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When the People’s Democratic Party was in power for 16 years, from 1999 to 2015, many Nigerians, especially members of the opposition, complained of the party’s haughtiness, highhandedness and fixation with victory. PDP was accused of seeing election as a “do-or-die affair.”
The President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), was a member of the opposition then. The President-elect, Senator Bola Tinubu, whose election in February has been condemned as lacking in transparency and not following the rules of the Independent National Electoral Commission, was also a member of the opposition. As opposition members, Buhari and Tinubu regularly condemned the PDP as lacking in democratic ethics and regularly flouting the rule of law. Buhari and Tinubu constantly projected themselves and the political parties as the better alternative to the PDP in terms of vision and democratic ethos.
Between 2003 and 2007 when Tinubu was in his second term, he was the…