The Politics of Opposition Parties Merger and the Struggle for Power in Nigeria’s 2015 General Elections

Year 2018, Volume: 16 Issue: 31, 197 - 216, 01.02.2018

Luqman Saka

Abstract

Since 1999 up till the conduct of the 2015 general elections, Nigeria’s party politics
has exhibited the near dominance of the political space by the then ruling People’s
Democratic Party, PDP. Aside the then four leading opposition parties, the Action
Congress of Nigeria, ACN; All Progressive Grand Alliance, APGA; All Nigerian
People’s Party, ANPP and Congress for Progressive Change, CPC; the rest of the
opposition pack comprised of smaller parties that lack organizational structure,
possess little electoral worth and lack the capacity to make meaningful contribution to the deepening of the nation’s democratic process. Realizing the importance
of pulling resources together in an alliance, four main opposition parties, ACN,
ANPP, APGA and CPC entered into talk directed at facilitating the merger of their
parties to form a formidable opposition party. The result was the collapse of their
structures and subsequent formation of, the All Progressive Congress, APC. While
numbers of issues and factors accounted for the electoral defeat of the then ruling
PDP in the 2015 general elections, this paper advance the argument that the united
front presented by the opposition elements under the banner of the emergent All
Progressive Congress was instrumental to the alternation of ruling party at the national level that Nigeria witnessed in 2015. Informed by this position and drawing
insights from newspapers articles, commentaries, opinion piece and academic literature, this paper interrogates the politics of opposition merger and struggle for
power in the course of the 2015 general elections. 

Keywords

Opposition Parties, Party Merger, Party Alternation, People’s Democratic Party

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