There Is Too Much Ideology in Nigerian Politics

This represents an interesting paradox. What might be seen as ideology in other contexts is precisely what is taken to represent its absence in much of Africa. The paradox deepens if additional conditions are present. Let’s suppose that the major candidates endorse this set of policy proposals and that elections become mainly about which of them can enact such policies most competently. 

In Nigeria, this is no longer hypothetical. President Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, the main candidates in the 2023 election and in the coming 2027 election, all embrace this agenda. Continued privatization, broad commitments to a market-determined exchange rate, meagre, if any, welfare provision and the removal of public subsidies remain the norm across their manifestos. In other contexts, such harmony in economic terms would be seen as expressing ideological hegemony. Yet much of Nigeria’s academic, civil society and media discourse frames this situation as the absence of ideology. 

This framing is in some ways understandable. Popular analysts usually assume that party ideology must produce disagreement. Rival parties, in this view, should adopt antagonistic perspectives on important policy issues. Ideological disagreements should stabilize after having sorted politicians and voters into rival camps, establishing a left/right division in both party and society. This account appears plausible enough. After all, we usually recognize ideology through disagreement. Conservatives oppose socialists; liberals oppose conservatives; elections offer competing visions of how society should be organized. When those disagreements are absent, it is tempting to see politics as ‘devoid of ideology’. ‘I have said it before,’ affirmed Obi in an Arise TV interview. ‘There is no different ideology between all of us who are running…Our politics has not matured where we have different ideologies, beliefs and everything.’ 

Yet the history of democratic politics over the past four decades suggests almost the opposite. One of the defining features of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century party politics was not the collapse of ideology but the convergence of rival parties around a shared ideological settlement. Across much of Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa, parties that once championed sharply different economic programmes increasingly accepted the basic premises of the dominant ideology of their time—neoliberalism. Ideology had not so much vanished as it had become accepted enough to no longer distinguish one major party from another. Yet, while oppositional movements, popular constituencies and progressive media and academics in most of the world rallied against this consensus, neoliberal convergence seemed to go nearly unnoticed in countries such as Nigeria. 

Neoliberalism’s history partially explains its muted presence in certain contexts. As a programme of economic reform, neoliberalism found its most comprehensive political expression first under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile before being popularized internationally by the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. It is characterized by a commitment to reducing the state’s role in the productive economy through privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, fiscal austerity, flexible labour markets and the retrenchment of welfare provision, while reorienting the state toward supporting financial markets and large-scale private capital. 

While they were first introduced by right-wing political parties, neoliberal policies were embraced by many nominally left-wing parties in the 1990s and early 2000s. Seeking a pragmatic ‘third way’ between state socialism and free-market conservatism, centre-left parties increasingly accepted the premises of the new economic model, promising to temper it with greater social inclusion and more effective governance—‘neoliberalism with a human face’ is what its critics called the emerging cocktail. In Europe and North America, the rightward shift of left-wing parties frequently came with the claim that the traditional left-right divide had become obsolete—that politics had moved beyond ideology towards evidence, competence and pragmatic problem-solving. Yet, as Stephanie Mudge, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, and author of Leftism Reinvented, has argued, this represented less the disappearance of ideology than the reinvention of leftism. Critics such as Tariq Ali went further still, arguing that the apparent consensus between centre-left and centre-right parties constituted not the end of ideology but the emergence of what he famously called the ‘extreme centre’. Thus, from its origins in Chile, neoliberalism spread to the global North. 

But neoliberalism’s journey through the global South took a different path. In much of Africa, its implementation was first consolidated by authoritarian regimes during the 1980s through the adoption (and imposition) of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). Championed most visibly by Western creditors and international financial institutions, SAPs were also often embraced by an emerging class of domestic elites whose political and economic interests aligned with these reforms. SAP reforms, which encoded neoliberal principles into a policy package, were presented as the only viable solution to the debt crises that picked up pace beginning in the 1970s. In Nigeria, neoliberal reforms—displacing both statist and alternative market reform ideas—came to dominate the language of economic policymaking from the mid-1980s. Running in parallel, economists and bankers with backgrounds in international financial institutions increasingly occupied key positions in economic policymaking, frequently serving as finance ministers and central bank governors. Over time, however, neoliberalism ceased to be merely the language of technocrats. It increasingly became the shared economic framework within which Nigeria’s major political parties competed, narrowing the ideological boundaries of democratic competition—what I’ve previously referred to as right-wing convergence—rather than eliminating ideology altogether. 

The more specific roots of this convergence stretch back to Nigeria’s transition from military rule under General Ibrahim Babangida. The process through which structural adjustment was adopted under Babangida (who was reportedly enamoured by Pinochet’s program in Chile) cemented an emerging economic direction and narrowed the horizons of legitimate economic debate. The military-sponsored transition to the Third Republic (1992-1993), announced contemporaneously with the new economic programme in the regime’s 1986 budget speech, permitted political competition, but muted voices that disagreed with the regime’s new economic direction. While labour unions, student movements and sections of the Nigerian left attempted to organize on an anti-SAP platform, such efforts were officially branded ‘extremist’ and banned from participating in the transition programme. Instead, the Babangida regime established two state-sponsored parties—one famously described as ‘a little to the left’ and the other ‘a little to the right’—both of which accepted the broad contours of structural adjustment. Long before Ali coined the phrase ‘the extreme centre’ to describe the narrowing of ideological alternatives in Western democracies, Nigeria’s transition had produced something strikingly similar. Electoral competition between major parties was permitted to differ at the margins while sharing the same underlying economic settlement. 

The Fourth Republic (1999-present) largely inherited this settlement, and the same reform programme continued to be championed by Olusegun Obasanjo and his hand-picked successors within the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). It is not without irony that PDP’s founding manifesto copied, word-for-word, whole sections of both the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and National Republican Convention (NRC) manifestos (is it possible to imagine a more determined attempt to locate the centre of the centre)?! For much of the first decade of civilian rule, continued reform under PDP coincided with sustained economic growth and growing international confidence in Nigeria’s economy. Yet the benefits were distributed highly unequally, with impressive macroeconomic indicators coexisting alongside persistent poverty, unemployment and widening social inequality.  

To be sure, neoliberal reform was never uncontested. Ageing veterans of the anti-SAP struggle who lingered on in some unions, and sections of the media, and civil society repeatedly mobilized against fuel subsidy removal and privatization. As anti-austerity sentiment grew and public confidence in the ruling PDP eroded, elements of the statist right—most visibly around Muhammadu Buhari— built on this momentum and were able to mount a serious challenge to the prevailing reform consensus by advocating a more interventionist role for the state, coupled with a nationalistic and punitive orientation towards social dissent. Yet, despite a historic opposition victory and his re-election to a second term, Buhari’s ultimately unpopular mix of conservatism and statism did more to delegitimize alternatives to neoliberalism than to construct a durable governing alternative. By the 2023 election, Tinubu, Abubakar and Obi all campaigned on broadly similar commitments to subsidy removal, exchange-rate liberalization and market reform, with Tinubu pursuing a version of neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ upon taking power.  

Nigeria’s current policy trajectory would be recognizable in other parts of Africa—from Kenya to Ghana, from Zambia to South Africa—where neoliberal proposals dominate reform discourse by party leaders and experts. Despite the prevalence of this world view, analysts and popular commentators still insist that African parties are devoid of ideology.  

This is partially a question of media framing. The language through which African politicians—and observers—discuss elections often revolves around ethnicity, regionalism, religion, or about who is more or less competent or corrupt. Identitarian personal differences generate more friction and thus lend themselves more easily to commentary and engagement than do economic worldviews, which the dominant politicians largely share. The more sensational differences occupy the foreground in much media discourse while the underlying economic agreement is confined to the margins or treated as irrelevant.  

A deeper explanation lies in the limited ideological inheritance bequeathed to Africans in the transition to democracy, the broader phenomenon the Swedish Malawian economist, Thandika Mkandawire, famously called ‘choice-less democracy’. The exclusion of anti-SAP voices—and the wider crisis of the political left—has meant that public awareness of the ideological underpinnings of the prevailing consensus has dwindled. One outcome of this is that neoliberal politicians often fault rivals for not implementing ‘the’ reforms competently enough. Framed in this way, mainstream political debate reinforces the notion that better management (of the same set of reforms) is needed rather than a change of direction. 

A further source of misrecognition is peculiar to neoliberalism itself. One of its distinguishing features is that neoliberal policies are often presented less as ideological choices than as a necessity—as common sense, the smart technocratic option, the only sensible alternative. Only rarely, and more often when talking to foreign media, might an African politician come out and say, for instance, that he is a disciple of Margaret Thatcher (as Abubakar did in a 2019 interview in Bloomberg). More often than not, neoliberalism hides behind the invisibility cloak of inevitability, necessity or pragmatism.

Even more, when it comes to political parties, analysts often assume that the presence of ideology would automatically guarantee numerous desirable party functions—from discipline (i.e. no ‘cross-carpeting’) to accountability; where members and voters can ensure that manifesto promises become government policies that are consistently implemented. But this is wishful thinking rather than an analysis of how ideology functions in the real world. It is in fact perfectly imaginable that a group of dogged ideologues might also be factionalized, highly incompetent, morally bankrupt or unaccountable—or even that some ideologies (take for instance, certain variants of anarchism) may lend themselves to what might look like indiscipline. Yet, economic ideology is often wrongly assumed to automatically guarantee decorum, thus the presence of scandal must necessarily mean the absence of ideology. 

There are more sophisticated reasons why African neoliberalism is frequently misrecognized. A significant group of African governments facing a limited fiscal space must rely on donor funds to finance basic state functions. Another set of governments who are endowed with natural resources and thus less beholden to donors often find that political competition comes to be defined by corruption and rent seeking, based on the standard assumptions of the resource curse thesis. In both cases the expectation is that neoliberal discourse, if it arises, does so either to placate funders or as a smoke screen for personal enrichment. In other words, politicians are only mouthing neoliberal slogans to justify their pecuniary or political survival. The underlying assumption is that a clean separation can be established between the personal interests and ideological commitments of political actors.

I find this dichotomy unconvincing. An analogy to another ideological construct—patriarchy—illustrates why. Men derive material advantages from patriarchy, and some of its most visible defenders also profit directly from promoting patriarchal ideas (for instance, through the book sales or ad revenue derived by ‘manosphere’ content creators). Yet these material incentives do not demonstrate the absence of ideological conviction. On the contrary, it should not be surprising that direct (monetary) beneficiaries of an ideological order frequently become some of its most sincere believers. 

The same logic applies to neoliberalism. A politician can sincerely believe that fuel subsidies should be removed, exchange rates liberalized and state enterprises privatized while simultaneously directing contracts to allies, engaging in patronage or benefiting personally from privatization. Corruption explains the means through which power is exercised and wealth accumulated; ideology helps explain the ends toward which governments seek to organize the economy. Treating corruption as an alternative explanation to ideology lazily mistakes separate (if overlapping) dimensions of political life for competing explanations. 

Indeed, neoliberal restructuring has often layered new opportunities for rent extraction—through outsourcing, public-private partnerships, consultants and financial intermediation—onto older forms of corruption rooted in oil rents, discretionary budgeting and state-owned enterprises. Material interests and ideological commitments therefore frequently become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. This, for instance, is why I find Abubakar’s frequently stated commitment to privatization more convincing precisely because he says his friends would receive preferential treatment in such asset sales.  

Moreover, an extensive tradition of scholarship has documented neoliberalism’s influence not only on economic policy but also on popular culture and political subjectivity. As Michel Foucault argued in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, neoliberalism is both a set of economic prescriptions and a form of governmentality that seeks to produce particular kinds of subjects—individuals encouraged to understand themselves as entrepreneurs, investors and managers of their own human capital. If neoliberalism has profoundly shaped popular understandings of markets, work, personhood and citizenship, wouldn’t it be somewhat remarkable if African political elites alone have escaped its influence?

A final source of misrecognition is, to an extent, a caricature of the donor dependency question raised above. This increasingly popular orientation sees the policymaking process in countries like Nigeria as entirely stage-managed by external puppeteers. Agency is externalized entirely to places like Washington and Paris. Yet African governments sometimes appear more committed to neoliberal approaches than the institutions that originally championed them. Take a recent IMF country report on Nigeria from June 2026, for instance. While lauding the government’s reform agenda, the fund has repeatedly pleaded that social investments are insufficient, urging the federal government, to ‘rechannel the savings from subsidy removal into social safety nets.’ This is an understandable plea. The ₦32.7 billion approved for the National Social Investment Programmes in 2025 is less than ₦39 billion allocated for the renovation of the International Conference Centre in Abuja. How should we account for moments where governments such as Nigeria’s seemed to go even further than the prescriptions of international financiers? A case of the student surpassing the teacher? 

Acknowledging the blind spots in our analysis of party ideology allows us to better understand Nigeria’s political-economic trajectory. It becomes possible to trace how the neoliberal policy framework has been implemented—no doubt with modifications and periods of reversal—during the intervening 40-year period since the SAPs were adopted in Nigeria, and how various constituencies have sought to benefit, modify, amend, or otherwise interact with this policy project. 

In contrast, continually insisting that Nigerian politics has ‘no ideology’ does more than misdescribe reality; it does voters a disservice by obscuring the economic choices already being presented (or not presented) to them. If the country’s dominant political actors largely agree on the direction of economic reform—and offer only more or less competent, ‘cleaner’ or articulate versions of the same script—then the democratic challenge is not to search endlessly for ideology where none supposedly exists. It is rather to ask whether neoliberalism deserves continued support or whether credible alternatives should be articulated, debated and organized.  

More fundamentally, if Nigerian—and African—democracy is to offer meaningful political choice, it must recover the possibility of genuine ideological contestation. At a time when neoliberalism is increasingly being revised, challenged or abandoned across the world, there is little reason for Nigerians to continue treating it as economic common sense rather than one political tradition among many. The problem with Nigerian politics is not that it has too little ideology. It is that it has too much of one ideology—and far too little debate about whether others are possible⎈

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