More than 93 million Nigerians were registered to vote yesterday in an election that could reshape the politics of Africa’s most populous country. Eighteen candidates contested the presidency, but three dominated the campaign: Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the governing All Progressives Congress, former vice-president Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party.
As I write this on Sunday, there is no final presidential result. Votes are still being counted and collated, and it would be irresponsible to declare who has won before Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission completes the process. What is already clear is that the election has become a test of something more fundamental than which candidate receives the largest number of votes: whether Nigerians trust the system that converts millions of individual ballots into one authoritative national result.
That sounds like a technical problem. It is actually one of democracy’s central political problems.
Casting a ballot is an individual act. Determining an election requires aggregating millions of those acts through polling stations, local collation centres, state-level processes and eventually a national declaration. Nigeria’s own electoral commission describes collation and declaration as particularly sensitive stages because failures in transparency, speed or accuracy can damage public confidence even when earlier stages of an election have been conducted successfully.
This distinction between voting and aggregation matters enormously. A citizen can personally know which candidate they selected. They cannot personally observe what happened to every other ballot across a country of more than 200 million people. At some point, the voter has to trust an institutional process.
Democracy therefore contains an unavoidable information problem. Millions of people possess tiny pieces of private information about how they voted, while the electoral commission possesses the machinery required to aggregate those pieces into a national answer. The institution becomes credible when citizens can verify enough stages of that aggregation that they do not need to rely entirely on faith.
This is why electoral technology matters politically.
Nigeria introduced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, or BVAS, partly to make voter identification more reliable and reduce opportunities for multiple voting or impersonation. The electoral framework also envisaged electronic uploading of polling-unit results to an online portal, creating an additional mechanism through which results could become publicly observable.
Technology can reduce particular forms of electoral manipulation.
It cannot manufacture trust automatically.
If machines malfunction, connectivity fails, officials use procedures inconsistently or electronic results appear slowly, a technology introduced to increase confidence can produce the opposite effect.
That appears to be part of the controversy developing today. There have been reports of delays and technical difficulties around the uploading of some polling-unit results. Opposition parties and civil-society observers are scrutinising the process closely.
We should be careful not to move from “there were technical problems” to “therefore the election was fraudulent”. Those are completely different propositions.
An administrative failure can occur without changing the winner.
A technical failure can create opportunities for manipulation without proving manipulation occurred.
An allegation can be politically serious without already being evidentially established.
This distinction is particularly important during an unfinished count because uncertainty creates a market for narratives. Every delay can be interpreted through prior political beliefs. A Tinubu supporter may view complaints as opponents preparing excuses for defeat. An Obi or Atiku supporter may interpret the same delay as evidence that the establishment is manipulating the process.
The event remains the same.
The political prior changes its meaning.
This is why transparency matters most when trust is already low. A highly trusted electoral commission can survive a technical malfunction because citizens initially assume incompetence or bad luck rather than conspiracy. A distrusted institution receives much less interpretive generosity.
Institutional trust therefore behaves like capital.
It accumulates before the crisis and becomes spendable during one.
Nigeria enters this election carrying substantial historical baggage. Since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999, the country has held repeated elections and achieved something that should not be understated: presidential power has transferred between parties through elections. The 2015 election was particularly important because incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan conceded after losing to Muhammadu Buhari, producing Nigeria’s first transfer between competing parties at the presidential level.
That was democratic progress.
Yet Nigerian elections have also repeatedly faced allegations and evidence concerning vote-buying, violence, logistical failures, intimidation and problems in result collation. The country therefore has functioning electoral competition without uniformly high confidence in the institutions administering that competition.
Democratic consolidation is not binary.
Nigeria is neither simply “a democracy” nor simply “not democratic”.
It possesses competitive institutions that have become stronger in some respects while remaining vulnerable in others.
This election is particularly important because the political competition itself has changed.
For much of the period since 1999, presidential politics was dominated by two large organisations: the PDP and, after its formation, the APC. Peter Obi’s Labour Party campaign has disrupted that structure by mobilising voters who do not identify strongly with either traditional bloc.
His support has been particularly visible among younger, urban and digitally engaged Nigerians, creating the possibility that the country’s party system is becoming more competitive.
That is democratically valuable.
Competition gives political organisations incentives to respond when established coalitions stop representing parts of the electorate.
But greater competition creates another problem: fragmentation.
In a two-candidate contest, one candidate necessarily receives more than half of the valid votes unless the result is exactly tied. In a three-way contest, the winner can receive considerably less than a majority.
Nigeria’s constitution addresses this partly through a geographical-distribution requirement. A presidential candidate needs not only the highest vote total but also sufficient support across the federation. The purpose is important in a country containing enormous regional, religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity: the presidency should ideally require a coalition broader than domination of one geographical constituency.
That institutional design tells us something about Nigeria itself.
The country is too diverse for simple national majoritarianism to be politically safe.
Nigeria contains more than 200 million people, hundreds of ethnic groups, a roughly Muslim-Christian religious division with substantial regional patterns, and thirty-six states plus the Federal Capital Territory. Political competition has historically interacted with those identities.
A candidate who could become president by accumulating overwhelming support in one section of the country while receiving almost no support elsewhere might possess numerical legitimacy without enough territorial legitimacy to govern comfortably.
The constitutional spread requirement therefore attempts to make coalition-building national rather than merely arithmetic.
This is a form of institutional engineering.
The electoral system does not simply count preferences.
It attempts to shape them.
Candidates have incentives to campaign beyond their strongest regional or ethnic constituencies because geographically concentrated support is insufficient.
That does not eliminate identity politics.
It changes the payoff structure around it.
This is one reason electoral-system design matters so much in divided societies. Institutions cannot make citizens forget identity. They can reward politicians for constructing coalitions across identities.
Peter Obi’s rise makes that question particularly interesting. Obi is Christian and Igbo, from southeastern Nigeria, a region that has never produced a democratically elected Nigerian president in the current republic. Tinubu is a Muslim Yoruba politician from the southwest. Atiku is a Muslim from the northeast.
Those identities matter politically.
They are not complete explanations of support.
Reducing Nigerian voters to ethnic or religious blocs would miss the economic and generational dissatisfaction driving this election.
Nigeria possesses enormous economic potential. It is Africa’s largest oil producer, has one of the continent’s largest economies, a rapidly expanding technology sector and an exceptionally young population.
Yet millions of Nigerians experience unemployment, poverty, insecurity, unreliable electricity and weak public services.
The contrast between national potential and everyday state performance creates political frustration.
Again, natural resources do not automatically become state capacity.
Nigeria exports oil.
That does not guarantee reliable electricity.
It earns petroleum revenue.
That does not guarantee functioning schools.
It has a huge internal market.
That does not guarantee enough formal employment for its rapidly growing young population.
The missing mechanism is institutional conversion: how effectively does the state transform economic resources into public goods?
This resembles Iraq’s problem, although Nigeria’s political economy is different.
Resource wealth can weaken the fiscal relationship between citizens and government because states receiving substantial oil revenue rely less heavily on broad taxation than they otherwise might. Political competition then becomes partly a struggle over who controls the distribution of resource rents.
Again, this does not make the “resource curse” inevitable.
Institutions mediate it.
Nigeria’s federal structure distributes substantial revenues to states, creating additional layers of political authority and accountability. Federalism can bring government closer to citizens, but it can also disperse responsibility when services fail.
Who is responsible for the road?
The federal government?
The state?
The local government?
Fragmented authority can become fragmented accountability.
The incoming president will also inherit an extraordinary security problem. Boko Haram and Islamic State-linked insurgents remain active in the northeast. Armed bandit groups have terrorised communities in the northwest. Kidnapping has become a major problem. Farmer-herder violence and communal conflicts affect parts of the Middle Belt. Separatist tensions remain significant in the southeast.
These are not one security crisis.
They are several crises with different causes that become politically aggregated under the word insecurity.
That distinction matters because one national military strategy cannot solve all of them.
A jihadist insurgency requires different tools from organised kidnapping.
Farmer-herder conflict involves land, climate, policing and communal institutions.
Separatism involves political identity and federal legitimacy.
Treating every problem primarily through military force risks substituting coercion for diagnosis.
Again, state capacity needs differentiation.
Sometimes the state needs soldiers.
Sometimes it needs police.
Sometimes courts.
Sometimes roads.
Sometimes land administration.
Sometimes political negotiation.
Governments become ineffective when the only functioning instrument is the coercive one.
The economy presents an equally difficult set of choices. Nigeria has spent enormous sums subsidising petrol, keeping domestic fuel prices below what they would otherwise be.
The subsidy is politically popular because citizens experience cheap fuel directly.
It is also fiscally expensive and can distort incentives.
Removing it would free government resources.
It would immediately increase transport and living costs for households already under economic pressure.
That is the political economy of reform in one policy.
A reform can improve aggregate fiscal efficiency while making millions of people worse off in the short term.
The correct economic question therefore cannot simply be whether the subsidy is inefficient.
It is how the transition away from it is distributed.
Who receives compensation?
Can public transport improve?
Does the government save the money transparently?
Do citizens believe savings will become public services rather than disappear through corruption?
Trust determines the political feasibility of economically rational reform.
A citizen may understand that a subsidy is inefficient and still oppose removing it because they do not trust government to use the savings well.
That is not necessarily economic ignorance.
It can be a rational response to institutional expectations.
This brings us back to the election itself.
The next president will need to make painful decisions in a country where trust in institutions is uneven.
That makes electoral legitimacy economically valuable.
A president perceived as having won through a credible process possesses more political capital for difficult reform.
A president whose victory is widely believed to have resulted from manipulation begins with less.
Election administration therefore affects much more than political symbolism.
It affects governing capacity afterwards.
This is why the current collation process matters so much.
Nigeria’s electoral commission needs to produce not merely a number but an auditable chain between polling-unit votes and the national result.
INEC’s own procedures recognise this. Results move through successive levels of collation, and party agents can receive copies of result sheets.
The logic is decentralised verification.
If every polling station produces a result observable locally, manipulation at the national level becomes harder because parties and citizens possess independent records against which totals can be checked.
Technology should strengthen that architecture rather than replace it.
This is an important principle because governments increasingly treat digitalisation as though it automatically solves institutional problems.
A digital system can be more transparent.
It can also fail at enormous scale.
A paper result sheet can be forged.
A server can be hacked, misconfigured or simply unavailable.
Institutional robustness comes from redundancy.
Paper records.
Electronic records.
Party agents.
Observers.
Public posting.
Courts.
No single mechanism should have to be trusted completely.
This is how resilient systems are designed.
Aircraft do not depend on one instrument.
Banks do not depend on one database backup.
Elections should not depend on one technology either.
The question is whether independent records converge.
If they do, confidence increases.
If they do not, institutions need procedures capable of resolving the discrepancy transparently.
The behaviour of losing candidates will matter enormously once the result becomes clear. They have every right to challenge irregularities and use courts where evidence supports their claims.
Democratic responsibility does not require immediate unquestioning concession.
It requires distinguishing between evidence-based challenge and outcome-based rejection.
We have seen how dangerous that distinction becomes when politicians erase it.
Trump in the United States.
Bolsonaro in Brazil.
The principle should apply identically in Nigeria.
If evidence demonstrates serious violations, challenge them.
If courts provide remedies, use them.
If the evidence ultimately fails to change the result, opposition continues through politics rather than attempts to delegitimise the entire constitutional system.
Winners have responsibilities too.
They should not treat legal victory as proof that every criticism was malicious.
A government beginning with perhaps far less than half the national vote needs particular humility about mandate.
Winning an election gives authority.
It does not make the preferences of everyone who voted differently disappear.
This is especially important in a geographically and religiously diverse federation.
The next president will need to construct legitimacy beyond the coalition that elected him.
Appointments matter.
Regional representation matters.
Policy distribution matters.
Language matters.
A winner who treats the presidency as the property of one political network could deepen precisely the divisions Nigeria’s constitutional spread requirement is designed to reduce.
There is also a generational dimension that may matter long after this election. Nigeria’s median citizen is extremely young. A huge share of the electorate has little personal memory of military rule, which ended in 1999.
Their benchmark for political legitimacy is therefore different from that of an older generation.
For citizens who remember dictatorship, repeated civilian elections themselves represent a major achievement.
For citizens born under democracy, the question is increasingly: what has democracy delivered?
That is a healthy but demanding transition.
Historical progress becomes the new baseline.
A twenty-five-year-old Nigerian does not owe the political system gratitude simply because generals no longer govern.
They expect employment, electricity, security, functioning infrastructure and accountable institutions.
This is performance legitimacy inside a democracy.
It does not replace procedural legitimacy.
It adds to it.
Nigeria’s political system therefore faces a generational test similar to the one I discussed in Iran and China, though under completely different institutions. Governments cannot rely indefinitely on achievements that occurred before younger citizens formed political memories.
Every generation updates the standard.
The 2023 election itself may already reflect that shift.
Peter Obi’s campaign has mobilised many younger voters who believe the established parties have not delivered enough. Whether he wins or loses, the emergence of a credible third political force tells the larger parties something important.
Electoral competition is information.
The establishment can interpret a challenger as a temporary disruption and wait for voters to return.
Or it can ask what unmet demand allowed the challenger to grow.
That is how democracies learn when parties permit themselves to learn.
As of tonight, Nigeria does not yet have a declared winner.
That is precisely why this may be the best moment to think about the election.
Once a winner is announced, political analysis will immediately become about personalities: Tinubu, Atiku or Obi.
The more important institution is the process underneath them.
Nearly 93.5 million people were registered to participate. No individual citizen can know how all of them voted. Nigeria therefore needs an electoral institution capable of turning private choices into a public fact.
That is an extraordinary act of collective trust.
The commission counts.
Parties observe.
Citizens compare.
Courts remain available.
Eventually one number becomes authoritative enough that a country of hundreds of millions accepts one person as president.
Democracy makes that transformation look ordinary.
It is not.
The ballot is only the beginning.
The harder institution is everything required to make strangers believe everyone else’s ballots were counted too.
