By Marindoti Oludare
The essence of democracy is not the ballot. The ballot is only its instrument. The essence of democracy is the free and open contest of competing ideas — the guarantee that power may be questioned, that the governed may argue back, and that no authority is so settled that it cannot be challenged in the open air of public debate. Strip away that contest and what remains is not democracy but its costume: elections without meaning, chambers without dissent, a people who vote but do not choose.
This was the insight at the heart of the political tradition Nigeria inherited. John Locke argued that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed — that men do not surrender their liberty to rulers absolutely, but entrust power on the condition that it serve their good, and retain the right to withdraw that trust when it is abused. Power, in Locke’s account, is held in trust, and a trust betrayed may be revoked. Montesquieu added the architecture: liberty survives only where power checks power, where no single hand holds all the levers, and where competing institutions restrain one another. Take away the check, and the trust has no enforcement; the consent becomes a formality; the ruler, however elected, drifts toward the very absolutism the whole system was built to prevent.
Consent, then, is only as real as the mechanism that can revoke it. And in a democracy, that mechanism has a name: the opposition. The opposition is not merely a rival team hungry for office. It is the institutional embodiment of the people’s reserved right to say no — the standing reminder to those in power that their tenancy is conditional. When the opposition is strong, the incumbent governs knowing he can be replaced. When the opposition is hollow, the incumbent governs knowing he cannot, and consent quietly curdles into submission.
It is against this standard that I make a claim many will find perverse: that Nigeria’s opposition, out of power, has done more to damage this democracy than the All Progressives Congress has done in power. The APC’s offences are real, and I will come to them. But the APC is behaving exactly as an unchecked power behaves — that is the nature of unchecked power, and it was the opposition’s one job to check it. A government abusing its dominance is a predictable disease. An opposition too vain, too fractured, and too self-absorbed to offer the antibody is the deeper sickness, because it removes the cure.
The evidence arrived this week
We did not have to wait long for the illustration. This past week, in Ondo State, Nigerians watched the mechanism of consent being openly dismantled — and watched the opposition do nothing with the gift.
The sequence was brazen. Party members had come out. Politicians had walked the streets and campaigned for votes. And when incumbents whom the people judged unresponsive — unresponsive in the harshest economic season this country has known in a generation — were voted out in the primaries, the party simply overrode the result. Aspirants who had won the most votes were disqualified after being cleared. Others who had won were struck out and replaced by the invisible hand of Abuja, according to calculations known only to the party’s inner councils. The votes of party members, freely cast, were treated as suggestions to be revised.
The hypocrisy sharpens the offence. This is the same political establishment that championed the reform toward direct primaries — a genuine improvement on the old delegate system, in which a handful of party barons, bought or coerced, decided candidates in back rooms while the membership watched. Direct primaries put the choice back in the hands of the members. It was a real advance for our democracy. And now the very people who enshrined that advance have shown they will honour it only when it produces the result they wanted, and shred it when it does not. That is not a technical irregularity. It is a brazen absence of constitutional discipline, an abuse of power, and it should not be allowed to stand.
But here is the point that indicts the opposition rather than the government. This chaos inside the ruling party was not a surprise. It was always coming; the internal contradictions of a sprawling, patronage-bound ruling coalition guarantee it. A serious opposition would have been positioned to catch the falling fruit — to stand before the country and say: “Look, this is what they think of your vote; come to us, where your vote will be honoured.” Instead, the moment arrived and the opposition was absent. There was no unified voice, no coordinated challenge, no coherent alternative waiting to receive the disillusioned. The ruling party disgraced itself, and nothing happened, because there was no one standing on the other side to make the disgrace cost anything.
The disarmament was self-inflicted
Why is the opposition absent? Not because it was crushed. Because it disarmed itself.
The leading figures of the opposition have spent the years since the last election tending their own political fortunes rather than building the thing that might actually contest power. Atiku has been consumed by Atiku. Obi has been consumed by Obi. Each has guarded his personal ambition and his personal following, and neither has invested in the unglamorous, patient work of building the structures — the ward-level machinery, the coalitions, the shared institutions — that a real challenge to an incumbent requires. They have hoarded their egos and starved the movement.
This is why they will fail again next year, and the failure is written in the arithmetic of their own neglect. You cannot climb to Aso Rock on ambition alone. You need a ladder, and the ladder is structure — the organised, funded, disciplined apparatus that turns discontent into votes and votes into protected mandates. They did not build the ladder. They spent the building years admiring their own reflections. And so, when the ground shifts beneath the ruling party, they have nothing to stand on to reach the opening.
The result is a paradox that ought to alarm every Nigerian who cares about this democracy. Bola Tinubu is, by any honest measure, a weak incumbent — presiding over economic pain, insecurity, and public exhaustion. Yet he is simultaneously the weakest incumbent in Nigeria’s history with the strongest prospect of re-election in Nigeria’s history. Both things are true at once, and they are true for a single reason: the opposition has capitulated. It has unilaterally disarmed. And now it chases shadows, quarrelling over personalities and precedence while the one genuine opening in years passes it by. The people are left without a real choice — not because the incumbent is so strong, but because the alternative has refused to become one.
What the wronged candidates must now do
There is a narrower duty that falls on specific shoulders. The politicians who won their primaries and were then disqualified after being cleared — and those now being written off by the magic hands of Abuja — must go and fight for the mandate the people gave them. They must demand it. They must pursue it through the courts and through every lawful avenue, and they must expose the corruption that produced their removal.
This is not optional, and the logic is simple. If you ask people to come out and vote for you, and they do, and then their voices are silenced — and you accept it lying down for the sake of some future political favour or to avoid some future blowback — then you are a coward, and you do not deserve to return to public office. A politician who will not fight for the people’s vote has told you, in the plainest terms, that he will not fight for the people’s rights, their interests, or their welfare. The vote is the test. Fail it, and every promise you make afterward is empty. Any candidate who takes this brazen assault on the voice of the people lying down should quit politics, because at that point politics has become a charade with him as a willing extra.
Even where the party’s national leadership has signalled that substitutions may ultimately not be sustainable, the wronged candidates and the public must not let the matter rest. The disqualifications and the impositions must be investigated and exposed. The franchise of the people must be defended, not as a favour to any one politician, but as a precedent for the country — so that this travesty is not quietly normalised and repeated at will in every cycle to come.
The stakes are the democracy itself
Let me be precise about where blame lies, because precision is the point. The power grab by the APC, by its National Working Committee, and by the machinery around President Tinubu has been brazen and shameful. I do not excuse it. But a ruling party seizing what it can seize is doing what unchecked power always does. The failure that makes it possible — the failure that turns a containable abuse into a systemic danger — belongs to an opposition that should have made this week a turning point in its favour and instead made it one more day of its own irrelevance.
We are not merely watching a bad primary season. We are watching consent become a formality. When the votes of a party’s own members can be overridden without cost, the ordinary Nigerian is entitled to ask what protection his vote will enjoy in the general election of 2027. Locke warned that a trust betrayed may be revoked — but revocation requires an instrument, and the instrument is a living, credible opposition. Montesquieu warned that liberty dies where power meets no counter-power — and Nigeria is running, today, on an executive that meets almost none.
The task, then, is twofold and urgent. The wronged must fight for their mandates in the courts and in the open, and refuse to trade the people’s voice for private comfort. And the country must find a way to build a real opposition — coalitional, structured, disciplined, and larger than any one man’s ambition — so that this betrayal is not repeated in perpetuity. We do this not to hand power to Atiku or Obi or anyone else, but to restore the mechanism without which democracy is only theatre. We must strengthen this democracy, not preside over its weakening while congratulating ourselves on our votes.
The APC has shown us what it will do when no one stops it. The graver question is whether anyone in the opposition will finally do the one thing history has assigned to them: stand up, unite, and become the check that a free people cannot do without. Until they do, the greater betrayal will remain theirs — not the abuse of power they rail against, but the abdication of the duty to oppose it.
*Dr. Oludare, a US-based Nigerian medic, is Convener, Social Rehabilitation Gruppe (SRG). He writes from Texas.
