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What Nigeria increasingly calls “consensus” in party primaries is, in many cases, neither democratic compromise nor political maturity. It is often a carefully choreographed performance – an aesthetic of unity masking the reality of coercion, elite bargaining, and imposed outcomes. Behind the smiling group photographs, scripted endorsements, and orchestrated withdrawals lies a more troubling truth: the gradual hollowing out of internal party democracy.
In principle, consensus is not inherently undemocratic. In established democracies, parties sometimes build consensus through negotiations, persuasion, ideological alignment, and broad stakeholder accommodation. Genuine consensus emerges from voluntary agreement. What Nigeria practices, however, is too frequently a politics of manufactured unanimity where aspirants are pressured to “step down in the interest of the party,” citizens are conditioned to accept predetermined outcomes, and dissent is treated as rebellion. The result is a dangerous contradiction: parties preach democracy to the nation while suffocating democracy within their own structures.
This contradiction has become one of the defining features of Nigeria’s political culture. Primaries are increasingly transformed into political bazaars where power brokers negotiate candidacies behind closed doors while ordinary party members merely witness the formal announcement of decisions already taken elsewhere. The language is always polished – “harmonization,” “strategic alignment,” “party supremacy,” “family meeting,” “stakeholder consensus.” But beneath the elegant vocabulary lies the crude reality of exclusion and imposition. Consensus, in the Nigerian context, has become an instrument for managing elite anxieties rather than strengthening democratic legitimacy.
The tragedy is that this culture produces consequences far beyond the primaries themselves. When candidates emerge through manipulation rather than competition, they inherit office without accountability to party members or the electorate. Having secured power through godfathers instead of grassroots legitimacy, their loyalty naturally shifts upward to political patrons rather than downward to citizens. Governance then becomes transactional. Public office becomes compensation for political investments made during the internal struggles of party selection. This is why flawed primaries often produce flawed governance.
Political parties are supposed to be laboratories of democracy – institutions where leadership is tested, ideas are debated, and public confidence is cultivated. In Nigeria, however, many parties have evolved into electoral machines driven less by ideology than by access to state power. The absence of ideological clarity worsens the crisis. Since most parties are not meaningfully differentiated by policy philosophy, primaries become desperate contests over access to patronage networks rather than contests of ideas or competing national visions. The battle is therefore not over ideology but over control.
And because the stakes are extraordinarily high, party elites fear open contests. Free and transparent primaries create unpredictability; unpredictability threatens entrenched interests. Consensus then becomes the preferred mechanism for risk management. Democracy is tolerated only to the extent that it produces acceptable outcomes for the powerful. Yet this strategy carries within it the seeds of implosion.
Imposed candidates rarely heal divisions; they merely postpone them. Aggrieved aspirants defect, sabotage campaigns, fund internal rebellions, or quietly work against their own parties during general elections. The surface appearance of unity conceals deep fractures beneath. What looks stable before the primaries often disintegrates afterward. Many of Nigeria’s major political crises – defections, factional wars, litigations, parallel congresses, and electoral losses – can be traced to the unresolved bitterness generated by manipulated primaries. The irony is striking: in trying to avoid competition, parties frequently manufacture instability.
More fundamentally, the normalization of imposition weakens citizens’ faith in democracy itself. When party members repeatedly witness predetermined outcomes, they become cynical about participation. Voter apathy grows. Young people lose confidence in political processes. Politics begins to appear not as a contest of competence and ideas, but as a closed cartel controlled by money, influence, and elite arrangements. Democracy then survives only as ritual, not as substance.
Nigeria’s democratic problem is therefore not merely electoral malpractice during general elections; it begins much earlier within the internal mechanics of political parties themselves. A democracy cannot become healthy externally when its foundational institutions are internally authoritarian.
If political parties continue to substitute coercion for consensus and imposition for legitimacy, they risk destroying themselves from within. What appears today as tactical control may tomorrow become organizational collapse. Political history is filled with parties that mistook temporary dominance for permanent stability. True consensus strengthens parties because it is negotiated. Imposition weakens parties because it is enforced.
Nigeria’s democracy will remain fragile until parties rediscover a simple principle: democracy cannot be defended nationally while being denied internally.
