Editorial: As the 2027 Campaigns Begin

Nigeria has begun the long march to the 2027 general election. The campaign calendar opened on August 19, with presidential and National Assembly voting scheduled for January 16, 2027. The politicians have therefore been released from the starting blocks. Nigerians should now ask a rather unfashionable question: what, precisely, are they selling? The answer, so far, is depressingly familiar: personalities, primordial loyalties, religious arithmetic, ethnic mobilization, money and the eternal Nigerian political commodity known as “our turn.” What remains in short supply is a policy program and governance blueprint to address the life and death challenges facing the nation.

Nigerian electioneering has become an elaborate exercise in asking citizens to choose a ruler without first explaining what the ruler intends to do. Manifestos are produced with the solemnity of holy books and read with about the same practical consequence. Slogans proliferate. Endorsements are traded. Defections are celebrated as though politicians had discovered a new political philosophy. Supporters abuse one another on social media. But where are the competing programs? Where is the detailed argument over how Nigeria will dismantle its security crisis, reduce inflation, industrialize, create productive employment, reform education, expand healthcare, raise agricultural productivity, reform taxation, fix electricity and make public institutions work?

The National Peace Committee has just reminded politicians of precisely this deficiency. Its assessment of previous elections found that the issue-based campaign commitment had been breached 43% of the time, while violations involving misinformation reached 90%. That is not an accidental blemish. It is evidence of a political culture in which winning the election is more important than governing the country. The deeper problem is Nigeria's enduring prebendal political culture: public office is treated less as a mechanism for delivering public goods than as an instrument for distributing patronage among one's political, ethnic, religious and personal networks. In such a system, an election is not primarily a contest between alternative visions of Nigeria. It becomes a census of whose network is bigger.

This explains the extraordinary intensity of Nigerian politics. If political office were merely an opportunity to implement competing programs, losing an election would be disappointing. But when political office controls access to contracts, appointments, licenses, protection, public resources and patronage, losing becomes economically existential for the political class. That is how elections become “do-or-die” affairs. President Bola Tinubu, represented by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation at last week's Peace Accord ceremony, correctly urged politicians not to treat the election as do-or-die and called for campaigns based on ideas rather than ethnic and religious sentiments. The depressing part is that Nigerian politicians have been making versions of this promise for years. The Peace Accord exists precisely because normal democratic behavior apparently requires a ceremonial reminder. That is an indictment in itself.

When the ballot becomes a marketplace, money completes the pathology. The 2026 Electoral Act raised the campaign-spending ceiling to ₦10bn for presidential candidates and ₦3bn for guber candidates, with lower ceilings for legislative contests. One may debate whether those limits reflect the real cost of modern campaigns. What is less debatable is that Nigeria has struggled to make campaign-finance rules meaningful in practice. Civil-society assessments have warned that monitoring and enforcement remain weak. And the consequences are not theoretical. Vote-buying has become sufficiently entrenched that the EFCC chairman has publicly described monetization of the electoral process as a threat to democratic governance. SERAP has likewise warned that buying votes turns a constitutional political right into a financial transaction, particularly exploiting citizens suffering economic hardship.
This is the grotesque bargain at the heart of Nigerian electoral politics: politicians purchase temporary loyalty from citizens whom their policies have left permanently poor, then return to government to administer the poverty. It is difficult to devise a more efficient machine for reproducing bad governance. The historical relationship between vote-buying, intimidation and violence is hardly reassuring. Academic research has documented vote-buying and political intimidation as characteristic features of Nigerian election campaigns, with violence suppressing turnout and vote-buying strengthening partisan loyalty. The machete, meanwhile, has become an almost too-perfect metaphor for election campaigns: bring enough money, muscle and primordial sentiment and call the resulting transaction democracy.

The 2027 election should therefore be treated as an unusually simple examination. Every presidential candidate should answer, in measurable terms: 1) Security: How will terrorism, banditry, kidnapping and communal violence be reduced? With what resources, institutions and timetable? 2) The economy: How will Nigeria move beyond an import-dependent, consumption-heavy economy towards manufacturing, agriculture, technology and value addition? 3) Jobs: Where will productive employment come from, and what precisely will government do to create the conditions for private investment? 4) Inflation: What is the candidate's strategy for restoring purchasing power without simply reviving the fiscal and monetary distortions that produced previous crises? 5) Electricity: What is the plan for reliable and affordable power, and who pays? 6) Education and health: What measurable improvements will occur, by when, and at what cost? 7) Corruption: How will procurement, political patronage and illicit campaign financing actually be constrained?

These are not unreasonable demands. They are the minimum intellectual requirements of democratic government. The electorate should be suspicious of any candidate who offers a. five-minute sermon about ethnicity but cannot explain a five-year industrial policy. It should be even more suspicious of the candidate who arrives with a truckload of rice, cash and branded T-shirts but no credible explanation of how he intends to make the recipient sufficiently prosperous that he will no longer need the rice that is used to bribe voters. Distributing foodstuffs and cash to entice voters is not campaigning. It is political dependency with a campaign logo. The electorate must graduate from this dependency. There is, however, a danger in blaming politicians alone. Politicians exploit the incentives voters provide.

If Nigerians reward ethnic arithmetic, politicians will calculate ethnicity. If they reward religious mobilization, politicians will manufacture religious anxiety. If they accept cash for votes, politicians will budget for cash. If they demand programs and punish empty rhetoric, politicians will eventually discover the radical proposition that ideas matter. The electorate therefore has the power to change the political market. The Peace Accord is useful, but peace without accountability is merely etiquette. Politicians can sign documents until their pens run dry. What matters is whether breaches carry political consequences. Peter Obi put the point bluntly at the signing ceremony: the punishment for politicians who violate their commitments is for Nigerians not to vote for them. Exactly.

The ultimate enforcement mechanism is the ballot. Nigeria does not need another election in which citizens are asked to choose the politician who most successfully manipulates their anxieties. It needs an election in which politicians are forced to compete over competence. The country is too poor, too insecure and too economically consequential to continue treating presidential elections as elaborate tribal carnivals punctuated by manifesto launches. A democracy is supposed to give citizens a choice between alternative futures. Nigeria's political class too often offers them a choice between alternative patrons. That is why elections become do-or-die. When politics is about policy, losing means returning to opposition. When politics is about patronage, losing means losing access public resources. The 2027 election will therefore tell us rather less about Nigeria's democratic maturity if voters merely choose another set of personalities. The real test is whether politicians can finally be compelled to answer the question they have spent decades avoiding: Not “whose turn is it?” but “what, exactly, will you do with the country if we give you the power?”