Between rigging and resignation, millions of Nigerians face an impossible choice — to vote in a system they no longer believe in, or to stay home and be ruled by it anyway.

Nigeria is approaching 2027 with all the familiar noise of an election season and none of the familiar hope. Political groups are already defecting and realigning. INEC is unveiling timetables and talking up technology. Civil society organisations are launching voter education campaigns from Lagos to Maiduguri. Yet on the streets, in markets, in danfos, and in Diaspora WhatsApp groups, the dominant mood is not excitement but a deep, exhausting ambivalence.

It is not apathy. Apathy suggests people do not care. Nigerians care desperately. What they are experiencing is a textbook dilemma — a circumstance in which a choice must be made between two or more alternatives that seem equally undesirable. For millions, the choice is now this: participate in an electoral process they believe is compromised, or withdraw completely and hand their future to the very people they distrust.

That dilemma is splitting the country into two camps. In the first are those who have decided not to participate at all, out of total distrust in INEC. Their numbers are not small, and they are not silent. In the 2023 presidential election, the Independent National Electoral Commission registered over 93.4 million voters, but only 24.9 million votes were cast for all candidates combined — a turnout of 27 percent, one of the lowest in Africa and the lowest in Nigeria’s history since the return to civil rule in 1999. According to Afrobarometer’s 2024 survey, only 23 percent of Nigerians said they trust INEC “somewhat” or “a lot,” down from 47 percent in 2017. When people say they will not vote, they are not being lazy. They are delivering a verdict on an institution they believe has failed them.

In the second camp are those who will vote, but who are haunted by the question of whether their vote will survive the journey from polling unit to collation centre. They will queue under the sun to be accredited by BVAS, but they wonder if violence will scatter the queue before counting starts, or if their result sheet will be rewritten at the ward level after they leave. This fear is grounded in lived experience. In the 2023 general elections, Yiaga Africa documented 101 critical incidents of result manipulation and intimidation across 21 states, while the Centre for Democracy and Development reported armed disruption of voting in Lagos, Rivers, and Kano. The faith of many in the electoral system is at an all-time low. And antecedents in Nigeria are not distant history — they are last election.

What has systematically ganged up against the hope people have in elections is not one factor but a chain of complicity that Nigerians now understand too well. The first link in that chain is vote-buying, which has ceased to be a rumour and has become the open market price of democracy. In the off-cycle governorship elections in Bayelsa, Imo, and Kogi in 2023, observers from Yiaga Africa and the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room reported voters being openly offered between N3,000 and N15,000 per vote, with agents using mobile bank transfers to avoid cash detection. The 2022 Electoral Act criminalises vote-buying with up to 12 months imprisonment, but not one high-profile conviction has been secured. Poverty has been turned into a campaign strategy. As Chinua Achebe warned in 1983 in The Trouble with Nigeria, “Nigerians are what they are only because their leaders are not what they should be.” When a bag of rice costs N95,000 and the minimum wage is N70,000, N5,000 on election day feels like survival.

The second link is the growing belief that the judiciary, not the electorate, is the final decider of who wins. “Go to court” has become a provocation, not a remedy. After the 2023 elections, over 1,200 petitions were filed at election tribunals, challenging results from presidential to state assembly seats. The Supreme Court ultimately decided the presidency, as it has in every cycle since 2007, and determined the fate of at least three governorships. Judicial intervention is constitutional and necessary, but when nearly 25 percent of all legislative seats are decided by judges rather than voters, citizens begin to believe that the real campaign happens after the vote — in chambers, not in communities. The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi once said, “When justice is only available to those who can afford to buy it, it ceases to be justice.” That sentiment now defines the electoral court.

The third link is the connivance of security agents and ballot snatchers. Nigerians have retired the term “ballot snatching” because the method has evolved. It is now voter suppression by uniform. The European Union Election Observation Mission, in its 2023 final report, noted “a lack of prosecution of electoral violence, including by security personnel, and an atmosphere of impunity.” During the 2023 elections, verified videos on social media showed police officers standing idle while thugs disrupted voting in Eti-Osa, Lagos, and in Obio-Akpor, Rivers. In other places, excessive force was used to disperse legitimate voters. When the person meant to protect the ballot becomes a spectator to its theft, the citizen learns that showing up is risky.

The fourth link is the electoral officer who manipulates results. INEC introduced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and the IReV portal to close the gap between the polling unit and the collation centre, promising real-time transmission. On February 25, 2023, that promise collapsed for the presidential election. INEC’s own explanation was a “technical glitch,” but for many Nigerians, that glitch became the symbol of distrust heading into 2027. The problem is not just technology — it is the human being operating it. Former INEC Chairman Prof. Attahiru Jega publicly admitted in 2021 that “we have had to deal with election rigging within INEC itself.” The alteration of Form EC8A, the swapping of result sheets between polling units, the sudden declaration of inconclusive elections in areas where an opponent is leading — these remain part of the toolkit.

There are other links that rarely get mentioned but are just as powerful. There is the resident traditional ruler and community youth leader who are settled to deliver a bloc vote. There is the complicit media aide who manufactures fake results on X and Facebook before INEC can declare anything, creating confusion and post-election anger. There is the desperate candidate who sees violence as cheaper than persuasion. There is the INEC ad-hoc staff, poorly paid and poorly trained, who becomes susceptible to a N50,000 inducement to look away. Together they form an ecosystem that profits from distrust. As Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka put it, “A nation that spends so much on falsehood will never move forward.”

This is the version nobody dares to say plainly: Nigeria does not have a voter turnout problem. It has a trust production problem. The political class knows exactly why people have lost faith, because they have built careers on that loss. They know that ethnic sentiment mobilises faster than a manifesto, that religious division guarantees a base without performance, that a disillusioned middle class which has japa-ed or tuned out is easier to defeat than a mobilised one. As much as political groups, INEC, and other stakeholders are doing toward 2027, for many Nigerians it is not clear if their participation will be guaranteed — because the things that have to change are not in the timetable. They are in the culture of impunity.

The danger is that this distrust is now self-reinforcing. When credible people stay home, the field is left to those who buy votes. When those who buy votes win, INEC and the courts appear to legitimise them, which further convinces credible people to stay home next time. It is a vicious cycle, and breaking it will require more than another press conference from INEC headquarters.

But history also teaches a counter-lesson, and it is here that Nigerians must choose differently. The only ingredient necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. Evil does not need your vote — it only needs your absence. Vote-buying only wins when those who cannot be bought refuse to show up. Result manipulation only succeeds when polling units are empty and there are no vigilant party agents or citizen observers to compare the EC8A pasted on the wall with the figure uploaded on IReV. The court only becomes the decider when the margins are small enough to steal.

To do the right thing in 2027, therefore, means refusing to leave things to chance or to bad influencers who profit from your cynicism. It means organising not just to vote, but to defend the vote with lawful presence. Stay until your vote is counted. Take a picture of the result sheet. Know your polling unit agent. Join election observation groups like Yiaga Africa, the Situation Room, or local civil society — because a crowded polling unit is harder to rig than an empty one. Demand that INEC prosecutes its own compromised staff and that security agencies are held accountable when they collude. Distrust cannot be the end of the story. It must be the beginning of vigilance.

By: Allen Durueke

The post OPINION… THE DILEMMA BEFORE THE BALLOT: Nigeria’s 2027 elections and the crisis of trust appeared first on Latest Nigeria News | Top Stories from Ripples Nigeria.