03/09/2026
The 2027 election is a survey on stupidity
By
Sonala Olumhense 30th August, 2026
Campaigns for Nigeria’s 2027 elections have officially begun. In truth, they ended four years ago, which means that what is coming is not an election. It is a gauge of how stupid Nigerians are or aren’t.
How? The campaign at the federal level, which is what matters in Nigeria, ended in 2023. That was when the man who would win that year’s election told Nigerians that if he failed to end the nation’s electricity woes once and for all, he did not deserve a second term.
Four years in the presidency, Mr Bola Tinubu has barely scratched the surface of the electricity problem or any other major issue. And he is on the ballot in 2027 as the incumbent president.
Elsewhere, that would have been considered an insult to voters. And that is why the ballot will test who Nigerians really are: everyone who has been hurt by those problems or knows someone else who has. Everyone who has a drop of dignity left. Every Nigerian who is not stupid.
Because Nigeria, and every Nigerian voter, must in 2027 answer this question: Am I in denial or am I stupid? Voting with that in mind should be easy.
Here is my personal testimony, which should be read against the fact that in 2015, I was a fervent advocate of the All Progressives Congress in its quest to supplant the ruling PDP.
But APC swiftly became the All-Propaganda Conglomerate, denying its obligations to the Nigerian people and treating Nigerians as if they did not matter.
In “Propaganda and conscience”, in this column on December 29, 2019, after four years of challenging the party to honour its pledges, I introduced a standing invitation which welcomed rebuttals from government officials.
I ran it every week, tweaking it in January 2023 to include the party. I wanted any officials who cared, or who felt that I had been unfair, to enjoy the right of reply, unedited, on my own turf.
I kept that invitation open until one month before the current government assumed office. But not once, on any issue, in four years, did anyone in the presidency, legislature, judiciary, Ministry, Department, Agency or parastatal react. Four years, and not one challenge or clarification or correction.
There was, then, only one viable interpretation: APC was a fraud. It is still a fraud. Twelve years after it took control by marketing the concept of CHANGE, it is concerned only with power, not the public interest.
In 2023, then, given the nation’s torturous experience at the hands of the party that I had documented for eight years, I reached the next conclusion: if APC did not care whether it was trusted or not, it did not deserve re-election.
And so, for two weeks early that year, I counselled Nigerians that electoral support of the party amounted to self-sabotage. “To vote APC in 2023, you must first hate yourself (I),” I wrote on January 29, repeating the warning the following week.
Four years after that, I attempted to deploy the same warning. But that would be unfair to the Nigerian voter, given that APC did not actually win in 2023. To caution against repeating self-harm that the voter did not commit would be worse than the alleged su***de attempt. Nigerians and those who observe her closely know that APC is not in power because it won the last election. Its futility and ineffectiveness are traceable to that illegitimacy.
That is why the 2027 campaigns ought to be easy for even half-decent opposition. Because APC has no campaign.
An incumbent campaign means that the campaigner has something to demonstrate. In which case, the campaigner will appear before voters not in scripted TV advertising but in direct public engagement, including debates, to celebrate its achievements.
Not only does APC lack such a scorecard, but it has also cynically driven Nigeria backwards and behind even poor African nations. In its hands, Nigeria has become a crumpled and rumpled umbrella. We are a shrivelled entity. We have become far more insecure, far hungrier, far angrier, and far uglier. We are a nation in bo***ge and torture: a people without hope. Nigerians will not vote for this.
As terrorists sn**ch our wives and children, empty our villages and burn down our farms, APC claims that the insecurity is overstated. They dismiss the daily pain and loss and grief of millions. Nigerians will not vote for this.
APC treats the public trust as optional. It celebrates the recovery of kidnapped victims who should never have been abducted in the first place. Nigerians will not vote for this.
But what is even more sinister is that what they are trying to accomplish is to establish an alternate reality in which character and decency are irrelevant, and shame and shamelessness are the new standards.
In their world, while there may be crime, there are no criminals when such animals pledge allegiance to APC. A casual glance at the top echelons of the party confirms this. What good families taught their offspring to avoid is becoming mainstream.
This is the territory of a certain condition that some people call nose-blindness. Its real name is anosmia, which is when you lose your sense of smell. APC wants Nigerians to accept that there is no such thing as decay or smell, and that nothing stinks. But APC’s Nigeria stinks, and I don’t think Nigerians will vote for it.
Nigerians must remember the scale of the party perfidy of a party that rode to power offering to CHANGE Nigeria for good. To that end, here are the APC Manifesto and Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope version. 12 years, and neither has been implemented; a historic swindle I identified spoke six years ago.
Sadly, some members of Nigeria’s political elite have become anosmic, and present the chichidodo alibi, asserting that because there is “no opposition,” they will vote APC.
Of course that is a cheap ruse. When there is the kind of menace that APC presents, credible opposition is anyone else on the ballot. You cannot take sides with shamelessness and claim to be a saint. To ride with the aggressor is to become the aggressor. There is no middle road.
In the forthcoming election, the Nigerian voter is in effect being asked to vindicate treachery; to vote against itself by voting for APC. But Nigerians are not stupid.
And while the people have every right to be concerned that their votes may not count, that is a secondary matter. The principal challenge is to come out in the vast numbers demanded by the callousness, indifference and betrayal of the defendant. The challenge is to confront the menace of the ruling party by voting with indignation and outrage.
APC has authored a deformed democracy that Nigerians resent, a crime-in-progress they are now being set up to approve.
That is why 2027 is not really an election. It is a survey of the true political character of Nigerians.
Sonala Olumhense
