A former presidential candidate and one-time critic of Nigeria’s major parties, Shitu Mohammed Kabir, has defended his decision to join the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), arguing that the country’s refusal to build ideological political parties and adopt proportional representation has entrenched desperation, opportunism and a winner-takes-all political culture.
Kabir, a former leader of the Advanced People’s Democratic Alliance (APDA) and a past chairman of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), made the remarks during an interview on Wednesday, where he was challenged over what many Nigerians see as a shift from his long-held principled stance to political pragmatism ahead of the 2027 elections.
“What we have been telling Nigerians is now happening”, Kabir said. “As chairman of the Inter-Party Advisory Council, I brought two, three bills into the National Assembly. I brought proportional representation into the National Assembly, and we also brought up this local freedom, this local government State Electoral Commission”, he stated.
He argued that Nigeria’s democratic journey would have been stronger if those proposals had been adopted.
“We said: ‘look, you must remove that to allow one single system; because these are two things that would have strengthened our democratic journey, and we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this mess that we found ourselves; because it’s a mess where everybody just knows ideology is absent. We have no ideological political parties now. All we want is to find a way to just get what I want to get,” he said.
Kabir explained that proportional representation would have encouraged ideological consistency and reduced desperation in politics.
Responding to questions on why he was now in the APC if ideology mattered to him, Kabir replied: “You cannot build an ideology or propagate an idea in isolation”. He rejected suggestions that his move mirrored the wave of defections to the APC driven purely by political calculation, insisting it was still possible to reform the system from within.
Looking ahead to 2027, Kabir dismissed claims that elections would merely ratify decisions already taken by those in power.
In a blunt response to a final question on whether principle still survives in Nigerian politics, Kabir said: “We are not there today”.
