By Mohammed Bello Doka
15 June, 2026.
Will there be an election in Nigeria in 2027 or is the government planning a coronation? Is Nigeria officially in a dictatorship? These are no longer the questions of opposition politicians crying wolf or activists suffering from political paranoia. They have become the urgent, unavoidable questions that every Nigerian citizen must confront following the Federal High Court ruling of June 15, 2026, which ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission to deregister the African Democratic Congress and four other political parties. When a court of law, at the behest of a ruling party member, eliminates the main opposition party just months before a general election, the term dictatorship ceases to be rhetorical and becomes descriptive.
The evidence that the All Progressives Congress engineered the crisis in the ADC is not hidden in leaked memos or whispered in backroom conversations. It exists in public statements, court filings, and the open actions of APC officials. The case that led to the deregistration of the ADC was instituted by the Incorporated Trustees of the National Forum of Former Legislators. The man who filed that suit is Hon. Nnanna Igbokwe, a former member of the House of Representatives who openly defected from the PDP to the APC on the floor of the House in December 2017. He was welcomed at that plenary session by then-Governor Rochas Okorocha. As recently as May 2026, legislative records identified Igbokwe as an APC member sponsoring motions. A member of the ruling party filed the lawsuit that killed the main opposition party. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a court docket.
The most damaging evidence, however, came from the mouth of the Chief of Staff to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Femi Gbajabiamila, standing in public at an event in Abuja in April 2026, addressed Leke Abejide, then an ADC member of the House of Representatives. He said, and I quote directly, Honourable Abejide, my charge to you is to stay in that same ADC. Fight them. Scatter them. We like what you are doing. Continue. Do not mind what the former governor said, that they will come and join APC. No, no, no. Stay in ADC. Win your re-election in ADC. Good luck in court. The Chief of Staff to the President of Nigeria publicly encouraged an opposition lawmaker to remain inside his party and destroy it from within. He promised that the presidency supported this effort. He wished him good luck in court. That court, just weeks later, issued the order that deregistered the ADC. When the President's own chief of staff says stay and scatter them, and then the party is legally scattered, no reasonable person can call that coincidence.
The court's reasoning in deregistering the ADC defies basic logic. The ADC was spared from deregistration after the 2019 elections because Leke Abejide won a House of Representatives seat under the party's banner. He won that seat again in 2023. The same candidate, the same party, the same constitutional provision under Section 225A of the 1999 Constitution which was added in January 2019 under President Muhammadu Buhari. Yet in 2020 the ADC was allowed to continue, and in 2026 it was ordered deregistered. What changed? The political threat level changed. In 2020, the ADC was a minor party with one seat and no national figures. By 2025 and early 2026, the ADC had become a genuine opposition coalition. Atiku Abubakar aligned with it. Nasir El-Rufai, Abubakar Malami SAN, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal and Rotimi Amaechi joined it. For the first time since the APC came to power in 2015, a credible opposition force was emerging. That force was eliminated not at the ballot box but by judicial decree.
The asymmetry in the court's legal reasoning is even more telling. If defecting out of the ADC means those lawmakers no longer count for the party, then by the same logic, defecting into the ADC should mean those lawmakers now count for the party. The court applied the logic only one way. Lawmakers who left the ADC were used to argue that the party had no elected members. Lawmakers who joined the ADC were dismissed as not being elected on the party's platform. This is not jurisprudence. This is partisan engineering dressed in legal robes. The Greek philosopher Aristotle warned long ago that the rule of law is meaningless if the law is not applied equally to all. When the law bends in one direction for the ruling party and in the opposite direction for the opposition, what remains is not justice but the appearance of justice masking the will of the powerful.
The same weaponization of the courts is visible in the crisis engulfing the Peoples Democratic Party. The PDP has no universally recognized national leadership today. The Supreme Court ruling of April 30, 2026, invalidated the party's previous national conventions, effectively stripping the party of a valid National Working Committee. Two factions now claim legitimacy. One faction is backed by Nyesom Wike, who serves as a minister in the APC-led government while remaining a member of the PDP. There is no formal alliance between the APC and the PDP. Wike is a sitting minister in a government led by a different party. The political scientist Giovanni Sartori, in his seminal work on party systems, described such arrangements as semi-competitive authoritarianism, where opposition parties are allowed to exist but are hollowed out from within by figures who serve the ruling party's interests while retaining opposition credentials.
The Wike faction insists there is no alliance. Their spokesman, Jungudo Mohammed, has called such claims mischievous. But the actions speak louder than the denials. The other PDP faction, loyal to Kabiru Turaki and Governor Seyi Makinde, has publicly warned that they will fight any move to turn the PDP into an appendage of the APC. The result is a party in chaos, unable to present a united front, unable to hold valid primaries, and facing the real possibility of being disqualified from the 2027 elections altogether. The court, in both the ADC and PDP cases, has served as the instrument of this destabilization. The judiciary was meant to be the arbiter of political disputes. It has become the weapon of political destruction.
What Nigeria is witnessing is not unique. Across Africa and beyond, incumbent governments have used courts and electoral commissions to eliminate opposition parties, creating de facto one-party states. The consequences have been catastrophic. In Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko established a one-party state under the Popular Movement of the Revolution. For 27 years, there was no opposition. The economy collapsed. GDP per capita fell from 380 dollars in 1970 to 120 dollars by 1997. Hyperinflation reached 9,000 percent. The state hollowed out completely. In 1997, rebels marched into Kinshasa unopposed. Mobutu fled. The collapse triggered the First and Second Congo Wars, which killed over five million people. In Somalia, Siad Barre established a one-party state under the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party. Within 15 years, the state had vanished. Barre fled Mogadishu in 1991. There was no successor government. Somalia has been a failed state for 35 years, with no central government, warlords controlling territory, and over 500,000 dead in civil wars.
In Yugoslavia, the one-party system under the League of Communists lasted 45 years. There was visible progress. Living standards were higher than in the Soviet bloc. Tourists visited from the West. But the one-party system suppressed every ethnic and political grievance. When it collapsed in the 1990s, it collapsed violently. The Yugoslav Wars killed between 140,000 and 250,000 people. Genocide was committed at Srebrenica. Two and a half million people were ethnically cleansed. The country shattered into seven separate states. In Syria, the Baath Party under the Assad dynasty ruled for 40 years before the 2011 protests. There was seeming stability. Infrastructure functioned. Assad was received at international forums. But the one-party system had no mechanism for peaceful change. When protests came, the regime responded with bullets and barrel bombs. The state lost control of most of the country. Over 600,000 people have been killed. Fourteen million people have been displaced. Half of Syria's pre-war population is either internally displaced or living as refugees. The regime today holds only about 60 percent of Syrian territory, and only because of Russian and Iranian military support.
These are the destinations on the road that Nigeria is now traveling. The APC is using the courts and electoral institutions to drive the country toward a one-party system. The deregistration of the ADC, the destabilization of the PDP, the open encouragement of opposition lawmakers to scatter their own parties, the selective application of Section 225A, the timing of the court ruling just months before the 2027 primary deadlines all of it points in one direction. An election with no viable opposition is not an election. It is a coronation. As the political philosopher Robert Dahl wrote, democracy requires more than free and fair elections on the day of voting. It requires the continuous possibility of opposition, the freedom to organize, and the protection of political parties from state repression. When the state can eliminate parties through court orders, the continuous possibility of opposition disappears. What remains is electoral authoritarianism, a system in which elections are held but the outcome is never in doubt.
Nigeria and the world cannot afford a dictatorship for two fundamental reasons. The first is the sheer size of the Nigerian population. With over 230 million people, Nigeria is the most populous black nation on earth. A breakdown of law and order in Nigeria would not be a localized crisis. It would be a continental catastrophe. The Democratic Republic of Congo, with 100 million people, collapsed into the Congo Wars and triggered a regional conflict that drew in nine African nations and killed over five million. Nigeria is more than twice the size of Congo. If Nigeria collapses into the kind of state failure seen in Zaire, Somalia, or Syria, the death toll would be measured in the millions. Refugees would flood across the borders of Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin. The Lake Chad Basin, already destabilized by Boko Haram, would become a zone of total chaos. The entire West African subregion would be destabilized for generations.
The second reason is the lesson of every one-party system in modern history. Dictatorships do not produce stability. They produce the illusion of stability until the illusion shatters. The Roman philosopher Cicero wrote that liberty is not the absence of constraint but the presence of law that applies equally to the powerful and the weak. In a one-party system, law does not apply equally. It applies selectively. The powerful are protected. The weak are crushed. And when the powerful eventually lose their grip, as all dictators eventually do, there are no legitimate institutions left to manage the transition. There are no opposition parties to negotiate with. There are no independent courts to arbitrate disputes. There is only violence. The state, having spent decades destroying every alternative center of power, finds itself standing alone with nothing but guns and soldiers. And when the guns run out of ammunition or the soldiers stop taking orders, the state collapses like a building made of sand.
The Nigerian government still has time to choose a different path. The court ruling can be appealed. INEC can refuse to enforce deregistration until all appeals are exhausted. Political parties can be allowed to exist and compete. The judiciary can reclaim its role as an independent arbiter rather than a political weapon. But if the current trajectory continues, if the APC continues to use courts and state institutions to eliminate opposition, if Nigeria drifts further into one-party rule, the question will not be whether Nigeria becomes a dictatorship. The question will be whether Nigeria survives the dictatorship. The people of Zaire, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and Syria learned that lesson at the cost of millions of lives. Nigeria should not need to learn it again. Will there be an election in 2027 or a coronation? Is Nigeria officially in a dictatorship? The answer to those questions will determine not just the fate of Nigerian democracy but the fate of 230 million people and the stability of an entire continent.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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