Nigeria’s march toward elite cartel rule

Nigeria’s March toward Elite Cartel Rule

Babayola M. Toungo

The ongoing migration of Nigeria’s nomadic political elite into the ruling All Progressives Congress is not a sign of national consensus; it is a symptom of democratic decay. It reflects a calculated belief that elections can be rendered inconsequential, that voter choice is an inconvenience rather than the foundation of legitimacy. Power is no longer being sought through persuasion or performance, but through elite convergence around the instruments of state coercion. In this emerging order, elections are stripped of their competitive essence and reduced to coronations.

This trajectory points unmistakably toward authoritarian relapse. When political competition is deliberately narrowed, institutions are subordinated to partisan interests, and electoral credibility is hollowed out, democracy survives only in form, not in substance. An electoral umpire whose antecedents and public record raise legitimate concerns about neutrality becomes not a referee but a facilitator, presiding over processes whose outcomes are tacitly assumed in advance.

This is how democracies die in slow motion – not with tanks on the streets, but with defections in the night; not with suspended constitutions, but with hollowed institutions that continue to perform rituals whose substance has already been drained. When politicians abandon parties en masse not because of ideological realignment but because of fear, inducement, or survival instinct, democracy is no longer functioning as a system of choice. It has been reduced to a marketplace of elite bargains.

At the heart of this degeneration lies the looming spectre of authoritarian relapse. Nigeria has been here before. The substitution of competition with control, of consent with coercion, has always preceded democratic breakdown. A political environment in which the ruling party actively engineers dominance by absorbing governors, legislators, and structures across the federation is one in which pluralism is deliberately suffocated. The opposition is not defeated; it is neutralised. And when opposition ceases to exist as a credible alternative, accountability becomes a fiction.

This drift is further compounded by the role of institutions that ought to serve as neutral arbiters. An electoral process overseen by an umpire whose antecedents and publicly documented inclinations raise legitimate concerns about neutrality cannot inspire confidence. Elections conducted under such conditions are not exercises in popular sovereignty; they are administrative endorsements of predetermined outcomes. Ballot papers become ceremonial artefacts, and voter turnout becomes irrelevant to elite calculations.

More insidious still is the consolidation of elite cartelisation. What is emerging is not a dominant party in the classical sense, but a political cartel – an amalgam of career politicians, rent-seekers, and power brokers bound together not by vision or policy, but by mutual dependence on state power. In such a cartel, defection is rewarded, dissent is punished, and ideology is meaningless. The state becomes the shared property of an elite class, and politics becomes a closed shop.

Cartels, by their very nature, are hostile to transparency and accountability. They thrive on opacity, patronage, and the systematic exclusion of outsiders. In this system, elections are tolerated only insofar as they can be controlled; institutions are respected only insofar as they can be captured; and laws are enforced selectively, depending on one’s proximity to power. This is not governance – it is organised political predation.

The irony, which today’s defectors either ignore or actively suppress, is that Nigeria has already witnessed this movie. The People’s Democratic Party once believed itself invincible. By 2014, it controlled the federal government and twenty-eight states. It dominated the National Assembly and exercised near-total control over the commanding heights of political power. The PDP mistook numerical supremacy for permanence. Yet that concentration of power did not produce stability; it produced implosion. The party collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions – unrestrained egos, internal sabotage, and ambitions that no amount of patronage could reconcile.

That experience should have taught a permanent lesson: political monopolies are inherently unstable. When ambition is crowded into a single party, conflict intensifies rather than disappears. Today’s APC, swollen by coerced and transactional defections, is accumulating not strength but volatility. A party that becomes a refuge for all ambitions eventually becomes a battleground for survival.

But the danger now is greater than it was under the PDP. What we are witnessing is not merely party dominance, but systematic state capture. Regulatory agencies, security institutions, the legislature, and even civil society spaces are being steadily subordinated to partisan imperatives. Public resources are deployed not for development but for political insurance. The line between the ruling party and the state is being deliberately erased.

State capture has consequences that extend far beyond elections. It corrodes public trust, destroys institutional memory, and normalises impunity. When citizens realise that outcomes are fixed and participation is futile, cynicism hardens into alienation. And alienation, in a country as socially fractured and economically stressed as Nigeria, is not a benign condition – it is combustible.

Yet those driving this project appear unconcerned. They behave as though history has been suspended, as though legitimacy can be indefinitely manufactured, and as though repression disguised as stability can endure. They forget – or choose to forget – that no political order survives indefinitely without consent. A democracy emptied of choice does not become stable; it becomes brittle.

Nigeria is once again approaching a dangerous threshold. The choice before the country is no longer between parties or personalities, but between two radically different political futures. One path leads to competitive politics, institutional restraint, and the slow, difficult work of democratic consolidation. The other leads to coronations, cartel rule, and the quiet return of authoritarianism in civilian clothing.

Those cheering today’s defections may celebrate short-term victories, but they are laying the groundwork for long-term instability. When the ballot is reduced to theatre and institutions to instruments, the reckoning does not disappear – it is merely deferred. And when it arrives, it rarely announces itself politely.