Nigerians will go the polls on Saturday, 25 February 2023 to elect a new president. Muhammadu Buhari, the current president, will not be on the ballot after having served two consecutive terms. The standard bearer of his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), will instead be his party’s co-founder, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the ‘godfather’ of Lagos politics who governed Lagos during the first eight years of the Fourth Republic. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which ruled Nigeria between 1999, when civil rule was restored, and 2015 will be led by Atiku Abubakar, a former Vice President who fell out with his boss, Olusegun Obasanjo, and was hounded out of the party before plotting his way back in 2017.
After six elections and 24 years of continuous competitive politics, pundits believe that Nigeria’s polity can be characterised as an established two party system. In this system, voters are assumed to be locked in and new parties…
