The Politics of Opposition Parties Merger and the Struggle for Power in Nigeria’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

Since 1999 up till the conduct of the 2015 general elections, Nigeria’s party politics has exhibited the near dominance of the political space by the then ruling People’s Democratic Party, PDP. Aside the then four leading opposition parties, the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN; All Progressive Grand Alliance, APGA; All Nigerian People’s Party, ANPP and Congress for Progressive Change, CPC; the rest of the opposition pack comprised of smaller parties that lack organizational structure, possess little electoral worth and lack the capacity to make meaningful contribution to the deepening of the nation’s democratic process. Realizing the importance of pulling resources together in an alliance, four main opposition parties, ACN, ANPP, APGA and CPC entered into talk directed at facilitating the merger of their parties to form a formidable opposition party. The result was the collapse of their structures and subsequent formation of, the All Progressive Congress, APC. While numbers of issues and factors accounted for the electoral defeat of the then ruling PDP in the 2015 general elections, this paper advance the argument that the united front presented by the opposition elements under the banner of the emergent All Progressive Congress was instrumental to the alternation of ruling party at the national level that Nigeria witnessed in 2015. Informed by this position and drawing insights from newspapers articles, commentaries, opinion piece and academic literature, this paper interrogates the politics of opposition merger and struggle for power in the course of the 2015 general elections.