By: Sopriala Membere
Max Weber, in the foundational lecture that gave modern political science its vocabulary, defined the state as that human community which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. This definition, scholars have pointed out, is not merely descriptive; it is diagnostic. When a ruling party begins to privatise that monopoly—when it transforms the police, the anti-corruption agencies, the digital surveillance apparatus of the State, and the informal networks of political thuggery into partisan instruments—what remains is no longer a State in the Weberian sense. What remains is a syndicate: an organised criminal enterprise that wears the costume of government while functioning as a protection racket.
Nigeria, in the twilight months of 2026, is living through this theoretical nightmare in real time. And the sentence that unlocked it was spoken not in a dark room but in broad daylight, by a sitting president who should have known better. “All is fair in politics.” President Bola Tinubu uttered those words in July 2026 while receiving Catholic Bishops, and in doing so, he did not merely offer a casual reflection on the rough-and-tumble of democratic contestation. He issued a philosophical charter for lawlessness and a licence that dissolves the distinction between the legitimate coercion of the state and the predatory violence of the street.
Between July 2025 and September 2026, the ADC and other opposition political parties have documented a systematic campaign of violence against opposition political meetings, the destruction of party property, assaults on participants, and threats against citizens because of their political preferences across Nigeria.
This is not the random turbulence of a raucous democracy. It is the patterned choreography of a ruling Party (APC), that has run out of ideas and has reached for the gun.
To understand what is happening, one must move beyond the mere thought of electoral malpractice and into the conceptual territory of competitive authoritarianism. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, in their seminal work on the subject, describe regimes that hold elections but systematically tilt the playing field through coercion, patronage, and the selective application of the law.
Nigeria under President Bola Tinubu fits this typology with disturbing precision. In Edo State, the ADC secretariat in Benin City was attacked, and gunfire was directed at the residence of former Governor and leader of the ADC, H.E. John Odigie-Oyegun, during a gathering of political leaders. The police confirmed the incident and promised an investigation. That was February 2026; yet to date, no arrests have been made, nor any official prosecutions.
In Rivers State, the home of an ADC member, Isaiah Thomas, was attacked by armed men barely 24 hours after campaigns officially opened; the assailants ransacked his residence, looted property, and set buildings ablaze after failing to find him at home.
More recently, on September 18, 2026, an ADC member named Mr Kamadiyoi was killed in Abua-Odual Local Government Area of Rivers State while preparing for a party meeting. In Isiokpo, Ikwerre LGA, three ADC members were arrested during a meeting on charges of cultism based on what police officers described as an “order from above.” In Osun, Governor Ademola Adeleke has publicly alleged that police officers colluded with APC thugs to intimidate voters, with an officer nicknamed “London” deployed from Port Harcourt specifically to disrupt polling. All this while, a serving senator and an ally of President Tinubu, Senator Francis Fadahunsi, the APC senator representing Osun East, was featured in a video circulated in which he was reported to have instructed APC supporters to “kill” members of the rival Accord Party.
In Kaduna, suspected APC thugs attacked ADC supporters and vandalised vehicles on September 16, 2026. The Chairman of Kuje Area Council openly instructed residents to vacate the council area if they did not intend to vote for the APC. These are but a few examples of what democracy has come to mean under President Tinubu and the APC.
Hannah Arendt, writing on the nature of totalitarian terror, observed that its essence is not merely the punishment of opposition, but the destruction of the very space in which opposition can exist. When citizens cannot gather without fear of arson; when candidates cannot campaign without fear of their supporters being attacked or killed; and when the police become the enforcement wing of a political party (as we recently saw in the attack on a political meeting in Delta State) the civic space in which democracy lives is extinguished. What the APC has engineered is not merely voter suppression; it is the systematic demolition of the public civic sphere itself. The terror is not an aberration; it is the logical terminus of a political party that can no longer win consent through ideological engagements and must therefore obtain consent through coercion.
Beyond all these forms of intimidation, the APC also understands that physical violence, while effective, is crude and cannot, on its own, be sufficient against a citizenry that is increasingly fed up. As boastful architects of anti-democratic subversion, they have also engaged in more sophisticated forms of intimidation against opposition political parties and figures through the machinery of the Nigerian bureaucracy. Guillermo O’Donnell, in his work on bureaucratic authoritarianism, described what he called the “brown areas” of democracy, zones where the rule of law is suspended, and state agents operate with impunity. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, created to fight corruption, has been repurposed as a political police force. In August 2025, the EFCC detained former Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal over allegations of a suspicious withdrawal of N189 billion, launched an “urgent” investigation into former Imo Governor Emeka Ihedioha’s seven-month tenure, and began excavating files on Senator David Mark, who left office as Senate President in 2015, more than a decade ago. All three are chieftains of the ADC opposition coalition. Atiku Abubakar, the ADC presidential candidate, described the pattern as “a continuation of the Tinubu-led administration’s agenda to harass, intimidate, and decimate the opposition.” No one is saying that those in the opposition coalition should be immune to graft or any form of legitimate criminal investigation, but when examined comparatively with politically exposed figures in the ruling APC, the selectivity is grotesque. Former Delta State Governor, Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, was under EFCC investigation until he defected to the APC, at which point, in the ADC’s words, “his files vanished like morning dew.” Let’s not talk about the dramatic sequence of the so-called Kogi White Lion and the EFCC chairman.
We can all agree that when an anti-corruption agency investigates and harasses only the opposition while immunising members of the ruling party, it can no longer be seen as a law enforcement body (at least by citizens), but rather a useful tool in a regime protection racket.
Andreas Schedler, in his analysis of electoral authoritarianism, describes the “nested game” that such regimes, like the Tinubu regime, play: they maintain the formal architecture of democracy, such as elections, courts, and civil bureaucracies, while hollowing out their substance. The APC has mastered this game. It does not abolish institutions; it colonises them. It does not ban opposition parties; it utilises its influence in making opposition unbearable and unsustainable. It does not cancel elections; it ensures that the playing field is so tilted that only one outcome is possible.
Yes, this is not the crude dictatorship of the barracks, but a sophisticated authoritarian colonisation of the ballot box.
Antonio Gramsci distinguished between hegemony achieved through consent and domination maintained through coercion. When a ruling party can no longer secure consent through governance (which is difficult when poverty has risen to 63% and inflation has ravaged purchasing power), it must either calibrate its policy approaches or repress. The APC under President Bola Tinubu has chosen repression.
Samuel Huntington, in his work on political decay, argued that societies become praetorian when social forces radicalise and institutions fail to channel participation into legitimate political activity. Nigeria is approaching this precipice. The APC cannot campaign on its record because its record is a ledger of ruin: a fiscal deficit of N10.24 trillion, a poverty rate at 63% affecting 141 million Nigerians according to the world bank, with electricity tariffs that have risen 240%, and the purchasing power almost of ordinary citizens almost vanished. When a government has nothing to show, it has only one move left: to make opposition impossible, and repression both open and systemic, its official policy. This is the crisis of hegemony that Gramsci described—the moment when the ruling class, having exhausted its moral and intellectual authority, it must rely increasingly on the “apparatus of coercion” to maintain its position.
The contrast with the African Democratic Congress could not be more stark.
While the APC is organising violence and her agents are moving form TV stations, confessing in their capacity to rewrite the will of the people, Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi are selling their policy proposals to the people.
At the 2026 Nigerian Bar Association conference in Port Harcourt, Amaechi, When challenged by Omoyele Sowore, posited that those on the ballot should be Judged by their achievements, whilst demanding a standard of accountability that the APC cannot meet because the Bola Tinubu regime’s achievements are either stolen from previous administrations or a just lies masked by propaganda.
This is the fundamental distinction that Robert Dahl, in his theory of polyarchy, identified as the difference between authentic democracy and its counterfeit. Democracy requires not merely elections but free organisation and opposition, free expression, and alternative sources of information. When a ruling party systematically destroys these conditions—through physical terror, bureaucratic and judicial harassment and formal payment and enlistment propagandists; it is not merely attempting to rig an election. It is dismantling the very possibility of democratic dissent. The ADC ticket, by contrast, represents what Jürgen Habermas would recognise as the deliberative alternative: a politics that takes its arguments to the public space, that subjects its policies to rational scrutiny, and that measures legitimacy not by the decibel of threats but by the quality of outcomes, hinged on recorded achievements in previous responsibilities.
The 2027 election will therefore be a referendum not merely on candidates but on the Tinubu regime of the APC. On one side stands the politics of organised violence, where the ruling party APC has transformed the state institutions into an instrument of terror, (using the EFCC to harass opponents, the police to arrest dissenters, and thugs to threaten and kill campaign volunteers). On the other side stands the politics of deliberative democracy, an opposition ticket that is taking its policy arguments directly to the people, promising to make Nigeria affordable again, offering the Atiku Economic Recovery Plan with a production subsidy designed to lower PMS costs while building domestic refining capacity, and harping on a governance model that produced Nigeria’s highest GDP growth when Atiku chaired the National Economic Council.
The APC knows it cannot win a contest of ideas, especially because lived experiences of citizens cannot be fooled by propaganda. That is why it has chosen to wage a war of intimidation and constitute itself into a terror group. But there is a limit to what terror can achieve in a society that has tasted democratic possibility. The young man killed in Abua-Odua, the family home burned in Aluu, and the opposition leaders harassed by the EFCC (just to mention a few), are not signs of strength. They are the desperate spasms of a ruling party that has run out of arguments and is now running out of time.
As Hannah Arendt reminds us, every act of political violence is also an admission of political failure. The APC’s terror is the confession of a party that knows it cannot win on merit.
Nigeria has seen this before. In the final years of military rule, the state also tried to suppress its way to legitimacy. It failed. The ballot box, when it finally arrived, delivered its verdict with crushing finality. The APC would do well to remember that history.
No amount of thuggery, no volume of “orders from above,” and no quantity of sabre-rattling can subvert the people’s will.