Editor’s note: In this piece, Rivers’ politics since 2023 becomes a lens for understanding how power now shifts quietly across Nigeria. Peace and conflict researcher Lekan Olayiwola explains why alignment, not parties, is shaping democratic life ahead of 2027.
Democracy does not collapse when people disengage; it thins when people stop noticing how it is being rearranged. Recent political turbulence in Rivers state since 2023 offers a revealing case study of this quieter process not because it is uniquely aberrant, but because it exposes pressures now acting on Nigeria’s political system. What unsettles observers is not simply conflict, defection, or federal intervention.
Source: Twitter
What feels disorienting is the configuration in which they have appeared together; party labels losing organising force, informal networks overriding formal alignments, legislatures behaving as mobile instruments rather than deliberative bodies, and federal authority operating less as a distant arbiter than as an immediate stabiliser of subnational crisis. To understand why this moment feels different, it helps to take a long view.
From party dominance to alignment politics: A compressed history
Since 1999, Nigeria’s political system has evolved through clear phases. Early on, parties mattered: they organised competition, structured patronage, and contained power struggles within defined frameworks. Over time, incumbency strengthened. Executives captured party machinery, internal democracy weakened, and loyalty increasingly followed access to state resources. Party identity still imposed some discipline, but its grip loosened.
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By the mid-2010s, federal power grew more decisive, party switching accelerated, and survival began to outweigh loyalty. Opposition remained possible but costly. By 2023, parties functioned more as gateways to power than as anchors of authority. The Rivers episode must be read in this context: not as a local feud, but as the collision of weakened parties, intensified federal leverage, and elite survival logic under pressure.
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The significance of the Rivers moment
The striking feature of the Rivers episode is not that power was contested, but how. Influence crossed party lines without formal conversion; legislative blocs shifted en masse without ideological change. Federal authority intervened not to seize subnational power, but to suspend politics long enough to restore equilibrium.
This produced a configuration where actors formally in one camp exercised influence in another, lawmakers switched platforms while retaining older loyalties, and constitutional tools served crisis management more than settled norms. To citizens, it seemed incoherent; structurally, it reveals a system in transition. Old rules no longer guarantee survival; new ones remain unstable.
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This does not mean Nigeria is uniquely failing. It reflects a universal democratic tension between order and accountability under intense pressure. Similar dynamics have occurred in South Asia and Latin America; the difference lies in timing and intensity, and whether adaptations endure or remain temporary.
Informal power and the quiet erosion of norms
At the heart of the current moment lies a familiar but under-examined dynamic—the relationship between formal rules and informal power. Every political system relies on both. Informal negotiation, elite bargaining, and behind-the-scenes compromise are not pathologies; they are often necessary lubricants of governance. Problems arise when informal power ceases to supplement formal norms and instead begins to substitute for them. Informal power expands fastest when formal norms are treated as optional conveniences rather than shared commitments.
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Democracy erodes not through the abolition of institutions, but through their instrumentalisation. The Rivers case illustrates this danger vividly. Party rules mattered less than personal networks. Legislative procedures became tools rather than constraints. Constitutional mechanisms were interpreted flexibly to resolve immediate deadlock. Each move could be defended as pragmatic. Taken together, however, they risk teaching a dangerous lesson: that rules are provisional, and that stability is best secured through alignment rather than accountability.
Alignment as survival logic
One of the most consequential implications of the recent turbulence is the elevation of alignment as the primary axis of political survival. Where once control of party structures or electoral legitimacy might have sufficed, proximity to federal power now appears increasingly decisive. This has profound implications.
First, it reshapes incentives. Political actors learn that maintaining favour upward may matter more than cultivating consent downward. Second, it weakens opposition not by banning it, but by making it precarious. Third, it encourages fluidity without responsibility: movement without conversion, loyalty without transparency.
None of this requires conspiracy or bad faith. It follows logically from a system in which the costs of misalignment are high, and the rewards of proximity are immediate. But such a system is inherently unstable. Stability achieved through alignment is efficient, yet brittle. It secures order, but often at the expense of trust.
Source: Twitter
The legislature and the problem of representation
Another quiet lesson from the Rivers experience concerns legislatures. Assemblies are meant to be sites of representation, debate, and constraint. When they become primarily instruments of elite negotiation, they lose that function. This does not render them irrelevant; it makes them powerful in a different, less visible way as levers rather than forums.
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The danger here is cumulative. When citizens perceive legislative behaviour as detached from electoral mandate, cynicism deepens. When cynicism deepens, participation thins. And when participation thins, the space for further informal manoeuvre widens. Again, this is not unique to one state. It is a structural risk facing democracies where party identity weakens faster than institutional culture strengthens.
Early warnings on the road to 2027
Looking ahead, the significance of the Rivers episode lies less in its resolution than in the precedents it sets. Several early warning signs merit attention as the country moves toward 2027: (i) Exceptional measures becoming routine. What is justified today as necessary may tomorrow be cited as normal. (ii) Defection without consequence. When movement carries no reputational cost, accountability erodes quietly. (iii) Alignment replacing competition. When success depends more on negotiated proximity than on public persuasion, democracy narrows without formally closing.
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It is important to speak of these matters without moral panic or personal accusation. Political actors operate within constraints shaped by history, institutions, and incentive structures. Understanding this is not absolution; it is the basis of meaningful reform. Democracies do not fail because individuals are flawed; they falter when systems reward the wrong behaviours consistently.
Nigeria has navigated moments of far greater peril. The current challenge is subtler. It asks whether the country can recalibrate; whether it can rebuild party credibility, re-anchor legislatures as deliberative spaces, and reassert norms as shared commitments rather than tactical options.
Vigilance as civic responsibility
The most important lesson from the Rivers drama is not about personalities or outcomes. It is about attention. Democracies rely not only on participation but on public understanding of how power is rearranged in their name. When citizens, journalists, and leaders notice patterns early before they harden into habits, they retain the capacity to steer.
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As 2027 approaches, the task is not to deny complexity or demand purity. It is to insist, calmly and persistently, that power explains itself, restrains itself, and remembers that legitimacy is not inherited through alignment alone. Democracy rarely disappears overnight. More often, it erodes quietly, procedurally, and with the consent of exhaustion. Noticing that process is the first act of preservation.
Lekan Olayiwola is a public-facing peace & conflict researcher/policy analyst focused on leadership, ethics, governance, and political legitimacy in fragile states.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.
Proofreading by James Ojo, copy editor at Legit.ng.
Source: Legit.ng