The most serious damage of the Tinubu presidency may turn out to be the damage that shows up in no economic table. Prices and exchange rates move; institutions, once broken, tend to stay broken. Over the past three years Nigerians have watched the machinery that makes democracy meaningful — a functioning opposition, independent legislatures, courts that decide rather than defer, and security agencies that serve the state rather than the ruling party — grow steadily weaker. Not through a single dramatic seizure of power, but through a slow accumulation of defections, suspensions, emergency declarations and convenient prosecutions. That erosion is the subject Nigerians should be arguing about most fiercely before 2027, and it is the one receiving the least attention.
The Great Migration to the Ruling Party
Since 2023, a remarkable number of governors, senators, House members and state legislators elected on opposition platforms have found their way into the ruling party. Each defection arrives wrapped in the same language — development, alignment with the centre, the interests of the people. Almost none is explained by any change in policy or principle, because almost none is about policy or principle. It is about proximity to federal resources and distance from federal trouble. The cumulative effect is that voters in state after state now find themselves represented by a party they did not vote for, having exercised a choice that was quietly annulled after the fact. Whatever else that is, it is not the system Nigerians were promised.
Rivers State and the Emergency Precedent
The Rivers State crisis produced the clearest warning of the era. A protracted political fight between a sitting governor and his predecessor’s allies ended not with a negotiated settlement or a judicial resolution, but with a state of emergency and the suspension of an elected governor, deputy governor and state assembly — an outcome that many constitutional lawyers argued the Constitution does not permit. Whatever one thinks of the personalities involved, the precedent is what matters. It establishes that a political dispute inconvenient to the centre can be resolved by removing the people the voters chose. Every future president now inherits that template. Precedents in Nigeria are rarely used once.
A National Assembly That Has Stopped Asking Questions
A presidency can only expand as far as the legislature allows, and the 10th National Assembly has allowed a great deal. Loan requests running into trillions have moved through with minimal interrogation. Budgets have been passed at a speed that makes genuine scrutiny impossible. Nominees have been confirmed in ceremonies rather than hearings. Under Godswill Akpabio’s leadership, the Senate has repeatedly behaved as an extension of the executive rather than a check on it, and members who broke ranks have discovered the personal cost of doing so. Nigeria’s Constitution assumed the legislature would defend its own institutional interests. That assumption has failed, and the presidency has been the beneficiary.
Anti-Corruption as a Political Instrument
Nigeria’s anti-graft agencies have never been fully insulated from politics, but the pattern under this administration has been striking in its clarity. Opposition figures under investigation have a way of finding their cases losing urgency shortly after they join the ruling party. Politicians who remain outside find their files acquiring fresh energy. The public draws the obvious conclusion, and the damage runs in both directions: genuine corruption cases lose credibility because they look like score-settling, and genuine political persecution hides comfortably behind the language of accountability. A country that badly needs to punish theft has managed to make the punishment of theft unbelievable.
Protest, Press and the Shrinking Space to Object
When Nigerians took to the streets over the cost of living, the response was not primarily a conversation about the cost of living. It was arrests, detentions, and in some cases charges of extraordinary severity levelled against very young protesters — charges that drew condemnation from across the political spectrum and were ultimately abandoned, but not before the message had been delivered. Journalists have been detained over reporting. The cybercrime law continues to be deployed against critics in ways its drafters claimed it never would be. None of this amounts to a formal ban on dissent. It does not need to. The point of an example is that it teaches everyone else.
The Referee Question Ahead of 2027
All of this converges on the election now approaching. The 2023 process left a substantial share of the electorate unconvinced, and the failure to deliver on promised electronic transmission of results did lasting harm to public confidence. Since then, Nigerians have watched the appointment of a new INEC leadership, contentious proposals around voter revalidation, and a timetable whose logic many find difficult to read as neutral. Democracy does not require that every voter like the result. It requires that they believe the count was honest. On present trends, there is no reason to assume that belief will be widely held in 2027 — and a disputed outcome in a country under this much economic strain is a genuinely dangerous prospect.
What Nigerians Should Be Voting On
It is tempting to treat institutional decay as an elite concern next to the price of rice, but the two are the same story. Nigerians cannot vote out bad economic management if the vote itself has been hollowed out. Every defection, every suspended assembly, every unasked question in the Senate reduces the number of ways citizens can force a correction. A president who inherits a country and leaves its checks and balances weaker than he found them has taken something from Nigerians that no subsidy or exchange-rate adjustment can return. In 2027, the question is not merely whether Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms worked. It is whether the country will still have the tools to answer that question freely the next time it is asked.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
