In the wake of the hard-fought and widely unpopular presidential victory of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election, it is easily forgotten that the ruling party’s initial triumph in 2015 seemed to represent the flowering of popular aspiration.

Bearing “change” as its campaign slogan, the party came to power in the first victory by an opposition party, with its presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari defeating Goodluck Jonathan of the incumbent People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which had held power since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999.

But the APC seemed to represent change in more fundamental ways. The party’s rise was propelled by popular protest against austerity policies, chief of which was the PDP’s attempt to remove Nigeria’s fuel subsidy. Having overseen a period of commercial expansion, GDP growth, and intensified privatization of state-owned enterprises, the PDP, it appeared, had overplayed its hand in attempting to remove Nigeria’s “meager but essential form of social welfare derived from the country’s vast petroleum resources.”

When the PDP government announced a planned removal of the subsidy in 2012, prominent opposition party leaders—who only a year later would unite to form the APC—joined unionists, civil society groups, and youth activists in a nationwide protest. The ensuing general strike and #OccupyNigeria protests contributed to the downfall of the PDP government at the same time as social movements and political parties were challenging orthodox economic regimes across the globe.

Thus, seen as arriving in the wake of candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and parties such as Podemos, and Syriza, who “used popular discontent with austerity as a springboard to elected office,” it is understandable that some observers hoped the APC could succeed in breaking “with the assumptions of neoliberal technocratic management.”

As such, Buhari’s victory can be considered a product of what has been called “the end of the end of history,”—a period concurrently marked by the breakdown of the neoliberal order and the rise of the “global populist wave,” which appeared to gain pace across consolidated and electoral democracies alike.

However, approaching the end of its tenure, it is clear that the Buhari administration’s attempted challenge to neoliberalism has been as ineffective as it has been fraught with contradictions—both those inherent to the nature of the ruling party’s coalition and driven by exogenous economic and political events. This essay focuses on the former. Specifically, it considers the ideological foundations of the Buhari administration, assessing how far they shaped the economic policy pursued by the administration and what might come after it.