2027: Democracy without people’s input!

The 2027 election, which is two years away, seems to be more important to the political class, than the nation’s 2025 drift into mass poverty and virtual anarchy.  Even as the administration clamps down on protests or objections to their uncompassionate rule, the main pre-occupation of our political class is to forecast the 2027 election […]

The 2027 election, which is two years away, seems to be more important to the political class, than the nation’s 2025 drift into mass poverty and virtual anarchy.  Even as the administration clamps down on protests or objections to their uncompassionate rule, the main pre-occupation of our political class is to forecast the 2027 election result in their favour.

In forecasting election outcomes, modern scientific approaches, including opinion polls, political stock markets and statistical models are used to try and gauge voters’ opinions or wishes. In Nigeria, elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the opinions and wishes of voters have proven to be neither a major consideration, nor the determinant of the result. INEC conducts elections in a manner in which the actual number of votes cast for each aspirant is not considered important!

Although INEC is supposed to be an independent body whose members should be of unquestionable integrity and shall not be members of any political party, card-carrying members of the ruling party are known to have been appointed as INEC commissioners. The incompetence and lack of integrity of INEC staff has been the main contributors to the discontent with the Nigerian electoral system, which has been abandoned by the majority of registered voters who no longer bother to vote because they do not trust INEC to declare the true results.

As the chaos in the nation increases daily, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, the 2023 vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party claims that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is poised for defeat in 2027. He is encouraging people to turn out to vote in the belief that because he believes that in true democracies in which votes count, the APC’s failure to fulfil election promises, solve an ever-worsening economic situation, reduce insecurity to a barest minimum,  and allow for vocal opposition is more than adequate reason why voters would support a change of government.

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There are others, such as the Chairman of the North Central Governors Forum, Nasarawa State Governor Abdullahi Sule, who, despite the nation’s ever-worsening situation, has called upon the North and Nigeria as a whole to be “patient” and support President Tinubu’s re-election. His perverse reasoning is that whether Tinubu is good, bad, or ugly, he must “reign” for eight years because “the North” made a firm commitment that since they were entitled to a failed Buhari presidency for eight years, the South is also entitled to a failed presidency for eight years!

This is nothing short of an insult to all well-meaning Nigerians. The undefined “North” never held any meeting in which they decided to keep anybody in power for eight years. Democracy is about the will of the people and about having choices. The likes of Governor Sule are basically telling Nigerians that their democracy does not involve choices because “by the grace of God” Tinubu is ordained to be re-elected.  Perhaps it is also “God” who ordained the shambolic election which brought him into power in the first place?

Many of those who fear that President Tinubu must definitely win re-election regardless of the votes cast have raised the alarm that the nation is suffering from a brazen abuse of power and spiralling into tyranny. Censorship, which is undeniably a crude form of dictatorship, is now the order of the day. The government has banned songs or media posts which express anger, frustration and dismay at the mass killings and growing poverty that citizens are enduring. Undoubtedly, the country is hard!

Pastor Tunde Bakare declared that the foundations of justice and fairness have been eroded by politicians pocketing the judiciary to subvert all legal challenges. The blame lies squarely at the door of National Assembly members. They represent only themselves and their interests, are complicit in executive overreach, failure to ensure the separation of powers and the impending collapse of democracy. They continue to fail in their principal and primary responsibility of upholding constitutionality and representing the welfare of their constituents.

At a time when the world is wondering why the Nigerian government cannot secure lives and property and doesn’t seem the slightest bit concerned at the growing chaos and insecurity, and even as Nigerians are being massacred daily, our president feels no need to appear concerned and return to the country to commiserate and oversee justice for the dead.

Our absentee president has been virtually guaranteed a second term, despite Theophilus Danjuma, a former Minister for Defence, re-iterating his warning that Nigerians should rise up and defend themselves because the government seems not to see it as a priority of theirs. It is an unfolding tragedy that our electoral process is overwhelmingly fraudulent, and our political class has long since lost integrity and compassion for the electorate.

Despite overwhelming public opinion that the government can do much better in solving the massive insecurity and tanking economy, there is little hope that things will change in 2027. Nigeria now operates a democracy in which under INEC’s routine declaration of false figures, the will of the electorate, and indeed their votes, count for nothing. It is a democracy operated without the people’s input!