If Political Power Can Decide Elections, What Exactly Are Nigerians Voting For?

Nigeria's next general election will be more than a contest between candidates. It will also test whether Nigerians believe their votes can actually determine political outcomes.

That question has become more urgent following recent comments by FCT Minister Nyesom Wike about the role political power played in previous elections. In August, Wike said that if President Bola Tinubu had wanted to win the Osun governorship election "at all costs", he could have deployed federal political influence and, in Wike's words, "we would have won it". Wike presented the absence of such intervention as evidence that the Osun election was allowed to proceed without federal interference.

His more recent comments about the 2023 presidential election have generated another controversy. Wike said the PDP's G5 governors had deliberately adopted a strategy designed to prevent Atiku Abubakar from benefiting from the South-South's traditional PDP strength. He said Rivers was treated differently because of its political significance and that the strategy involved allowing Peter Obi to win in certain places so that Atiku would not benefit from those votes. Wike has subsequently denied that this amounted to personally rigging the election.

That distinction is important. Political strategy, campaigning and influencing voters are legitimate parts of democratic competition. Manipulating ballots, falsifying results or interfering with electoral administration is something entirely different, and Nigeria has enough history of disputed elections to understand why the distinction matters.

The 2023 presidential election produced serious allegations concerning result transmission, discrepancies, and the handling of results in Rivers State. A recent review by Premium Times of IReV results found a particularly large discrepancy in Obio/Akpor between the figures declared by INEC and the figures visible on uploaded polling-unit result sheets. The newspaper also reported apparent alterations and mutilations on some result sheets, while acknowledging that some results were missing, illegible or improperly uploaded and that it could not independently tally every polling unit.

The courts did not ultimately accept the petitioners' allegations as sufficient to overturn the presidential result. The Presidential Election Petition Court, for example, said the Labour Party had not established that INEC deliberately refused to upload results to manipulate the election.

That legal outcome does not mean Nigerians should stop asking questions. Quite the opposite. A functioning democracy should make it possible for disputed results to be independently verified without requiring citizens to rely on competing political narratives.

INEC therefore has an enormous responsibility before 2027. It must make the chain from accreditation to polling-unit results to collation as transparent and auditable as possible. Political actors who publicly suggest that elections can be determined through political machinery should not simply be ignored. Their statements should be examined against the law and the safeguards of the electoral system.

The objective should not be to declare in advance that an election will be rigged. The objective should be to make rigging, manipulation, and result falsification sufficiently difficult that nobody can reasonably believe political connections are more important than votes.

If Nigerians reach the point where they believe elections are merely elaborate exercises in confirming decisions already made by political elites, the damage will extend far beyond one election. Democratic legitimacy depends on something very simple: people must believe that when they cast a vote, the vote matters.