Break the number down and the illusion collapses. Fifty thousand naira, divided across four years, 1,461 days, comes to roughly ₦34 a day. Not enough for any loaf of bread in any market today, let alone the years of school fees, hospital bills, transport fares, and electricity tokens that follow. That is the true price at which a citizen is asked to sell the power to choose who governs roads, hospitals, schools, and security for the next four years. The naira is spent in a week. The consequences of that vote outlive it by 1,454 more days.
Compare that pittance to what governance is meant to deliver. A functioning primary healthcare centre saves a mother’s life during childbirth. No price tag captures that. Free, quality basic education compounds for a lifetime in a child’s earnings and dignity. Steady roads cut the cost of moving goods to market every single day for years. These are not gifts from a benevolent leader; they are obligations owed to citizens, purchased with tax revenue and oil wealth that already belong to the people. When a voter accepts ₦50,000 in exchange for looking away, they are not receiving a bonus. They are being paid a fraction of what was already theirs, while surrendering the leverage to demand the rest.
Nigeria’s history offers a sober warning here. Constituencies that have sold votes cheaply are, without exception, the same constituencies that return years later still without water, still without power, still burying citizens lost to preventable causes. The pattern is not a coincidence; it is cause and effect. A leader who buys entry into office with cash has already budgeted the cost of governance as an expense to be recouped, not a duty to be fulfilled. The porridge is eaten in a day. The hunger it was meant to relieve returns for 1,460 more.
There is, however, a more demanding but far more rewarding path: the New Nigeria path, where citizens negotiate not for pocket change but for policy, functional hospitals, safe schools, employment for the youth, security for the vulnerable. This requires patience and civic discipline, the willingness to say no to short-term relief in favour of long-term dividends. It is harder than pocketing an envelope on election morning. But it is the only arithmetic in which the citizen, not the vote-buyer, comes out ahead.
So, when the offer comes, and it will come, dressed as kindness, urgency, or survival, remember what is actually being weighed. On one side sits ₦34 a day for four years. On the other sits the shape of the nation your children will inherit: its schools, its hospitals, its safety, its dignity. No pot of porridge is worth that exchange. Guard your vote as you would guard your future, because that is precisely what it is.
A New Nigeria is POssible, for sure, and it has begun!✅
Emedosi writes for PO Express Media, POEM.
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