There is a ritual in Nigerian politics close to each general election.
It involves politicians switching seats and vehicles, changing political parties, making friends and enemies in order to be positioned for success in the elections or in the aftermath.
It is never quiet, but it is shameless, almost an acrobatic art of crossing the carpet.
Most Nigerian adults have watched this game all their grown-up lives.
One season, a man is waving the green broom of the APC, shouting change against what they called a slide toward PDP’s one-party dominance.
The next season, he has draped himself in the PDP’s red umbrella, looking you dead in the eye like it never happened.
No apology. No explanation. No ideology.
Just a fresh agbada and a new slogan.
The next season, the same politician has moved on to a third, fourth or may even be back to the first party.
None of it matters.
Nigerian political parties are like the doors of a casino, whichever one you open leads to the same thing – games.
Politicians know most Nigerians have accepted it as a way of life.
They cheer their politicians on no matter where they go or how many times they hop.
There is no need for pretence.
The politicians are still around, still changing parties as they have been doing for nearly 35 years.
And it is shameful that most Nigerians are not blinking.
They seem to enjoy it, really.
Most experienced in this game is the godfather of political contests and party switching, the man who has been contesting the presidency since 1992, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
Altogether, Atiku has joined nine political parties between 1989 and now and he has run for the presidency six times
For over three decades, this man has pirouetted across the Nigerian political landscape with the grace of a seasoned acrobat and the principles of a weather vane.
He has been PFN, SDP and UNCP.
Since 1999, he has been PDP, AC and PDP again. He was on the doorstep of APC.
Atiku launched a presidential bid under PDP for the third time in 2023.
And now, he has leaped from the PDP to the ADC, repositioning for 2027.
Altogether, Atiku has joined nine political parties between 1989 and now and he has run for the presidency six times.
Atiku does not change parties.
He shops parties.
He treats Nigerian political structures the way a market woman treats stalls in Balogun market: moving wherever the price is right, the crowd is thick, and the profit is near.
And then there is Peter Obi (warning: do not lynch – these are facts).
In 2022, Nigeria’s educated middle class erupted in collective ecstasy over this man.
The Obidient movement. The third force.
The harbinger of a new politics.
And where had Peter Obi come from before his Labor Party coronation?
He was APGA. Then PDP. Then Labor.
You would think that with his ideology of change that benefits the common man, he had found a home among labor activists.
And you would be wrong. It was just the beginning of shopping at Alaba.
The man who was supposed to represent an entirely new chapter has turned out to be merely a new character in the same old story.
Shopping with Obi is Rabiu Kwankwaso, former Governor of Kano State, known for his populist Kwankwasiyya movement.
He’s a visitor to seven parties since 1989 – PFN, SDP, APC, PDP, NNPP, ADC, NDC.
This year alone, like Obi, he has joined three parties – NNPP, ADC and NDC.
These are politicians who lack principle and ideology, but they would disagree.
Die-hard Peter Obi foot soldiers shared a message, purportedly written by him, claiming that even if he had to switch to 20 parties in order to achieve his goals of bringing beneficial change to Nigerians, he would not consider it unethical.
That sounds like a pastor preaching to the congregation that if he had to divorce and remarry 20 times to find a godly woman, he would consider it spiritual.
In the First Republic, Nigeria produced politicians who actually stood for something – not just somewhere.
Nnamdi Azikiwe, our first president, was a committed Pan-Africanist.
He believed in a federated Africa, in the liberation of colonised minds, in the dignity of the Black man as a philosophical and political project, economic progress and social advancement.
People recognised his ideas had a framework, and it was labelled Zikist.
Obafemi Awolowo was a man who read and wrote books – deeply, seriously – and allowed those books to govern his politics.
His Action Group championed what he called democratic socialism: free education, universal healthcare, a welfare state for ordinary people.
When Awolowo introduced free primary education in the Western Region in 1955, he was not making a campaign promise.
He was executing an ideology.
He was translating a belief about human dignity into governance. Children went to school because a man actually believed something.
Ahmadu Bello was a “progressive conservative” preserving traditional customs while adopting modern governance.
He preached “work and worship,” preferring to lead the North rather than seek federal power, so that his people were not left behind in civil service, education, commerce and modernization.
What does Atiku believe? What does Peter Obi believe?
We may even ask: what does President Bola Tinubu believe?
Tell me if you know anything beyond their campaign manifestos.
Beyond winning, beyond the presidency, beyond the trappings of Aso Rock – what idea drives these men?
Aristotle, writing in the Politics some 2,300 years ago, declared that man is by nature a political animal – zoon politikon – and that the purpose of political life is not merely power, but the pursuit of the good life for the community.
Plato went further in The Republic, insisting that governance must be entrusted to those who have cultivated wisdom and virtue, not merely those who have cultivated connections.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in The Social Contract that political legitimacy flows from the general will – the collective interest of the people – not from the private interests of those in power.
And Edmund Burke, father of conservative ideology, taught us that politics without principle is not just weak; it is dangerous, because it offers the people no compass, no anchor, no north star.
These are not foreign standards.
They are ideals that Nigeria’s First Republic politicians aspired to and upheld.
Ideology can be misused, weaponized, corrupted.
But the point is this: where ideology exists, accountability is possible.
You can ask a Labour politician why they voted against the NHS.
You can ask a socialist why they privatised a public company. You have a measuring stick.
In Nigeria today, what is the measuring stick for Atiku?
For Peter Obi? For Bola Tinubu? And for Kwankwaso?
For the vast majority of politicians who slide between parties like oil on a hot pan?
There is none.
And without ideology, there is no accountability.
Without accountability, there is no governance.
And without governance, there is no Nigeria – only a territory managed for the benefit of its managers.
It is time that Nigerians got serious with politics and shut the revolving doors. We must begin to demand ideology – not as an academic exercise, but as a civic requirement.
When a politician comes to your ward, your market, your church, your mosque, your community hall, ask them not what they will do, but why.
If they tell you what they will do but cannot tie it to a principle, they are just fooling you.
They do not have any deep conviction or a missionary approach to the goal.
Ask them what they believe about education, about land, about poverty, about the relationship between the state and the citizen.
If they cannot answer, they are not politicians.
They are opportunists in agbada.
We also need to think about building institutions that make carpet-crossing costly.
The constitution’s anti-defection provisions are toothless where political parties themselves have no internal democracy and no ideological coherence.
Most urgently, we must raise a new political generation – in the universities, in the civic spaces, in the community halls – that has read Awolowo not as nostalgia but as instruction
They are too weak to stop any politician from hopping over and over like rabbits.
A party built on nothing can be left for nothing.
The solution is parties built on something – membership, manifestos, internal accountability, genuine platforms that attract people based on shared conviction, not shared calculation.
Most urgently, we must raise a new political generation – in the universities, in the civic spaces, in the community halls – that has read Awolowo not as nostalgia but as instruction.
That understands Azikiwe not as a statue but as a challenge.
That appreciates Sir Ahmadu Bello not as a regional or religious leader but as a conservative.
We need people who know what it means to govern for a people rather than over them.
Nigeria is not a poor country.
It is a country managed by people who have no incentive to make it rich – because a dependent, divided, disoriented citizenry is the most useful raw material for those who wish to rule without governing.
The carpet-crossing gladiators are not villains in isolation.
They are products and producers of a political culture that rewards strategy over substance, positioning over principle, survival over service.
Nigeria has produced Azikiwe. Nigeria has produced Awolowo.
Nigeria has produced Aminu Kano and Gani Fawehinmi – even something so deeply they paid for it with their freedom and their health.
The question is not whether Nigeria can produce such people again.
The question is whether we, the people, are ready to demand them.