The next Nigerian elections are a little over a year away, and the ritual has already begun. The bargaining. The defections. The loud declarations of loyalty that mean nothing and the quiet deals that mean everything. The country is already in campaign mode, as if governance is a brief inconvenience between two seasons of conquest.
The leader of the current regime, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, understands the Nigerian political elite with a frightening intimacy. He knows precisely how power circulates in this country: how ambition rots, how fear is used, how hunger becomes leverage, how “alignment” is sold as maturity, how shame is presented as naivety. He has the unique ability of being able to corrupt and convert anyone who has even the slightest hint of greed, even the slightest potential of moral flexibility. Since he took power in 2023, governors have crossed over in steady procession. As of late January 2026, reporting in Nigeria put the APC in control of 29 of 36 states—an extraordinary grip, and one that keeps tightening.
When a party controls that much of the federation, it is no longer just a party. It begins to feel like the only sky. The political class adjusts to that pressure the way bodies adjust to harm: by normalising it.
You can argue about whether Tinubu “convinces” politicians or simply provides the conditions under which they convince themselves. You can argue about whether coercion is explicit or structural. But what matters is the direction of travel, and how quickly it is happening. What matters is whether anyone can prevent the drift toward a one-party state.
Tinubu also has the unusual advantage of a Trojan horse in the so called opposition. Nyesom Wike, his brash and powerful Minister of the Federal Capital, still wears the badge of the PDP, yet functions as its saboteur-in-chief—loudly loyal to the president, relentlessly destructive toward his own party, and effective enough that the opposition has splintered into yet another vehicle: the ADC. The story of opposition coalition leaders adopting ADC as their platform, appointing interim leadership, and presenting themselves as a united front has been widely reported.
But this essay is not about Tinubu—who, despite a past clouded by unresolved questions about his criminal history in the United States, his education, even his age, has risen to the most powerful office in the land. It is not about Wike, who embodies the Nigerian political talent for occupying two contradictory positions without shame. It is not about the newly formed ADC, which faces the familiar Nigerian opposition problem: a party assembled for the express purpose of power must still pretend to be a party assembled for the purpose of ideas.
It is not about Atiku Abubakar, who will be nearly eighty years old by the time the next government is formed. It is not about Peter Obi, who rose on the back of an extraordinary, youth-driven, citizen-led movement in 2023, shook the establishment, but has since concluded—perhaps correctly—that mass enthusiasm alone cannot defeat a system in which the electoral commission, the courts, and the legislature are thoroughly captured. It is not about this man who has moved from the base that made him nationally popular to seeking support and elite consensus among people he once condemned as ruining the country. It is not about that grim realism that has followed the lesson he learned that Nigeria defeats purity with arithmetic: money, violence, court injunctions, party structures, security agencies, ballot logistics, and a thousand small acts of sabotage.
This essay is about Nigerian voters.
Nigerian voters have always known the truth that polite political analysis avoids: elections in this dysfunctional country are choices between the devil and the deep blue sea. I wrote years ago in the Financial Times about the way collective amnesia enables political shamelessness: voters forget, politicians repeat. The country moves in circles and calls it history.
Already, Nigerians online are sorting themselves into camps. APC loyalists, hoping proximity to power will trickle down. Opposition supporters splitting into rival blocs, arguing over who must step aside for whom. Atiku’s supporters call themselves Atikulates. Obi’s supporters are Obidients. They trade insults, accuse each other of sabotage, and insist that unity means submission to their preferred candidate.
Meanwhile, the principals meet, dine, negotiate, and plan together. They are not enemies. They are colleagues managing a market. The voters provide noise. The elite provides outcomes. Yes, elections in Nigeria do not determine outcomes. Elite consensus does. It is elite consensus that determines whether the Supreme Court will uphold the results of elections marred by irregularities or simply say that there is not enough evidence to overturn an election. Or whether they will "restore" a politician's mandate.
And here is the deeper insult: Nigerians conduct these online civil wars as if parties in Nigeria are ideological families.
There is not a single Nigerian political party today with a clear political, economic, or social ideology. Parties are not homes of belief. Parties are special-purpose vehicles for acquiring and retaining power. Politicians move between them with ease because nothing of substance binds them. Most of Nigeria’s political class has belonged to multiple parties since 1999. When they speak of “structure,” what they mean is access. When they speak of “grassroots,” what they mean is purchase.
Even Peter Obi, who some argue might be the least openly shameless of the major figures, has moved from APGA to Labour to ADC. In a normal country, ideological drift would require explanation. In Nigeria, it requires only opportunity.
This is why no political party deserves the loyalty of Nigerian voters.
Nigeria’s problems did not begin with the APC. The APC did not invent the absence of electricity. The APC did not invent the collapsing grid, the national embarrassment of blackouts treated as weather, the terrorism and banditry, the scandal of a country where huge numbers of citizens remain disconnected from power in the most literal sense: not just politically, but electrically. (With perhaps the world's largest energy access deficit, up to 40% of Nigeria's population does not have access to the epileptic national grid, representing roughly 85 to 90 million people). The APC did not invent the hollowing out of schools, the theatre of public hospitals, the normalization of kidnapping and ransom payments, the way inflation eats salaries like termites, the way terror becomes background noise.
The entire criminal political class is implicated.
Every four years they perform infighting for the cameras, then settle back into the same two formations: those who have power and those waiting to regain it. Parties reorganise around this. People switch sides and call it “realignment.” They join the ruling party and call it “bringing dividends of democracy.” The same faces become new slogans. The same appetites take new acronyms.
Look at the defections and you see the naked logic. The justification is always “alignment with the centre,” always “development,” always “state interest.” The language changes, the hunger remains. Even mainstream reporting about defections has treated it as a rolling phenomenon reshaping the political map ahead of 2027.
Half the new opposition figures calling the current government a failure were members of the APC until they lost relevance within it. Others were members of the PDP until the PDP’s internal rot swallowed them or until federal power became too tempting to resist. These people are not converting. They are relocating.
And Nigerian voters keep giving them the greatest gift of all: loyalty. The Nigerian voter has perfected a Biblical love: bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things—while being governed into ruin.
Loyalty allows politicians to live in obscene luxury while presiding over a nation sliding deeper into hunger and violence. Loyalty allows collective amnesia to wipe clean yesterday’s crimes and recycle yesterday’s villains as today’s saviours. Loyalty recruits citizens to fight, insult, and sometimes kill one another in the streets while power is calmly negotiated in private rooms.
Loyalty is why politicians do not fear voters. They fear only elite defection.
They fear losing access. They fear being excluded from the distribution room. They fear being on the wrong side of the security agencies, the wrong side of the courts, the wrong side of the money. They do not fear the people, because the people arrive every election season as fan clubs, not as employers.
This is why Nigeria needs disloyal voters.
Disloyalty does not mean apathy. Disloyalty does not mean cynicism. Disloyalty means refusing to tether your identity, your hope, your dignity, or your moral judgement to any party. It means recognising parties for what they are: elite bargaining platforms. It means voting without romance, without spiritual attachment, without the intoxicating lie that a politician is your relative.
It means refusing to be recruited into elite wars.
It means refusing to inherit someone else’s enemy.
It means refusing to do street-fighting work for men who will shake hands tomorrow.
And disloyalty must go further than elections. Democracy is not a four-yearly pilgrimage to a polling unit. Democracy is sustained challenging of power and forcing power to fear consequence. It is knowledge. It is paperwork. It is attention.
It means understanding how legislative recall works when a senator or representative betrays your interests. It means paying attention to state elections, because state power is where daily life is managed or mismanaged. It means paying attention to local governments, where the closest money to your life gets shared out among small kings. It means following budgets, asking questions, demanding receipts, creating consequences.
The Nigerian elite is largely united. Their quarrels are temporary. Their insults are campaign tools. Their peace is private. They call each other brother and sister and mean it. Their children party together in mansions in Nigeria and abroad.
Only voters remain divided by fake loyalties.
The most patriotic thing a Nigerian can do today is to be disloyal—to parties, to personalities, to slogans—and loyal only to outcomes: dignity, safety, infrastructure, electricity, justice.
Nigeria does not need more obedient supporters.
Nigeria needs disloyal voters.
