<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Prince Feyisayo Ijifusi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
”A ballot should not constitute a wager with mortality. A ballot should be banal. Until that banality is restored, the lifting of the campaign ban will amount to little more than sound and motion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the Independent National Electoral Commission lifts the ban on campaign towards the 2027 elections, the machinery of politics grinds back to life across Nigeria. Banners will unfurl. Convoys will snake through cities. Slogans will be chanted in markets and on timelines. Yet beneath the orchestrated pageantry lies an unsettling dissonance: we are inaugurating a season of persuasion in a country where large swathes of the populace cannot move without trepidation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2026, we collate voter registers in enclaves of relative stability and better power supply , while relegating to the periphery communities where the generator expired with the last technician capable of reviving it. There is an almost perverse irony in amplifying electoral rhetoric at a moment when the agricultural calendar \u2014 the true barometer of national sustenance \u2014 lies in tatters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Democracy presupposes presence. It presupposes that a citizen can rise, proceed to a polling station, authenticate their franchise, and return to the quotidian. But presence has become a luxury. The conduit to the market now demands tribute. The path to the farm exacts a mortal toll. When locomotion is fraught with peril, choice devolves into abstraction, and campaigns risk becoming monologues delivered to the already accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The disquiet is not conjectural. The ledger of the dead continues to lengthen. Abductions have been normalized into routine. Multitudes confront an abyss of food insecurity. Hunger is not a datum in a technocratic brief. It is a father who renounces his own sustenance so his progeny might eat. It is a mother who interred seeds into reluctant soil and beseeches providence that marauders do not arrive before germination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What, then, becomes of electoral suffrage when the very terrain is inhospitable? INEC may deploy sophisticated apparatuses. Bimodal Voter Accreditation System devices may function flawlessly. The INEC Result Viewing Portal may transmit results instantaneously. Yet no algorithm can negotiate a barricade erected by dread. No server can tabulate the votes of a community dispersed months prior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elections are not conducted in the ether of cyberspace. They are enacted in physical locales \u2014 in classrooms, under canopies, beside dilapidated structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And those locales are contracting. In certain jurisdictions, institutions of learning have been transmuted into sanctuaries for the displaced. In others, arable land has been converted into theaters of conflict. When populations flee, they do not prioritize civic documentation. They salvage children. They salvage what can be borne on their backs. The state is ordained to safeguard human dignity. Instead, we compel citizens to adjudicate between survival and civic entitlements even as campaign season commences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This engenders a perilous calculus. If enfranchisement is circumscribed to pacified enclaves, then representation will be similarly circumscribed. It is conceivable for executive authority to be conferred absent a single ballot from entire geopolitical blocs. That is not a mandate. That is topography arbitrating leadership. And at present, that topography is being delineated by coercion, even as aspirants begin to solicit our mandate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The political elite will now pivot to realignments, to rallies, to the transactional calculus of patronage. These deliberations possess merit. Yet they resonate with dissonance in communities where boreholes have been vandalized and primary health centers lie barren. Cynicism among the populace does not emanate from a deficit of patriotism. It emanates from a chasm between proclamation and lived experience \u2014 a chasm no political jingle can bridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This year constitutes an inflection point precisely because the ban has been lifted. It represents the final substantive interval to demonstrate that the apparatus of the state retains the capacity to penetrate its peripheries. If we cannot secure logistical arteries for sustenance, we cannot secure them for ballots. If we cannot protect an educator, we cannot protect ad-hoc electoral personnel. Security is not a siloed portfolio. It is the substratum upon which every campaign promise must rest, or else collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Therefore, the interrogative posed to every aspirant who now has the microphone must be unflinching: What is your blueprint for rendering Nigeria sufficiently secure to inhabit, and by extension, sufficiently secure to participate in? We require granular policy, not rhetorical flourish. Thoroughly patrolled thoroughfares. Law enforcement institutions that command public trust. Decentralized policing architectures imbued with local intelligence. Agrarian systems shielded from predation. Populations displaced by conflict resettled with dignity rather than warehoused indefinitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A ballot should not constitute a wager with mortality. A ballot should be banal. Unremarkable. You proceed to vote, you exercise your prerogative, you resume your life. Until that banality is restored, the lifting of the campaign ban by INEC will amount to little more than sound and motion. We must first reclaim the terrain. Only then can we contend, legitimately, over who is entitled to occupy elective positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prince Feyisayo Ijifusi writes on governance, security, and civic participation from Abuja.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 By Prince Feyisayo Ijifusi ”A ballot should not constitute a wager with mortality. A ballot should be banal. Until that banality is restored, the lifting of the campaign…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":28051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pages"],"yoast_head":"\n