Beyond the ribbon: The questions Nigeria’s 2027 campaign must answer, By Dakuku Peterside

Nigeria’s 2027 campaign is already taking shape. Billboards will multiply. Commissioning ceremonies will assume the choreography of state occasions. Governors and ministers will present flyovers, airports, secretariats, stadiums, housing estates, and freshly paved roads as proof that government has worked. In the political marketplace, concrete photographs well: it gives achievement a shape, a price tag, and a ribbon to cut.

Nigeria needs infrastructure, and ambition requires no apology. Roads can connect farms to markets, airports can unlock commerce, and well-planned cities can raise productivity. The danger begins when visibility is mistaken for value—when the monument becomes more important than the life it was meant to improve.

A flyover is easy to display. A child who can read because her teacher was trained, present, and properly supported is harder to put on a billboard. A grand hospital can be named and unveiled; a ward-level clinic that quietly prevents maternal deaths rarely commands a live broadcast. Drainage that keeps a neighbourhood dry, safe water that prevents disease and sanitation that restores dignity are almost politically invisible. Yet these are often the public investments that matter most.

The coming campaign must therefore force one question into the open: what should count as successful government? The answer cannot be the number of contracts awarded, structures commissioned or kilometres announced. Government must be judged by whether people became safer, healthier, more capable, more productive, and more dignified.

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Election seasons reward what might be called commissioning politics: development reduced to projects that can be branded, televised, and converted into campaign material. But a ceremony proves only that a structure exists. It does not prove that the structure solves the right problem, serves enough people, works reliably, or can be maintained.

The fundamental questions begin when the cameras leave. Does the road connect productive communities or merely beautify an already privileged corridor? Is the new secretariat improving public service, or housing the same inefficiency in a more expensive building? Can the hospital recruit staff, power equipment, and stock medicines? Is there a recurrent budget for the airport after the inaugural flight? A project without purpose, operation and maintenance is not transformation. It is an unfinished sentence.

This matters even more because states now command greater fiscal space. Higher allocations following the removal of subsidies and foreign exchange reforms have expanded both opportunity and responsibility. Fiscal federalism cannot remain a quarrel about how much money leaves Abuja. It must become a compact about what states deliver. More resources must produce more measurable public value.

The same discipline must govern accountability. Nigeria’s deeper problem is not simply a shortage of projects, but a surplus of announcements and a deficit of execution. Projects are budgeted, funded, abandoned, and rediscovered in another election cycle. Transparency reforms have improved the publication of budgets, audited accounts, and procurement records in many states, but disclosure is only the threshold. Citizens should know not merely what was spent, but what worked; not merely what was completed, but what remains operational; not merely the contract value, but the value delivered to the public.

Basic education reveals the poverty of a construction-only idea of government. Building classrooms matters, but a classroom without a competent teacher, books, water, toilets, electricity, and measurable learning is only partially a school. Nigeria’s learning crisis is an economic emergency unfolding slowly. Children who cannot read, reason, calculate or solve problems today will enter tomorrow’s labour market already excluded from much of its opportunity.

The meaningful education scorecard for 2027 is therefore not how many blocks were erected. It is whether literacy and numeracy improved; whether teachers were present and effective; whether children attended, progressed, and completed school; and whether inspection produced correction. A governor who builds fewer classrooms but enables more children to learn may have delivered the greater legacy.

Healthcare demands the same change of lens. For most families, the health system is not the gleaming specialist hospital in the capital. It is the primary healthcare centre in the ward. It is where a pregnant woman should receive antenatal care, a child should be immunised, and an infection should be treated before it becomes an emergency. A beautiful clinic without staff, medicines, water, or electricity is architecture, not care.

Water and sanitation expose another contradiction. No city is modern if taps are dry, refuse chokes the streets, open defecation persists, and the first serious rain turns roads into rivers. Flood prevention is not emergency relief; it is urban governance. Drainage, wetland protection, waste collection, building code enforcement, and responsible land use are not peripheral environmental concerns. They are the hidden engineering of a functioning city.

Nowhere is the moral claim clearer than in the Niger Delta. Communities that have carried the environmental cost of Nigeria’s petroleum economy cannot be answered with intermittent clean-ups and ceremonial promises. Remediation must be measurable: what is contaminated, what is being restored, who is responsible, when the work will be completed and how livelihoods will recover. A federation cannot distribute oil revenues while socialising pollution among host communities. Ecological responsibility is part of fiscal justice.

Security governance, too, is vulnerable to theatre. After an attack, vehicles are purchased, checkpoints appear, and emergency meetings are convened. Some responses are necessary, but activity is not architecture. A serious state asks where crime concentrates, which roads, waterways or forests enable it, what patterns preceded attacks, how intelligence travels from communities and who is accountable for prevention and response.

The objective is not to react impressively to the last crime, but to prevent the next one. Crime reduction, safer highways, faster emergency response, and better community intelligence are outcomes; patrol vans, uniforms and meetings are inputs. Confusing the two leaves citizens paying an insecurity tax: farmers abandon fields, transporters avoid routes, shops close early and investors choose elsewhere.

Jobs are the other infrastructure Nigeria urgently needs. Young people do not chiefly require another empowerment slogan. They need skills, electricity, finance, connectivity, secure transport, and a regulatory environment in which legitimate enterprise can breathe. Government cannot employ everyone, but it can stop making enterprises unnecessarily difficult.

The best state for business is not necessarily the one with the largest investment summit or the thickest collection of memoranda. It is the state where land titles are processed, permits are predictable, informal levies are restrained, markets are safe, farms connect to buyers, and industrial sites have power. The credible economic scorecard counts businesses that survive and expand, jobs that endure and administrative barriers that disappear.

For most Nigerians, government is experienced in ordinary places: the school down the road, the ward clinic, the police station, the market, the refuse truck, the planning office, the drainage channel outside the house and the road to the farm. In these unglamorous encounters, trust is built or broken.

That trust cannot be repaired by louder propaganda. It returns when public revenue becomes reliable service; when a promised road is completed; when a teacher is present; when a clinic treats patients; when officials answer questions; when procurement can withstand scrutiny; and when failure has consequences. The electorate, media, civil society, professional bodies, and community leaders must therefore insist that every major campaign claim answer five questions: Why was this built? Who benefits? How was it financed? How will it be maintained? What measurable outcome has changed?

Nigeria should welcome leaders who think beyond a single electoral cycle and pursue transformative infrastructure projects. The choice is not between grand projects and basic services. It is between coherent development and vanity—between infrastructure that expands human possibility and monuments that advertise political power.

So, as campaigns compete in numbers—roads, bridges, buildings, kilometres, and billions—citizens should introduce a more demanding arithmetic. How many children learned to read? How many mothers received safe care? How many communities gained clean water? How many businesses grew? How many flood-prone neighbourhoods have become safer? How many abandoned projects were recovered? How much crime was prevented? How much easier did government make daily life?

These questions are harder because they demand outcomes rather than objects. Yet they are precisely the questions that can change the incentives of politics. Leaders build what voters reward. If ribbon-cutting remains our principal evidence of progress, governments will keep producing spectacles. If citizens reward learning, health, safety, opportunity, maintenance, and accountability, those neglected foundations will finally acquire political value.

That is the choice before Nigeria in 2027: to reward the spectacle of development or insist on its substance. A government may leave behind monuments and still leave its people behind. The true measure of development is not the height of what leaders build, but the height to which leadership lifts the people.

Dakuku Peterside is the author of Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.

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