Nigeria is set to hold her eighth consecutive presidential and general election in January 2027. With the election only seven months away, there is an air of indifference surrounding the core question on everyone's mind: the question of who rules the nation for the next four years. In several of the conversations I've been a part of, the argument against voting keeps circling back to the same question: “How would anyone know the election will be free and fair?” The truth is that I, someone who advocates for civic participation, barely could proffer a cogent response. At least, not one that could be availed on a firmer scaffold than abstract hope.
On reflection, I am convinced that there isn't a clear yes or no answer that will correctly inspire participation in upcoming elections. Nigeria, as we know her, rarely gives up her answers that cleanly. This, in turn, demands a more thorough inspection of her electoral history to undo the fog surrounding the aforementioned dilemma which puzzles a fair percentage of potential voters.
Ironically, the cleanest patch on that record is the one from the colonial era. Nigeria's earliest elections, from the 1920s through the early 1940s, carry no documented reports of rigging, fraud, or violence. It's a strange place to start a case against ourselves, admitting that the years we were not yet self-governing are the years our elections looked most honest.
1964 is where one begins to see cracks in our electoral system. Scholars who study this era describe rigging as something that became, almost immediately, synonymous with Nigerian elections. The 1964/65 polls came with bribery, vote buying, thuggery, arson, and killings, a template that would repeat itself for the next six decades with almost no variation. Nineteen years later, in 1983, the pattern hadn't just repeated; it had worsened enough to help usher in a military coup that shut the whole experiment down.
Then there's June 12, 1993, which was by nearly every account, Nigeria's freest and fairest election. MKO Abiola was headed for a clear win. Even General Babangida, the man who annulled it, has since admitted publicly that the election was credible, free, and fair, and called its cancellation “most regrettable.” The one election Nigerians largely agree was clean is also the one the state simply refused to honour. If free and fair wasn't enough in 1993, what exactly then are we voting toward now?
The return to civilian rule in 1999 hardly changed anything systematically. Human Rights Watch's assessment of that period showed that the 1999 and 2003 elections were marred by widespread rigging and violence, and the men who emerged from them went on to preside over rampant corruption. By 2007, international observers described an election so poorly organised, so short on transparency, and so full of manipulated results at collation that there were open calls for entire state results to be thrown out.
In the last general elections, perhaps a glimmer of hope was fanned into flames with the idea that technology and BVAS could allow some credibility back into the electoral process. INEC rolled out biometric verification and a live results portal specifically to remove doubt from the process. However, the European Union observers still found the handling of the presidential and state polls damaging to public trust, citing voter intimidation and results that were barely uploaded in real time. The EU's assessment was disputed by the Nigerian government, which rejected its conclusions and pointed instead to assessments from local observers, including the Nigerian Bar Association, whose survey found that 91.8% of Nigerians rated the conduct of the elections as credible and satisfactory. But notice what that argument actually proves. Sixty years on, technology and all, we are still arguing about whether we can trust that what is decided at electoral polls is what becomes of the reality that rules us for the period for which it was decided. That argument, recurring after nearly every election regardless of who wins it, is itself the answer.
And so where do we go from here? We have seen that the sentiments against voting for the sake of civic duty stem not just from sentiment; history proves that indeed, the further we are in our practice of democracy as a nation, the lesser the possibility of government being decided by the people gets. So if I were to tell you to go out to vote in the upcoming election against all the odds stacked from the corruption that marks our government today and the history of rigged elections, on what grounds would I ask you to do so in the hope that it will be different?
The power in your hands
Perhaps, our attempt to answer the question should begin by questioning the need for campaigns. If the masses hold so little power in deciding their future leaders, why do political parties spend so much money and time courting them?
Except, of course, there is a need to establish the legitimacy of their candidate before they get to the polls. Ahead of the 2023 primaries, before campaigning even began, before a single rally or manifesto had been presented to the public, the APC was estimated to raise over ₦30 billion from the sale of expression-of-interest and nomination forms. The PDP had already realised at least ₦9.24 billion from the sale of its forms by April 2022, with the final figure expected to be higher. That is money spent purely to secure the right to be considered, before the public has said a word. Whatever we think campaigns accomplish, those figures tell us something about what politicians believe they need from us: familiarity and confidence, even when it's manufactured with inflated promises and unfounded claims. If our attention and our bias were worth nothing, it would not cost that much to buy.
But there is a problem with the way we have come to understand political attention.
In the years leading up to the 2023 elections, it was easy to mistake online visibility for electoral reach. Young Nigerians were loudly political online. Candidates became social media phenomena. Political hashtags trended, campaign videos travelled and civic conversations filled our timelines. Yet when the votes were counted, Nigeria recorded one of the lowest voter turnouts in its democratic history, with only about 27.5% of registered voters participating in the presidential election.
The most important insight here is not that young Nigerians were loud online and then failed to vote but that we may have mistaken visibility for participation.
The recent Voters' Preference Survey by Invictus Africa makes that distinction even harder to ignore. The survey, which sampled 11,196 eligible voters across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, is designed to understand what actually influences voters' choices, including their preferences towards women, young people and persons with disabilities.
And what it shows is a useful corrective to the idea that Nigerian politics is happening primarily on our screens. Social media presence may make a candidate visible to us, but visibility is not the same thing as influence. Traditional media, family and friends, and trusted community and religious networks remain important parts of the environment in which voters form political preferences. A candidate can dominate social media and still be almost invisible to the people who will ultimately decide the election. A political conversation can consume an urban, digitally connected generation while barely reaching the communities where millions of votes are cast. If we want to understand how Nigerians actually make political decisions, we have to pay attention not only to who is trending, but to who people trust.
And maybe that is where we have been getting civic participation wrong.
As a generation seeking change, we have to become people who outlast problems. We must approach Nigeria's problems with eyes void of shortsightedness that leans towards blindness, and shortsightedness is what most of our civic responsibility runs on right now and there I say fuel the civic fatigue that makes the attitude most young Nigerians have about the upcoming elections. Civic responsibility tied to a single election, a single candidate, a single four-year cycle. Lasting change takes longer than that, and it takes commitment that doesn't lessen when the results are announced.
If you are a young Nigerian with no realistic path to influencing outcomes at the presidential level on your own, and you are one of millions in that position, your relationship to the 2027 election should not carry less weight than you've been conditioned by past elections and the fatigue that comes from constant disappointment on every front to give it. Not because your vote doesn't matter. You should still vote, and vote for whoever's manifesto is clearest and most realistic about our country’s pressing needs. But treating the presidency as the lever that changes Nigeria in four years has never actually worked, and the record we just walked through says so.
The more useful question to ask at this stage of our analysis then will be what you're doing to fix the rot in the system underneath it over the next eight to sixteen years, while you are still young enough to be counted among the population that rot affects most.
And here's the case for where that work should actually happen: Nigeria has 774 local governments, and every one of us comes from one.
I have a far better chance of knowing whether my local councillor or local government chairman is competent and honest than I am the presidential candidate, no matter how much airtime the presidency gets on a news channel or how well a candidate answers questions in a presidential debate. I can't to a large extent verify what a presidential candidate says about how well he would handle state funds; I would have to bank on some degree of faith in his eloquence or manifesto to do that, and that hope has consistently turned out in the past to be unreliable. But I can make informed decisions about my local government councillor by asking the next ten fellow indigenes of the community. That's not a smaller form of civic power, it's a more exact one.
And Invictus Africa’s VPS report offers an interesting reason to take that proximity seriously. The survey suggests that the problem may not be a lack of willingness among Nigerians to see young people in office. Among respondents who had never voted for a young candidate, 79.9% said they had never encountered a young candidate on the ballot. More broadly, the survey found substantial willingness to vote for young candidates
That should change how we think about youth political participation. If voters are already expressing an appetite for young people on the ballot, then the question is no longer simply whether Nigerians are ready for young leadership. It is whether enough young Nigerians are willing to do the slower, less glamorous work of becoming the kind of leaders voters can actually choose.
And that work has to begin much closer to home. At the grassroots, a young person does not have to wait for a presidential campaign to prove that they can lead. They can contest a councillorship, organise within their ward, serve their community, build a record and become known to the people whose votes they are asking for. This is where the abstract promise of youth representation becomes a more exact form of civic power: voters can observe the work, and young people can build the political credibility that national politics too often asks us to assume.
In this way, we will be asking better questions in the months leading up to elections, questions like: who has demonstrated that they can do the job? If the VPS tells us that there is already a willingness to put young people on the ballot and in office, then perhaps our responsibility is to make sure there are more young people there who are worth voting for. That kind of political credibility has to be built, not parachuted in.
The goal isn't that by participating in politics at the grassroots level we would make instant change. It's three or four general election cycles from February 2027, long enough that the presidential candidates who will be on the ballot are potential leaders built by the people through years of youth engagement at the grassroots, and themselves often the youth who did that engaging.
Imagine that pattern repeated across Nigeria's 774 local governments: councillors and local officials in their twenties who stay in the work long enough to become state legislators, commissioners, governors or national leaders in their thirties and forties. By the time we reach 2036, that's not one face on a presidential ballot we're hoping to trust. That's a hundred faces we already know because we were the ones who watched them work.
And there is another encouraging implication in the VPS findings: the survey suggests that voters' willingness to support young candidates is not necessarily dependent on generational solidarity. Many respondents pointed to a candidate's merit and track record as reasons they would be willing to vote for a young person.
That is really important as we do not need to build a politics where young people vote for young people because they share an age bracket. We need to build a politics where competence can be seen early enough for voters to recognise it.
One more layer to this, that might be the one that ties everything together, is that a national election cannot be free and fair if the places with the weakest institutions carry the greatest barriers to participating in it, and in Nigeria, those places are often rural.
Nigeria's rural population is roughly 100 million people, many of whom live beyond the reach of the infrastructure and institutional presence concentrated in our cities. The World Bank has estimated that more than 40 percent of Nigeria's rural population lacks access to a road network. Their votes are shaped less by national policy debate and more by immediate, local realities: water, security, agriculture, and often mediated through traditional and communal leaders who stand between the electorate and the political class.
That's not a flaw in how rural Nigerians engage with politics. It's a rational response to what politics has actually delivered them.
But it is also where the machinery of elections most consistently breaks down. During the 2023 elections, INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu attributed delays in opening some polling units to perennial logistics problems and insecurity. INEC's subsequent review of the election also identified insecurity and disruptions at polling units among the factors affecting the voting environment, and it is rural and hard-to-reach areas that absorb the worst of both. Civic education campaigns rarely reach as far as they need to. Party agents and international observers cluster where the cameras are, which is rarely a village three hours from the nearest paved road.
And with only about 41 percent of Nigerians using the internet, the digital layer increasingly built around elections cannot be assumed to reach everyone. In a country where access remains sharply unequal, particularly between urban and rural communities, tools designed to make elections more transparent can only be as inclusive as the infrastructure that allows citizens to access them.
This is why the VPS's findings about where political influence actually happens is pivotal. If political choices are shaped not only by what candidates broadcast to us but by the people and institutions we trust, then civic engagement cannot be designed entirely around the platforms where the loudest conversations happen.
We have to go where people are and have structured conversations about the long term impact of the decisions we make at the electoral polls and about the influences that form those decisions.
We have to pay attention to the radio programme, the community meeting, the religious gathering, the family conversation, the local association and the ward meeting. We have to care who is contesting the council seat, who is counting the votes and who remains accountable after the cameras leave.
So when we ask whether Nigeria has ever had a free and fair election, we're often really asking about Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt—the places journalists and observers can get to. But an election is only as free and fair as its weakest link, and that link has almost always been the places where institutions are least accessible.
If we are serious about building toward the kind of electoral system this piece has been arguing for, one grown from the grassroots up, it has to start exactly there: in the places currently least equipped to participate in it, not despite the difficulty, but because of it.
Then the most useful thing we can do before February 2027, then, is to stop asking only whether our vote will be enough to change the country. The better question is whether we are willing to become the kind of citizens who keep showing up long enough to make the country change.