 19, requires all parties to maintain ‘a digital register of its members containing the name, sex, date of birth, address, State, local government, ward, polling unit, National Identification Number and photograph in both hard and soft copies,” he wrote.
“The Act goes further: the parties must submit the register (presumably both hard and soft copies) to the INEC at least 21 days before party primaries, which must occur between April 23, and the end of May. In effect, the parties, which have until now not been required to have digital registers, must create them in less than two working months. The cost of failure to do this will be disqualification of their candidate(s) from the contest.”
Of course, this law is legislative rascality taken too far. But the bigger worry is not even the legislature but the judiciary. Odinkalu noted that in 1979, the Federal Electoral Commission tried to disqualify Nnamdi Azikiwe of the Nigeria Peoples Party, NPP, and Aminu Kano of the Peoples Redemption Party, PRP, from the presidential elections but the courts saved them. That was when the country’s judiciary was manned by conscientious and upright judges who took the reinforcement of the pristine ramparts of law as a sacred duty. Not anymore.
Odinkalu worries that “there is ample room for pre-election judicial mischief in the 2026 Electoral Act, which the courts could easily use to preclude competitive candidates from the contest.” Because of the way Nigerian judges discharged their duties in 2023, Odinkalu came to the inevitable conclusion: “It will be surprising if this is not deployed to block competitive candidates from the presidential election in January 2027. The irony is that the president whose claim to fame is his advocacy against military rule, could be the person who eventually appropriates the methods of Nigeria’s maximum military ruler to make himself the only competitive candidate in an un-contested election in 2027.”
The augury is stark. Sadly, some Nigerians who know the issues are, nevertheless, applauding the “political sagacity” of those making a mess of this democracy.
In recent weeks, all manner of brickbats have been hauled at Mr. Peter Obi, for leaving the Labour Party. He should have stayed back to rebuild the party, they chorus. But they have not asked themselves why it took the exit of Obi for the storm in the party to quieten. Few days after Obi’s exit, the courts finally ruled that the Senator Nenadi Usman-led faction is the authentic Labour Party and INEC hurriedly accorded them recognition. Julius Abure, the former chairman, disappeared from the scene, likewise the other characters like Lamidi Apapa. Obi was the target, not the Labour Party. He knew it and left before it was too late. He was smarter.
Is it any surprise that of the 21 registered political parties, only the three with the potential of producing candidates that can challenge Tinubu in 2027 – Labour Party, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP – were wracked by leadership crisis? Meanwhile, the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, that posed no threat was left alone. Instructively, the Prof Chukwuma Soludo-led party has adopted Tinubu as a consensus candidate, just as the Labour Party and the Wike-led Peoples Democratic Party will sooner than later. Now that Senator Musa Kwankwaso has left the NNPP, the party will be left alone.
Like the GDM of 1998, the only party holding out now is the African Democratic Congress, ADC. Someone asked recently if the party is a safe political platform and whether it will survive. My answer was simple: It will survive if Tinubu refrains from playing the ill-fated 1998 Abacha power game in 2026. But where he proves incapable of helping himself, ADC will survive if Nigerians tell him unmistakably that democracy is still the triumph of the majority will over the monkeyshines of a privileged minority.
*Amaechi is the publisher of TheNiche
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