By Micheal Eze | Critical Frontiers
Campaigns for the 2027 general election officially began on August 19. The usual promises are spreading, and national expectations are high. I have studied Nigerian elections over the last four years in different capacities. This has led me to conclude that you can draw a near-straight line from 1999 to 2023 and extend it confidently into 2027. The next general election is fast approaching, and there's no reason for optimism.
Nigeria's electoral system has consistently undergone cycles of reform in the Fourth Republic. Before every election cycle, there is an institutional upgrade that signals progress. In 2011, Nigerians voted with permanent voters' cards for the first time. In 2015, INEC deployed smart card readers for biometric accreditation. In 2019, electronic voter verification expanded. In 2023, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was introduced alongside the Electoral Act 2022, which promised electronic transmission of results through the IReV portal. Now we have the Electoral Act 2026, signed into law earlier this year. Section 60(3) explicitly requires presiding officers to electronically transmit polling unit results to IReV, giving statutory recognition to the INEC Result Viewing Portal. INEC has also announced a spending limit on campaigns aimed at arresting the pervasive monetisation of the electoral process. In principle, this is the most consequential electoral reform since 1999. In practice, its success depends largely on structural capability, institutional incentives and political will to implement the law with integrity. These conditions have been missing in varying degrees in previous election cycles. There is no persuasive reason to expect any significantly different outcome. The political economy structures that drive the zero-sum competition of power persist. Making every change nominal and easily derailed.
A considerable portion of the Nigerian electorate now arrives at the polling unit with expectations of monetary or material rewards in exchange for their votes. This undemocratic exchange a persistent feature of electoral competition since 2015, cutting across party lines and taking different forms before, during and after election day. The transaction may involve cash, food, goods, transport or other material inducements, with political actors and intermediaries adapting the form of exchange to local conditions. This practice will not abate come 2027. Compared with the 2023 electoral cycle, the 2027 election will take place amid substantially greater pressure on household purchasing power, raising the potential value of short-term material inducements to economically vulnerable voters. Petrol subsidy removal, naira devaluation, and food inflation have combined to make the inducement of vote trading irresistible, especially for the most economically vulnerable citizens who are most susceptible. Political intermediaries effectively operate as brokers in this electoral exchange, competing to mobilise voters on behalf of candidates and parties. They are better capitalised and more sophisticated than the civic education infrastructure that is supposed to counter them.
BVAS failing was one of the defining images of the 2023 election. Accreditation delays, device failures, and the partial implementation of IReV transmission all created grounds for dispute. The Electoral Act 2026 now mandates electronic transmission. But a mandate in law and a functioning transmission system on election day are different things. INEC's capacity to deploy and sustain technology across 176,000+ polling units in one day has not materially changed. The technology has improved. The institutional capacity to implement it reliably, in real time, under political pressure is uncertain.
This is the most underreported form of electoral manipulation in Nigeria. Late distribution of polling materials can become politically consequential when delays disproportionately affect particular wards or categories of voters. When materials arrive at 2 pm in a particular ward, fewer people vote, and those who remain tend to be those with an interest in a particular outcome. The National Union of Road Transport Workers, an organisation with a record of political partisanship, is involved in election day logistics in ways that introduce additional vulnerabilities. Recent electoral reform has not addressed the administrative incentives that make late distribution useful to specific actors.
Turnout has been declining since 2011. In 2023, it fell to approximately 27 per cent. The apathy is a response to the alienation of the state over the years. The citizens are disillusioned by the personalisation of the common wealth by the ruling coalition. The young population, which holds the numerical advantage, is largely politically disengaged, to the satisfaction of the gerontocratic political class that benefits from low participation. So far, there is no indication of a different outcome in the 2027 voting exercise. On the contrary, economic disillusionment makes voters more susceptible to inducement and simultaneously less motivated to participate without it.
Although the scale of electoral violence has declined considerably since 2011, it remains a central feature across elections in Nigeria. Voting exercises often start well with watchful observers and international attention. However, voting hardly ends in peace. Thugs often interfere with the process to turn the tide in favour of the contracting party or candidate. Voters, agents and electoral officers are dispersed, maimed or killed in worst cases. Election materials are destroyed or carted away. This mostly results in inconclusive elections. In other instances, specific categories of voters are harassed and barred from polling units completely. This pattern of disenfranchisement is likely to resurface in the next general election in 2027.
The voting behaviours of Nigerians largely respond to their primordial sentiments. Ethnic and religious solidarity are critical in political selection, appointment and voting preference in Nigeria. President Tinubu's "Emi lo kan" moment in 2022 was a deliberate strategy to appeal to the ethnic sentiment of the south-west region. Peter Obi's campaign rounds at Pentecostal churches carried an equivalent logic. All three major candidates in 2023 benefited from ethno-religious mobilisation in varying degrees. Despite the negative externalities for national integration and nation-building, ethnic and religious considerations will remain key determinants in the 2027 general elections.
A host of domestic and external observers cover the voting exercise in the country, especially during general elections. Observation missions in Nigeria do not produce a coherent picture of the electoral exercise. International and domestic observer reports regularly diverge — sometimes on the same incident — depending on manpower, perception, and the interests of the observing organisation. No single mission covers enough polling units to give an aggregated and reliable account of what happened across polling units nationwide. This is partly a logistics problem in a country of Nigeria's size. But the more consequential problem is the ambiguity and contradiction in observation reports on polling units with large voter populations and places that actually determine outcomes. Disputed elections generate competing narratives that are immediately deployed in court and then weaponised in litigation and public discourse.
At least one candidate will go to court after the results are announced. The 2023 presidential results were shrouded in controversy around the margin of the declared winner, the IReV transmission discrepancies, and the interpretation of the constitutional requirement for 25% of votes in at least 12 states. The declared winner spent over a year convincing the public of the legitimacy of his victory, even after the Supreme Court upheld the results. The judiciary has become a parallel ballot in Nigerian elections, one that runs longer and under different rules. The interesting question for 2027 is not whether results will be challenged, but what the political consequences will be if the courts reverse a presidential result for the first time. That possibility, however unlikely, is now on the table.
The trends above are not natural laws. They are the product of specific political and institutional arrangements that persist because they serve the interests of those with the power to change them. For 2027 to look meaningfully different from every cycle since 1999, at least one of three things would need to be true: INEC implements the Electoral Act 2026 with a fidelity it has never demonstrated under political pressure; the major parties compete on the substance of their policy positions rather than ethnic mobilisation and resource deployment; or Nigerians vote in numbers large enough to overwhelm the machinery of manipulation. None of these conditions is in place as the campaign begins.
Micheal Eze is the founder and principal analyst at Critical Frontiers, an advisory firm specialising in political economy and governance in West Africa. With direct field experience as an election observer and researcher since 2022, his work bridges institutional policy, electoral integrity, and political risk across the region.
