By Dr. Osamhanze Akugbe Idahosa.
Nigerian politics has a familiar rhythm that repeats itself with the certainty of the rainy season. As an election approaches, the airwaves fill not with policy proposals or development blueprints, but with recycled scandals, resurrected controversies, and character assassinations dressed up as accountability. Old files are reopened. Rumours are given new life. Personalities are dissected forensically, while the economy — the very thing that determines whether ordinary Nigerians eat, work, and hope — is left to fend for itself in the background noise. 
This is not new. It is, in fact, a pattern the late Professor Claude Ake diagnosed with uncomfortable precision decades ago. In his enduring body of work on how politics has underdeveloped Africa, Ake argued that the continent’s governing elites have rarely treated development as politics’ central business. Instead, politics became the prize — an unrelenting contest for power and its spoils, disconnected from any serious commitment to transforming people’s material conditions. Development was talked about, promised, and occasionally budgeted for, but it was never the organizing logic of governance. Power for its own sake was.
Nigeria, in many painful ways, has continued to prove Ake right. A country blessed with abundant human capital, fertile land, solar potential across its northern belt, gas reserves that could power industries for generations, and a youthful population bursting with energy and ambition, still finds itself struggling with basic questions of electricity, food security, and job creation. The paradox is not a mystery. It is the direct consequence of a political culture that majors on the minor and minors on the major—one where cutthroat politicking consistently displaces the harder, slower, less theatrical work of nation-building.
The Noise That Drowns Out the Signal
Every election cycle in Nigeria seems to produce its own theatre of distraction. Certificates are questioned. Personal histories are excavated. Allegations, some genuine and many manufactured for effect, are deployed not to inform the electorate but to overwhelm them. The result is a public conversation so saturated with noise that the signal — what each aspirant actually intends to do about unemployment, inflation, infrastructure decay, and industrial collapse — gets lost entirely.
This is not to say that character and integrity do not matter in leadership. They do, profoundly. But there is a difference between legitimate scrutiny of a candidate’s fitness for office and the wholesale substitution of personality warfare for policy debate. When name-calling becomes the primary currency of political engagement, it does more than distract; it actively erodes the electorate’s capacity to hold anyone accountable for economic outcomes, because the entire conversation has shifted away from outcomes altogether.
What 2027 Should Really Be About
As Nigeria edges toward the 2027 electioneering season, there is a genuine opportunity to break this cycle — but only if electorates themselves insist on it. The question voters ask of every aspirant should not primarily be “what has this person done to embarrass their opponent,” but rather “what, brick by brick, will this person do to build an economy that works?”
Brick by brick is the operative phrase, because national economic transformation is not a single grand gesture. It is the cumulative result of deliberate choices: stable macroeconomic policy that tames inflation without strangling growth; a manufacturing and agro-industrial base that converts raw endowments into finished value rather than exporting them raw; an education and skills pipeline that matches the needs of a modern economy; an investment climate credible enough to attract long-term capital rather than speculative inflows; and an energy infrastructure reliable enough to let businesses plan beyond the next generator refueling.
None of this makes for exciting soundbites. It does not trend the way a scandal trends. But it is the substance that determines whether Nigeria remains a country of enormous unrealized potential or becomes genuinely competitive within the comity of nations — able to stand alongside the economies it is so often, and so wistfully, compared to.
Change for the Sake of Change Is Not Change
The revered Benin monarch, Oba Ewuare II, recently offered a formulation that deserves wider circulation in the run-up to 2027: change should not be pursued for its own sake, but only where it promises something demonstrably better than what already exists. This is a subtle but important corrective to a political culture that often treats “change” as a self-justifying slogan, detached from any rigorous comparison of what is being offered versus what is being replaced.
Applied to Nigeria’s coming election, the royal father’s counsel suggests a discipline that both aspirants and voters would do well to adopt. Aspirants should be pressed to show, in concrete, measurable terms, how their vision improves on the present—not merely that they are different from the incumbent or from a rival. And voters should resist the seduction of change as spectacle, insisting instead on change as substance: a credible, costed, and coherent pathway to shared prosperity.
A Call to Refocus
Nigeria’s governing class, and the political ecosystem that surrounds it — commentators, party strategists, media platforms, and yes, the electorate itself — bear collective responsibility for the terms on which political contests are fought. If the 2027 cycle is allowed to descend, once again, into a contest of who can most effectively humiliate whom, the country will have squandered another opportunity to have the conversation it desperately needs: the conversation about how to convert its abundant natural and human endowments into the kind of broad-based prosperity that reduces poverty, creates jobs, and restores national dignity.
Professor Ake’s warning was never simply academic. It was a call to reorder national priorities before politics as usual consumes what remains of the country’s developmental promise. As 2027 approaches, that call deserves to be heard again — not as a lament, but as an instruction: look beyond the name-calling, beyond the personality contests, and ask instead what each aspirant will actually build.
Dr. Osamhanze Akugbe Idahosa is of the Africa Development Studies Center and writes from Abuja.
