The Political Bureau was inaugurated on 13 January 1986 by General Ibrahim Babangida, four months after his August 1985 coup displacing Muhammadu Buhari. It was chaired by Dr. Samuel Joseph Sofola Cookey, a prominent academic and former Vice-Chancellor, supported by sixteen other members spanning academia, law, religion, and civil society—two of whom were women. Its mandate was sweeping: to review Nigeria's entire political history since independence, identify the root causes of repeated governmental failure, conduct a national debate on the country's political future, and recommend an ideological and structural framework for the Third Republic.
The Bureau operated for thirteen months, traversing all nineteen states then existing. It collected 27,324 memoranda from individuals, groups, institutions, and communities—one of the largest public consultation exercises in Nigerian history. It held town halls, symposia, and zonal conferences. The final report, transmitted to the government in March 1987 and subsequently published by the Directorate for Social Mobilisation (MAMSER), ran to 256 pages. Its central ideological recommendation was that Nigeria should adopt social democracy as its governing philosophy, rejecting both capitalism and Marxism, with the state playing a developmental and redistributive role. Politically, it recommended a two-party system, a new federal capital at Abuja, direct local government elections, a return to the presidential system, and a staggered transition to civilian rule by 1992. It also controversially recommended that Nigeria's membership of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (then OIC) be reconsidered, a finding the government suppressed from the publicly released version.
Babangida's government accepted the two-party structure—creating NRC and SDP by fiat—and the 1992 transition timetable, but explicitly rejected the social democracy recommendation, preferring a market-oriented approach. The OIC section was withheld from the official MAMSER publication. Several recommendations on local government autonomy and state-federal fiscal relations were partially implemented. The Bureau's ultimate legacy was ironic: its elaborate consultative process legitimised Babangida's transition programme in appearance while the regime repeatedly extended, annulled, and restructured that programme, culminating in the annulment of the 12 June 1993 election—the very democratic consolidation the Bureau had been designed to engineer.