ABUJA — Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election produced a winner with less than 37 percent of registered voters casting a ballot. The country has never questioned that result with the urgency it deserves. And on a recent episode of Volume with FemiDlive, a governance researcher offered a structural explanation for why millions of Nigerians keep choosing to stay home on election day — and why that choice is entirely rational.
Amara Nwankpa, Director at the Yar’Adua Foundation, brought a sociological framework to one of Nigerian democracy’s most persistent puzzles. His central argument: low voter turnout is not apathy. It is a rational withdrawal of labour by citizens who have concluded that the state extracts from them but delivers nothing in return.
Nwankpa reached for the political theorist Peter Ekeh’s concept of “two publics” to explain Nigerian civic behaviour. Nigerians, Ekeh argued, inhabit two simultaneous public spheres: the primordial public of ethnic, religious and community belonging — where moral obligation runs deep — and the civic public of state institutions — which is perceived as extractive and impersonal. Nigerians feel obligated to their community. They feel no such obligation to the state. Voting, Nwankpa suggested, is an act of participation in the civic public that citizens have concluded is not worth making.
“Voting is social labour,” Nwankpa told FemiDlive. “And when people withhold their labour, it is because they have decided the return on that investment is not worth the cost.” The cost of voting in Nigeria — the physical risk in certain areas, the hours lost, the transportation expense, the psychological toll of participating in a process widely believed to be rigged — is not trivial. And the return, measured in the lived experience of communities that have voted consistently for decades without seeing improved roads, schools or hospitals, is visible only in its absence.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling on local government autonomy became a test case in Nwankpa’s analysis. The ruling was unambiguous: local governments must control their own funds, free from state governors who had long treated them as personal patronage pools. Two years on, implementation remains largely fictional. Governors who lose control of local government funds lose their most effective mechanism for distributing patronage and maintaining political control. The incentive to comply is zero. The ruling sits in law but not in practice — a perfect illustration of what Nwankpa calls “elusive law.”
Nwankpa made a point that carries particular weight for the 2027 cycle: Nigerians do not trust the formal state, but they do trust traditional rulers and religious leaders. A governance architecture that routes public services through informal but trusted structures — the district head, the women’s cooperative, the mosque committee — would have more impact than any electoral reform. But it would also require Nigeria’s political class to surrender the patronage networks that sustain their power. That surrender, Nwankpa conceded, is unlikely to be volunteered.
The economic dimensions were striking. Nigeria’s informal economy is estimated at $26 billion — a vast, self-organising system of exchange that operates entirely outside the state’s sight. Citizens who would never trust a government contract pay each other, lend to each other, and hold each other accountable within community networks of social trust. The state has failed to tap this energy. The question Nwankpa posed: what would happen if government learned to meet citizens where they already are, rather than demanding that citizens come to the state?
On the international front, Nwankpa offered a reconception of Nigeria’s African foreign policy. The country has long styled itself as “Big Brother” to smaller African states — a posture that buys little goodwill and costs considerable resources. He advocated instead for “Old Brother” positioning: collaborative, experienced, offering solidarity rather than superiority. Nigeria’s moral authority in Africa has been consistently undermined by its domestic failures. Fixing those failures would do more for Nigeria’s continental influence than any diplomatic initiative.
As 2027 approaches, Nwankpa’s analysis lands as a structural challenge to the campaign teams assembling across party lines. Mobilising voters who have consciously withdrawn their civic labour requires more than candidate branding. It requires a credible account of why this election will be different — why casting a ballot this time will produce a return that the last ten elections have not. Answering that question is the real work of Nigeria’s democratic project.
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