By Joy Akut
In recent months, opposition figures and political actors have raised the alarm, warning that Nigeria is drifting toward a one-party state under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Yes, the defections are piling up, but the harder truth is this: Nigeria is already a one-party state. It just bears different names. I do not say this because one party has strangled the others out of existence, but because the distance between them has always been too thin, too fluid, too negotiable to amount to anything resembling a real ideological difference. No, I am not going to crucify the defectors. And I am not going to blame the President. He is navigating the system as it exists, and doing so with political skill. What we are watching is a system doing exactly what it was built to do.
I have followed American politics for years. Not through policy papers or academic journals, but through fiction. The West Wing, House of Cards etc. A borrowed understanding from borrowed stories. And what stood out was how deeply people lived inside their party, not as a voting habit, but as a worldview. A Democrat and a Republican are not just placing their thumbprints beside different names on a ballot. They are shaped by different philosophies about what a country owes its people, and what people owe their country. When a lifelong Democrat crosses the aisle, it is not a career move, but a reckoning. People want to know what changed, because what you are walking away from is not a logo. You are not merely dropping an umbrella for a broom. It is a belief system. The same is true in Britain. Labour and the Conservatives are not just parties. They are traditions. They are cultures. And if you ever switch, you are expected to explain what shifted in your convictions to make that possible. That is what political scientists call programmatic politics, where the platform comes before the person, and the party represents a coherent set of ideas.
Now consider Nigeria. What, in clear terms, is the ideology of the People’s Democratic Party? What is the ideological anchor of the All Progressives Congress? The silence is telling. Nigeria does not operate programmatic politics. What we have instead is clientelistic politics, where the party is not a value system, but a vehicle. You step in when it serves a purpose, and step out when it no longer does. Often, the next vehicle is not fundamentally different from the last. It is simply closer to where power currently resides.
In a system like that, it becomes difficult to fault individuals for switching sides. If there is no ideological compass to begin with, what exactly is being betrayed beyond the name of the party? What principle has been abandoned? The defections we have witnessed over the years are often framed as betrayals of conviction. But more often than not, they are repositioning. Strategic, calculated, and entirely consistent with a system that rewards access to power over ideological alignment. This does not make the system ideal. But it does make it honest. And it shifts the conversation to where it truly belongs. Not on the individuals jumping ship, but on the structure of the ship itself. A system that was never designed to hold its actors accountable to a shared ideological core. And this matters, not just for political actors, but for ordinary Nigerians. Because when parties do not stand for clear ideas, citizens are left voting for personalities instead of policies.
If Nigeria is to build a political culture that commands trust, then the conversation must move beyond personalities and toward structure. Toward what it would take for parties to stand for something, and for that “something” to endure beyond election cycles. Until then, we must resist the temptation of easy cynicism. Because beyond the noise, the defections, the survival politics, and the constant repositioning, the system does not exist in isolation. It is still inhabited by people. And there are still individuals who move into this arena not because the system invited them, but because something in them refuses to stay out. They navigate it, they endure it and they show up anyway. Not perfectly or without compromise, but with enough conviction to keep going. And in a system designed to wear that down, that is worth something.
*Joy Akut is a writer and the Special Assistant on Youth & Women Affairs to the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. She writes from Abuja.
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