Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
There’s one kind of dishonesty we like to package as “political sense” in Nigeria. You’ll see it in living rooms, on Twitter threads, inside long WhatsApp voice notes from people that claim to be “in the know.” It sounds like analysis. It uses big grammar about governance, strategy, geopolitics — all those things.
But if you listen well, and follow it to the end, you’ll realise it’s empty. It goes round and round and ends exactly where it started: watching from the sidelines. It’s the same people who always “understand everything,” who can explain all the problems, who can point out every failure — but when it’s time to act, they do nothing. They just observe. They witness. They talk, but they never move.
This essay is about that dishonesty. It is about what we — not our politicians, not our parties, not our candidates — have refused to do for twenty-seven years. And it is about what 2027 demands of us, not of Peter Obi, not of any single aspirant who carries the hopes of the dispossessed into a contested ballot box. Because 2027 is not Peter Obi’s election to lose. It is ours to win or to squander, as we have squandered every opportunity before it, with the meticulous efficiency of people who have perfected the art of being right about everything and changing nothing.
Let me tell you about last week, because it is where this essay really begins.
I sat with a few people — eight of us in a room, most coming from the South-East and South-South. The kind of gathering that starts casually, with small talk and news items and the usual pick-up-and-drop of stories. We moved around. We argued. And then, as it always does in any room of Nigerians right now, the conversation found its way to security. Three of the eight people in that room told us, matter-of-factly, that they had not gone home in over a year. Not because they did not want to. Because they were afraid of being kidnapped. Three out of eight. In one room. Sitting comfortably somewhere in the city, disconnected from the place that made them, held hostage not by chains but by fear.
One of them — someone I speak with often — turned to me and said: “Kalu, I don’t know how you do it. You just came back from the village, I guess.” I didn’t let it lie. I told them I had spent over a month. The response was a collective scream.
What? Over a month?
And I understood the shock, even as it saddened me. Because what that scream said, without meaning to, was this: the village had become so abstract to them, so dangerous in imagination, that a month of ordinary life there registered as an act of recklessness. It said that an entire generation of educated, connected, vocal Nigerians has accepted, as a fact of life, that they cannot safely inhabit the places that produced them. That they have conceded their home territories to insecurity and moved on, not with grief but with adaptation. They live in the city. They post online. They opine. And the village, where so many of their voters live, where so much of the country’s human reality is concentrated, has become somewhere they talk about but do not go.
We moved on to elections. Possibilities. Chances. Who could win. Who should win. Who was being betrayed by the system and who was playing the system well. The conversation heated up quickly, as it always does when Nigerians discuss politics in small groups. Voices rose. Interruptions multiplied. People spoke over one another with the intensity of people who feel things deeply and want desperately to be understood. I noticed, as I always do in these conversations, that almost nothing being said was about policy.
About what a candidate actually proposed to do about agriculture, or education, or the security crisis that had just, minutes earlier, been acknowledged as so severe that three people in this very room had not gone home in a year. The conversation was almost entirely emotional: attachments to candidates, affinities, resentments, the politics of identity and region and personality. Who was a good man. Who had betrayed whom. Who the establishment was trying to stop.
And then I asked the question.
How many of you voted in the last election?
The room went quiet. Not the silence of people thinking. The silence of people who know exactly what their answer is and are not proud of it. I let it sit. I pushed. Pushed on. And what came out, slowly, in the deflating way that uncomfortable truths emerge in rooms where people have been talking loudly for hours, was this: only three of the eight people present had voted in 2023. Five had not.
Five people who had just spent the better part of an hour telling me, with considerable passion, who should be president of Nigeria — five people who had opinions about electoral strategy and coalition-building and the betrayal of the South-East — had not voted in the last presidential election. I sat with that for a moment. Then I asked more.
Of the five who had not voted, all of them live on social media. Three of them appear regularly on radio and television talk shows — people you might have heard discussing Nigerian politics on platforms that reach thousands of listeners. They push arguments. They shape opinions. They are, by any reasonable definition, public voices on matters of democratic governance. And they had not voted. They had not stood in a queue. They had not cast a ballot. They had observed the most consequential civic act of 2023 entirely from the outside, and then proceeded to spend the subsequent months and years telling anyone who would listen what had gone wrong and who was to blame.
I pushed further. Do you have your Permanent Voter Cards?
Two of the five had PVCs. But when I pressed on how they used them, what came back stopped me cold. They used the cards as identification documents. For boarding domestic flights. As a form of ID at hotels and offices. The PVC — the instrument specifically designed to give a citizen a voice in the governance of their country — had been repurposed in their hands as a convenient travel document. Its democratic function had been evacuated entirely, leaving only its bureaucratic utility.
The other three did not have PVCs at all. Three people with public platforms, with social media followings, with opinions offered freely and at volume on the state of Nigerian democracy — and they had not registered to vote. Not in 2023. Not before. They had exempted themselves entirely from the process they discussed as though they were its most informed participants.
I called time. I told them directly what I thought, and I will say it here with the same directness, because I think it needs to be said plainly and without diplomatic softening.
Every one of them is less than that poor single mother somewhere in this country who stands in two queues on the same day. The first queue to collect rice or a thousand naira — whatever the politicians are distributing in exchange for loyalty. She collects it, because she is poor and the rice is real and the thousand naira is real and her children’s hunger is real. And then she stands in the second queue on election day and she votes. Whatever her reasons, whatever the pressures on her, whatever transactions she has agreed to: she shows up. She participates. She puts her body in the space where democracy is supposed to happen and she engages with it physically, materially, actually.
These friends of mine — these social media commentators, these radio voices, these television faces who carry opinions about Nigeria’s political future as if they were personally responsible for it — cannot say the same. The woman they would describe as uninformed, as manipulated, as a victim of the system they claim to oppose, has done something they have not done. She voted. And in doing so, she participated in democracy in a way that they, with all their knowledge and all their platforms and all their accessibility to information, did not.
This is the indictment I want to sit with for a moment before I move to the numbers, because the numbers will confirm it in ways that should disturb all of us. The people who are loudest about what is wrong with Nigeria are, in too many cases, the people least willing to do the one thing that might begin to fix it. They have constructed an elaborate performance of political engagement — the hot take, the thread, the talk show appearance, the WhatsApp group monologue — and convinced themselves that this performance is participation. It is not. It is commentary on participation, from a safe distance, by people who have quietly opted out of the actual thing.
There is a particular cruelty in this arrangement that I think we have not fully reckoned with. When educated, connected, publicly vocal Nigerians do not vote, they do not merely fail themselves. They fail the single mother who did vote, whose ballot is then outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the machinery that those non-voters had all the knowledge to understand and all the opportunity to resist.
They fail the people who have fewer resources, fewer platforms, fewer options — the people who depend most urgently on the outcome of elections to determine whether their children will eat, whether the road to their village will be safe, whether the hospital will have drugs. Those people showed up. The commentators did not. And the result is a country governed not by the preferences of its most informed citizens but by the discipline of those most willing to weaponize the absence of the informed.
Let me be precise about one more thing that came out of that room, because it points to something structural rather than merely personal. The security crisis that kept three of my friends from going home for over a year — that crisis does not exist in a vacuum. It is the downstream consequence of decades of governments elected without the full participation of the people most capable of demanding accountability. It is what you get when those who understand the system opt out of the system and leave the system to be captured by those who benefit from its dysfunction. My friends are afraid to go home.
They are afraid to go home in part because elections — the elections they did not participate in — produced governments that did not take their security seriously, because governments respond to the people who elect them, and the people who elected these governments were not asking for safer roads in the South-East. They were asking for other things entirely. The price of non-participation is not merely a lost election. It is the accumulated governance deficit of every election in which those who could have demanded better chose instead to observe.
I left that gathering more resolved than I arrived. Not with optimism, exactly — optimism requires certainty, and nothing about Nigeria’s political landscape warrants certainty. But with the particular kind of determination that comes from understanding, precisely and without illusion, what the problem is. The problem is not only the political class, as convenient as it is to locate all blame there. The problem is the gap between the people who shape opinion and the people who exercise franchise. The problem is the social media commentator without a PVC. The problem is the television voice that has never stood in a queue. The problem is the eight people in a room, three of whom went home and five of whom did not — and the five going loudest about the state of the country.
Let us begin now with the mathematics, because the mathematics are damning, and they damn us all.
On February 25, 2023, Nigeria conducted what was, by the reckoning of its own electoral commission, the most expensive election in the country’s history. The Independent National Electoral Commission had, in the years preceding the vote, received investments exceeding two billion dollars. It had enrolled 93.5 million registered voters on its rolls — the largest electoral register on the African continent. It had deployed a Bimodal Voter Accreditation System that was supposed to be the technological revolution that would finally make Nigerian elections unriggable.
The country’s youth had responded to the moment with unprecedented energy: nearly ten million new voters had registered ahead of the election, 84 percent of them under the age of thirty-five, a generation that had watched the #EndSARS protests of 2020 brutally suppressed at the Lekki toll gate and had decided, in the aftermath of that horror, to translate their grief into electoral action. The excitement was real. The optimism, however qualified, was real. The Obidient movement had held rallies in cities that had never seen political crowds of that energy. Something was happening. Or it seemed like something was happening.
And then came election day.
Of 93.5 million registered voters, fewer than 25 million valid votes were cast. Turnout collapsed to 26.72 percent — the lowest in the entire history of the Fourth Republic, a figure so low that Chatham House, one of the world’s most authoritative foreign policy institutes, noted with barely disguised alarm that the election represented a record of democratic disengagement unmatched since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999. The winning candidate, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, received 8,794,726 votes — 36.6 percent of the valid votes counted, the lowest winning percentage of any victor in the history of the current republic.
More critically, as Chatham House calculated with clinical precision, Tinubu’s mandate flowed from less than ten percent of Nigeria’s total electorate. He became the president of 220 million people on the strength of roughly eight point eight million votes, fewer than Muhammadu Buhari had received in either 2015 or 2019. The man we are all either celebrating or mourning today won a presidential election in Africa’s largest democracy on votes representing less than one in ten of those eligible to cast them.
Pause there. Not to condemn Tinubu, but to ask the question that burns underneath the headline: where were the other ninety percent?
They were home. They were in their shops. They were abroad, posting analysis. They were waiting for the results to come in on their phones so they could be outraged about them. They had, as a people, mastered the craft of political commentary and abandoned the practice of political participation. They had decided, whether through exhaustion, or fear, or that peculiarly Nigerian form of cynical sophistication that dresses despair in the language of worldliness, that casting a vote was beneath them, or futile, or dangerous, or simply not their job. And in doing so, they handed the republic over — as they have handed it over in every election since 1999 — to those with the organization, the resources, and the ruthlessness to mobilize the people who do show up.
This is the central fact of Nigerian democracy that we have spent twenty-seven years refusing to confront: the people who run this country do not represent a majority that voted for them. They represent the organized minority that turned out when the majority did not. They represent the discipline of those who treated the election as a deployment — who moved their people to polling units, who stationed their agents at collation centers, who paid for the transport and the food and sometimes the coercion that got votes counted or uncounted in the right direction. We have spent twenty-seven years complaining about this system. We built it by our absence.
Chatham House has documented, across successive election cycles, the steady decline of voter turnout that began almost as soon as the Fourth Republic began. From a high of 52 percent in 2003, turnout fell to 38 percent in 2011, dropped further to 34 percent in 2019, and then collapsed to the 2023 nadir. And the scholars who study these numbers — at the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at the Institute for Security Studies in Addis Ababa — all point to the same diagnosis: Nigerian voters, particularly the educated urban middle class that produces the loudest political commentary, have become disillusioned.
Disillusioned by the recycling of political candidates. Disillusioned by the failure of successive governments to deliver anything resembling the dividends of democracy. Disillusioned by internal party processes so thoroughly corrupted that elections within parties are often more fraudulent than elections between them. And so they withdraw. They disengage. They retreat into the comfortable rage of the timeline.
The tragedy is that their withdrawal is rational. It is individually rational in the same way that it would be rational for each person in a burning building to wait for someone else to open the door. The logic of collective action, as the economist Mancur Olson explained decades ago, tells us that rational individuals, acting in their own interest, will often fail to produce outcomes that serve the collective interest. What happens to each individual if they stay home — they remain safe, or comfortable, or uninvested — is different from what happens to everyone when everyone stays home. When everyone stays home, the country burns. And it is burning.
Let us be clear about who the fire serves. Because the recycled political class — those same names in different garbs, those same faces wearing the insignia of whichever party currently holds power in the region they seek to dominate — are not confused about what they are doing. They understand, with a precision that we should frankly admire and absolutely oppose, that a low-turnout election is an election they can control. BusinessDay Nigeria, in a searching analysis of the democratic rot that has accumulated over twenty-six unbroken years, described the situation with unflinching clarity: democracy in Nigeria has been effectively privatized.
What began in 1999 as a promise of civilian governance mutated into an enterprise of state capture. Elections are not contests of ideas but auctions of loyalty. Public office is not service but spoils. Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Nigeria 145th out of 180 countries — not a ranking that arrives by accident, but the measurable output of a system in which, as the political scientist Richard Joseph identified decades ago, every official views public office as an entitlement to personal wealth, a platform for what Joseph called prebendalism: the conversion of public trust into private extraction.
The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs put it this way: since 1999, the democratic space has been dominated by political elites who consistently violate fundamental principles associated with a liberal democratic system. These are individuals who gain power through nepotism rather than competence, who influence voters with food rather than vision, and who consolidate power through intimidation or by incentivizing constituents with material gifts framed as empowerment to keep them subservient and loyal.
More than ninety political parties are registered in Nigeria. Almost none of them possess any ideological distinction. The same political actors oscillate between them, driven not by conviction but by convenience, carrying their patronage networks and their extortion relationships from one platform to the next like pieces of luggage. They are not confused about their interests. The question is whether we are confused about ours.
And here is what I want to say directly, without the cushioning of academic language or the hedging of the think tank: our tribes and ethnic affiliations are not protecting us. This is the lie that the political class has sustained across twenty-seven years with ruthless consistency, and it is the lie that has most comprehensively destroyed us. The Igbo who votes for the Igbo politician because he is Igbo and finds that his children still cannot get electricity, still cannot get healthcare, still watches the roads crumble and the schools empty.
The Hausa-Fulani who votes for the northern candidate because the North must produce the president and finds that the poverty rates in Kano, Zamfara, and Sokoto are among the highest in the country, that his daughter cannot go to school safely, that his farm is contested by men with guns. The Yoruba who votes for the Yoruba power broker because Lagos must produce the president and finds that the traffic still chokes the city, that the opportunities are still concentrated in the hands of the same families who have always held them, that his rent has quadrupled and his salary has not moved.
The only tribe that is thriving, consistently, across every administration, regardless of which region produces the president, is the tribe of one-percenters: the recycled political class, their financiers, their children who study abroad and holiday in Dubai, their fixers and contractors and consultants who know that the party in power is merely the latest iteration of an arrangement that was never designed to serve you.
P.M. News, in an editorial titled “Recycled Leaders, Recycled Problems,” stated it plainly: when the same political thinking circulates for decades, innovation suffers. Governance becomes repetitive. The most dangerous consequence is not what these recycled leaders do when in power — though what they do is catastrophic — but what their dominance of the political space produces in those outside it: the growing political apathy among young Nigerians, many of whom no longer believe the system rewards competence or integrity.
Some retreat into online activism. Others focus entirely on japa — on leaving the country. A generation that should be driving national renewal increasingly feels disconnected from governance itself. And so the cycle feeds itself: disengagement produces governments that serve only those who engage, which produces deeper disengagement, which produces more efficient capture of the state by those organized enough to exploit the vacuum.
This is the machine we need to break. And I want to be honest about what breaking it will require, because I am tired of the essays and the speeches and the eloquent analyses that diagnose the problem with great precision and then conclude with a vague call for “better leadership” or “structural reform” or “civic engagement,” as if the conclusion did not require the same kind of courage and discomfort that the diagnosis avoided.
Breaking this machine will require you — specifically you, the person reading this — to do something that the political class is counting on you not doing. It will require you to vote. Not to intend to vote. Not to register to vote and then decide on election morning that the roads are bad and the queues are long and your vote won’t matter anyway. To vote. To stand in the queue. To stand in the heat. To stand there even when the officials are late, even when the BVAS machine malfunctions, even when the thugs make their presence felt at the periphery of your consciousness.
And then — this is the part that we failed at most comprehensively in 2023 — to stay. To not vote and go home. To remain at that polling unit until the votes are counted publicly, until the results are written on the Form EC8A and announced aloud by the presiding officer, until a photograph of that result sheet has been taken by every agent and every citizen present and uploaded to every platform available. The election, as the Obidient Movement’s own national coordinator Yunusa Tanko has argued, should end at the polling unit.
It should not migrate to collation centers where it can be manipulated, rejigged, adjusted. It should not migrate to courts where it can be litigated for months and years while the declared winner governs regardless of the outcome. It should be decided at the polling unit, by the people physically present at the polling unit, who counted the votes with their own eyes and will not be moved from their account of what those eyes saw.
I know this is not merely theory, because I lived it. Let me tell you what happened at my own polling unit in the last election, because I think the story is worth telling in full, and because I believe it is the story that needs to become the national template for 2027.
Election day began badly. The INEC staff did not arrive on time. Over two hours late, as a matter of fact — two hours during which the atmosphere at the polling unit curdled with exactly the kind of anxiety that the political class depends on to clear the field. It rained slightly in the morning, not heavily enough to be an excuse to stay home, but just enough to make the decision to leave feel reasonable. People were coming and going. Some arrived, looked at the empty INEC tables, sucked their teeth, and left. Others hovered, checking their phones every few minutes, as if some message from the ether would tell them whether to stay or go. And the rumour mill was in full swing, fed by the very technology that was supposed to empower us.
WhatsApp was not helping. It never does on election day in Nigeria, and I say this as someone who uses the platform daily. On that morning it became a vector for paralysis. Hundreds of messages flooding in, each one more alarming than the last: INEC has cancelled elections in this ward; soldiers have seized ballot boxes in that state; the system has been hacked; the election is a sham; go home, there is no point. The algorithm gods, as I thought of them that day, were doing a double take, swinging all sorts of news at an acceleration we couldn’t contain.
Misinformation and legitimate concern were arriving in the same format, with the same urgency, from the same sources, impossible to verify and impossible to ignore. It is one of the understudied dimensions of Nigerian electoral dysfunction: the weaponization of digital uncertainty to suppress turnout among precisely the demographic most likely to demand accountability. You don’t need to intimidate everyone if you can flood their information environment with enough noise that leaving seems like the rational response.
But something happened at my polling unit that I have thought about many times since, and that I believe holds within it the seed of what 2027 could become if we let it.
A few of us got talking. Not formally. Not through any organized structure or party apparatus. Just citizens, clustered under whatever shade we could find, sharing the frustration of the wait. And here is what struck me immediately, and strikes me still: we did not all support the same candidate. The people I found myself talking to that morning held different views, backed different parties, carried different visions of what Nigeria ought to become.
There was, in the usual vocabulary of Nigerian political commentary, no reason for us to cooperate. Our social media timelines probably would have had us arguing rather than standing together. But we were not on social media. We were in a physical space, sharing a physical reality, confronting the same physical inconvenience. And in that shared reality, a conversation became possible that the digital world had been rendering impossible.
We agreed — and the simplicity of what we agreed on still moves me — to stay the course. To not leave. And then, because staying the course in Nigerian heat, in the aftermath of light rain, without shade and without certainty, required more than resolve, we decided to make it manageable. I paid for canopies. Another person brought chairs. Several others who lived not far away decided to contribute lunch, snacks, water. A small, spontaneous, entirely unsponsored act of collective civic provisioning. Nobody told us to do this. No party agent organized it. No NGO funded it. No social media campaign inspired it. It emerged from the simple human recognition that we were all in the same place, trying to do the same thing, and that we could make it easier for each other.
We started calling the people who had left. Not all of them came back — some were too far, some too discouraged, some too convinced that the morning’s delays were a sign of things to come. But most of them came back. They came back because they received a phone call from someone they knew who was still there, who told them that the canopy was up, that food was coming, that the INEC officials were on their way, that it was worth returning.
This is something that the political scientists and the electoral analysts rarely model in their calculations: the power of a personal call from a trusted peer, saying simply, I am here, come back, we are doing this. No amount of national messaging about the importance of voting can replicate the specific gravity of that call. It is the technology of community, and it is older than any app.
The INEC officials arrived. We voted. We rode out the delay and the administrative hassles that accompanied the actual voting process — because there are always administrative hassles, there are always moments when the machine seems designed to exhaust your patience rather than receive your ballot. And when the votes were cast and the counting was done, there came the moment that I think is the most important moment in any Nigerian election, and the moment that is most frequently abandoned by citizens who believe the hard part is over.
The officials said they would upload the results later. Take the results to the collation center and upload from there.
We refused.
We insisted, firmly and without aggression, that the results be uploaded from the polling unit itself, right there, while we were all present and could verify what was being transmitted. This is the law. This is what the IReV portal was built for. This is the entire point of the technological investment that INEC had proclaimed as a revolution in electoral transparency. And this is the moment, repeated at polling units across the country on election day, at which the results of an election most easily diverge from the will of the voters — when the ballot goes on a journey, away from the people who cast it, into the hands of officials whose supervisors have supervisors whose loyalty is owed to powers the voter cannot see.
We waited. By almost seven in the evening, the results had been uploaded on-site. The Form EC8A was filled. The results were announced aloud to everyone present. Party representatives from multiple sides signed the sheet. And then we dispersed — tired, later than any of us had planned, carrying with us the specific, irreplaceable satisfaction of people who had not merely witnessed a process but had participated in making it honest.
I am telling this story not because it ended perfectly or because the candidate I supported won the presidency. I am telling it because it happened. Because ordinary people, with no special resources and no organizational backing, with different political views and the same human need for shade and food and water, created between them the conditions for an election to be conducted honestly at one polling unit on one election day in one corner of a country of 220 million people. And I am telling it because I believe — I know, with the conviction of someone who was there — that it is replicable. That it is, in fact, the only replication that matters.
There are nearly 180,000 polling units in Nigeria. The political class cannot corrupt all of them if citizens refuse to leave. It cannot tamper with results that have been photographed, uploaded, and distributed by multiple people on multiple platforms before the ink on the Form EC8A is dry. It cannot suppress a mandate that was announced aloud in the presence of witnesses who stayed. The system is not invincible. It is a system that relies on our departure. Stay, and the system has no one to steal from.
What my polling unit taught me, more than anything, is this: we are not enemies to one another. The man who supported the other candidate and I sat under the same canopy, ate the same food, made the same phone calls to the same neighbours, and insisted on the same transparency when the counting was done. Our arguments about who should be president are real, and they matter, and they should continue — in the full, productive, democratic sense of argument as the engine of political progress. But our agreement that the process must be honest, that the votes must be counted fairly, that no one should be allowed to take from us what we cast — that agreement turned out to be more durable, more immediately powerful, and more politically consequential than any of our disagreements about candidates or policies.
This is the solidarity that 2027 requires. Not the solidarity of identical politics. Not the solidarity of a single movement or a single party or a single man’s presidential ambition. The solidarity of people who recognize that they are at the same polling unit, confronting the same system, with the same interest in making that system work honestly — regardless of whose name they mark on the ballot. When enough of us operate from that understanding, one polling unit at a time, the arithmetic of democracy becomes impossible to corrupt. The machine that has run Nigeria since 1999 is not stronger than 93 million registered voters who refuse to leave the polling unit until the results are signed.
The 2023 election demonstrated this in one state more dramatically than anywhere else. Peter Obi won Lagos. He won it in Bola Tinubu’s own political stronghold, the city Tinubu had governed for eight years and whose political machinery he had constructed over two decades of careful, ruthless, remarkably effective institution-building. He won it because in Lagos, the Obidient mobilization had been most intense at the granular level — most organized ward by ward, most determined to stay polling unit by polling unit, most willing to make the calls and bring the chairs and wait out the rain and the delays and the institutional friction. His win in Lagos was not a miracle. It was the result of people doing exactly what the people at my polling unit did: deciding, in the absence of any guarantee, to stay.
The 2023 election also revealed, in its aggregate numbers, something that the political class would prefer you not to think about too carefully. The APC and PDP together, the two parties that had dominated Nigerian presidential politics since 1999, collected only 65.7 percent of the valid votes cast. Peter Obi on the Labour Party ticket took 6.1 million votes — 25.4 percent — the most significant performance by a third-party presidential candidate in the modern history of Nigerian electoral politics, as the certified INEC results confirm.
And he achieved this without the patronage network of the established parties, without the incumbency advantage, without the state resources that flow to ruling parties, without the decades of machine-building that Tinubu had invested in Lagos and beyond. He achieved it on the strength of a movement that was organized largely outside the traditional structures of Nigerian political parties — online, in diaspora networks, in youth-dominated WhatsApp groups, in the improvisational solidarity of people who had never done this before and were making up the rules as they went.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, analyzing the two voting blocs that the 2023 election revealed, described Obi’s coalition as “makers and millennials” — two overlapping segments of Nigeria’s long-suffering electorate. Makers: wealthier, better-educated Nigerians of all ages who are striving to innovate, invest, and push for genuine accountability. Millennials: young people of all social standings who reached voting age around the time of Nigeria’s 1999 return to civilian rule, who have never known anything but the Fourth Republic and its failures, and who arrived at 2023 with a mixture of desperate hope and clear-eyed fury at what had been done to their country in their names.
These two groups, combined with the geographical spread Obi managed — winning the FCT decisively, carrying Lagos against all expectations, performing creditably in parts of the South-West and Middle Belt — demonstrated that the coalition for change exists. It is not hypothetical. It voted in 2023 even under the worst logistical and security conditions of any election in recent memory, even through fuel shortages and naira scarcity and BVAS failures and the political thuggery that terrorized polling units in Obi’s strongholds. It was there. It showed up. And it was not enough, in part because too many others who should have been there were not, and in part because too many who were there left before the votes were properly defended.
Now it is 2026. The election is months away. Peter Obi is on the ballot again — this time under the Nigeria Democratic Congress, a new platform built from the fractures of the post-2023 opposition landscape. The political terrain has shifted, as it always does in Nigeria, with the promiscuous flexibility of a class that treats party membership as a hotel room rather than a home. But the fundamental question that 2023 posed has not been answered. It waits for 2027 to answer it, and the answer will be written not by politicians but by the people who decide to show up — and stay.
I want to speak now about the nature of what we are really being asked to do, because I think we have been too polite about it, too careful, too reluctant to say plainly what the evidence says.
Voting in Nigeria is an act of resistance. It is not, as it might be in stable democracies with deep institutional legitimacy, a routine civic act like paying taxes or renewing a license. It is an act of resistance against a political class that has spent twenty-seven years perfecting the machinery for suppressing your voice, diluting your vote, stealing your mandate, and then governing in your name with your silence as their justification. The high nomination fees — one hundred million naira for APC presidential aspirants in 2023, as documented by the International Journal of Research and Innovation — are not administrative necessities.
They are gatekeeping mechanisms, designed to ensure that only those already embedded in the patronage networks of the wealthy can afford to compete for power. The internal party processes that produce candidates the majority never chose are not democratic failures. They are democratic intentions: intentions to ensure that the democracy on offer is the kind that circulates power within a closed circle and presents the public with a choice between representatives of that circle.
Understanding this is not cynicism. It is accuracy. And accuracy, here, leads not to despair but to a very specific conclusion: the only thing that genuinely threatens this arrangement is the one thing it cannot fully control once citizens decide to exercise it with sufficient numbers and sufficient organization. That thing is the vote. Not the tweet about the vote. Not the podcast about the failure of the vote. Not the WhatsApp forward about how the system is rigged. The actual vote, cast by an actual body at an actual polling unit, counted in public, documented, and defended until it is transmitted correctly.
Evil is not abstract. I have heard that formulation my entire life and I have often heard it deployed as rhetoric, but I want to use it here with precision. Evil, in the context of Nigerian electoral politics, is not some metaphysical force hovering over Abuja. It is the specific, concrete, entirely avoidable outcome that is produced when people who know better choose not to act. It is the vacuum that is filled, every single time, by those who have decided that the state exists to serve them.
The political philosopher Edmund Burke is alleged to have said that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing — and while the attribution is disputed, the logic is not. The political cartel that has run Nigeria since 1999 does not triumph because it is stronger than the Nigerian people. It triumphs because the Nigerian people, in their tens of millions, have provided it with the gift of their absence. It has taken that gift gratefully, put it in power, and governed accordingly.
Consider the arithmetic one more time, from a different angle. Nigeria has 93.5 million registered voters. In 2023, fewer than 25 million voted. That means more than 68 million registered voters did not participate. If even half of those absent voters had shown up — if the turnout had been 65 percent rather than 27 percent — the electoral mathematics of 2023 would have been so different as to be unrecognizable. An 8.8 million vote plurality in a 25 million vote election is a win, however narrow and contested. An 8.8 million vote plurality in a 60 million vote election is not a plurality at all.
It is a footnote. It is the evidence of a candidate who failed to mobilize the country. The political class knows this. It knows that its power is built on your absence. It has organized its entire operation around ensuring that your absence is maximized, through intimidation, through logistics failures, through the strategic deployment of a learned helplessness that tells you your vote doesn’t count, knowing full well that if you believed otherwise and acted on that belief, the game would change.
This is why the instruction to vote and stay is not naive. It is the most strategically threatening thing you can do. Not because one polling unit changes the outcome of a national election. But because the nearly 180,000 polling units INEC deployed in 2023, each one a microcosm of the national contest, become unmanageable when each of them has citizens who voted and are standing there, watching, counting, photographing, uploading, refusing to leave until the Form EC8A is signed and announced.
The machine that steals elections is not a monolithic system that operates from a central point. It is a distributed system that requires cooperation or at least passivity from the grassroots up. Break the passivity. Replace it with presence. The system begins to seize.
The Obidient movement, at its best in 2023, understood this instinctively. It trained polling unit agents. It coordinated result collection. It built a crowd-sourced system for comparing the results announced at polling units with the results later declared at collation centers. It was imperfect — deeply imperfect, underfunded, organizationally fragile, vulnerable to the counter-mobilization of the established parties’ formidable machinery. But it demonstrated proof of concept.
It showed that ordinary people, without state resources, without patronage, without the inherited organizational infrastructure of decades-old party machines, could build something that mattered. That won Lagos. That won Abuja. That made the political class genuinely afraid, for the first time in a very long time, of what would happen if the people who were angry about Nigeria decided to express that anger at the polling unit instead of on social media.
The LSE Africa blog, analyzing the movement before the 2023 vote, quoted Ebenezer Obadare of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Whether he wins the presidency or not, Peter Obi has already changed the course of Nigerian politics for good.” That observation was made before the result. It remains true after it. But what it does not say — what it cannot say — is that a changed course is meaningless unless feet move in the new direction.
A new politics is not summoned into existence by the decision of a politician. It is summoned into existence by the decision of citizens to inhabit it. The Obidient moment was real. What it now needs is the civic infrastructure — ward by ward, polling unit by polling unit, village by city by diaspora chapter — that turns a moment into a movement and a movement into a mandate.
Let me bring together the three moments this essay has been carrying, because I believe they belong in the same sentence, and I believe what they say together is more important than anything I have found in the data or the scholarship.
There was a room. Eight people in it, most from the South-East and South-South. People with opinions, platforms, energy, access, and, between them, a total of three votes cast in the most consequential election of the last decade. Five absent. Two with PVCs repurposed as boarding passes. Three without cards at all. People afraid to go home to the villages that made them, watching from cities, posting from safety, opining at volume about a democracy they had quietly exited.
And then there was a polling unit. A morning of light rain and two hours of empty INEC tables and a WhatsApp feed in full alarm. And a small group of people, holding different views, backing different candidates, who decided — for no reason that any political scientist would recognize as strategic — to put up a canopy. To bring chairs. To send for food. To call back the ones who had left. To vote. And then to stay and watch and insist, until nearly seven in the evening, that the results be uploaded right there, in front of everyone, before anyone went home.
And then, somewhere in this country that both groups claim to care about, there is a woman standing in two queues on the same day. The first to collect rice, or a thousand naira, because she is poor and her children are hungry and the money is real even if the politician giving it is not. The second queue on election day, because she came to vote. Not because anyone told her to. Not because she had read the electoral analysis or listened to the podcast or followed the thread. Because she came. She showed up. She put her body where her voice was supposed to be.
I want you to feel the full weight of the comparison between these three pictures. I want you to feel the irony that is almost too painful to name: that the woman with the least — the least money, the least access, the least security, the least platform, the least ability to absorb the consequences of bad governance because she has no cushion between herself and the state’s failures — is the one who showed up.
She is the one who treated the ballot as something worth standing in the heat for. And the people with the most — the most education, the most connections, the most media access, the most capacity to understand what was at stake and to explain it to others — were home. Or on the plane. Or on social media. Or using their PVC to check into a hotel.
This is not a small irony. It is the central scandal of Nigerian democratic life. And it is a scandal for which the educated, connected, vocal, opinion-shaping class bears primary responsibility — not the politicians, not the system, not the security situation, not the INEC logistics, not the rain. Us. The ones reading this. The ones who can see what has gone wrong and cannot be bothered to do the one thing that begins to right it.
Here is what I know about the room of eight, and what I believe it represents at national scale. Nigeria has 93.5 million registered voters and a political class that governs on eight point eight million votes. The difference between those two numbers — the vast, yawning, democracy-swallowing gap between them — is filled almost entirely by people who think the way the five non-voters in that room think.
People who are not indifferent to politics. People who are, in fact, passionately engaged with it — as spectators. As analysts. As critics. As people who will tell you everything that is wrong and nothing that they personally did to fix it. People who have outsourced the physical act of democracy to whoever shows up in their place, and then complained bitterly about who showed up.
The Transparency International ranking — 145th out of 180 countries — did not arrive as a verdict from outside. It is the ledger of our collective absence. Every percentage point of decline in voter turnout, from 52 percent in 2003 down to 26.72 percent in 2023, is a percentage point gifted to the political class. Every person who stayed home is a person who cast a vote for the status quo, without meaning to, without knowing it, by simply not appearing. The system was not built to serve us. But we built the conditions that let it ignore us.
Peter Obi has his work to do. He must speak to the North he barely reached in 2023, must build the coalition that runs deeper than social media enthusiasm and diaspora donations, must demonstrate that his movement has roots in wards and not just in timelines. This Day Live has laid out the electoral arithmetic with clarity: the coalition required to govern Nigeria is not the coalition required to go viral on X. It must be built from the ground up, ward by ward, Northern state by Northern state, local government by local government. Whether he does this well or poorly will matter. But it is his work, and it is separate from ours.
Our work is simpler in description and harder in execution. It is to close the gap between our opinions and our presence. It is to move from the timeline to the queue, from the talk show to the polling unit, from the boarding gate to the voter registration desk. It is to stop outsourcing democracy to whoever is disciplined enough to show up in our place, and to understand, with the clarity that the arithmetic demands, that the five people in that room who did not vote are not victims of the system. They are among its most important architects.
There is a version of 2027 in which nothing changes. The political class deploys the machinery it has refined across twenty-seven years of practice. The talking class stays home or stays online. Turnout holds at 27 percent or drops further. Eight million votes, or ten million, or twelve, decide the fate of 220 million. The winner is confirmed by a court that has never overturned a sitting government. And the cycle resets: five years of complaint, five years of podcasts and threads and WhatsApp voice notes, five years of people who will not go home to the village telling you what is wrong with Nigeria, followed by another election in which they do not vote.
There is another version. It is not guaranteed. It cannot be purchased with optimism or summoned with slogans. But it is structurally available, in a way that no other reform in Nigerian political life currently is. It requires only that enough of the people who stayed home in 2023 understand, before election day in 2027, that their absence was not neutral. It was a decision. It had consequences. And it can be reversed.
Carry the room of eight into that understanding. Carry the knowledge that five people with platforms and opinions and PVCs can sit in a room and talk for hours about who should be president and then confess that they did not vote. Let that confession work on you. Let it move in you until it becomes impossible to repeat.
Carry the canopy. Carry the image of people who disagreed about candidates and agreed about process — who put up shade together, shared food together, made phone calls together, waited together in the long Nigerian evening until the Form EC8A was signed and the results were uploaded where everyone could see them. Carry the knowledge that this was not heroism. It was not organized. It was not funded. It was simply people who decided to stay, and who discovered in the staying that the system was not invincible, only that it had learned to count on their absence.
And carry the single mother. Carry her in particular, because she is the rebuke to every excuse that the educated class has offered for staying home. She cannot afford security. She cannot afford bad governance. She cannot absorb the consequences of another five years of the wrong people in power. She has the most at stake and the least protection. And she voted. She always votes.
She votes because she has not yet learned the particular luxury of civic detachment that comes with enough money and enough access to survive the government regardless of who wins. She votes because for her, it is not abstract. It is her children’s school. It is the road to the market. It is whether the policeman at the checkpoint takes her money or lets her through. It is everything. And she knows it. And she shows up.
The educated class has confused the capacity to understand politics with the authority to be excused from participating in it. It has built a large, loud, sophisticated infrastructure for observing democracy without practicing it. And in doing so, it has handed the republic over, election after election, to those who do practice it — imperfectly, corruptly, brutally at times, but physically. They are there. And presence, in a democracy, is the only thing that finally counts.
So here is what 2027 requires. Not a perfect candidate. Not a perfect party. Not a perfect electoral commission or a perfect security situation or a perfect morning weather forecast. It requires you to get your PVC if you do not have one. It requires you to use it for what it was made for, not as a boarding pass, not as a hotel ID, but as the instrument of a citizen exercising the one power that the political class cannot buy when enough people exercise it together. It requires you to vote.
And then, when you have voted, it requires the hardest and most important thing: to stay. To stand where you stood. To watch the count. To insist on the upload. To photograph the Form EC8A. To call the person who left and tell them to come back. To not go home until the republic has done what it promised to do — counted your vote, recorded your choice, and sent it into the system in the form you cast it.
Evil is not abstract. It is not a force that descends from outside. It is the specific, concrete, entirely reversible outcome that accumulates, ballot by ballot, election by election, in the space between what we could do and what we actually do. It is the five people in the room who did not vote. It is the PVC in the pocket at the boarding gate. It is the phone put down after the rant and picked up again when the results came in to be outraged about. It is the queue we did not stand in, the canopy we did not put up, the phone call we did not make to the neighbour who had gone home.
I am asking you — not as a writer, not as an analyst, not as someone who has read the scholarship and assembled the data — but as someone who sat in that room and felt the shame of that confession, and who stood at that polling unit until nearly seven in the evening because I believed that staying mattered, and who found that it did. I am asking you as someone who knows, from the evidence of one ordinary evening in Nigeria, that the machine is not as strong as it needs us to believe it is. It requires our departure to function. When we do not depart, it begins to fail.
The woman in the two queues is waiting for you. Not literally. But she is there: in every ward, in every local government, in every corner of this country where people show up without the luxury of cynicism because the stakes are too immediate and too personal for the comfort of disengagement. She voted before you. She will vote again.
The question is whether, when the election day of 2027 arrives, you will finally be standing in the queue beside her — not above her, not analysing her, not explaining to a podcast audience why her vote was transactional — but beside her. As a citizen. As someone who also showed up. As someone who also stayed.
2027 is not Peter Obi’s to lose. It is not the system’s to steal. It is not the political class’s to rig. It is ours — to give away in silence, or to defend in presence. The canopy is waiting. The Form EC8A will be printed. The question is only whether you will be there to see it signed.
Sources and References
• INEC — Independent National Electoral Commission
• Chatham House — Nigeria: Trust and Turnout Define 2023 Elections
• Chatham House — Nigeria’s Election Results Put Disenfranchisement in the Spotlight
• Chatham House — Democracy in Nigeria
• Dataphyte — Nigeria Records 26.72% Voter Turnout in 2023
• African Arguments — Nigeria’s Curious Voter Turnout Problem
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — The Two Voting Blocs That Could Transform Nigerian Politics
• Georgetown Journal of International Affairs — The Failure of Governance in Nigeria
• Institute for Security Studies — Nigeria’s Youth Take Centre Stage in the 2023 Polls
• LSE Africa Blog — The Obidient Movement Will Shape Nigerian Politics Beyond 2023
• CSIS — Identity, Insecurity, and Institutions in the 2023 Nigerian Elections
• BusinessDay Nigeria — Nigeria’s Unbroken Democracy and the Road to 2027
• P.M. News — Recycled Leaders, Recycled Problems
• Transparency International — 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index
• International Journal of Research and Innovation — The Malady of Nigeria’s Democracy
• Daily Post — Elections Should End at Polling Units, Not Courts — Obidient Movement’s Tanko
• Africanews — Nigeria’s NDC Names Peter Obi as 2027 Presidential Candidate
• This Day Live — Permutations, Hurdles and 2027 Presidential Poll
• NGElections — 2023 Presidential: What the Numbers Actually Said
• CNN — Peter Obi Lands Surprise Win in Lagos State
About the Author
Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, who writes under the pen name AI-KO, is a Nigerian writer, analyst, and public intellectual whose work sits at the intersection of political history, security studies, and narrative nonfiction. Drawing on a deep engagement with West African governance, conflict dynamics, and the long aftermath of colonial state formation, AI-KO writes to hold power accountable through the precision of argument and the force of prose. His essays and analyses have examined the structural conditions that shape inequality, insecurity, and institutional failure across the African continent, with particular focus on Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. He writes in the conviction that rigorous, accessible political writing is itself a form of civic participation — that naming the mechanisms of decay is the first act of demanding better. Correspondence and inquiries may be directed to aiko.writes2424@gmail.com.
