Online Workshop 14: "Convergence versus differentiation: Party ideology in Nigeria's Fourth Republic" by Dr Sa'eed Husaini

The idea that Nigerian political parties lack ideological content has achieved nearly unanimous acceptance in both academic scholarship and popular discourses. This echoes a wider perception that political parties have been the "weakest link" in the so called "third wave" of democratisation that swept across Africa and other parts of the global south in the early 1990s. Rather than attracting members and candidates on the basis of shared philosophies, political parties in Nigeria are thought to rely primarily on patronage networks and vote-buying, reflecting the supposedly "neopatrimonial" nature of African political parties. The paradigmatic example of the assumed lack of ideology in Nigerian political parties is the ease with which elected officials may switch from one major party to the other. However, the reigning consensus on the ideological emptiness of Nigerian politics relies on a simple but easily overlooked category error: it assumes that ideological politics necessarily requires ideological differentiation between the dominant parties. Rather, I argue that an apparent political consensus that is maintained in spite of the diversity of social and economic forces in society may be stronger evidence for ideological dominance or even hegemony than of ideological vacuity. In this sense, ideology may hide in plain sight. 

Through briefly re-considering the history of Nigerian political parties and the popular appeals of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People's Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria's contemporary parties of government, my presentation offers ideological convergence as an alternative conception that may account for party switching and the apparent absence of substantive policy disagreement between the two major parties without succumbing to exoticist tropes. I argue that rethinking ideology in Nigerian politics helps us to better understand why political participation remains meaningful for millions of ardent party supporters as well as to better recognise how local normative aspirations and global economic zeitgeists interact to shape the commitments of Nigerian political party members and elite.