Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
In 2026, Nigerians will live life in a double reality. We willliterally be dancing to two dissonant drumbeats. Some will find the gathering 2027 election campaign beats irresistible. On the contrary, the majority of the common folk, civil society groups and the non -political elite will cling to the chaotic receding beats of the Tinubu administration by insisting that the lavish promises made us in 2023 be fulfilled as the regime winds down. Yet by the nature of democratic ritual, both succession elections and the accountability of incumbency for promises made are inseparable. As a public, we just have to choose which dance requires more intensity.
The campaign season is time for political festivity, a time for singing and dancing to different candidates and their multiple drumbeats of promises and noise. It is time for lavish displays of music, dance and costume. It is also time for speeches drenched in promises and images of paradise approaching but forever receding. All roads will now be paved in gold. Everyone will be drowned in prosperity. We shall replicate Dubai, Taipei, Singapore and other glorious places here in Nigeria.
While the campaigns last, the public could be lost in a frenzy of partisan cacophony. New jingles will compete with advertisements for detergents and cell phone networks and nearly everything else for the airwaves and web space. The social media will be swarmed with competing views on the agenda of the parties and their candidates. Insults and counter abuses will compete with fake news for primacy on every conceivable platform including those hosted from garages and moving trucks.
The poor will troop to crowded campaign venues to scramble and struggle for handouts of pittances and food items on offer by politicians. People are likely to be injured in the scramble for paltry cash and packs of Indonesian noodles. There will be no First Aid assistance for those injured in the ensuing melees. Poor people will sing and dance to new songs and slogans wherever the campaign trains go. Some may don cheap Chinese T-shirts or customized Ankara wrappers with portraits of the major contenders distributed by political entrepreneurs. New opportunities in the campaign political economy will open up. Social media hacks and emergency influencers, advertising agencies, designers and printers of posters and handbills and all manner of political hustlers will find quick fortune often serving diverse partisan clients. Political money will flood the system as even the poor get some “stomach infrastructure” to occasionally make richer pots of soup while the campaigns last.
The more perceptive segments of the public are likely to fixate their eyes on the unfulfilled promises of the departing administration. Many will not be fooled by the loud sounds of new promises or the prospect of yet another election season. It is in the nature of democratic political contest to intoxicate the public with the prospects and drama of imminent elections and the much abusedword of political successions: CHANGE. Even a completely hopeless ruling party can hide under the smoky radar of forthcoming elections and the promise of change to contest for re-election.
But lest we forget, 2026 is still the final year of Mr. Tinubu’s first term. For those fixated on 2027 as the end of this administration, you need to readjust that perspective. All that will take place in early 2027 is the general election and the swearing in of the winner on May 29th. Everything else about the Tinubu administration ends this year. So, we are still well within the mandatory four –year tenure of the Tinubu administration. The administration still owes the public as an electorate a heavy burden of accountability debts for the many yet unfulfilled promises of the outgoing dispensation.
For those of us who insist on the bounding obligations of every elected government for the campaign promises it makes at inception, the approaching election season cannot absolve Tinubu and his gang of the obligations on the basis of which Tinubu was elected. The economic ,social and foreign policy promises which the President made at inception must remain obligatory. The fullest implications of the various policy measures introduced in the last three years need to be fully accounted for. To that extent, the recently presented 2026 national budget is still basically an economic component of Tinubu’s four yearcontract with Nigerians. Therefore, we must insist on holding this government and its sponsor party, the APC ,accountable for the state of the nation it signed up to make a better place than what it inherited from Mr. Buhari.
From Tinubu and his gang, we are entitled to full accountability for everything about the present state of the nation. They promised us paradise. We are not there yet. But we are at least entitled to a peep through the gates into the paradise we were promised. All the promises that Tinubu made while campaigning for 2023 will have to be fulfilled this year. Hunger should vanish from the lives of most Nigerians. Poverty needs to be reduced to a minority affliction. ASUU should no longer go on strike for unpaid benefits and long– standing unfulfilled agreements. The poor should become more prosperous or fewer in number (“let the poor breathe” – Tinubu)!. Bandits, kidnappers and terrorists should disappear instead of increasing in nuisance presence. Inflation should take flight or at least be tamed. All our jobless and unemployed should find work. The road to our New Jerusalem should this year be wide open either through the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway or the other many broken roads across the nation. Oh by the way, we were also promised a Badagry- Sokoto Highway and a Lagos-Abuja high speed road that would reduce travel time between the two cities to less than five hours! Yes, bring it all on. Just close your eyes in January and wake up in December this year. Paradise will be waiting!
The approach of the end term of an administration does not mean the end of government of course. It can only mean a certain winding up body language. Instead, what the recently announced national budget indicates is in many ways an admission of the administration’s failure to meet the expectations of the majority of Nigerians. The 2026 budget and its accompanying policy gestures indicate a government that is still emplacing new policies and stumbling on existing errors at the point of exit literally. A contentious new tax legislation is drowned in legislative ping pong. The French connection of the new tax initiative is yet shrouded in opaque mystery. No one even knows what is authentic about the tax bill as it has been disclosed that what was gazetted is different from what the National Assembly debated and passed. A commendable fresh set of initiatives on insecurity has only recently been launched with many lapses and contradictions. A government with the full complement of army, Air Force, Navy, Department of State Security, Police, Civil Defense Corps etc has now established something called Forest Guards to secure ungoverned spaces! These are the belated actions of an administration that assumed power mostly ill-prepared, more than three years ago. That trademark incoherence remains the footprint of the Tinubu administration. In a country where incumbent administrations end up funding their re-election expenses from government budgets, it is uncertain what percentage of the 2026 budget will go up into the smoke of a re–election campaign.
In the meantime, the policy and performance deficits and untidiness of the outgoing administration remain everywhere with us. Nigeria’s affordability index is scandalous. Hardly any essential life item in today’s Nigeria is within the reach of most honest ordinary citizens: healthcare, transportation, school fees, food, electricity, cooking gas, sustenance medications, etc.
In the interim, nearly every state governor in the federation either belongs to or has defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Similarly, many influential politicians are taking their cue from the governors. The anticipation and loud speculation is that the APC under Tinubu’s leadership is likely to be re-elected in a landslide. This optimism is based on the singular truism that in Nigerian politics, money is everything. It is argued by APC optimists that only the Tinubu war chest has the resources needed to literally drown the nation in an avalanche of cash and emerge victorious.
The fledgling opposition is yet to crystallize into a credible alternative in terms of leadership, organization, general membership and a potential for matching funding to counter the Tinubu machinery. There is still a haze of unseriousness around the ADC as a convincing opposition platform.
The present APC domination of the partisan political space raises many issues and problems for democracy anddemocratic elections in Nigeria. Ordinarily, every election in a democracy ought to be a test of the popularity of parties and their incumbent office holders. An electorate either rewards or punishes an incumbent party and its leadership at the next election on the basis of the public perception of its performance in office. A party that has led the nation badly should ordinarily be thrown out by the electorate at the next election. What happens in Nigeria isoften a reversal of this standard expectation. A democracy in which election results return bad parties and disastrous candidates to power is indeed a strange one.
The APC under Buhari’s first term was a disaster. Yet it was returned for a second term. Even after Buhari’s two disastrous terms, the APC still “won” the 2023 election that handed Mr. Tinubu the keys to the Aso Rock Presidential Villa. The contradiction in this anomaly is more a question for INEC and the electoral system than for the populace.
One possible argument is that our recent election results, which return unpopular parties and candidates, are merely “referendums of the willing”. Voter turnouts in the last set of elections have been abysmally low, an indication that perhaps the vote counts returned by INEC results are perhaps correct counts of those who support the more favoured parties and whose voters may have somehow been encouraged to vote
For instance, in the 2023 presidential election that returned Tinubu as President, only about 30 million people voted for Tinubu out of a registered voter population of a little more than 80 million people. Similarly, in standalone elections in Ondo, Edo and Anambra, respectively, voter turnout was in each case between 25% to 30%. In each of these cases, it does seem that many voters stayed away either for security reasons or where they felt the outcome of the election would favour the incumbent and richer more influential candidate. More and more Nigerians have come to distrust democracy as practiced in our country because the outcomes of elections run counter to the wishes of the people.
If there is a reasonable basis to adjudge the Tinubu first term as good for the people, then perhaps the imminent campaigns for 2027 by the APC deserve an audience. But if the opposition succeeds in campaigning on the gross failures of the APC, then it would be time for a different dance and a new drumbeat.
