What is at Stake?

Why the future of democracy in Nigeria depends on making losing bearable and development possible.

Nigeria approaches another election at a moment that appears, at first glance, familiar. Since the return to civil rule in 1999, after nearly two decades of military government, democratic life has acquired a degree of continuity. The current stretch of civilian rule is the longest since independence in 1960. Elections have been regularly held, governments have changed, and the expectation that power is obtained through the ballot has, in formal terms, taken hold. This has encouraged a view that, despite its flaws, democracy in Nigeria has achieved a measure of stability.

However, that stability has always rested on shaky foundations. Electoral competition has remained tense, frequently accompanied by allegations of fraud, manipulation, and episodes of violence. More importantly, successive civilian governments have struggled to alter the underlying structure of the state and economy. Public authority remains marked by weak institutional and bureaucratic capacity, persistent corruption, and an inability to deliver basic public goods. At the same time, the economy has not been placed on a sustained path of productive transformation capable of reducing poverty for the majority. These features are not new. They have defined much of Nigeria’s democratic experience since 1999 and, taken on their own, might simply be expected to persist.

What gives the present moment greater significance is a shift in the material conditions that have underpinned this political order. Oil revenues, long central to the functioning of the state and its surrounding networks of patronage, are no longer sufficient in the way they once were. Fiscal pressures have intensified, while efforts to diversify the economy into more productive sectors have yielded limited results. The consequence is a tightening environment in which the resources available for distribution are more constrained, even as dependence on access to the state remains high.

This combination alters the stakes of political competition. As the fiscal space narrows, the value of controlling the state increases, while the costs of exclusion become more severe. Under such conditions, electoral defeat becomes harder to bear, and political victory more consequential. The risk is not simply of continued underperformance, but of a gradual erosion of the conditions that have allowed democratic competition to persist.

Recent events have made this harder to dismiss as an abstract concern. After months of speculation and selective revelations, the government finally publicly charged the perpetrators of an alleged coup plot in court. The plot involved a prominent former governor and immediate former oil minister, persons across the security services, with plans that, if carried through, would have involved the seizure of key state institutions and the detention, and possibly assassination, of senior political leaders. Even allowing for the uncertainty that surrounds such allegations, their very plausibility is revealing. They point to the continued presence of actors willing to consider extra-constitutional routes to power, and to the existence of networks through which such plans can be organised.

The reaction to the alleged plot has also exposed deeper ambiguities. Official accounts have been partial and, at times, inconsistent, and public information has emerged slowly and unevenly. This has fed both scepticism and unease. As Chris Ogunmodede notes:

There are good reasons to demand that claims made by military and government authorities regarding such a serious allegation meet the highest standard of proof, given that previous Nigerian governments have used alleged coup plots as a pretext to suppress dissent. Those of us who recall the dark years of military rule in Nigeria recognize that few things are more destabilizing and terrifying than rumored coup plots, whether real or fictitious, given that a guilty verdict by a military tribunal could mean execution by firing squad.

While it is reassuring that the government wants to pursue a civil trial and that we have hopefully moved past the days of death by firing squads, the episode draws attention to a fact that is only acknowledged but never fully confronted. The transition to civil rule in 1999 and 25 years of civilian governance have not brought stability, nor have we crossed some magical rubicon to democratic inevitability.

These developments bring into focus a more general question about democratic stability. It is not enough to observe that elections continue to be held or that civilian rule has endured for over two decades. The more relevant issue is whether the underlying political and economic conditions make it reasonable for major actors to accept the outcomes of electoral competition. Where power remains highly valuable and loss highly consequential, democratic continuity rests on a narrow foundation.

Democratic stability is often treated as a matter of institutional design or civic commitment, but this obscures a more basic point. Democracies do not endure because political actors are inherently attached to rules. They endure when those rules align with the interests of the actors who must abide by them. The persistence of electoral competition depends less on formal procedures than on whether the outcomes those procedures produce are bearable to those who lose.

I drew this insight from a 2005 paper by Adam Przeworski¹. Democracy, in his account, survives when it becomes a self-enforcing arrangement among competing actors. Winners accept limits on their power, and losers accept electoral outcomes, because both judge continued competition to be safer than confrontation or domination. Conflict does not disappear, but it is channelled into a form that all sides find preferable to the alternatives. Democracy endures, in other words, when political defeat is tolerable.

The conditions under which this becomes possible vary across societies. In richer and industrial democracies, economic life is less dependent on direct control of the state, and the range of outcomes political actors can tolerate tends to be wider. Losing office does not necessarily imply exclusion from security, opportunity, or status. By contrast, where wealth, protection, and advancement are tightly linked to political access, the consequences of defeat become more severe. In such settings, compliance with electoral outcomes becomes harder to sustain because the costs of losing are higher and the guarantees offered by the system are weaker.

Nigeria fits more closely into this latter pattern. Electoral competition takes place in a setting where access to the state remains central to material security, political relevance, and group standing. Political defeat is therefore not experienced as a routine outcome within an ongoing process. It carries consequences that extend beyond the temporary loss of office.

Part of the explanation lies in the structure of the state itself. Public office continues to provide access to contracts, appointments, and other forms of advantage that are not easily available outside it. This reflects corruption in a direct sense, but also a broader pattern in which the state remains a primary mechanism for the allocation of economic opportunity. Where that is the case, elections become contests over access to resources that are both scarce and unevenly distributed.

For a time, the scale of oil rents allowed for a broader sharing arrangement in which even those outside formal control of the state could maintain an adjacent relationship to its benefits. This helped reduce the immediate costs of exclusion and sustained a workable, if limited, equilibrium. As fiscal space has narrowed, this arrangement has become harder to maintain. The difference between winning and losing has grown wider, and the incentives that once encouraged restraint have weakened.

This Time is Different

One immediate response to these pressures is to maintain wider access to power. On this note, the immediate past government of Muhammadu Buhari set a bad precedent. Accusations of biased appointments and exclusion were met with an arrogant shrug. The current Tinubu government is running its own version of that dangerous experiment, with the aggressive tactics of suppressing opposition parties and consolidating power. While some may argue that this is simply the pattern of ruling parties since 1999, the point I have been making is that the times are different and things may actually tip over. Some form of distributed power sharing has always been the underlying logic of political power in Nigeria, from cabinet appointments to civil service recruitments. There is much to criticise about this arrangement, but its strategic importance to maintaining our current democratic equilibrium should not be underestimated.

Democracy for What?

Reducing conflict in the short run, however, is not the same as securing democratic endurance in the long run. A democracy stabilised primarily through inclusive rent-seeking and distribution remains vulnerable as long as the broader conditions that make political power the main source of enrichment remain intact. What ultimately alters those conditions is a deeper transformation of the economy and politics.

In the long run, democracy becomes more secure when it leads to development. As economic life becomes more productive and diversified, livelihoods, investment, and status depend less exclusively on state control. This reduces the material consequences of political defeat. At the same time, a more capable state extends the reach of rules and reduces reliance on discretion, making the outcomes of political competition more predictable and credible. Structural transformation, through industrialisation, job creation, and overall technological capability, will create broader access to opportunity, which creates a wider range of actors with a stake in continuity and stability. Together, these changes expand the range of outcomes that political actors can tolerate.

Under such conditions, democratic competition does not cease to be fiercely contested, but it also becomes less likely to be experienced as a zero-sum struggle for survival. Governments can be judged more on performance than on their control of distributive networks, and the loss of political access will not come as a huge loss. Nigeria has not made that transition, but the current juncture is a critical one, and should be treated as an opportunity to choose the right path to proceed.

1. Democracy as Equilibrium - Adam Przeworski