APC, MORE DOMINANCE, LESS HEGEMONY
By Rowland Enwerem
Hegemony and dominance are interconnected, but hegemony takes root in dominance, and dominance its support in hegemony; therefore, any political party that exercises dominance overtime without hegemony lacks normative legitimacy, but at best, enjoys coercion as its communal creed.
Nigeria as a political entity has never had political parties with enduring and demonstrable homogeneity, or hegemonic ideologies that cut across culture, ethnicity, religion and sociology. At best, it has flaunted a semblance of political party coalitions that were forged to wrestle power, regionally or nationally.
From the foregoing context, therefore, what determines dominance, and what constitutes hegemony?
Dominance refers to the capacity of a political party to control power through institutional, coercive, or material means, while hegemony denotes the ability to lead politically through ideological consent and normative legitimacy.
Hegemony is power gained through influence, ideas, ideology and acceptance, while political dominance is power gained through force, authority, or institutional advantages.
Dominance enforces power; hegemony normalizes it. In practice, durable party power emerges when dominance is transformed into hegemony, and hegemonic authority, in turn, stabilizes dominance.
Mirroring Party Hegemony
Some flashes of party hegemony were experienced during Nigeria’s pre-independence, and the early days of first republic politics. The pre-independence parties like the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), led by Sir Herbert Macaulay, the National Council of Nigerian and the Cameroon (NCNC), led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, were borne by a common ideological goal – to oust the colonial masters from governance, while the post-independence parties leaned more towards ethnic and religious persuasions like the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), which was dominant in the Northern region, Action Group (AG), which was strongest in the Western region, Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), which represented northern radical views, and the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC), which represented minorities in the North, among others.
Military Interregnum
We cannot ignore the incalculable damage of military intervention in Nigerian politics in 1966, which helped to erode all forms of ideology from party politics. The military did not just appropriate political power, but began to tinker with party formation, structures and funding when agitation to end military rule became unbearable. The military politicians continually banned political parties each time there was a change of government, such that it at some point decreed political parties into existence, and instigated politicians to join anyone of their choice. In October 1989, General Ibrahim Babangida, as Head of State decreed the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and the National Republican Convention (NRC) into existence, going ahead to build political offices for each across all 301 local government areas, state capitals and the federal capital territory.
Between 1997 and 1998, General Sani Abacha, under the veil regimented five political parties that he wanted to surreptitiously use to transform from military head of state to a civilian president before his demise. The parties (five leprous fingers) were: the United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP), Congress for National Consensus (CNC), Democratic Party of Nigeria (DPN), National Centre Party of Nigeria (NCPN), and Grassroots Democratic Movement (GDM). The parties were so inorganically created into existence that Chief Bola Ige (a former governor of Oyo State, and former minister of Justice) called them “the five fingers of a leprous man.”
Emergence of party dominance without hegemony
Nigeria’s emergent party formation and evolutions – since 1999 to date, has been characterized by institutional dominance without consolidated hegemony, no thanks to the manner in which the military regime of General Abdusalam Abubakar handed over the reins of power to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that defeated All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) and the Alliance for Democracy (AD) at the polls.
The two parties that haven privileged to rule Nigeria at the Centre – PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) 1999 – 2015, and APC (All Progressives Congress) 2015 to date, have only exercised control through incumbency, elite alignment and re-alignment, and structural leverage, but have not been able to transform their dominance into a widely internalized ideological consensus. Consequently, power has remained contested, defections frequent, and legitimacy perpetually negotiated.
APC Dominance
While PDP always sought means to dominate other parties but eventually failed – mostly due to internal dynamics that tended to undermine it from within, it, however, appears that the APC has been able to exploit some of those negative dynamics that rocked the PDP to unleash unfair advantage against other political parties and against the entire Nigerian polity. While PDP could only boast of controlling 20 states in 2015 before the emergence of APC on the political scene, and at the Centre, APC in 2026 seems to control 30 states, and still counting.
What is APC’s unfair advantage? Control through incumbency, elite alignment, and structural leverage.
Between 2025 and 2026, eight governors abandoned their various parties and joined APC: (1) Sheriff Oborevwori, Governor of Delta State: He defected from PDP to APC in April 2025. (2) Umo Eno, Governor of Akwa Ibom State: He defected from PDP to APC in June 2025. (3) Peter Mbah, Governor of Enugu State: He defected from PDP to APC in October 2025. (4) Douye Diri, Governor of Bayelsa State: He resigned from PDP and joined APC in November 2025. (5) Siminalayi Fubara, Governor of Rivers State: He defected from PDP to APC in December 2025. (6) Ademola Adeleke, Governor of Osun State: He defected from PDP to the Accord Party in December 2025. He couldn’t move to APC because party men in Osun APC “allegedly” blocked his overtures. (7) Agbu Kefas, Governor of Taraba State: He officially resigned from PDP on December 14, 2025 but was fully integrated into APC on January 31, 2026. (8) Abba Kabir Yusuf, Governor of Kano State: He defected from NNPP to APC in late 2025.
As of today, APC has 30 out of 36 state governors are in its fold. They are: Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Enugu, Ekiti, Gombe, Imo, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Lagos, Nasarawa, Niger, Ogun, Ondo, Plateau, Rivers, Sokoto, Taraba, and Yobe. Not only that, it has 75 out of 109 Senators, and 230 out of 360 members of House of Representatives.
To retain and leverage elite alignment, and structural leverage, “heavy-weight” politicians like Atiku Abubakar and Nasr El-Rufai moved out of their former parties to the ADC while leaving their biological sons in APC; the godfather of Kano Politics, Musa Kwankwaso on whose party, NNPP, the governor was elected, allowed him to move to APC while he stayed back in NNPP. On the part of Nyesom Wike, he effectually decimated the PDP from within as the serving Minister of FCT, while maintaining alliance with either the APC, or his benefactor, President Bola Tinubu.
Contrasts between hegemony and dominance
There is no doubt that APC has taken over every political party space in Nigeria, which is dominance in deed. But the question is, when the legitimacy of such dominance is juxtaposed with its variant species called hegemony, does it meet the status of a hegemon? Even if has, can it stand the test of time?
Taking over political space is one thing, winning the hearts of the electorate is another.
A majority of actions taken by the APC underpin its lack of hegemonic principles and innovations, such as ideology, consensus, persuasion, socialization, and moral leadership, as against control of institutions, rules, and enforcement, command, sanctions, exclusion, and intimidation.
Hegemony on Trial
The unwillingness of APC to allow real-time transmission of election results via electronic means on the election day is a testimony to its lack of normative legitimacy that breeds hegemony, and thus exemplifies its clay-footedness – knowing that it cannot guarantee, or command free and fair mass voting, legitimately. Inserting a clause in the revised Electoral Act, which empowers a recourse to the use of manual (Form EC8A) “as the primary basis for result collation and declaration if electronic transmission fails due to network or communication issues,” instead of to “electronically transmit results from polling units to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Results Viewing Portal (IReV)” only, is an ambush on the electorate to subvert their will on the election day, by covertly relying on such a loophole that would be exploited by the ruling party – using its agencies of coercion to bypass electronic disclosure.
Nigeria, South Africa, and India – a Comparative Analysis
Nigeria, South Africa, and India illustrate distinct configurations of party power. Nigeria represents a system of institutional dominance without consolidated hegemony, where parties command the state but not societal consent, producing fluid loyalties and elite defections.
South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) exemplifies historically grounded hegemony, where liberation legitimacy sustained long-term dominance despite governance erosion.
India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demonstrates ideology-driven hegemony, in which sustained cultural and political mobilization precedes and stabilizes electoral dominance.
These cases show that durable party power depends not merely on controlling institutions, but on embedding authority within society’s moral, cultural, and ideological frameworks.
Conclusion
Until political parties succeed in converting dominance propped up and nurtured by incumbency into societal hegemony, Nigeria’s party politics will remain fluid, transactional (prebendal), and prone to realignment.
Going by Nigeria’s ever-evolving heterogenous realities that are hinged on ethnic, religious and economic resource contentions, and recently the emergence of terrorism that has caused enormous instability in several states, can truly hegemonic political parties evolve, or emerge in Nigeria to bolster a better and more dynamic polity?
Rowland Enwerem is a journalist, author, and policy researcher whose work interrogates politics, governance, and social development in Nigeria. He is the Research Lead at Development Diagnosis Initiative (DDI).
