Election Notes: On Nigeria's Political Movements

Something remarkable happened in Nigeria in February 2023. In a country where elections had long been dismissed as an alleged elaborate auction of the highest bidder, ballots purchased with bags of rice and wads of naira, millions of young people decided to show up. Not exactly with the rosy beliefs in a fair and balanced system but because, for the first time in a generation, millions believed the tides could be changed.

The vehicle for that hope was Peter Obi, the then Labour Party candidate whose surge from political long shot to genuine contender stunned the two leading parties that had monopolized Nigerian power since the return to civilian rule in 1999. But the real story was never entirely about Obi. It was about the movement that coalesced around him, the so-called "Obidient" movement, and what it revealed about the shifting foundation beneath Nigerian democracy.

Peter Obi (peter-obi.org/Google)

The numbers alone told a striking story. Nearly ten million Nigerians registered to vote for the first time ahead of the 2023 election, with 84 percent of those new registrants under the age of 35. This was not spontaneous. It was the fruit of years of accumulated grievance and organization, most visibly channelled through the #EndSARS protests of 2020, when young Nigerians poured into the streets to demand an end to police brutality. When the state allegedly responded with contempt and with everything that happened at the Lekki Toll Plaza, including flying bullets, it did not extinguish the movement. A radicalized generation was born.

ENDSARS Protest (Circa 2020/@_thegramboii)

The Obidient movement transformed that political energy into electoral force. Nationwide rallies, social media campaigns, and volunteer networks mobilized communities that had long been locked out of Nigeria's transactional political system. Obi ultimately won eleven states and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, a feat that analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations described as a disruption of Nigeria's two-party structure unlike anything the country had seen before.

All politics is local

Yet the election also exposed and elevated the reality of the limits of movements that flourish online but struggle in the granular, unglamorous work of ground-level politics. Nigeria's electoral geography remains stubbornly shaped by ethnoreligious loyalties and the machinery of patronage. The eventual winner, Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, drew more than half his votes from his home region in the South West. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party dominated the North East. Peter Obi swept the South East with nearly 88 percent of the vote in his home geopolitical zone. Identity, as ever, cast a long shadow over aspiration.

A picture of protesters holding up their fists (Google)

The lesson is not that grassroots movements are futile in the Nigerian environment at any level. The issue is that these movements must be built for the long game. Civil society in Nigeria remains, as researchers at the World Peace Foundation have noted, one of the country's most promising drivers of democratic change, but challenging transactional politics (politics of hunger and stomach infrastructure) requires more than a single election cycle and a charismatic candidate. Such deep-seated and sweeping change requires institutions, coalitions, and the patience to convert viral enthusiasm into durable political infrastructure.

There are other lessons too, ones that carry weight far beyond Nigeria's borders. The 2023 election demonstrated that youth-friendly platforms are not merely “nice to have”, they are electoral imperatives. Parties that ignored young voters' demands on unemployment, insecurity, and the cost of living found themselves outflanked. In a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty, any political movement that treats youth as an afterthought does so at its peril.

Nigeria also provided a cautionary tale about the integrity of electoral institutions. In advance of the vote, fewer than a quarter of Nigerians trusted the Independent National Electoral Commission to run free and fair elections. Those doubts were not unfounded. Allegations of manipulation and violence marred the process, and court challenges followed. When the scaffolding of electoral credibility is this weak, even a powerful civic movement can find its results overturned not at the ballot box, but in the courtroom.

A Gavel

Nigeria's twenty-fifth consecutive year of unbroken democratic governance, marked with ceremony in June 2024, is a genuine achievement for a country that has known military coups and civil war. But longevity is not the same as legitimacy. A democracy that holds elections without honouring their results, that tolerates vote-buying as a system feature rather than an aberration, and that deploys the courts as instruments of political settlement, such a democracy risks hollowing itself out from within.

The Obidient generation has not gone away. The energy, for now, feels muted, and organizational momentum is somewhat frayed due to the economic challenges that have swept through the societal ranks, but it remains a latent force in Nigerian politics. The question for 2027 and beyond is whether that energy can be converted into the kind of sustained civic movement that reshapes political markets rather than merely disrupts them. Nigeria's youth have demonstrated they can make history. Whether they can sustain the tempo or attempt change remains the harder, longer task ahead and one that the continent, and the world, are watching closely.