THE 2019 GENERAL ELECTIONS AND INTRA-PARTY CONFLICTS IN NIGERIA

A CROSS SECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF APC, APGA AND PDP

Abstract

One of the common features of the Nigerian electoral democracy in the fourth republic (1999 - 2019) is intra and inter-party conflicts. Interestingly, conflict being inevitable in organized societies, is a necessary condition for politics. Politics thus creates and reconciles conflicts whereby every person, group and sections of the political system is guided by tacit, distinct and convoluted interests. These interests are rooted in political power consolidation, use, exercise and application towards who gets 'what, when and how' by individuals and groups within political parties who share varied interests outside what the parties hold supreme. It is therefore difficult to define these interests where the party is made up of hard-to-knit personalities and groups guided by in definitive courses. Political parties of the fourth republic are registrants of INEC that were not formed on the basis of clear-cut ideologies. Hence, political parties are mere labels to be used and discarded at will by politicians as instruments of electoral competition. People join political parties to actualize their interests which range from getting elected into public position to accessing vantage positions from where power and influence are wielded and to their advantage thereby describing the dialectics of value allocation and distribution of public goods. Any threat to these interests trigger conflict and eventual decamping or re-decamping to and from other political parties. This paper explores the trend, causes and dynamics of party competitions that give rise to conflicts within political parties while examining how such conflicts influenced political party performances in the 2019 general elections. Based mainly on secondary sources of data, analyses of the paper are rooted in postulations of the conflict theory as according to Marx, Weber and Coser. The paper surmised that membership and candidate recruitment combine with unbridled struggle for the control of party structures generate unending intra-party conflicts that negatively influence party performances in the fourth republic Nigerian elections. It specifically observed that the defeat of President GEJ in the 2015 presidential election was a function of the dissociation in the PDP and stated that high level of conflicting interests within the APC impacted on the party's performance especially in the National Assembly and gubernatorial elections in the 2019 general elections. It thus enjoined the leadership of Nigerian parties to conduct the affairs of their parties according to the provisions of the party constitutions.