In Nigeria, candidate nomination has traditionally been defined by two legally recognized modes of selection: direct and indirect primaries. However, in 2022, former President Muhammadu Buhari pressured the National Assembly to institutionalize consensus candidacy as a third mode in the Electoral Act.

This conferred legality on a long-standing practice in which political parties adopt to nominate candidates, even at the expense of the will of party members. Consensus has always been used as a tool to eliminate competition, including candidates who do not enjoy the blessing of party hegemons.

In the 2026 Electoral Act, the National Assembly eliminated indirect primaries and retained only direct primaries and consensus candidacy as the two legally approved modes for candidate selection. For direct primaries, the Act empowers political parties to determine their procedures. However, the Act prescribes three strict conditions for validating a consensus arrangement adopted by a political party. First, only cleared aspirants may participate, and they must voluntarily withdraw from the contest. Second, each aspirant must endorse one of the remaining aspirants as the consensus candidate. Third, the consensus candidate must be ratified at a special convention or nomination congress held at designated centers across the national, state, senatorial, federal, and state constituency levels. All three conditions must be fulfilled before INEC will recognize any consensus candidate. Where one aspirant declines to withdraw, the party must conduct a direct primary.

As Nigeria counts down to the 2027 general elections, the political temperature is rising, and political mobilization is in full swing. Political parties are also racing to meet a highly compressed and arguably unjust timeline for candidate nominations. One mode of selecting candidates that is generating controversy is consensus candidacy. This is not due to its theoretical intent, but rather how it is currently being implemented. What is unfolding is not consensus; it is elite imposition. It is unmistakably clear that consensus candidacy has become a practice whereby political parties, godfathers, and so-called party stakeholders anoint a candidate ahead of any competitive process, then exert pressure on other aspirants to withdraw, step aside, or be simply ignored. Let us call this practice what it is: organized theft of the people’s franchise and the proscription of political aspiration.

Consensus candidacy is increasingly a mechanism of elite capture, dressed in the language of unity, cost reduction, and party stability. But recent experiences show that consensus candidacy shrinks the space for contestation, concentrates excessive powers in the hands of godfathers and party leaders, and strips party members of genuine choice.

What Consensus Candidacy Is — and Is Not

In politics, there are genuine instances where convergence of opinion occurs around the suitability and preferability of a particular aspirant, especially when, following an assessment of the electoral landscape, one candidate commands broad support and offers the party its best prospect of electoral victory. That kind of convergence is democratic solidarity: earned, voluntary, and transparent. Where it authentically exists, parties can legitimately rally behind a single, electable candidate. Notwithstanding, that process needs to fulfill some conditions to be legally certified.

What is happening in the lead up to the primaries is a choreographed elimination of competition. Powerful individuals, governors, cabals, and backroom brokers decide who the candidate will be before any primary is conducted, then deploy financial incentives, intimidation, threats of political exile, and institutional manipulation to clear the field. Those who dare to resist are branded as disloyal, divisive, or worse, a tool of the opposition. This frontloaded “consensus candidacy” is undemocratic and amounts to the imposition of candidates.

At its core, democracy is defined by fundamental principles such as competition, participation, transparency, and legitimacy. Consensus candidacy undermines all four. Consensus candidacy hands the power of selection to party governors, godfathers, and backroom negotiators, rather than allowing party members to debate ideas, assess competence, and freely choose among aspirants. What is then presented to the public as an “agreement” is often nothing more than forced withdrawal dressed up as unity.

The Immeasurable Harm of Consensus Candidacy to Democracy

The first problem with consensus candidacy is that it substitutes negotiation among elites for genuine democratic competition. In theory, consensus suggests broad agreement reached through open consultation. However, in practice, it is often created by a small group of influential individuals in private settings, such as secret meetings, hotel rooms, or the homes of party stakeholders, well before ordinary party members are even aware of the “consensus” candidate. By the time the arrangement is announced, party members are expected to applaud a decision they never influenced or approved. That is not consensus. It’s an imposition dressed in democratic language.

Worse still, consensus candidacy produces candidates who owe their emergence not to the people they will represent, but to the political broker who cleared the path for them. This creates a dependency that shapes everything that follows: appointments, budget priorities, legislation, and ultimately governance. The elected official is accountable upward to their godfathers, not downward to their constituents. This practice is one of the clearest roots of the representation deficit Nigerians continue to experience and condemn.

Second, consensus candidacy undermines internal party democracy. Political parties are supposed to serve as schools of democracy, expected to model the values they claim to defend in national politics. When parties deny aspirants the opportunity to test their popularity through transparent, competitive, and democratic primaries, they affirm loyalty to powerful individuals rather than party members. Aspirants stop campaigning to voters and start lobbying power brokers. Issue-based politics and competence take a backseat while elite endorsement and backroom deals become the determining factor. The long-term effect becomes weak political institutions and a deeply entrenched culture of patronage politics.

Third, the consensus model is inherently discriminatory. It disadvantages women, youth, and reform-minded candidates, who lack access to entrenched patronage networks. Opaque negotiations, rather than open competitive primary elections, systematically shut out aspirants without financial war chests, influence, or godfathers. Consensus candidacy therefore reproduces inequality and preserves the dominance of an old political class that fears open competition.

What Must Change

Competitive primaries, despite their imperfections, create at least some opportunity for scrutiny, persuasion, and comparison. Aspirants must engage party members, defend their records, articulate their vision, and earn support. Unfortunately, in most cases, the consensus model rewards proximity to power over popularity, loyalty over competence, and obedience over ideas. The best candidate may not emerge; the most connected candidate often does.

Changing the system requires action on several fronts. First, INEC must insist on credible primary elections, not observe cosmetic primaries staged to satisfy formal requirements. The Commission has both the institutional authority and the legal mandate to reject candidates presented through very obvious shambolic processes. Second, civil society and the media must refuse to normalize the language of consensus candidacy. When a party announces a “consensus candidate,” that phrase should be interrogated, not reported as a settled fact. Journalists, analysts, and civic actors should ask the obvious democratic questions: Who agreed? How was that agreement reached? Were aspirants pressured to withdraw? Were party members given a meaningful role in the process?

Third, political parties must recognize that the long-term survival of Nigerian democracy depends on the legitimacy of their internal processes. Parties that produce candidates through genuine competition generate greater public confidence, stronger campaign coalitions, and more accountable elected officials. The short-term convenience of consensus candidacy deepens democratic crises.

Finally, citizens must demand better. The voter is the principal; the party is the agent. Consensus candidacy inverts this relationship, turning the voter into a passive recipient of choices made by others. Ahead of 2027, every ward, every local government, and every state constituency deserves a competitive, observable, and credible primary. Citizens should organize and demand it.

In conclusion, for consensus candidacy to be meaningful, it must be genuinely voluntary, transparent, and subject to the informed consent of all aspirants and party members as stated in the Electoral Act 2026. Any party that claims to be democratic should not be afraid of primaries. It should not fear debate, contestation, or the unpredictability of free choice. The real threat to the electoral fortunes of parties is not competition but the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Consensus candidacy is undemocratic because it silences members, empowers party godfathers and oligarchs, and empties politics of genuine choice. It must be confronted for what it is: a sophisticated instrument of exclusion, not a so-called path for achieving party unity.

Samson Itodo is an election, democracy, and public policy enthusiast. Itodo serves as the Executive Director of Yiaga Africa, Principal Partner of the Election Law Center, and Chairperson of the African Union Advisory Group on AI in Peace, Security and Governance. He is also a member of the Kofi Annan Foundation board and the Board of Advisers of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). (Channels)

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