The 2027 elections are still years away, and Nigeria's political class is already deep in the business of positioning, defecting, and deal-making. The conversation about who should govern has taken over almost completely, crowding out the harder, less glamorous question of how the country should be governed.
This is the pattern that keeps repeating. Parties in Nigeria function less as vehicles for ideas and more as platforms for personalities. Loyalty shifts with opportunity, and the big tent always seems to belong to whoever holds power at the moment. Policy debates rarely drive the public conversation the way candidate speculation does.
The cost is real. When political energy is spent almost entirely on personalities, the work of building durable institutions, setting long-term agendas, and holding governments accountable to specific promises tends to get deferred. Voters are left choosing between faces rather than between competing visions for what the country could become.
Nigeria has talented people across civil society, academia, and business who understand what structural reform could look like. The question is whether the 2027 cycle creates any pressure for that conversation to happen publicly, or whether it gets swallowed again by the noise of who is aligned with whom.
Watch this space. The next two years will reveal whether Nigerian politics has any appetite for the kind of platform-driven campaigning that could make elections about something bigger than the candidates themselves.
Originally published by BusinessDay.