Beyond stomach infrastructure: party membership and political ideology in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

This thesis explores political ideology in contemporary Nigeria through tracing the origins of two mass membership parties: The All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Mainstream scholars of African democracy explain mass political mobilisation through “ethno- clientelism,” that is, through a combination of primal ties and gift-giving. However, ethno-clientelistic explanations are susceptible to two significant explanatory weaknesses. These explanations prevent scholars from considering the domain of political “affect”, that is to say the role of utopian desires and fantasies in propelling wide-scale political mobilisation, including mass party membership. Secondly these perspectives offer us an elitist gaze of non-Western democracies. This is because these explanations are used to promote a “common good” defined not by the citizenry, but by elevated, often non-local, analysts — those thought best equipped to assess the quality of a government’s management of a capitalist economy under conditions of fiscal austerity. In place of these explanations, I offer a de-exoticized, left- populist conception of mass mobilization grounded in Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic definition of ideology. I argue that in Nigeria’s current democratic republic, the two parties of government, the APC and the PDP are both centre-right populist parties and, thus, that Nigeria’s main parties are ideological, even if they are ideologically convergent rather than opposed. To empirically assess these claims, I examine the testimonies and practices of APC and PDP party loyalists throughout an election and post-election period. Nine months of fieldwork — including attending scores of party meetings and interviewing numerous party members — was conducted in Ekiti state (a Yoruba majority, south-west state) and in Kaduna state (a Hausa-Fulani majority, north-western state). These states were selected for their accessibility as well as to allow me to inductively examine what differences and similarities would emerge by contrasting two historically and ethno-culturally distinct states. Across both locations, both the APC and the PDP are centre-right populist parties in social composition, practice, and economic policy. I find that a mixture of cultural norms, populist and liberal institutional rules, and centrist economic policies govern political practice and thought in these parties. I also find that the character of political parties is best seen not in the words of political speech-writers, but in the practices of democratic citizens on the public calendar of party activities known as the electoral cycle. Through the study of ideology in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, my thesis makes an empirical contribution to left-populist theory and a conceptual contribution by reintroducing the left/right ideological spectrum into the comparative study of African democracy.