Check out the types of political parties in Nigeria? ‘Political Parties,’ what exactly are they? It seems logical that we should first understand what exactly politics is. That way we can more easily understand the other parts of this article such as political parties as a concept, and then proceed to the main purpose of this article which is the types of Political Parties in Nigeria.
So what is Politics?
Politics is the set of activities associated with the governance of a country or an area. It involves making decisions or policies that apply to every member or citizen of the state or country. It further refers to all the lobbying, campaigning and compromising that it takes to achieve and exercise positions of governance, in order to get control over a human community or a state or country.
If that is politics, then what is a Political Party?
A political party is an organized group of people who have the same ideology- or as it obtains in Nigeria, who have the same political ambition, which is basically to seize power for themselves. After the Political Party has been registered the are then free to field candidates for elections, in an attempt to get them elected and thereby bring power to the party.
Types of Political Parties in Nigeria
As the reader may already be aware, Nigeria is a habitation of over 200 Million plus peoples and individual cultures. Therefore, there is often no singular and binding ideology in any party, and whenever a party takes a stand on social issues it usually involves a heavy amount of lobbying from the beneficiaries of whatever issue is being discussed as they try to win over other sections or tribes that may be part of the Political Party.
In order to categorize the political parties in Nigeria, therefore, we must use the size or reach of the said parties. This is because there are some political parties that despite being in existence for a number of years, have not grown in size or structure or area of influence. Those parties often stick to a region, concern themselves to the advancement of the interests of those regions and usually have a kind of tribal texture to them. For this reason, we have arrived at the following categorization for the Political Parties in Nigeria: National Parties, Regional/Tribal Parties, New/Emerging Parties and finally ‘Election Parties.’ Let us now get to a breakdown, so that you can get a better understanding of what we mean by this categorization.
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National Parties
In Nigeria, there are parties that have a national reach. These are parties that have the structure on the ground and have worked to spread their tentacles all across the whole federation. Of course, they may be more popular in one region, and less influential in another geopolitical zone, but as long as they are able to have some presence, some kind of structure on ground, through which they are able to mobilize some kind of support in the area, then they qualify for this listing.
Unfortunately, these mega parties have little or nothing to offer in terms of manifestos or vision, or mission. They do not have any ideology worth talking bout and only pride themselves by attracting large crowds to rallies. They often have obscure sources of the funds with which they throw boisterous parties in the name of pre-election rallies. As far as these kinds of parties are concerned the huge crowds make them influential and the influence makes them power.
Parties of this nature are the APC, PDP.
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Regional Parties
Regional Parties are parties in Nigeria that are smaller in influence and smaller in structure. As per reach, they basically stick to the region in which they were formed and try to assert themselves as the power that controls the area. Regional Parties may pose an ideological threat to the continued unity of the country because they are, by their very structure ethnocentric. By promoting the well being and advancement of the interests of only one tribe or ethnicity, sometimes at the detriment of other tribes, they work directly against the tenets of federalism upon which the Nigerian democracy is built. We decline from providing any names in this field although there are quite a number of them.
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New/ Emerging Parties
At the 2019 elections, there were a number of new parties that sponsored candidates to vie for even the highest elective offices in Nigeria. These parties were often led by young, vibrant and obviously capable men, some of whom came in from the diaspora to try their hands at effecting political change. They had interesting perspectives to offer on weighty national issues on the subjects of security, economy, education and so on. These parties and their candidates could however not rival the overwhelming popularity of the major parties in Nigeria, thus exposing their sore lack of structure- this is a thing that can be solved by dedicated investments in building a presence and structure so as to gain more influence and political importance.
The African Atiom Congress (AAC), Young People’s Party (YPP) are among the front runners for this sort of party.
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Election Parties
The term Election Party was coined after a lot of tinkering and deliberations as we tried to find a term that would pass the information or the idea without necessarily being offensive.
In the 2019 elections, there were parties that were hurriedly registered in order to accommodate the political ambitions of certain candidates who could not have their way in their original parties. In some cases, these parties were launched by the candidates in question, and in other cases, they were launched by the godfathers of the candidates who sought to use their influence to force their parties into fielding their candidates but were generally met with stiffer opposition than they expected.
Those kinds of parties were found in Imo, Rivers, and Ogun states, and generally lost the governorship elections. But they specially categorized in this section because after losing the elections such parties generally lost their existence, showing that they were nothing but ad hoc parties that were put together for the sole purpose of contesting the elections. Have done so (unsuccessfully) they have then been discarded into the bin of irrelevance.
That’s all on