*Photo:Kehinde Yusuf*
A series of events which took place within the past three to four weeks have brought to the fore the question of democracy in Nigeria. The pivot of these events was the celebration of the 2025 Democracy Day which was marked with a national holiday on June 12.
On June 12, 1993, after about eight years of political merry-go-round by the military regime headed by General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida from 27 August, 1985, Nigerians, with a lot of hope and enthusiasm, went to the polls to vote in the presidential election between the candidate of the National Republican Convention (NRC) – Alhaji Bashir Tofa – and that of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola (popularly called MKO Abiola).
When it became apparent that Chief MKO Abiola had won the election, Babangida’s military regime suspended the announcement of the results and annulled the election, thereby dashing the hope of millions of Nigerians across the nation. The regime went ahead, on 26 August, 1993, to install an illegitimate contraption called the Interim National Government (ING) headed by a well-known industrialist, Chief Ernest Sonekan, who, like MKO, was from Abeokuta in Ogun State.
This weak impostor government was unsurprisingly sacked on 17 November, 1993, and General Sani Abacha was declared military Head of State. It is not clear whether the Babangida regime, the ING contraption and the Abacha junta anticipated the reaction of citizens to the electoral travesty. The winner of the election, MKO Abiola, resisted the annulment and the subsequent illegal administrations and insisted on the restoration of his mandate, and at a point in time he had to leave Nigeria to go and pile international pressure on the Abacha regime.
There were widespread protests against the annulment, and various resistance groups emerged, with the most famous being the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) formed on 15 May, 1994. The longstanding Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, was part of this coalition. In 1994, MKO Abiola returned from exile, and on 11 June, 1994, he declared himself President at Epetedo in Lagos. He was arrested by the Abacha regime and kept in detention until he died on 7 July, 1998, after resisting all attempts to get him to drop his claim to victory at the June 12, 1993 election.
One of the Nigerians who stood by Abiola prominently and continued the pro-democracy struggle even after MKO’s death was Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He represented Lagos West Senatorial District from 1992 and his membership of the Nigerian Senate was terminated with Abacha’s dismantling of all democratic structures in 1993. Going into exile in 1994, he continued the pro-democracy agitation, collaborated with other pro-democracy activists and provided refuge and sustenance to a lot of others outside Nigeria.
Dismissive of this democratic antecedent, the former Governor of Jigawa State and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain, Alhaji Sule Lamido, in a 21 June, 2025 interview with Arise News, said: “I feel highly entertained by Tinubu’s rhetoric. The way he is dramatising his own role in Nigerian democracy. … With all respect to him, he was part of those people who were supporting Babangida’s annulment of June 12. He was part of it. His own mother, Hajiya Mogaji from Lagos, was organising Lagos market women to Abuja to pledge support for Babangida.”
In a 22 June, 2025 press release, Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, countered Lamido’s claims as follows: “Let us set the record straight: Mrs Mogaji never mobilised market women to support the unjust annulment.” Similarly, on 4 June, 2001, at the renaming of the newly-dualised Oregun Road in Lagos “Kudirat Abiola Way,” in honour of the Late Alhaja Kudirat Abiola (MKO Abiola’s wife), a then much younger Femi Falana (who has since grown to become a Senior Advocate of Nigeria), acknowledged Alhaja Mogaji’s condemnation of the annulment. He noted that Alhaja Mogaji asked the Federal Government, through Oyinlola who was in a Federal Government delegation to Kudirat Abiola’s burial: “E ti oko m’ólé, e p’aya è. Èyí wa daa bí?” (‘You imprisoned the husband and killed the wife. Is that good?’)
Onanuga also stated: “It is important to remind Nigerians that Mr Lamido, as secretary of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – the party whose candidate, MKO Abiola, won the June 12 election – was among those who failed to oppose the military’s injustice. The SDP leadership, including Mr Lamido and chairman Tony Anenih, wrote their names in the book of infamy by surrendering the people’s mandate without resistance. To their eternal shame, Messrs Lamido and Anenih teamed up with the defeated National Republican Convention to deny Abiola his mandate. … In sharp contrast, Bola Tinubu stood firm even before General Abacha dissolved the political parties and all democratic institutions, including the National Assembly, on 17 November 1993, following his coup.”
Moreover, in a 25 June, 2025 interview on Channels Television, Senator Shehu Sani said: “The contribution of Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the struggle for the restoration and revalidation of the June 12 mandate was unequaled and unparalleled by anybody in the political realm.… In fact, the first time I met him was in the sitting room of Chief MKO Abiola [along with] the late Dr. Beko [Ransome Kuti] and Frederick Fasheun … strategising on how to mobilise a national resistance and a national protest at that very era. Tinubu played a pivotal role in triggering a national uprising that gave birth to the recognition of June 12 decades after. … Lamido played a role in Abiola’s victory, but he was absent in the resistance, and as far the resistance was concerned, Tinubu was in the forefront.”
With the sudden death of the Head of State, General Sani Abacha, on 8 June, 1998, General Abubakar Abdulsalami became the new Head of State and drew a swift timetable for the return of democratic governance on 29 May, 1999, ushering in the Nigerian Fourth Republic. The more liberal outlook of the Abdulsalami military regime paved the way for many of the pro-democracy activists in exile, including Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to return to Nigeria to take part in the new politics enabled by the new administration.
Tinubu contested the governorship election for Lagos State on the platform of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) which was a party formed by Afenifere. He won and was Governor of Lagos State from 29 May, 1999 to 29 May, 2007. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former military Head of State, who became the first democratically-elected President of Nigeria in the Fourth Republic, did not find it easy adjusting to the appreciably liberal nature of democratic governance.
To President Obasanjo, it was an afront for Tinubu, the Governor of Lagos State, to create Area Councils in the state. For this reason, the allocations due to Lagos State from the Federation Account were withheld. The Lagos State Government approached the Court, and the Supreme Court ruled the Obasanjo administration’s action illegal and ordered the release of the withheld funds to the state. However, the Obasanjo-led Federal Government did not comply with the Supreme Court judgement. This was a flagrant contempt of the Supreme Court and an attack on the rule of law which is one of the major pillars on which democracy rests.
Obasanjo’s manifestation of discontent with the democratic principle of separation of powers and his lack of respect for the free choice of the people was also shown in his attempt to muscle victory. In 1999, the bulk of the South-west voters did not support him at the ballot box. Being from the South-west himself, this amounted to a big source of embarrassment. To remedy the situation, Obasanjo approached the leaders of Afenifere and AD with a plea. He wanted the South-west to give him handsome votes in 2003.
One of the terms of the agreement was that the South-west AD members would vote for him in the presidential elections, and he would work for the South-west AD governors in the gubernatorial elections. The governors fulfilled their part, but Obasanjo did not fulfil his own. So, while he earned good votes in the South-west and won in the zone, the acquiescent AD governors lost their seats to Obasanjo’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The only governor who didn’t swallow the bait was Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Referring to this episode, on June 12, 2025, a day that had been thoughtfully and duly declared by President Muhammadu Buhari as Democracy Day in Nigeria in honour of Bashorun MKO Abiola’s victory, Tinubu said in his speech to the National Assembly: “In 2003, when the then-governing party tried to sweep the nation clean of political opposition through plot and manipulation, I was the last of the progressive governors standing in my region. … My allies had been induced into defeat. My adversaries held all the cards that mortal man could carry. Even with all of that, they could not control our national destiny because fate is written from above.”
Relating this to the allegation that the Tinubu administration and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) were working to turn Nigeria into a one-party state, the President said: “Look at my political history. I would be the last person to advocate such a scheme.” He also noted: “A greater power did not want Nigeria to become a one-party state back then. Nigeria will not become such a state now.”
Even with respect to the APC, some believe that Malam Nasir El-Rufai’s inability to scale through the Senate ministerial screening in 2023 led him to defect from the APC, and become a strident critic of both the party and the president. Former Governor Rotimi Amaechi, in his case, didn’t leave the party, but due to his loss in the 2022 APC primary election to then-Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, he seems to have become an inconsolable critic of the winner. Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, who was the candidate of the PDP in the 2023 presidential election has also been an implacable critic of the president.
These political figures are part of a coalition named the All Democratic Alliance with the principal declared aim of stopping President Tinubu from winning a second term election in 2027. The National Chairman of the new SDP, Shehu Gabam, noted, in a 24 June, 2025 press conference, that there are certain “forces of the coalition who believe that SDP must be hijacked at all cost or who believe crisis must be induced in SDP because they couldn’t hijack SDP.”
Democracy is by nature conflictual, and such conflicts where properly moderated can propel growth. It is necessary to assess the extent to which these conflicts, instances of which are mentioned above, have been managed in the Nigerian experience, and which expectations for development citizens should realistically have.