Many Nigerians are not asking whether elections matter. They are asking whether the system still respects the people who vote. That is the more dangerous question, because democracy rests on one quiet agreement: that citizens consent to be governed because they believe the process that chooses their leaders is fair. Take away that belief, and an election becomes a ritual, expensive, well attended by party machinery, and empty of everyone else.
Nigeria is close to that line. In the 2023 presidential election, only about one in four registered voters turned out, the lowest figure of the Fourth Republic. Turnout has fallen in almost every cycle since 2011, when it last crossed fifty percent: 54.07% in 2011, 43.65% in 2015, 34.75% in 2019, and 26.72% in 2023, when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) recorded 24,965,218 votes from 93,469,008 registered voters.
That decline is usually blamed on apathy. It is better read as a verdict. When people register, collect their PVCs, argue politics every day, and still stay home, they are not lazy. They are telling us they no longer believe votes can change the outcome, punish failure, or reward credible leadership. The crisis before 2027 is not voter apathy but the loss of public consent.
The figures behind the process explain part of the lost faith. For 2027, INEC has proposed about N873.78 billion to conduct the elections, and a separate N171 billion for its 2026 operations. The cost climbs each cycle, but turnout declines. So a citizen may ask, If we keep paying more and getting less, what are we buying? A budget should buy more than ballot papers; it should buy public confidence and a result citizens can trace from polling unit to final declaration. It has not. In 2023, the winner was returned with fewer than 9 million votes from a register of over 93 million.
Although INEC is established as an independent electoral umpire, its leadership is appointed through a political process that can shape public perception of neutrality. The President nominates its chairman and commissioners, and a National Assembly full of serving politicians confirms them, the very people who benefit from the elections INEC runs. When civil society organisations (CSOs) such as Yiaga Africa raise legitimate concerns about the partisan history of nominees, the answer cannot be a shrug. It should be a transparent process that protects both real neutrality and the look of it. The umpire must not only be fair, but also citizens must be able to see that he is.
The same logic reaches beyond the office. The immediate past INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, was later appointed Nigeria’s ambassador to Qatar by the sitting President. That may be lawful, but in a country where trust is already thin, rewarding a former umpire with a presidential posting creates damaging perceptions, even if nothing improper occurred. In elections, perception is much of the game.
There is also the drift of political competition and election outcomes into the courtroom. Increasingly, who may stand, which faction is legitimate, and which party survives appear to be decided by judges rather than members or voters. The Labour Party, third in the 2023 presidential vote, was left in near paralysis by court battles, and the pattern has reached the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and African Democratic Congress (ADC). Many of these rulings may be sound in law. But when parties are repeatedly destabilised through litigation timed around the election calendar, it weakens public confidence and narrows the choices voters feel they have.
Beneath all of it sits the open secret of vote buying. It has moved from ballot box stuffing to cash handed over near the polling unit, sometimes in plain sight. Vote buying remains a persistent threat that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) did not eliminate because the transaction often happens before accreditation and outside the device’s reach. CSOs like SERAP have gone to court over the failure to prosecute offenders, yet arrests, when they come, fall on poor voters at the point of sale, rarely the financiers behind them. When the price of buying an election is a press statement, the market stays open.
So the frustration pushes many to the same place: why vote at all? Why not boycott 2027 and deny it legitimacy? It is an understandable instinct. It is also a trap. The renewed boycott debate has already entered public discourse, with IPAC threatening to boycott 2027 if reforms are not made. However, a boycott works only where high participation is the norm and a mass withdrawal would shock. Nigeria is the opposite. Low turnout no longer frightens those in power. It has become part of the calculation. With turnout already at one in four, more empty polling units do not read as a protest. They read as a gift. Boycotts reward the side with guaranteed delivery: the party machinery and the cash networks. Stay home, and you simply lower the number of votes the favoured candidate needs. You do not weaken entrenched power. You hand it an easier win.
But the opposite reflex, vote no matter what, is not enough either. No one should have to stand under the sun for hours only to feel like a fool when the result is read out. Voting inside a system built to devalue your vote is not the same as holding it to account. The path between surrender and blind compliance is conditional, organized participation: citizens, civic groups, and the media setting clear public demands before the campaign begins and making plain that the credibility of any outcome depends on whether they are met.
A credible 2027 must pass at least five public tests. Result transmission from every polling unit should be mandatory and traceable, not subject to a convenient plea of technical difficulty. Appointments at INEC should face genuine public scrutiny, with a clear partisan history triggering a conflict-of-interest test and, in sensitive cases, disqualification. Vote buying should be pursued as organized crime, with the financiers prosecuted, not only the poor voters at the point of sale. The full budget should be published in plain language and past spending audited before the next is approved. Party cases should be weighed for their democratic consequences, because technical rulings reshape the choices voters have. They are the minimum a state owes the people it invites to the polls.
None of this happens on its own. Past demands failed not because demands do not work but because they came from scattered, poorly timed voices easy to ignore. What 2027 needs is a coordinated accountability coalition that pressures every actor, the presidency, the National Assembly, the judiciary, and the security agencies, not INEC alone, across the whole cycle and not only on voting day. Nigeria has the civic groups, the legal talent, the media reach, and the diaspora networks. What it lacks is coordination and resolve.
So no, Nigerians should not boycott 2027. Neither should they treat the election as a sacred ritual that demands public money and public patience without public accountability. The vote still matters. But trust is the ballot before the ballot. Before 2027, the system must earn it. If citizens are asked to show up, the institutions must show up too.NAN
