In 1927 the German jurist Carl Schmitt published The Concept of the Political, an essay that asked what makes politics a distinct sphere of human life. Morality, he argued, turns on the distinction between good and evil, aesthetics on the beautiful and the ugly, economics on the profitable and the unprofitable. Politics turns on its own distinction: that between friend and enemy. A political community, and a political party within it, exists only where people draw a meaningful line between those who share their conception of how life ought to be ordered and those who oppose it. Schmitt is a troubling guide; he joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the year after the expanded edition appeared. But his diagnosis contains a test that any party system can be put to. Where there is no meaningful distinction, there is no politics, only administration and the contest for office.

Put Nigeria’s parties to that test and they fail it. If two parties cannot distinguish themselves through their visions of society, what makes them political alternatives at all? Every party with a realistic prospect of governing promises roads, hospitals, electricity, employment and an end to poverty. On economic management, they commit to much the same agenda: privatization, a larger role for private capital, a contracted role for the state, and the removal of costly subsidies. It would be convenient to call this a shared ideology. I do not believe it is one. An ideology is not an inventory of promises. It is a coherent set of beliefs about how a society ought to be ordered, held with enough conviction that a party will argue for them, accept losses for them and retain them when they become unpopular. By that standard, our parties have none.

Their sameness did not arise from shared belief. It arose from shared deprivation: the poverty, the failing hospitals, the broken roads, the darkness, and a treasury too depleted to remedy any of them quickly. When the deficits are this wide and this visible, every party pledges to close them, and pledging to close a gap demands no theory of society. Nobody needs a philosophy to promise a road. That is why the agreement among our parties reveals nothing about what any of them believes. They share the same promises and hold no ideology. I call this consensus without conviction.

The ideology we once had

It was not always so. Our first parties were founded on an ideology, and that ideology was nationalism. The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), founded in 1944 by Herbert Macaulay and Nnamdi Azikiwe, set out to prepare Nigerians for self-government. The Action Group (AG), founded by Obafemi Awolowo in 1951, went further and later adopted democratic socialism as its doctrine. Whatever divided these parties, they shared one conviction for which their leaders were prepared to suffer: Nigerians ought to govern themselves.

But nationalism is an ideology defined by its antagonist. It can unite a people against a foreign ruler. It cannot, by itself, instruct them in how to rule themselves. The fractures appeared before independence. In 1953 Anthony Enahoro of the AG moved a motion in the House of Representatives calling for self-government in 1956. The Northern People’s Congress (NPC), led by Ahmadu Bello, countered with an amendment for self-government “as soon as practicable.” Southern members walked out, Northern delegates were jeered in Lagos, and that May riots in Kano left about 46 people dead. The shared aspiration to freedom had already fractured along regional lines over a question of timing.

When independence came in 1960, the antagonist departed with the colonial flag, and the one idea that had bound the parties to a national purpose departed with it. Each party retreated into its regional base. The contest for the center became a contest over which region would control it, and the crises that followed brought down the First Republic in 1966. In my view, we have never replaced nationalism with another idea capable of performing its function. The region became the parties’ creed. Later, even the region yielded to the party as a mere vehicle for capturing office.

What politics elsewhere argues about

I have spent some time observing how politics matures in other countries, and what stays with me is not their wealth or their infrastructure. It is the gravity of the questions their politics is willing to carry.

In June 2016, Swiss voters were asked whether every adult should receive an income from the state simply by virtue of existing, whether or not they worked. The question was not fundamentally about money. It asked what a person is owed as a person, and whether dignity derives from labor or precedes it. The Swiss declined, by 76.9 percent. But an entire country spent months deliberating on the purpose of work, and those who lost the vote lost an argument, not a share of the spoils.

In June 2025, the House of Commons in Britain voted 314 to 291 to permit terminally ill adults to seek assistance in ending their lives. The parties did not instruct their members. Each member had to decide alone, between two principles that are both legitimate and cannot both be fully honored: individual autonomy over the end of one’s own life, and society’s duty to protect those who might be coerced into ending theirs. Colleagues of many years voted against each other, and each had to justify the choice to constituents in their own words.

In 2009, Germany wrote a limit on borrowing into its constitution, the debt brake, which caps the federal government’s structural deficit at 0.35 percent of output. Beneath the technical language lay a moral proposition: one generation has no right to consume what the next must repay. In March 2025, under pressure from war on its eastern flank and decaying infrastructure, the German parliament amended that limit, exempting defense spending above one percent of output and an infrastructure fund of more than €500 billion. Whatever one makes of the decision, it was contested as a conflict between two obligations: the duty to protect the living and the duty not to burden the unborn.

None of these countries has resolved the hard problems of human existence. What they have done is admit those problems into their politics. Their elections are, at least some of the time, contests between rival conceptions of the good life and the just society.

The French scholar Jean-François Bayart borrowed an expression Africans themselves use to describe a different order of politics: the politics of the belly. In it, the state is a granary and politics is the queue before it. I do not regard the phrase as an insult. It is a diagnosis, and I believe it describes much of ours. Our elections contest who will eat, how much, and in what order. They seldom contest what is right.

It is tempting to attribute this simply to poverty. In 2022 the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) classified 133 million Nigerians, 63 percent of the population, as multidimensionally poor. When people lack clean water, a functioning clinic and a passable road, questions of principle can appear to be luxuries reserved for richer societies. I understand the temptation, but I believe it inverts the matter. Deprivation does not remove moral questions from a society. It multiplies them and sharpens them.

We confront more such questions than most. In 2022 the Senate passed an amendment that would imprison anyone who pays a ransom to kidnappers for at least 15 years. Beneath it lies one of the most painful dilemmas any society can face. Does a family owe more to the father held in a forest tonight, or to the stranger who will be abducted next month with the money they pay? A state that cannot fund every hospital must decide whose illness takes precedence. Each time we borrow, we determine how much of our children’s income we may consume for our own needs. Each subsidy embodies a judgment about whether cheap fuel for all today is worth more than schools and clinics tomorrow. These are questions of right and wrong, and scarcity is precisely what makes them unavoidable. In our politics they are settled by procedure, by silence, or by whoever controls the allocation.

Here, I believe, lies the deeper connection to the absence of ideology. Shares can be bargained over. Principles cannot. They can only be held, defended or abandoned. A politics that treats deprivation purely as a matter of distribution never compels anyone to believe anything, because every disagreement can be dissolved with a larger share for someone. Convictions are formed where principles collide and someone must choose between two goods that both matter. A party system that never enters that terrain will never produce an ideology, however many manifestos it publishes.

The poverty of identity

Schmitt’s insight explains what happens next. The need for political distinction does not disappear when ideas do. It finds another source. Where parties cannot be told apart by their visions of society, the line between friend and enemy is drawn instead by ethnicity, religion, region and personality. If two goods are identical in every respect, the buyer’s choice cannot turn on the goods, because there is nothing in them to choose between. It turns instead on something outside the transaction: which seller is a kinsman, which one worships where the buyer worships. I believe this is precisely what has happened to the Nigerian voter.

The tendency to vote by tribe and religion is usually charged to the electorate, as proof of parochialism. I think the causation runs the other way. When every party pledges the same roads, the same hospitals and the same reforms, and no campaign contains a serious argument about the nature of the state, the proper limits of its power, the claims of the poor on the wealthy or the obligations of the present to the future, the voter is deprived of any intellectual basis for choice. Parties that offer no philosophy cannot expect to be judged philosophically. Identity becomes the only remaining point of difference. It is not chosen over ideology. It is what remains in ideology’s absence.

The consequence is visible in what our campaigns argue about. In 2022, the decision of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to field a same-faith presidential ticket drew sustained objection from the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and others. In my observation, the faith of a running mate stirred more public passion than any account of how the country ought to be governed, because the faith of a running mate was one of the few things that actually differed between the tickets.

Identity is a poor substitute for ideology because it answers the wrong question. It tells the voter who a candidate is, never what the candidate will do. A kinsman in office owes his kin nothing that can be specified, measured or enforced, so a mandate secured on identity is a mandate without terms. The record bears this out. The North has supplied the country’s head of state for much of its independent history, yet according to the NBS, 65 percent of Nigeria’s multidimensionally poor, about 86 million people, live in the North, and Sokoto records the highest incidence in the country at 91 percent. Shared identity at the summit of power has not secured the welfare of those who share it at the base. Identity can tell us whose turn it is to rule. It cannot tell us how anyone ought to be ruled, and that is the question an ideology exists to answer.

An agreement no one signed

Few questions in economic policy are more plainly ideological than a fuel subsidy. Beneath it lie questions of doctrine: whether the state ought to shield citizens from the market price of an essential good; whether the oil beneath Nigerian soil is a common inheritance every citizen is entitled to enjoy cheaply, or a commodity to be sold at its market value; whether relief for the poor is better delivered through universal prices or through targeted transfers. A market liberal answers these questions one way and a social democrat another, and each answer follows from a view of what the state is for.

In 2023, all four leading presidential candidates, Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, pledged to remove the subsidy. They gave the same answer. What none of them offered was the reasoning from which that answer ought to follow. The pledge was a conclusion without premises. It sat in manifestos and debate answers while the campaigns were fought on region, religion and the arithmetic of alliances. When the new president declared on inauguration day that the subsidy was gone, the policy arrived as though it had no author. It had been everyone’s position, so in practice it was no one’s argument.

What followed exposed the absence of doctrine more clearly than the pledge itself. Obi, who had supported removal for years, said in June 2023 that he would have removed the subsidy differently, with relief measures to soften the shock. His quarrel was with method, never with principle. In August 2026, Atiku, who had pledged removal in 2023, pledged to restore the subsidy if elected in 2027, arguing that its removal had failed to improve Nigerians’ lives. Changing one’s mind in the light of evidence can be a virtue. What is revealing is that neither the original pledge nor its reversal came with an account of what the state owes its citizens in the price of fuel. A position adopted without reasons can be abandoned without reasons. It moves with the mood of the electorate because it was never anchored in a conviction. That is the difference between holding a policy and holding an ideology.

The mark of an undeveloped politics

We customarily measure development in roads, power plants and hospitals. I believe political development has its own measure: whether a party label carries meaning, and whether the politician who bears it is bound by it. By that measure, the clearest evidence of our political underdevelopment is the ease with which our politicians cross the carpet.

In the democracies I have observed, a party label is treated as part of the mandate, and a member who abandons it pays a price for doing so. When Douglas Carswell left the Conservatives for the UK Independence Party in August 2014, he did not simply change benches. He resigned his seat and sought re-election under his new party, which his constituents granted that October. His choice was unusual even in Britain, but it was praised precisely because it honored a principle the British recognize: the voters chose a person and a program together. New Zealand has written that principle into law. Its electoral law allows a party to have a departing member removed from Parliament, and in October 2024 the Green Party invoked it and a former Green member’s seat was declared vacant. In those countries, crossing the floor is possible, but it is costly, and it is understood as a breach to be answered for.

Here, crossing the carpet has become routine. In 2025 alone, the governors of Delta, Akwa Ibom, Enugu and Bayelsa left the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on whose platform they were elected, for the governing APC. None returned to the electorate for a fresh mandate, and the Constitution did not require them to. Its defection provision binds legislators only, and a governor may change parties at will. Atiku Abubakar helped found the PDP in 1998. He left it for the Action Congress in 2006, returned, departed again for the newly formed APC in 2014, returned in 2017, and left once more in July 2025 to join the African Democratic Congress (ADC) coalition. The 2023 election exposed the same habit within a single party. When five PDP governors led by Nyesom Wike broke with their own presidential candidate, they did not even move together. Wike helped deliver Rivers State to Bola Tinubu of the APC and was later appointed to his cabinet. Samuel Ortom openly declared for Peter Obi of the Labour Party. Had a shared doctrine bound them, it would have directed them one way.

I do not regard these politicians as uniquely cynical. They are acting rationally within a system devoid of ideology. If a party is a body of belief, leaving it entails apostasy. If a party is merely a vehicle for capturing office, leaving it entails nothing more than changing vehicles. Our politicians are not pursuing standards against which they will be measured. They are pursuing popularity and proximity to power, and they migrate toward wherever the crowd and the treasury appear to be heading. Defection is the natural conduct of those who were never bound by belief.

The cost falls on the electorate. Nigerians have changed governing parties at the federal level and in the states, yet the faces on the platforms remain conspicuously familiar. When a new party is formed, it is assembled largely from the members of old ones. The voter is offered a new label on the same personnel and told it constitutes a new choice. We change the vehicle and retain the passengers, then wonder why the journey looks the same. That cycle is not a failure of the electorate. It is the predictable result of parties that stand for nothing a politician would feel obliged to keep.

How a promise born of deprivation behaves

A promise made because the need is self-evident, rather than because a party is committed to a particular remedy, behaves in a distinctive way. A federal government that spent 63.5 percent of its retained revenue on debt service in 2024 has little remaining to meet the needs it has pledged to meet. So the promise is proclaimed, not defended. When delivery fails or the chosen remedy inflicts pain, those who made the promise blame the predecessor, the creditor or the global market. They never defend their own reasoning, because they never advanced any.

I believe this matters for three reasons.

First, a remedy nobody defends cannot be corrected. Policy improves when those who chose it must justify it and answer those who oppose it. When every governing party offers the same remedy and none argues for it, opposition to that remedy finds no place within the party system. It migrates to the streets, the courts or apathy. Low turnout is often read as indifference. I read it as a rational judgment by voters that an election will not alter the direction of policy.

Second, a remedy nobody believes in will be abandoned at the first real cost. Reforms with long gestation require governments willing to absorb criticism in the interval. A party that adopted a reform because it felt it had no alternative will reverse it as soon as reversal appears cheaper than defense. Nigerians have watched policies announced, suspended, revived and quietly discarded so often that the pattern is treated as normal. The problem is not that our parties change their minds. Their minds were never made up.

Third, and most fundamentally, democracy rests on the public’s right to choose a different course. When every viable party offers the same course, and the same personnel circulate freely among them, the vote ceases to choose a direction and merely selects who will hold the wheel. Elections choose custodians, not directions. Into that vacuum, as I have argued, flow tribe and faith. They are not the cause of the emptiness in our party competition. They are its symptom.

What conviction would look like

Conviction in politics is not volume. It is revealed in what a party is willing to pay for a position: the votes it will risk, the allies it will forfeit, the justifications it will offer when the position becomes unpopular. The nationalists who built our first parties understood this. By that test, a party with a modest program it will defend is more ideological than a party with a grand manifesto it will not. Nigeria does not need its parties to invent new doctrines. It needs them to decide what they believe about the deprivation this country endures, to stand behind those beliefs, and to engage the questions that admit no easy answer.

The actors best placed to encourage that already possess the means to do so.

Parties ought to publish costed manifestos with numbered pledges, and governing parties ought to report on each pledge annually while in office. A pledge with a number, a cost and an annual report is harder to disown than one buried in a launch document.

Civil society organizations and the press ought to track those pledges from the day of inauguration, as the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) did for the 2015 promises with its Buharimeter, and publish the record before the next election, so that voters judge parties on performance against commitment rather than on origin or creed.

Debate organizers ought to change the questions they ask. Instead of asking candidates what they will build, they should ask what each would refuse to do, which policy of a rival they would reverse and why, and how they would resolve the hard questions: whether a family should be punished for paying a ransom, whose care takes precedence when the hospital budget falls short, and how much of the next generation’s income the present one may borrow. Questions of this kind compel candidates to disclose where they differ, and to concede when they do not. They also leave no room for answers framed in the language of tribe or faith.

Presiding officers of the National Assembly and the state houses of assembly ought to apply the Constitution as written. Section 68(1)(g) of the 1999 Constitution requires a legislator elected on one party’s platform who joins another party before the expiration of the term to vacate the seat, unless the move results from a division in the original party or a merger. A rule that is enforced makes a party label costly. A label that is costly begins to acquire meaning.

The National Assembly ought to close the gap that allows executives to cross the carpet without consequence. A governor or president who leaves the party that sponsored their election should be required to justify the move publicly and in writing. The Assembly should also consider granting the abandoned party a clear legal route to challenge a defecting legislator’s seat, as New Zealand has done, rather than leaving enforcement to presiding officers who may themselves have crossed.

The leadership of the National Assembly ought to permit conscience votes on questions of principle, as the British Parliament did, and publish how each member voted. A legislator who must cast a vote alone, on the record, on a question of right and wrong, is compelled to form a view and defend it.

Parties ought to finance themselves through their members rather than a handful of patrons. A party that depends on dues is accountable to those who pay them. A party that depends on patrons is accountable to the patrons, and patrons seldom care about doctrine.

Voters, finally, can put one question to every candidate that cuts through tribe, faith and slogan alike: what are you prepared to lose for what you believe? A politician who cannot answer it has no ideology to offer, however long the manifesto. A politician who has changed parties three times has already answered.

Schmitt held that politics begins where people draw a line between those who share their vision of the common life and those who oppose it. Nigeria’s first parties drew that line around an idea worth suffering for, and when that idea had served its purpose, nothing was written in its place. Tribe and faith now draw the line instead, and they have proved incapable of bearing the weight. Our political problem is not a shortage of promises or of parties. Our parties agree on more than they admit, argue about less than they should, and exchange members as freely as they exchange slogans. What the country lacks is a party willing to declare, before the votes are counted: this is what we believe, this is what it will cost, and we will answer for it. Until that happens, Nigerians will keep electing new labels on old faces, and wondering why a change of government changes so little.