Talking About So-Called Defectors

In the late 1990s, at the start of the Fourth Republic, certain politicians affiliated to what you might call the pro-Abiola faction of Nigerian politics withdrew from a nascent political organization because, they said, it was allowing politicians from the pro-Abacha faction to join. The pro-Abiola politicians went on to form the Alliance for Democracy (AD), while the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) became the banner of many, maybe most, but definitely not all of the pro-Abacha politicians.

Success and failure in Nigerian politics has little or nothing to do with proving that you are better at solving our problems than your rivals. It is about making mutually beneficial deals with godfathers, "stakeholders", "illustrious sons", basically people with the (perceived or actual) power to "deliver" discrete geographical blocs to the support column of the politicians and political parties. A person's ability to trade and subsequently "deliver" their village, town, local government area, senatorial zone, state or "geopolitical zone" is, of itself, subject to the same sort of deal-making. The credible threat of violence, and the actual use of violence, were part of the Fourth Republic's deal-making; arguably, the subsequent public security disasters of the Fourth Republic gestated in large part from this early use of "communal violence" and assassination as tools of politicking.

Anyway ...

It became clear the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), acting with ruthless venality, had corralled an juggernaut alliance of these backroom deal-makers, their political godsons and acolytes. Then came news that the AD, who had said they would never work with "Abacha Politicians" (i.e. the ANPP), had formed an anti-PDP electoral alliance with the ANPP (i.e. the Abacha Politicians). At the time, senior AD politicians said terrible things about Olusegun Obasanjo, the PDP presidential candidate....

.... which made it interesting when they flip-flopped four years later, and became incumbent President Obasanjo's most strident defenders and promoters ahead of the 2003 elections. They more or less said they would question the continued existence of Nigeria if Obasanjo didn't win.

I don't mean to pick on the AD/AC/ACN, though the faction, controlled since 2003 by former Lagos govenor Bola Tinubu, continues to switch political alliances every four years.

I could as easily have talked about incumbent Imo Governor Rochas Okorocha, who in the last 20 years has variously been a member of the PDP, the ANPP, the Action Alliance (AA), the Peoples Progressive Alliance (PPA), the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), and the APC. Okorocha joined and left the PDP two or three times, and is now, as a member of the APC, theoretically an ally of Bola Tinubu. This lip-service alliance has served the disparate purposes of both men for now, but is almost definitely semi-temporary. Yes, "semi-temporary". There is no basis to the alliance beyond two political sole proprietors' short-term calculation that the alliance works in the short-term for their short-term interests. It could be they continue to think the alliance works for them, and it could be they change their minds tomorrow. So let us call their alliance semi-temporary.


Nigerian politicians, inclusive of those who call themselves "progressive", have formed and broken a succession of ad-hoc alliances through the life of the Fourth Republic. It has been consistently funny to hear the APC blame Nigeria's problems on 16 years of the PDP, when every prominent member of the APC was either a member of the PDP, or a part of one of the other parties that governed Nigeria's three tiers during those 16 years. If the 1999-2015 period was the 16-year failure the APC says it was, then the defector-filled APC is as much to blame for it as the remnant PDP.

How can people like Nasir El-Rufai and Rotimi Amaechi keep straight faces when blaming the PDP for 16 years of bad government? Has Bola Tinubu forgotten that the AD/AC/ACN played a decisive role in reelecting Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan? And how can President Buhari claim the defectors (reverse-defectors?) are corrupt people who are leaving APC because they are afraid of his nonexistent anti-corruption war? Does he think anyone believes the remaining members of APC are all angels of purity?

There are people who think German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world. Oddly enough, President Buhari was standing right next to her when he dismissed his wife's opinions, because (in his words) she belonged in the kitchen, the parlour and "the other room". I do not know what he meant by "the other room", because I am innocent ...

.... but I am going to borrow his metaphor, and say Nigerian politics in the Fourth Republic is like a house. And the political parties are like rooms in a single house. The politicians are like housemates, who are free to choose their roommates, but who never actually leave the house they all share. The halls of this house are always full of housemates carrying their mattresses from one room to another, but solidarity to the house remains strong. They are in it together. They are housemates.


We should probably stop treating the Big Two, the PDP and the APC, as though they were cohesive entities. Yes, every political party on Earth is a tense alliance of competing interests, but the Nigerian mega-parties are not even minimally coherent. Hopping back and forth between the two parties is not really a "defection", but is more like an actor moving back and forth between the original television series and the spinoff series.