Nigerian Fourth Republic Parties and Opposition Politics

This chapter examines opposition politics and the role of political parties in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Nigerian parties are often described as weak and disorganised in their efforts to exert effective oppositional pressure on the ruling parties. The cases of the Fourth Republic differ, as illustrated by opposition politics in Nigeria, opposition parties and electoral politics, opposition politics and democratisation, and the specific cases of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and opposition politics and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). For the first time in the history of Nigerian political parties, an opposition (APC) has wrested power from the incumbent. This chapter concludes that most of the more than 100 registered parties in opposition politics are unserious, but the APC has shown an excellent quality of effective opposition that unseated the ruling PDP in 2015, but the PDP failed to organise and challenge the ruling APC after 2015 due to internal wrangling.