Inside Nigeria’s Political Game: How Elite Power Calculations Drive Conflict While Citizens Fight Emotional Battles

The political landscape of Nigeria often presents a paradox: a highly charged, deeply personal, and often acrimonious battleground for its citizens, yet a fluid, transactional, and collaborative marketplace for its elite. This disconnect, where the public perceives politics as a clash of ideologies or identities while the political class views it as a game of influence and resource acquisition, is a critical, yet underexamined, driver of national division and governance dysfunction.

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The Transactional Nature of Elite Politics

Nigerian politicians, much like their counterparts in established democracies, operate primarily on a calculus of self-interest and power maximization. Their core incentives are winning elections (Victory), maintaining public standing (Relevance), securing contracts and appointments (Resources), and ensuring access to the central levers of government (Access).

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This focus on the ends, acquiring and retaining power, explains the common, high-profile cross-carpeting (defections) that baffle and infuriate loyal party members. It’s quite like a famous quote from Henry Kissinger, the prominent American diplomat, that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”.

Data consistently shows that party loyalty is often secondary to political opportunity in Nigeria’s multi-party system:

• Defection as Strategy: The movement of political heavyweights like Peter Obi (from APGA to PDP to Labour Party) or Femi Fani-Kayode (from PDP to APC) perfectly underscores this pattern. These shifts are rarely driven by profound ideological conversion but rather by a cold assessment of which political vehicle offers the best route to power, relevance, or protection in the next cycle.
• Global Parallels: This pattern is not unique. Globally, political actors regularly recalibrate their positions to appeal to influential voter blocs or to join coalitions that guarantee legislative influence. The tactical positioning of a US Senator on a sensitive issue, for example, is often more about mobilizing a specific demographic ahead of an election than a deep-seated philosophical commitment.

Political hostility between candidates and parties often masks a deeper level of elite cooperation. What appears as fierce rivalry, public spats, heated debates, and dramatic confrontations is frequently political theatre crafted to energize core supporters and sustain the illusion of ideological conflict.

Much of this dynamic persists because of the political immaturity of the electorate, who interpret events through narratives shaped by the elites. As a result, citizens often make decisions that ultimately harm their own interests.

Instead of stepping back, removing emotion, and recognizing the larger patterns at play, many fail to see that they are being played against one another in the Nigeria’s political arena, while, in reality, the political elites themselves are rarely ever truly at war.

Shared Interests: The Underside of Elite Unity

Beneath the surface of Nigeria’s loud political rhetoric lies a tightly interconnected elite network that transcends party lines. This network is bound by family, business, and shared economic ventures, illustrating a structural unity that the public is rarely privy to.

• Marriages and Business Ties: Political families across the major parties (APC, PDP, etc.) frequently socialize, collaborate on private ventures, and maintain long-standing friendships. The fact that Nigeria’s current National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, is connected to opposition figure Atiku Abubakar through family ties is a prominent example.
• Post-Conflict Cordiality: Bitter election rivalries, such as the historic contests between former Presidents Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, often melt away within months of the final results. The sight of these former adversaries maintaining cordial relations, or even playing ceremonial roles in one another’s family events (like Atiku’s prominent role at Yusuf Buhari’s wedding), starkly contrasts with the bitter, often hateful rhetoric fueled by their supporters at the grassroots level. This reality reinforces the principle that the elite often remain united by shared self-interests even when the public perceives division.

This phenomenon is captured by the African Principle of Ubuntu, a philosophy meaning “humanity towards others,” which informs community and justice, though in the political elite’s context, it is often co-opted or twisted to mean “solidarity among the powerful.”

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They recognize a shared interest in maintaining the political system that benefits them, regardless of who is in power.

The Weaponization of Identity and Emotion

The most profound consequence of this elite-citizen disconnect is the weaponization of identity, namely, ethnicity, religion, and regionalism, by political actors.

• Tools for Electoral Advantage: As the analysis notes, labels and sentiment often serve as tools for electoral advantage, not genuine value systems. Politicians amplify emotional issues not out of conviction, but to mobilize targeted voter blocs. For instance, the strategic use of religious or ethnic rhetoric in specific regions ahead of an election cycle is a time-tested method for securing a committed, high-turnout vote.
• The Data on Division: Reports by organizations like Afrobarometer and the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) consistently show that emotional political division reduces public focus on economic reforms, security strategies, and institutional accountability.

The 2023 post-election tensions, fueled by misinformation and tribal messaging, deepened mistrust among citizens precisely while political actors were recalibrating their alliances for future contests.

According to a 2022 Afrobarometer report on Nigeria, while a majority of Nigerians (over 70%) express a strong preference for democracy, a significant portion still prioritize factors like the candidate’s ethnic or religious background over policy substance when voting, demonstrating the effectiveness of identity politics.

A CDD analysis of the 2023 election cycle highlighted how a surge in online misinformation targeting ethnic and religious anxieties was directly correlated with increased voter mobilization in certain identity-based strongholds, indicating a successful tactical deployment of emotional politics.

Policy Implications and Accountability Deficit

The widening gap between strategic self-interest (elite) and citizen emotion (electorate) has severe, real-world policy implications for the nation’s Economic Realities and Political Structures.

1. Reduced Accountability for Governance Failures:

When voters engage in politics as a battle for ethnic pride or moral supremacy, they unintentionally grant the elite a license to avoid accountability. The focus shifts from measuring performance, on metrics like inflation, security, and infrastructure, to defending a candidate or party based on identity.

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This emotional shield allows the elite to negotiate power-sharing deals and pursue personal ventures without facing rigorous public scrutiny over governance failures.

2. Diverting Focus from Core Development Challenges:

Nigeria, despite being Africa’s largest economy, faces significant development challenges. Economic Realities demand focus on complex structural reforms.

• Poverty: The World Bank estimates that nearly 80 million Nigerians (around 37% of the population) were living below the national poverty line as of 2023.
• Security: Ongoing conflicts and banditry have severely impacted agricultural production and access to markets, exacerbating food insecurity.
• Oil Dependence: Despite recent diversification efforts, oil still accounts for over 80% of export earnings, making the economy highly vulnerable to global price fluctuations.

These critical issues receive insufficient attention when public discourse is dominated by emotionally charged, identity-based conflicts orchestrated by the elite.

The Path to an Accountable Future

Nigeria’s long-term democratic stability and governance improvement depend on a fundamental shift in political engagement, moving away from emotional allegiances and toward issue-based accountability. This requires the electorate to internalize the core truth of elite political dynamics:

The Responsibility of the Electorate:

1. Recognize the Game: Voters must recognize that elite actors, regardless of their public posturing, prioritize personal and institutional interests. Public spats are often tactical positioning, not ideological war.
2. Shift Demands to Performance Metrics: The focus must shift from defending a candidate’s identity to demanding transparent governance, measurable performance metrics, economic reforms, and institutional discipline. The victory for the citizen lies not in their candidate winning power, but in holding that power accountable.
3. Harness Heritage for Civic Good: The Legacy of independence and the desire for true self-determination can be channeled into constructive civic participation. Informed, united, and issue-focused participation is the only effective counter to the elite’s strategy of divide and conquer.

The Nigerian political elite will always negotiate, realign, and pursue power; the responsibility lies with the electorate to avoid becoming collateral in these power games.

Nigeria’s political future can improve only when citizens stop fighting one another on behalf of politicians who remain united behind closed doors. The real victory lies not in emotional loyalty, but in informed civic participation.

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