By Kelvin Inobemhe

We should be embarrassed by the statistics, and be moved to act. Nigeria’s turnout rate in the 2023 presidential contest was also the lowest in the country’s democratic history, with less than 27 per cent of registered voters turning out at the polling stations.

With over 220 million people, more than 60 percent of whom are youths who are eligible to vote, the democratic process is losing participation at an alarming rate which every citizen, every policymaker, and every institution that purports to serve the Nigerian populace should worry about.

The pertinent question is no longer whether voter apathy is a problem; it is. It depends on whether we as a people have the political will and civic engagement to turn things around.

However, if we are to have any understanding of the solution, we must face the cause squarely. The problem with Nigerian voters is not that they are lazy; it is that they are apathetic. It’s not stupidity. After all, it’s a rational but devastating reaction to repeated betrayals.

Sadly, different generations of Nigerians have seen the politicians promise change and instead receive little on the ground. They have witnessed votes being counted, recounted, and manipulated. They have seen electoral commissions, no matter how reformed, fail to generate the needed trust. The political system appeared to be a dead-end to many young people, particularly Nigerians, who went out on the streets with immense energy and organisation in 2020 during the #EndSARS protests, whose voices were lost as soon as they left the polling booths.

This is the architecture of disillusionment and it did not come in a single day. Electoral violence, vote-buying, and the commercialisation of running for public offices have turned elections into business games and do-or-die exercises.

For voters in Ondo or Adamawa for example, who will receive a few hundreds of naira for their ballot, it is not a mere purchase of a vote, but a form of receiving the only immediate and tangible thing they think the political system can provide. The reasoning is quite strong: if governance does not improve no matter who wins, then let us at least get a reward for an election.

However, we cannot say, despair is destiny. If taken seriously, there are a number of structural and institutional interventions that can start to change this equation before 2027.

The first commandment is to be credible to the electorate. The reforms being carried out by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC with respect to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and IReV result viewing portal are good steps forward but INEC cannot create trust through technology. What is also needed is clear, consistent communication, before, during and after elections, to Nigerians on how their votes are safeguarded. Trust is earned by being accountable and INEC needs to be proactive in the dissemination of information on its processes and in making its mistakes public and rectifying them.

Civic education is the second lever, and it is not dry, textbook-fodder civic education that has not worked for decades. Nigeria requires a civic engagement movement that is reinvented in the platforms and places where citizens are present in the forms of WhatsApp groups, community radio, town halls in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Pidgin and the dozens of other languages that make up the republic’s actual public sphere.

Structured government and donor support are needed to scale civil society organisations, who are already doing an impressive job with limited resources. The National Orientation Agency needs to be revamped in a fundamental way, to become a dynamic and innovative instrument of democratic engagement.

Thirdly, and most structurally important, is the transfer of valuable power to the local government level. One of the least talked about factors behind apathy is the perceived gap between the way a citizen lives in his/her everyday life and the actions taking place in the Abuja legislature.

If the voter cannot see the link between their vote and the road outside their house, or the school their child is attending or the borehole in their ward, then there is no sense of the vote. The over-due full financial autonomy of local government must be prioritized and made effective, as now partially implemented with the 2024 Supreme Court judgment which gave financial independence to LGAs.

Experience has shown that close governance leads to civic investment.

Fourthly, the youth question requires a specific response and not a generic one. Talking about young Nigerians as mere recipients of political largesse is inadequate. The high cost of nomination tickets, lack of internal party democracy, and the dominance of godfathers have still kept young people out of meaningful participation as candidates despite the enactment of “Not Too Young to Run Act” of 2018.

There is an urgent need for political parties to show youth inclusion not through performance but by institutional practice, which they must be compelled to do, via legislation and sustained pressure from civil society.

Fifthly, there is the need for serious legislative engagement with the diaspora. Millions of Nigerians are living away from home who have strong interests in the future of Nigeria and their exclusion from the voting process amounts to a democratic deficiency and a waste of resources. A number of African countries have provided an enabling framework for diaspora voting. If the political class has the will, the same can be achieved in Nigeria before 2027.

None of it is easy and none of it is free. When institutions are persistently failing, it will take more than policy announcements to restore civic trust. It takes time and continuity; this is something that the Nigerian government has failed to provide consistently over time. Cynicism is in direct proportion to the length of the list of broken promises that members of the electorate have in their pockets.

There are, however, counter-examples in history. Participation is able to be reconstructed. Retreaters have come back when they were shown that they, even in spite of imperfect evidence, did produce change taking Ghana’s political trajectory as a case study. Since that was done, Ghana’s democratic elections and peaceful power transfer have consistently seen higher voter participation, even though socioeconomic pressures are similar to Nigeria. It is not a cultural thing. It is the confidence inspired by the country’s institutions.

Therefore, the 2027 Nigeria general elections will not only be a battle between candidates and parties but a referendum on the democratic project itself to the Nigeria people. The answer is shared by the leadership of the country, civil society, media, and citizens.

Much disillusionment should not be the end of it. But turning the tide will take more than just campaigning and mobilizing eligible Nigerians to vote. It will take a lot to get them to believe that, if they do, it matters.

Inobemhe, is a communication and media researcher. He writes on media, democracy, and governance in Nigeria.