Spaghetti and soap politics will determine Nigeria’s next president

At the conclusion of the FCT council elections in Abuja in February, in which the ruling APC won five out of the six seats on offer, an interview with a voter went viral. A veiled, gap-toothed woman confessed to selling her vote and explained that even though she was not happy with the state of […]

At the conclusion of the FCT council elections in Abuja in February, in which the ruling APC won five out of the six seats on offer, an interview with a voter went viral. A veiled, gap-toothed woman confessed to selling her vote and explained that even though she was not happy with the state of the country, she voted for the ruling party anyway because she was offered money. She insisted that, that meagre sum was the only thing she was certain of benefiting from the political system that would impose leaders even if she chose not to vote for them.

She was candid and spoke openly with no fear of consequences or little concern for public condemnation. Her words did not come out of a vacuum, but from an environment and a political culture that has normalised a political economy in which votes are traded for spaghetti, soap, and rice. In street lingo, we have taken to calling these commodities of our transactional politics stomach infrastructure.

With general elections barely a year away, political permutations and analyses have continued to emerge; narratives are being spun, often to dismiss the glaring failures of this government, especially in terms of insecurity and the economy, as attempts to influence the political outcome of 2027. While it is impossible to rule this out completely, the truth is that the government over the last two years has not done enough to demonstrate a clear commitment to curtailing insecurity and eliminate the prospect of any dubious politician using it to damage this government.

What the government has demonstrated has been a clear prioritisation of political objectives rather than public service. For example, President Tinubu’s recent visit to Jos following the attacks at Angwan Rukuba had greater political resonance than a social one. We had politicians lining up to pledge support to the political aspirations of the president, rather than the tenuous aspiration to curb insecurity.

More efforts have been invested in subsuming more politicians into the ruling party than have been genuinely invested in dealing with bandits and terrorists, who continue to operate with greater impunity, claiming the lives of Nigerian civilians and our troops, who seem to be offered as sacrificial lambs to pecuniary interest.

Ahead of the elections, what is left of the already decimated opposition is rallying to find a platform. It seems these interests are coalescing around the platform of the ADC, which already seems too floaty to hold the weight being placed on it. It is a year to the elections, and this hurriedly cobbled-together platform has not taken any kind of recognisable shape. There is no clarity about who leads the party or what the party’s objectives are—besides wresting power from the APC. There is no clear manifesto and, even worse, there is no clarity about who will bear the party’s flag in the next election.

The failings of this government, and there have been many, have sustained the frustration of Nigerians and their optimism in replacing the APC government in 2027 as the APC had replaced the PDP in 2015. I understand that optimism is coming mostly from frustration with this government rather than from any clear political strategy.

Any honest analysis will show that the APC is far better placed than the PDP was when it lost the elections in 2015. Here is the blunt truth: rather than splintering, as the PDP was doing at that time, the APC is consolidating. It has already subsumed 31 out of the 36 states, leaving the PDP controlling only two states while the remaining are scattered among an assortment of unambitious political parties.

Right now, it would seem the opposition’s biggest asset is the angst of Nigerians to help them coast to election victory in 2027. In a normal democracy, that would be a strong asset indeed. But in Nigeria’s Spaghetti and Soap democracy, I wouldn’t count on it.

Nigeria practices a neo-patrimonial democracy in which power is negotiated on the basis of a system of patronage, not on public service. The system is organised around clientelism and the distribution of state resources to secure loyalty. The politician with resources, or even access to state power, uses these as symbolic capital and hands out favours in return for political loyalty and support.

In this system, politics is understood as an investment that must produce returns. It also means that because offices are secured through transactions, the duty of service delivery is jettisoned. This logic manifests at the delegate level during party primaries, where often the candidates with the deeper pockets or the backing of godfathers with deep pockets are favoured over those with competence. Subsequently, this manifests at the electoral level through vote buying, where political actors offer cash, food, and commodities in exchange for votes.

So, while the opposition may be counting on the angst of Nigerians to win the elections, even if they themselves have not outlined better or clearer strategies for development, it would be politically naïve to trust the electorate to not be enticed by spaghetti and soap.

While this may sound blunt and even presumptuous, it is a historical reality that cannot be ignored. It derives from our pre-colonial patronage system where traditional institutions subsisted on this system of centralised power and weak accountability. In the north especially, this manifests in the culture of maula—the variant of which exists in other parts of the country—where people often approach public office holders for handouts to address personal needs, rather than with demands for accountability.

While these patron-client relations have pre-colonial roots, they have been shaped and reinforced by indirect rule and the extraction economy that colonial rule thrived on. They have also been deepened by decades of military rule that created a class of rich clients, rather than a rich and well-serviced system of public service. Since the return to democracy in 1999, the culture of vote buying has grown more brazen and entrenched a “cash-and-carry democracy”.

The poor voters may seem complicit in subsidising their own suffering; they are often coerced through systemic poverty, neglect, and oppression. Thus, a vicious cycle is established in which poor service delivery and unemployment make voters more vulnerable to inducement, while the winners then rely on patronage and public funds to sustain the same system. So, for the voter selling his or her vote, it is not an act of selfishness but often a survival strategy.

So, while the opposition is counting on the frustrations of Nigerians to oust the APC, I wouldn’t trust the electorate to deliver this. After all, Socrates’ scepticism about democracy, founded on his mistrust of the masses to make the right choices for the collectives, is well documented.

Is this system immoral? Absolutely. It distorts representation, raises the cost of politics, weakens party competition, and produces bad governance after the election. It produces a democracy where elections happen, but accountability remains thin and policy is bent toward private networks rather than the public good. The failure of the political institution to punish culprits and vote buyers has helped entrench this culture. The political class has no interest in changing this system and would rather weaken the regulatory institution to perpetuate the system.

While elitist arguments might want to sit on a high throne and judge the likes of that gap-toothed voter in the FCT council election, the pragmatist knows that there is a greater system at play. Any political calculations that ignore the impact of spaghetti and soap politics on the possible outcome of the elections compromises itself. As long as power in Nigeria remains a business of patronage, elections will keep producing buyers, sellers, and the illusion of democracy.