President Tinubu has inherited a constitutional system in which political parties are legally entitled to compete, governors possess electoral mandates, and opposition parties can challenge the government without seeking permission from the president. These are fundamental differences between the Fourth Republic and Abacha’s military dictatorship.
Yet democracy is not measured merely by the number of parties registered with the electoral commission. It is measured by whether those parties can compete freely, whether voters have genuine choices, and whether the governing party respects the legitimacy of political opposition.
Tinubu’s emerging political strategy raises troubling questions on these measures.
As the 2027 presidential election approaches, the APC has consolidated its influence across the federation, attracting politicians from opposition parties and building a formidable network of governors and political officeholders. Recent reporting has put the number of governors aligned with Tinubu’s political camp at approximately 31 of Nigeria’s 36 states. That is an extraordinary concentration of political influence in a federal democracy.
The distinction between an elected governor who independently supports the president and one who defects to the ruling party is important. So too is the distinction between voluntary political alignment and coercion. Not every defection is evidence of political manipulation, and a president is entitled to seek support for his re-election.
But when defections become a sustained pattern, the opposition is weakened, and the ruling party increasingly dominates the machinery of government, the cumulative effect deserves examination.
What happens to federalism when governors who should represent the distinct interests of their states become politically dependent on the president? What happens to legislative oversight when the ruling party’s influence extends across nearly the entire federation? And what happens to electoral accountability when political officeholders conclude that their safest route to power is to join the party controlling the federal government?
The danger is not simply that Tinubu might win another election. It is that the political environment could become so heavily tilted in favour of the incumbent that the formal existence of opposition parties conceals the practical difficulty of challenging the government.
A democracy can survive a powerful ruling party. It struggles when power becomes so concentrated that political alternatives exist largely on paper.
Litigation as a Political Battlefield
The courts are another important part of this unfolding story.
Political parties in Nigeria have increasingly found themselves embroiled in litigation over leadership, candidate selection, party recognition and control of party structures. Such disputes are not inherently suspicious. Courts exist precisely because political organisations must obey their constitutions and the law.
Nevertheless, litigation can become a political weapon when disputes are deliberately manufactured, prolonged or strategically deployed to disable opponents.
A party fighting over its leadership may have little time to organise voters. A candidate preoccupied with legal battles may struggle to campaign effectively. A faction unable to resolve its internal disputes may find itself excluded from the electoral contest altogether.
The result can be the weakening of political opposition without the government having to issue a decree banning opposition parties.
However, an important distinction must be maintained. The fact that a party is embroiled in litigation does not establish that the APC, Tinubu or the government engineered the dispute. Each case requires evidence, and judicial decisions must be examined on their merits. Allegations of coordinated litigation warfare should not be presented as established facts without supporting evidence.
The broader institutional question remains: are the courts resolving political disputes impartially, or are procedural battles becoming a substitute for democratic competition?
Where political actors manipulate legal processes to secure partisan advantage, the law risks becoming a weapon rather than a referee. Where judges resist such pressure and apply the law consistently, the courts can preserve the democratic space that politicians seek to occupy.
The judiciary must therefore be judged not by whether its decisions favour the government or the opposition, but by whether those decisions are lawful, independent and consistent with constitutional principles.
What the Constitution Requires
Section 40 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, as amended, protects the right to assemble freely and associate with other persons, including the right to form or belong to political parties.
Section 221 recognises the constitutional role of political parties in canvassing for votes and sponsoring candidates in elections. These provisions are part of a broader constitutional framework that presupposes political competition rather than the permanent supremacy of one party.
Section 14(2)(a) declares that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria, from whom government derives its authority through the Constitution.
These provisions establish an essential principle: political power is held in trust under a constitutional order. It is not the personal property of the president, the APC or any coalition of political elites.
There is nothing unconstitutional about a president seeking re-election, persuading governors to support him or welcoming politicians who voluntarily join his party. Equally, there is nothing illegitimate about opposition parties refusing to join the APC, challenging government decisions in court or attempting to defeat the president at the ballot box.
The constitutional concern arises when state power is used to suppress lawful political association, intimidate opponents, manipulate electoral administration or deny competing parties a fair opportunity to organise and campaign.
The constitutional test is therefore not whether Tinubu resembles Abacha in every respect. He does not. The test is whether the political practices employed under his administration strengthen or undermine the constitutional conditions necessary for a competitive democracy.
A president does not have to abolish the Constitution to weaken constitutional democracy. He needs only to preside over a system in which the institutions formally remain but become progressively less capable of checking his power.
The Political Class: Five Fingers, One Hand?
The most unsettling similarity between the Abacha era and contemporary Nigerian politics may lie not in the personalities involved but in the behaviour of the political class.
Abacha’s five parties demonstrated how political organisations could abandon their independent purposes in pursuit of proximity to power. Their leaders effectively surrendered the central responsibility of a political party: to offer voters a choice.
The same danger emerges whenever politicians treat party affiliation as a vehicle for securing appointments, contracts, electoral protection or access to the presidency rather than as an expression of political convictions.
If governors, legislators and political leaders continually migrate towards the party in power, what becomes of ideological competition? If every ambitious politician concludes that the APC is the only viable route to political survival, what happens to the opposition’s capacity to hold the government accountable?
The metaphor of the five fingers of a leprous hand is therefore more than a historical insult. It is a warning about the difference between political plurality and political independence.
The fingers need not belong to five separate parties. They may belong to factions within one dominant party, rival political camps that eventually unite behind the incumbent, or opposition organisations whose leaders abandon their platforms in exchange for political accommodation.
The common feature is not their formal structure. It is their willingness to subordinate independent political judgment to the preservation of power.
And the political class cannot escape responsibility by blaming the president alone. Governors who defect, legislators who surrender scrutiny, party leaders who negotiate away their independence and political financiers who support whichever candidate controls access to the state all participate in shaping the system.
A president may be the principal beneficiary of political consolidation, but he cannot accomplish it without collaborators.
Abacha’s Ambition, Tinubu’s Opportunity
There is a crucial difference between Abacha’s ambition and Tinubu’s opportunity.
Abacha ruled through military force. His opponents faced detention, intimidation, restrictions on political activity and a transition programme designed to preserve military power. The five parties operated within an authoritarian framework that denied Nigerians a genuinely open presidential contest.
Tinubu operates under a constitutional democracy in which opposition politicians can organise, journalists can criticise the government, citizens can protest, and courts can review official action. These freedoms remain indispensable, even when their practical effectiveness is disputed.
It would therefore be historically careless to declare the two administrations identical.
But historical comparisons are useful precisely because they help identify dangers before institutions collapse. Nigeria should not wait until political competition has been extinguished before asking whether its democracy is becoming excessively concentrated around one party and one president.
The most important warning from 1998 is that a transition can retain the outward appearance of democratic procedure while its political outcome has effectively been predetermined.
Abacha’s project was terminated by his death. Tinubu’s political future must be determined by constitutional processes, the choices of Nigerian voters and the integrity of the electoral system.
The question is whether the opposition will remain sufficiently organised, credible and independent to offer a genuine alternative, and whether the institutions responsible for administering elections and enforcing the law will protect the right of Nigerians to choose.
Conclusion: Democracy Is Not a Loyalty Test
Nigeria did not struggle through military dictatorship merely to exchange one form of concentrated power for another.
The return to civilian rule in 1999 was supposed to establish a political order in which power could be contested, leaders could be replaced, and no president could claim the nation as his personal political estate.
Tinubu is entitled to seek a second term. The APC is entitled to recruit politicians and win elections. Governors are entitled to support the president, and voters are entitled to reward a government they consider successful.
But none of these rights entitles the governing party to monopolise political power, weaken lawful opposition or turn the institutions of state into instruments of partisan survival.
The Chagoury business interests and other networks of wealth and influence deserve scrutiny wherever their relationships with successive administrations raise legitimate questions about transparency, conflicts of interest and public accountability. Such scrutiny must be evidence-based, not a substitute for proof.
Likewise, political defections and litigation must be assessed individually, while their cumulative effect on the health of Nigerian democracy remains a legitimate subject of public debate.
The ultimate lesson of Abacha’s five fingers is that the appearance of political diversity can conceal the absence of genuine choice. Tinubu’s Nigeria must not be allowed to drift towards that condition.
A democracy is not healthy because everybody agrees with the president. It is healthy because citizens remain free to disagree with him, organise against him and vote him out of office.
The president’s greatest democratic achievement would not be to assemble 36 governors beneath the APC banner. It would be to preside over a country in which an opposition governor can govern without fear, an opposition party can campaign without obstruction, and an opposition candidate can win an election without the incumbent treating defeat as a national emergency.
Abacha wanted five political parties to deliver one presidential candidate. Nigeria must ensure that its present political system does not reproduce the same outcome through a different route.
The fingers may have changed. The hand may now wear a democratic glove. But Nigerians must remain vigilant whenever political power becomes so concentrated that the difference between a ruling party and the state begins to disappear.
The republic belongs to its citizens, not to the hand that holds the fingers.
