By Daniel Nduka Okonkwo
Nigeria’s elections have become a tragic spectacle in which the future of millions is bartered for the price of survival. Election after election, citizens are handed bags of rice, packets of noodles, seasoning cubes, garri, beans, cooking oil, and a few yards of branded fabric, while the political class feasts in astonishing luxury, approving budgets that fund meals costing tens of thousands of naira per plate, amounts that many Nigerian workers cannot afford to spend on food in an entire day, or even over a longer period. This is not the triumph of democracy; it is the institutionalisation of poverty as a political weapon.
The greater tragedy is that the exchange extends far beyond food. For a handful of temporary relief, many voters unknowingly mortgage four years of their children’s future, legitimising a system that rewards exploitation over accountability. At the same time, those entrusted with public office are quietly transforming political power into family property, positioning sons, daughters, and close relatives for appointments, party tickets, and elective offices, as though leadership were an inheritance passed from one generation to another rather than a sacred mandate entrusted by the people. The next election, therefore, is more than a contest for votes. It is a defining moment that will determine whether Nigerians will continue to trade their sovereignty for crumbs or finally reclaim the dignity, accountability, and democratic future that have been denied to them for far too long.
As this coming election approaches, a familiar and degrading ritual is once again playing out across Nigeria. While ordinary citizens are handed one or two cups of rice in exchange for their votes, the politicians courting them are sitting down to buffets that cost more than most Nigerians earn in months. Breakfast at forty two thousand naira per person. Lunch at fifty-eight thousand naira per person. Dinner at fifty-nine thousand nine hundred naira per person. A single meal, for one person, at one table, costing more than the monthly salary of the civil servant, the teacher, the market woman, or the commercial driver being asked to trade their vote for a sachet of garri.
This is not simply an anecdote or exaggeration. According to details of the 2026 Appropriation Bill released by the Budget Office of the Federation for President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima have been allocated a combined ₦9,364,349,417 for local and international travel, food, and refreshments in the 2026 fiscal year. Of this, ₦7,446,216,694 is earmarked for the President, made up of ₦7,014,596,511 for travel, comprising ₦6,140,709,822 for foreign trips and ₦873,886,689 for local trips, and ₦431,620,183 for foodstuffs, catering materials, supplies, and meals. The Vice President’s allocation stands at ₦1,918,132,723, made up of ₦1,732,106,437 for travel, comprising ₦1,314,618,239 for foreign trips and ₦417,488,198 for local trips, and ₦186,026,286 for food and refreshments. These are proposed allocations contained in a budget that was still moving through legislative scrutiny at the National Assembly at the time of reporting, not money already spent, but the scale of the figures alone speaks to a governing culture in which the ordinary Nigerian is handed a cup of rice while the nation’s two highest offices budget billions of naira for travel and table.
This election will reveal a great deal about where Nigeria truly stands. It will serve as a yardstick to measure whether Nigerians have finally grown tired of suffering, or whether they remain willing, at the mere sight of packaged rice, seasoning cubes, noodles, garri, beans, bags of maize or sorghum, vegetable oil, palm oil, detergent, salt, sugar, and printed Ankara fabric, to sell away the next four years of their lives. The question every voter must sit with before they step into that booth is simple. Are these items, however useful for a week or a month, significant enough to justify handing over an entire electoral mandate?
There is another test worth applying to any politician seeking your vote this season. Watch whether they are willing to campaign alongside their own family. A politician who keeps his children far from the trail while asking you to entrust him with the future of yours is sending an unmistakable signal. If a leader is genuinely fighting for a better Nigeria, that fight cannot exclude the future of his own children, because a country worth building should be a country he is also building for them. It becomes difficult, under those circumstances, to place any faith in campaign promises delivered by people who have spent more than sixty years telling Nigerians what they wanted to hear rather than what was true.
None of this should come as a surprise. Nigerian politicians have built a long and consistent record of failing to deliver on the grand pledges that get them elected. Promises around stable electricity, mass job creation, currency stability, the revival of local refineries, and the total eradication of corruption resurface every election cycle, and they fail with the same reliability with which they are made. This is not a new pattern. It is a template, tested and repeated across successive administrations, refined only in its packaging and never in its substance.
Consider the promise of a functioning national grid and uninterrupted electricity. Every cycle brings a fresh vow to fix it. Every cycle ends with a country still producing a fraction of the power its population needs. Somehow, despite this consistent failure, the same actors manage to return to power, aided in no small part by a culture of electoral manipulation that has gone largely unpunished. The truth is uncomfortable but necessary to state plainly. The reason these politicians have never been held accountable is that Nigerians, cycle after cycle, have allowed them to walk away scot-free.
The same pattern holds for employment. Ambitious annual job targets and promises to lift millions out of poverty are announced with confidence and dissolve quietly into high unemployment. Graduates who spend years and scarce family resources in university find, at the end of it, that the opportunities they were promised are reserved for the children of the same political class that made the promises.
Security tells a similarly grim story. Politicians have repeatedly pledged to wipe out insurgency, banditry, and kidnapping within short, defined timeframes. Yet daily headlines continue to report communities under attack from terrorists, and kidnapping has been allowed to settle into something disturbingly close to routine. Meanwhile, public funds meant for infrastructure and social projects are routinely mismanaged or quietly diverted into private pockets, protected by institutional frameworks too weak to impose real legal or political consequences on those responsible. Campaigns are built on emotional soundbites and grand declarations rather than on data-driven, practical policy, and the same leaders who promised heaven on earth now govern in fear of the false heaven they never built.
Beneath all of this sits a deeper and more troubling trend, one that deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. Nigerian politicians are increasingly grooming and positioning their own children to inherit their seats of power. This is not incidental. It is a visible and growing phenomenon that has sparked legitimate debate about the emergence of hereditary political dynasties, where power and state resources pass quietly across generations within a small circle of elite families.
The strategy behind this succession is neither accidental nor subtle. Children of established politicians, upon returning home as graduates, are frequently placed in influential advisory roles, special assistant positions, or state ministries, granting them administrative exposure and public visibility long before they ever contest an election. When the time comes, established politicians deploy their financial resources and party machinery to secure nominations for these children during primaries, while ordinary Nigerians are left to be persuaded, through carefully managed campaigns, to vote for candidates whose main qualification is their bloodline.
Running for public office in Nigeria today requires a level of capital that places it entirely out of reach for the average citizen. Logistics, media, and grassroots mobilisation all demand resources that only the wealthy can command, and in far too many cases, those resources trace back to public funds that were never meant to end up funding a family’s political ambitions. Internal party structures, dominated by an aging elite, reinforce this cycle. These leaders prefer to pass influence down to their own descendants, preserving family networks and a measure of immunity from accountability, and none of it would be possible without the votes of the very citizens being sidelined.
While the ordinary voter is offered a cup of rice, the political class is quietly positioning itself for substantial salaries, generous allowances, and pensions that will outlast their time in office, ensuring that the family’s socioeconomic advantage does not end when one member leaves the stage. For decades, young Nigerians were told they were the future leaders of this nation. The steady rise of political dynasties tells a different story, one in which everyday citizens risk being reduced to permanent spectators of a system built to serve a handful of families, or worse, tools used every four years to keep that system running.
The choice ahead of this election is not complicated, even if it has been made to feel that way. It is a choice between a cup of rice today and a mandate that shapes the next four years. Nigerians have been here before. What remains to be seen is whether this cycle finally breaks the pattern, or simply repeats it in a new wrapper.
Daniel Nduka Okonkwo is an investigative journalist, human rights advocate, and policy analyst based in Abuja, Nigeria. He is the publisher of Profiles International Human Rights Advocate, a platform focused on accountability journalism, governance reporting, and the documentation of human rights issues across Africa. His work examines the intersection of political power, institutional accountability, systemic failure, and the human impact of corruption, with particular focus on Nigeria and the wider African continent.
Okonkwo’s reporting and analysis have been published in Sahara Reporters, African Defence Forum, Daily Trust, Vanguard, Daily Intel Newspaper, Opinion Nigeria, African Angle, Local Newsbreak, and other international media outlets. His work is driven by a commitment to transparency, democratic governance, and justice. He also collaborates with Daniels Entertainment on human rights initiatives, extending his advocacy beyond traditional journalism into broader public engagement.
He is based in Abuja, Nigeria, and can be reached at dan.okonkwo.73@gmail.com.
