By Ambassador Chuks Ododo
“In Nigeria, political power is everything; it is the road to wealth, status, and security.” — Claude Ake
In the high-stakes arena of Nigerian democracy, election seasons operate with the precision of military campaigns. Strategy rooms hum around the clock. Financial war chests swell with billions. Campaign machinery functions with a discipline that would be the envy of any Fortune 500 corporation. Nigerian political parties have elevated the science of winning elections to a level of sophistication that few democracies can match.
Then the election ends. The oath is administered. And the machinery stops.
The hyper-efficient operation that spent months and billions securing power gives way to executive lethargy, administrative drift, and profound disconnection from the very citizens whose votes were so aggressively pursued weeks earlier. The campaign war room becomes a press office. The mobilisation strategy becomes a blame strategy. And the voters courted, celebrated, and promised transformation become spectators to a governance vacuum they will endure for four years until the next election briefly restores them to relevance.
This is the central paradox of Nigerian democracy: the country has developed world-class strategies for capturing state power while remaining almost entirely bankrupt when it comes to exercising it for the public good.
A DEMOCRACY IN DOCUMENTED CRISIS
International IDEA reported that Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election recorded a voter turnout of just 27%; nearly three-quarters of registered voters chose not to participate. The 2023 state elections were marred by widespread violence and vote-buying, with 21 people reportedly killed. The Nigerian Bar Association’s observation of the 2026 Ekiti governorship election reported pervasive voter inducement and called for stronger enforcement. INEC’s own reform agenda identifies persistent challenges across party management, voter education, election security, and prosecution of electoral offences.
These are not isolated incidents. They are systemic features of a political ecosystem that invests extraordinary resources in winning power and almost nothing in preparing to use it.
THE MISSING HALF OF THE STRATEGY
A political party should have two strategies. The first answers: how do we win power? The second answers: what will we do with that power?
In Nigeria, the first question receives overwhelming attention. The second receives almost none. Where is the detailed 100-day plan? The five-year development strategy with measurable targets? The sector-by-sector plan for education, healthcare, infrastructure, and employment? The performance indicators against which citizens can hold their government accountable at midterm?
These plans largely do not exist not because they cannot be produced, but because they are not required. No institution demands them. No electorate insists on them. No political party has suffered consequences for governing without them.
Instead, the post-election playbook follows a pattern so predictable it has become its own governance model: perpetual blame directed at predecessors, self-congratulatory media tours, and armies of paid political aides whose function is not to deliver governance but to manage perception, shield non-performance, and discredit critics. The governance strategy amounts to crisis communications and patronage distribution.
“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership,” Chinua Achebe wrote. That failure begins in war rooms that treat state power as a destination rather than a responsibility.
WHY THE MACHINE BREAKS DOWN: POLITICS AS NIGERIA’S MOST LUCRATIVE ENTERPRISE
Why such extraordinary investment in winning and so little in governing? Because in Nigeria, politics is the most lucrative profession in the nation.
BudgIT estimates the annual cost of maintaining each senator at approximately N1.2 billion and each House member at N900 million in a country where the minimum wage is N70,000 per month. The National Assembly’s 2024 budget of N370 billion exceeds the total federal allocation for basic education. Governors retire into pension packages including furnished residences, vehicles, domestic staff, healthcare for life, and security details, all self-legislated before leaving office.
When political office offers this disproportionate return, contests become investment decisions rather than service commitments. Research by Yiaga Africa and the Centre for Democracy and Development consistently documents that the astronomical cost of contesting elections forces candidates to treat campaigns as high-risk financial investments. When political investors spend hundreds of millions to capture an office, asset recovery, not governance delivery, becomes the operative logic of tenure.
The cycle is self-reinforcing: money is required to compete; money influences party structures; structures determine candidate selection; candidates invest heavily to win; and recovering the investment becomes the primary post-election objective. Political office is treated as a return-generating asset rather than a public trust.
WHAT MUST CHANGE
Nigeria does not need more political parties. It needs parties that function as governance institutions rather than election-winning machines.
De-commercialise political office. Reduce financial rewards to levels that attract service, not enrichment. Transition legislatures toward part-time models, cap executive allowances, and repeal self-legislated pension packages. Ghana cut its cabinet from 88 to 48 ministers and reduced discretionary spending by 30% during its reform programme. Rwanda spends less than 7% of its budget on governance running costs. Nigeria exceeds 30%.
Mandate governance strategies alongside candidacies. INEC should require detailed, costed, time-bound governance plans alongside candidate nominations not vague manifestos, but actionable strategies with measurable targets. Parties must transition from Special Purpose Vehicles for winning elections into institutions that generate ideas, develop leaders, and translate promises into programmes.
Establish an Electoral Offences Commission. As long as the rewards of electoral crime outweigh the consequences, parties will invest in electoral warfare rather than governance. An independent commission with power to investigate, prosecute, and sanction would fundamentally alter the cost-benefit calculation.
Complete digital transmission of results. Electronic transmission from polling units to public portals would neutralise physical intimidation, ballot snatching, and manual alteration. When money and muscle can no longer guarantee victory, parties will be compelled to compete on governance quality.
Strengthen citizen accountability. Annual performance reports against stated targets, quarterly public town halls, independent mid-term assessments, and open-data dashboards tracking budget execution would create continuous accountability between elections, not only during them.
WHAT CITIZENS MUST ALSO CHANGE
Structural reform alone cannot solve a problem that also lives in the demand side of the democratic equation. Citizens, civil society, media, and community leaders must stop judging politicians by how much money they distribute or how many appointments they secure.
The questions that should determine political support are simple: What did you promise? What have you delivered? What measurable difference has your administration made? How much did it cost?
What remains outstanding and why?
A politician should not be celebrated for defeating opponents. They should be judged finally and only by the quality of life of the people they were elected to serve. Until voters apply that standard consistently, politicians will continue delivering what the market rewards: electoral spectacle without governance substance.
THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS UNANSWERED
Nigeria’s political parties have proven beyond doubt that they can win elections. They have spent decades perfecting the machinery of electoral victory. What they have not proven, what they have barely attempted, is that they can govern.
The most important question citizens should ask every political party is not “how will you win?” That question has been answered, repeatedly and at enormous cost.
The question that determines whether Nigerian democracy produces more than expensive spectacles is this:
“You have told us how you intend to win power. Now show us your strategy for governing Nigeria.”
Until winning elections and governing effectively become equally important objectives, equally resourced, equally scrutinised, and equally rewarded by the electorate, Nigeria will continue producing parties that are exceptionally lethal at the polls and profoundly paralysed in power.
Democracy must produce more than winners. It must produce governance. And governance, unlike elections, cannot be purchased. It must be planned, delivered, measured, and earned every single day of a term, not just on the day the votes are counted.
