President Bola Tinubu (PHOTO CREDIT: @officialABAT)
The leaders of the NPN never abandoned the idea of single-party rule. They set out to destabilise the other parties that had left them, and funded factions in the NPP, PRP and GNPP. The most terrible thing they did was to use state power to declare the illegitimate factions they secretly supported as the legitimate officially recognised ones. In the inaugural campaign rally of the NPN for the 1983 elections, President Shagari declared: “You cannot defeat the NPN. Join the NPN”.
Nigeria politics is about the acquisition of political power, not to serve the people but for self-service, towards the primitive accumulation of capital. In an incisive article, our recently deceased mentor, Dr Segun Osoba correctly identified 1952 as the critical threshold in the birth of the Nigerian ruling class. That was the year a “Nigerian power elite” came into power and:
“All the governing parties, committed to a ‘free enterprise’ economic
system used their control of fiscal policies in the regions and in the
