Nigeria has seen political defections before, but what is unfolding under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is something far more dangerous: the systematic dismantling of multiparty democracy. With Governor Ahmadu Fintiri of Adamawa now preparing to cross over to the APC, the ruling party is tightening its grip on the country with a speed and aggression unprecedented in the Fourth Republic.
This is not organic political alignment. It is not ideological persuasion. It is the quiet construction of a de facto one party state, engineered through pressure, patronage, and the overwhelming power of incumbency. When the governor of Atiku Abubakar’s own home state defects to the ruling party ahead of a presidential election, it is not politics as usual. It is the calculated neutralization of opposition strongholds. When Kano, Rivers, and now Adamawa are absorbed into the ruling party in rapid succession, it is not coincidence. It is consolidation.
President Tinubu’s defenders claim this is the result of “good governance” and “infrastructure dividends.” But Nigerians know better. No democracy thrives when the ruling party swallows the political map whole. No democracy survives when governors are lured, pressured, or politically cornered into abandoning the mandates on which they were elected.
A nation where 30 or 31 states answer to one party is not a competitive democracy. It is a political monoculture — brittle, unaccountable, and hostile to dissent.
Nigeria fought too hard for democracy to watch it be hollowed out through backroom deals and strategic defections. A system without a viable opposition is not a democracy; it is a coronation machine.
If President Tinubu continues down this path, history will not remember him as a reformer or a unifier. It will remember him as the leader who presided over the slow, deliberate suffocation of Nigeria’s multiparty system.