Nigeria has no shortage of people trying to fix things. Think tanks are constantly churning out policy papers, social media activists are trying to mobilise thousands with their posts, advocacy organisations fill rooms with inspiring conversations about democracy and civic duty, and yet real change is still far. The ideas stay exactly where they were conceived — in conference rooms, TikTok comment sections, and Twitter threads.
There are Nigerians who spend so much time dissecting the failures of the government, the subsidy removal, the naira freefall, the corruption, and the petrol queues, yet when election day arrives, they simply do not go out to vote. These people are not apathetic in the traditional sense, they watch the news, share their opinions on Twitter, and might even argue passionately with people who do not recognise said failures of the government. In the language of political science, they are aware, yet this awareness changes nothing because it never quite crosses the threshold of action —voting.
This is Nigeria’s political paradox. A country of over 220 million people, whose last census was in 2005, many of them extraordinarily opinionated about governance, consistently produces some of the lowest voter turnout figures on the continent and has yet, in over two decades of civilian rule, to hold a single elected official meaningfully accountable at the ballot box for corruption or failure to deliver. The noise is loud, the results are meagre, and that probably explains why Nigerian democracy feels suffocated.
In the 2023 presidential election, Nigeria’s most anticipated election in a generation, one preceded by months of social media fervour, youth mobilisation drives, and an unprecedented four-way race, only 26.72% of registered voters turned out to cast a ballot. Of 93.47 million registered voters, only 24.9 million people came out to vote. This was the lowest turnout since the country’s return to civilian rule in 1999.
The trend is unambiguous and has been worsening for years. Turnout peaked at 69% in 2003, fell to 53% in 2011, then 43% in 2015, and 35% in 2019. By 2023, despite the loudest pre-election conversations in Nigerian political history and the revolutionary Obidient Movement, voter turnout did not match the online noise.
As the Centre for Democracy and Development noted at the time, the winning president, Bola Tinubu, received his mandate from less than 10% of Nigeria’s total electorate, the narrowest popular base of any president in the Fourth Republic. These numbers would be startling in any democracy, but in a country whose citizens routinely top global surveys of political engagement, social media activity, and passion for public affairs, something is not adding up. What, then, does it mean to be politically aware if that awareness so often fails to become action?
October 2020 offered the most vivid, and ultimately most instructive, demonstration of the gap between political consciousness and political power. The #EndSARS movement was, by any measure, extraordinary. After a video emerged online showing Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) officers shooting a young man in Delta State, it accumulated over 28 million tweets in a matter of days, making it one of the most viral protest hashtags in African history. Nigerian youth, the so-called “Soro Soke” (Speak Up) generation, took to the streets of Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and many other cities in a leaderless, decentralised, and thoroughly 21st-century uprising. Within one week, President Buhari had announced the complete disbandment of SARS. The movement had, against all odds, forced an immediate government concession.
Six years later, SARS is gone in name only, the officers were simply absorbed into other units, and police brutality continues. The inquiry panels set up in each state to investigate abuses have largely stalled, many victims’ families have seen no justice. In a cruel turn to the story, Amnesty International reported that at least fifteen of the protesters themselves remained jailed without trial three years after their arrest, detained, in some cases without charge, by the very state they had dared to challenge.
The #EndSARS story is not simply a story about protest failing, it is a story about what happens when political awareness, even mass, embodied, physically-expressed awareness, collides with institutions that have little incentive to respond. The government made an announcement, waited for the cameras to turn away, and then reversed course. There was no electoral consequence, no minister lost their seat, and no politician faced accountability. Even so, it is hard not to ask how much consequence can be expected from a country run by people who do not respect the agency and wellbeing of citizens enough to do the right thing.
One reason political awareness so rarely translates into productive electoral behavior is that it tends to be filtered and distorted through the prism of ethnic and religious identity. In the presidential race, northern Muslim-majority states largely favored the APC’s Tinubu (whose Muslim-Muslim ticket was a calculated mobilisation of religious sentiment), while southern and Christian-dominated areas leaned toward the Labour Party’s Peter Obi. As Chatham House noted in its post-election review, where previous voting patterns had sometimes cut across regional lines along generational or class markers, 2023 saw a sharpening retreat into ethnic and religious enclaves.
This is not ignorance. Nigerians who vote along ethnic or religious lines often understand exactly what they are doing, and why. They live in a political economy where state patronage flows through identity networks, where your tribe or faith community provides your best bet against a system that has no universal welfare safety net, no reliable rule of law, and no technocratic merit in the distribution of contracts, appointments, or infrastructure. In that context, voting for “your man” is not naivety; it is rational self-interest in a broken system. But then, this produces a destructive paradox: the voter is simultaneously aware that the system is corrupt and choosing to reproduce the conditions of that corruption, because the alternative, voting on policy, feels like investing in a pyramid scheme that has admitted it ends badly. Nigerian political parties no longer function as ideological platforms but as “vehicles for patronage and elite bargaining.” The electorate has noticed, and many have concluded that in that environment, ethnic or religious loyalty is simply the best available hedge.
There is a further complication that rarely gets examined honestly: the conversation that passes for Nigerian political awareness is, in significant part, conducted by people who no longer live in Nigeria.
“Japa,” derived from the Yoruba word meaning to flee, has become the defining social phenomenon of the current generation. The brain drain from Nigeria is accelerating at a historic rate. The Nigerian Medical Association has reported that over 4,000 doctors left the country between 2021 and 2024 alone. Researchers, engineers, lawyers, software developers, and academics are departing in a sustained wave, driven by an economy that has failed to provide stable employment, a currency that has lost catastrophic value, and a security environment that has deteriorated across multiple regions.
What this means for political discourse is troubling. Nigerian Twitter, the space where the most sophisticated, articulate critiques of the political system are produced, is disproportionately populated by people who live in London, Toronto, Houston, Dubai, and Dublin. They follow Nigerian politics intensely, argue about it passionately, and have real knowledge of its failures, but they do not vote. They cannot be teargassed in a protest, and they are not standing in a queue at a polling station that INEC has allowed to open two hours late. Their political awareness is real, but its political weight is nearly non-existent. This creates a strange echo chamber effect in which the loudest, most articulate voices in Nigerian political conversation are structurally removed from the processes they are analysing.
The quality of information circulating in the political conversation that does exist inside Nigeria further exacerbates things. The 2023 elections were described by analysts as being shaped by what the Centre for Democracy and Development called “information disorder,” the widespread proliferation of fake news, manipulated videos, fabricated endorsements, and partisan propaganda that made it nearly impossible for ordinary voters to form accurate assessments of candidates’ records or intentions. Every major candidate had armies of online operatives, many paid, producing content designed not to inform but to confuse, to inflame, and to trigger tribal loyalties.
“Nothing will change” is often the default political position of the educated Nigerian middle class, and it is not entirely wrong. Historically, it has been more accurate than optimism, but in practice it functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The person who says “my vote doesn’t count” and stays home has made it literally true that their vote did not count. The person who says “all politicians are the same” and declines to distinguish between candidates has made it easier for the worst candidate to win. The political sophistication that Nigerians rightly pride themselves on —the ability to see through promises, to understand the structural constraints on governance, to appreciate the historical depth of corruption— can turn into a learned helplessness that serves power perfectly.
This is not an argument that Nigeria’s political problems are the fault of its citizens. The system is genuinely corrupt, violent in its suppression of dissent (the Lekki Toll Gate massacre), and resistant to reform. The cynicism is earned, but when it becomes passive, earned cynicism is indistinguishable in its political effects from ignorance. The outcome is the same: the elites remain, the institutions don’t change, and the conversation continues.
True political awareness, awareness that does something, would look different from what currently passes for it in Nigeria. It would involve sustained, long-cycle organising rather than episodic outrage. The #EndSARS movement was powerful but lacked the institutional infrastructure to translate protest victory into durable policy. A movement that could hold the government to its promises over two or three years, rather than two or three weeks, would be something genuinely new.
It would involve holding the line on ethnic and religious voting patterns, which requires not asking people to be irrational in a system that punishes irrationality, but building the cross-ethnic civil society coalitions that make issue-based voting less of a gamble. The Labour Party’s 2023 showing, a third-party candidate coming from nowhere to significant national contention on a largely urban, educated, cross-ethnic coalition, offered a glimpse of this possibility, before retreating back to ethnic base politics in the analysis of who voted for whom and why.
Nigeria’s political class has learned to survive in the gap between what its citizens say and what they do. Until that gap closes, the illusion will continue. Nigeria is not a country short of political intelligence, what it lacks, and what no amount of Twitter discourse can substitute for, is the institutional revolution that converts awareness into accountability, and outrage into outcomes. Creating that change is slower, harder, and less satisfying than trending online, but it is also the only thing that will actually work. Our anger is not enough until it creates tangible change.
