Ruling regimes rightly bear blame for democratic decay in America and Nigeria. Yet opposition parties deserve equal – perhaps sharper – scrutiny, their actions driving decline or revival.
By Chudi Okoye
The world’s oldest constitutional democracy is only heartbeats away from becoming a bona fide autocracy, and its largest African counterpart is on the brink of buckling to one-party rule. The principal blame for these crises lies with the ruling regimes and their well-documented abuses of power. Yet, another key factor, often overlooked, is the rival parties’ strategic blunder – what I term opposition strategicide: the implosion of opposition parties, their self-sabotage and disunity, and their retreat from electoral viability due to grave miscalculations.
If nothing is done to reverse these troubling trends, the United States and Nigeria could become the latest totems of democratic decay: one sliding into what scholars call competitive authoritarianism – a system where formal elections are held but opposition forces face formidable challenges and ruling regimes employ repressive tactics; and the other veering toward a managed democracy – where, despite the appearance of pluralism, democratic institutions are manipulated to entrench one-party dominance.
It is quite a moment for the global democratic project. Following what for years some scholars posited as “waves of democratization” (a term popularized by the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who identified three such waves in world history), it seems we’re living through a sustained democratic slide. After the cresting waves of what I might call democratide, we may now be witnessing a global ebb. Some scholars call it democratic regression or backsliding; others, more bleakly, refer to it as democracide.
Popular punditry in the U.S. and Nigeria almost exclusively blames the ruling parties for the democratic decline, rightly citing executive overreach, patronage, and institutional manipulation. Opposition parties are often given a pass or, at best, receive perfunctory critique, with far less attention paid to their strategic missteps and internal fragmentation. Yet, I would argue that opposition strategicide is a critical driver of democratic decay in both domains. In addition, when it comes to reform, there’s an asymmetry of incentives between ruling and rival parties. Incumbents have little reason to reverse authoritarian or one-party drift, unless it threatens their survival. By contrast, opposition parties, whose very existence depends on democratic revival, have every reason to regroup, reassess, and reassert themselves. Hence, my focus on the opposition as the vanguard of change. For democracy to be revived, opposition failures must be scrutinized as sharply as regime abuses.
In America, the Democratic Party – ostensibly the primary bulwark against right-wing authoritarianism – grievously miscalculated in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. Initially ignoring concerns about its nominee’s age and capacity, it clung to institutional inertia, delaying a leadership transition that could have strengthened its electoral standing. The result: a collapse that now risks full entrenchment of illiberal governance, particularly if Donald Trump, newly re-elected, enacts the maximalist ambitions outlined in his party’s radical policy playbook.
In Nigeria, opposition parties fragmented and floundered following the 2023 general elections. Despite collectively winning a commanding majority, their fragmentation resulted in electoral defeat. Since then, demoralized and depleted, they have failed to re-consolidate or mount an effective post-election strategy. With the opposition parties’ internal divisions and weak coordination, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) – which polled only a paltry plurality – now dominates the political space with minimal resistance. Through their own miscalculation and myopia, Nigeria’s opposition parties have hastened the country’s lurch toward de facto one-party rule.
To prove the point about opposition agency, I begin with the American case, tracing how the Democratic Party’s strategic errors, institutional fatigue, and delayed adaptation contributed to its stunning defeat. Then, I turn to Nigeria, where ambition and short-sightedness frittered electoral momentum into splintered votes, clearing the path for hegemonic entrenchment by a ruling party that had lost popular support.
Together, these case studies demonstrate that while autocratic consolidation may be driven by those in power, it is often enabled, or accelerated, by rival parties committing strategicide.
Dithering Democrats
President Joe Biden looked for all the world like a waxen effigy. There he was, the Democratic Party’s anointed nominee, listless, dopey, and utterly out of it during the June 2024 U.S. presidential election debate. There had been some unease among supporters when the 81-year-old plodded onto the platform, his face pale, at once wan and wooden despite the make-up. The disquiet deepened when he spoke: his gestures feeble, his voice barely audible.
Then came the moment that likely sealed his fate. Midway through a response, Biden froze: stupefied and mentally befogged, his face drained of life. For endless seconds, he stuttered and muttered, then, as if his mind had shuttered, he sputtered into silence. In that instant, his re-election chances were shattered. Biden had become a burden for his party!
It was a dispiriting spectacle; but undoubtedly inspiriting to his foes.
Even after that debacle, it took weeks of party wrangling and backroom skullduggery before Biden finally stepped aside for his younger vice president, Kamala Harris. But by then, it was too late. With only three months to the November election, the Democrats had no time to hold a proper primary or mount a stronger campaign against Trump, who had been plotting his return since his defeat four years earlier. Predictably, Harris was trounced at the polls.
It has since emerged that Biden had an aggressive form of prostate cancer and likely suffered from dementia. Why he sought re-election, after earlier pledging to serve only one term, remains a mystery, except perhaps for hubris. More puzzling still is why the Democratic Party, despite mounting concerns about Biden’s health, failed to block his bid or force him out earlier. Now in defeat, the party is in utter disarray, its last president’s legacy in tatters.
This is tragedy on an epic scale. Think of the biblical King Saul, whose faltering judgment cost him a kingdom; of Shakespeare’s King Lear, undone by pride and the ambitions of those in his court; or of the bard’s Brutus, whose noble intent to save the Roman republic paved the path to empire. These are cautionary tales – of leaders who misread the moment, ignored the warnings, or acted too late. So, too, did Biden and his party: dithering, gripped by denial and inertia, thus unwittingly aiding America’s authoritarian drift with Trump’s return.
Donald Trump’s re-election was a political earthquake, but hardly surprising. The signs were flashing, which should have made Democrats ruthless about clueless Biden: concerns about his age and agility; rising youth disaffection and working-class drift, seen in poll after poll; the far-right’s weaponization of immigration; and popular disgust with Biden’s duplicity – in Europe, arming Ukrainians against Russian adventurism, but in the Middle East, arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Yet the Democratic establishment, clinging to precedent and terrified of internal rupture, closed ranks around a fading incumbent.
This wasn’t just miscalculation, it was strategicide: a self-inflicted wound at a pivotal moment.
To be sure, the Republican Party bears central blame for America’s democratic unraveling – embracing a corrupt demagogue with an authoritarian complex and now acquiescing to his whimsical, repressive rule. But Democrats, by smothering dissent and succumbing to inertia, became complicit.
The irony is searing. A party that styled itself as democracy’s bulwark ended up paving the way for its erosion. The cost may go well beyond one election, threatening the constitutional order itself.
Forfeiture in Nigeria
If scripture and high literature provide texture to the tragedy of Democratic dithering in the U.S., several motifs also illuminate the opposition’s spectacular failure in Nigeria. But it’s not just classical scaffolding; even basic principles of game theory can be invoked here. I turn to both below in revisiting the opposition’s totally avoidable defeat in Nigeria’s February 2023 presidential election.
The election had the makings of a political turning point: a moment of renewal and democratic deepening in Africa’s most populous country. A vibrant youth movement, growing fatigue with the ruling party, and broader dissatisfaction with entrenched elites – all indicated a very real chance for change. The emergence of a viable third force hinted at possible realignment. But instead of harnessing this historic moment through strategic cohesion, Nigeria’s opposition parties succumbed to divisiveness, ego, and tactical myopia. What followed was not mere defeat; it was strategicide – a forfeiture of fortune, a squandered opportunity to dislodge an exhausted ruling party.
From the outset, the opposition was structurally fragmented and lacked a unifying ethos. The once-dominant People’s Democratic Party (PDP) – now the major opposition – was poised to re-nominate its losing 2019 candidate, the north-easterner Atiku Abubakar: a plan that provoked southern protest. Many in the South had expected the PDP to honor its internal zoning principle and rotate power southward. Atiku’s emergence also unsettled influential blocs in the North-West.
The fallout was fast and furious: Peter Obi, Atiku’s former running mate and a rising southern star, left the party to lead the Labour Party (LP) ticket; Rabiu Kwankwaso, a formidable northern figure, defected to head the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP). The party hemorrhaged yet more coherence during the campaign, as five PDP governors, the so-called G5, waged an insidious war against their own presidential candidate.
In the end, all PDP offshoot candidates ran fractured campaigns. Atiku ran with a morally depleted PDP. Obi surged on the back of urban discontent and youthful idealism, but the LP lacked institutional depth. Kwankwaso consolidated influence in his northern enclave, but the NNPP remained parochial. Together, the three polled 60.9% of the votes, while APC snagged 36.6% – meaning a landslide was even within PDP grasp, had it but remained intact. What might have been a formidable anti-incumbent front dissolved into factional vanity, each wagering they could go it alone.
There had been credible allegations of electoral malpractice against the ruling APC, though these were never successfully proved in court. Subsequent claims alleged that the courts themselves were compromised. That may well have been. But the electoral math was unambiguous, as I argued in several post-election analyses. With unity, the opposition could have carried the day. But in the end, fragmentation allowed the APC to eke out an improbable plurality. The tragedy was not just in the loss; it was in the avoidable nature of that loss.
Yet, further strategicide unfolded after the ballots had been counted. Rather than confront their failure with introspection and reform, the opposition parties fell into paralysis and even deeper fragmentation. Appeals for reconciliation and coordination, including those I made in Awka Times, were apparently unheeded. There was no serious summit of rivals, just half-hearted efforts. The field was ceded with the feeblest fight.
This vacuum has only benefited and emboldened the ruling APC. With no credible, purposive opposition, defections have surged into the party – not merely for opportunistic gain, though that’s a huge part of it, but as rational recalibration by politicians sensing a one-party tide. Legislative realignments, cross-party appointments, and the co-optation of dissent have deepened the sense that Nigeria is drifting toward a managed democracy, where elections are ritualized but the outcome is structurally predetermined.
What’s striking is that this drift is not the result of brute repression or legal disenfranchisement. Nigeria remains formally pluralistic; its media and judiciary, though under pressure, retain pockets of independence. Rather, the danger lies in the opposition’s self-inflicted weakness: its failure to adapt, collaborate, or inspire. It is not the machinery of state that has silenced them, but the inertia of their own strategic missteps.
This instance of strategicide – rooted not in repression, but in internal dysfunction – echoes timeless lessons from literature and theory alike. The ancient Greek tragedians leap to mind here – especially the Big Three: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their oeuvres show that tragedy unfolds not simply from malevolence, but often through misjudgment, pride, and paralysis in the face of moral choice. Nigeria’s opposition, like several of the tragic characters, ignored warnings before the last election and continues to do so even as 2027 looms.
In June 2022, eight months before the election, I wrote a piece titled “Nigeria 2023: Political Hazards and a Game Theory Argument for Electoral Alliances.” It came just after the PDP had fractured and argued that the opposition’s rational path was effective coalition. But each contender stayed siloed, gambling on solo success. The result was a failed coordination game: a textbook case of suboptimal equilibrium, where the absence of credible commitments led to mutual loss. This was a classic prisoner’s dilemma, with all players defecting, to their collective detriment.
The opposition parties had a chance. But instead of seizing it, they relapsed into sectarianism and solipsism. And so, the promise of democratic renewal faded.
There is potential for recovery, however, if the opposition in both countries could commit to a corrective course. In the U.S., as the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election loom, the Democratic Party must build broad, issue-based coalitions to counter right-wing populism. In Nigeria, ahead of the 2027 election, opposition forces must urgently reimagine coalition politics to arrest the country’s slide toward one-party rule. To this end, there was recent reporting about a new opposition concert, anchored on a possible Atiku-Obi rapprochement. It’s a welcome move, if serious, though it faces significant challenges: reconciling the colliding ambitions of these figures, against the logic of regional power rotation that previously fractured the PDP; agreeing the coalition vehicle, whether a new party or an alliance; resolving the internal divisions that have plagued the major opposition parties; reconnecting with the grassroots and disillusioned voters who drifted away after the previous defeat. It will be difficult, though not an impossible task.
Ruling parties typically have scant incentive to reform, unless at risk. It thus falls on the opposition forces to drive democratic renewal, recognizing their previous missteps and refining their strategies. Pundits must resist simplistic narratives that blame only incumbents, but also sharpen their scrutiny of the opposition. Democracy thrives on real competition; without it, elections become hollow rituals. Reviving the opposition is not just strategy – it is a democratic imperative.
