By Boma Lilian Braide (Esq.)
In any healthy and functioning democracy, an approaching election season should be a time of optimism and civic renewal. A moment when Communities gather to debate ideas, evaluate progress, hold candidates accountable, and exercise the foundational right of choosing who leads them. In Nigeria, however, the journey towards the ballot box triggers a completely different and deeply disturbing transformation. As political campaigns gain momentum, a cruel and recognisable pattern emerges: highways turn treacherous, remote villages erupt in gunfire, and mass abductions of schoolchildren, market traders, and ordinary travellers hijack the National conversation. It is as though an invisible switch is thrown, transforming the country into a theatre of managed terror. This is not conjecture. It is a pattern, and patterns, by definition, are not accidental.
The question that demands an honest answer is not simply why Nigeria suffers from insecurity. It is why that insecurity escalates with such predictable precision at moments of maximum political significance. Why does the security architecture of the most populous nation on the African continent appear to buckle at the very moment its leaders are on their knees before citizens, soliciting votes? As political campaigns intensify, kidnapping cases multiply. The national conversation, which should centre on inflation, failing infrastructure, broken promises, and the reckless management of public resources, is instead consumed by grief, fear, and desperate crowdfunding for ransom payments. While citizens are submerged in this survival crisis, the political class quietly manoeuvres: contentious policies are pushed through without scrutiny, state resources are redistributed along patronage lines, and controversial electoral arrangements are settled behind closed doors. The terror in the hinterlands functions as a deliberate smokescreen, forcing the public to accept elementary security responses as extraordinary governance rather than the constitutional obligation they have always been.
Then, with a disturbing consistency, the violence subsides. When elections are concluded, certificates of return are issued, and new administrations are sworn in, the storm miraculously abates. Bandits retreat into the forests. School raids slow to a trickle. A temporary, fragile calm returns to communities that had been burning weeks earlier. Ordinary Nigerians are left standing in the ruins of their peace, asking the question that no one in authority has the courage to answer: is this a coincidence, or is it a contract?
To understand this riddle, one does not need a degree in political science or international security. The ordinary citizen only needs to look at history and connect the dots.
The historical record is not kind to those who prefer coincidence. In April 2014, as the country was preparing for what would become the most fiercely contested presidential election in its post-military history, 276 schoolgirls were abducted from their dormitories in Chibok, Borno State. The event did not merely shock the world; it fundamentally rewrote Nigeria’s political landscape, collapsing public confidence in the government of the day and making national security the decisive currency of the 2015 campaign. Then, in February 2018, barely twelve months before the 2019 general elections, another mass abduction struck; over 100 girls were seized from their school in Dapchi, also in Borno State. Leah Sharibu, the one student reported to remain in captivity on account of her faith, became a symbol not only of private anguish but of catastrophic state failure.
Now, as Nigeria turns toward the 2027 electoral cycle, mass abductions have flared again with surgical regularity, striking schools and farming communities across Kaduna, Niger, and parts of the South West, including communities in Oyo State that had no meaningful prior history of large-scale banditry. Three different administrations. Three different parties in control of federal power. Three different security architectures. One repeating script. The only constant across all three periods is the approaching election.
The political establishment’s preferred explanation for this violence is familiar: these are impoverished, poorly educated men surviving on the margins of a failing economy, driven to crime by the absence of alternatives. That explanation is not entirely false, but it is deliberately incomplete. If these criminal networks were simply desperate men improvising their survival in the bush, they would not consistently demonstrate the logistical coordination, operational intelligence, and political timing required to stage mass abductions involving dozens or hundreds of captives at precisely the moments of greatest national vulnerability. That level of coordination does not emerge from desperation alone. It requires organisation, communication infrastructure, and either extraordinary luck or something far more troubling such as an advance knowledge of when and where the state will choose to look away.
The hard truth is that insecurity in Nigeria has long ceased to be merely a breakdown of law and order. It has become a form of political currency, circulated within the broader economy of power. For political actors seeking to unseat an incumbent, a spectacular security failure delivers the most emotionally devastating argument for change, condensing complex governance debates to a single question that no campaign slogan can deflect: can your government keep our children safe? For others pursuing different objectives, a sustained climate of terror in specific regions provides a mechanism for suppressing voter turnout, driving communities away from polling units and creating the conditions under which results can be manipulated at leisure. Both motivations, discrediting an incumbent and neutralising opposition stronghold, converge on the same instrument: manufactured chaos. The ordinary Nigerian, in every case, absorbs the full cost.
Consider the parent in a rural village who has sold farmland, sacrificed livestock, and borrowed money from every relative just to pay ransom to faceless criminals. Consider the thousands of displaced families who cannot return to their ancestral homes because their safety has been traded away for political leverage. These are the human casualties of a system that treats insecurity as a bargaining chip.
Nothing exposes the cynicism of this arrangement more starkly than what happens on election day. During the peak of a kidnapping crisis, security authorities offer familiar explanations such as; insufficient personnel, inadequate vehicles, limited fuel, thin intelligence coverage. Communities are counselled to be patient, to cooperate with ongoing operations, to trust in a process that visibly cannot or will not protect them.
Then election day arrives, and overnight the Nigerian state locates resources sufficient to deploy hundreds of thousands of police officers, soldiers, and civil defence personnel across the country, tasked with protecting ballot boxes, party agents, and political VIPs with an efficiency that the security crisis somehow never inspired. The message this sends to the parent in a rural local government who sold farmland and borrowed from every willing relative to pay a ransom is as clear as it is devastating: in the hierarchy of Nigerian state priorities, a piece of paper inside a plastic ballot box carries more weight than a living child inside a rural classroom. No government communiqué has ever stated this openly. The evidence of budgets and operational deployment patterns states it plainly enough.
It is worth dwelling on what sustained, manufactured fear does to a citizenry, because the political benefits extend well beyond any individual election cycle. A society kept in a permanent state of emergency loses the mental and emotional capacity for sustained political engagement. When families are crowdfunding ransoms on social media, when communities are displaced into camps, when the evening news is consumed by abduction tallies rather than policy scrutiny, citizens cannot simultaneously interrogate why education budgets are chronically underfunded, why the naira has shed a devastating share of its value, or where the billions allocated for rural security infrastructure have quietly vanished. Fear also fractures communities along existing fault lines. When people are traumatised, they retreat into ethnic and religious identities as their primary sources of protection and solidarity. Political actors who have every incentive to prevent the emergence of cross-ethnic, issue-based coalitions understand this dynamic with precision. Terror creates the conditions under which citizens vote defensively rather than aspirational, which is exactly the kind of voting behaviour that entrenches patronage politics and makes genuine programmatic governance permanently impractical.
The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, one of Nigeria’s most formidable legal and civic voices, captured this dynamic with the directness that defined his life’s work. His much-quoted observation that any insecurity which persists beyond 48 hours carries the fingerprints of state permissiveness is not hyperbole. It is an accurate characterisation of how security crises are sustained, not because the state lacks the capacity to address them, but because their resolution does not always serve the interests of those who control the levers of state.
The solution to this cycle will not come from expecting its beneficiaries to dismantle it voluntarily. That is not how entrenched political systems reform themselves. Change comes from below, when citizens alter the terms on which they engage with political power. As the 2027 campaign season accelerates, Nigerians must collectively refuse the politics of distraction.
When a security crisis erupts, the civic response must not be ethnic blame, partisan defensiveness, or the uncritical celebration of any belated rescue operation. It must be institutional accountability, pursued without sentiment such as; who was mandated to protect this community, what resources were allocated for that purpose, where did those resources go, and who will answer for the failure in specific and measurable terms?
Community-driven security advocacy structures must be built and sustained independently of the electoral calendar. Citizens must insist that the intensity of security deployment visible during party primaries and inauguration ceremonies becomes the baseline standard for protecting public schools, rural markets, and interstate highways every week of every year, not only during the days when ballot papers are being handled. Candidates seeking office in 2027 must face questions that campaign rhetoric cannot dissolve: What is your concrete framework for community policing in ungoverned spaces? How will you audit the financial systems that have turned ransom payments into a multi-billion nairashadow economy? What mechanisms will ensure that security budgets reach operational units rather than disappearing through procurement corruption? These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum standard of seriousness that the moment demands.
The hundreds of Nigerians currently in captivity across forests in the North West, North Central, and elsewhere did not disappear in a security vacuum. They disappeared in an environment shaped by years of deliberate underinvestment, institutional neglect, and the quiet tolerance of criminal networks whose continued existence has served identifiable political purposes. As the next electoral cycle gathers pace, the political class must be denied the comfort of allowing these human tragedies to fade from public consciousness between news cycles. Every candidate must be pressed on the specific fate of those still unaccounted for. Every security budget must be scrutinised against verifiable operational outcomes. Every claim of helplessness from those who simultaneously demonstrate state capacity the moment their personal interests require it must be met with the full weight of the evidence against them.
True political leadership is not measured by the size of a campaign convoy or the noise of a rally crowd. It is measured by whether the most vulnerable citizens of a country can send their children to school in the morning with a reasonable expectation of seeing them return safely in the evening. By that measure, successive administrations have failed, and the citizens of this country are entitled to say so clearly, persistently, and at the ballot box. The forests must be cleared. The captives must come home. The political economy of manufactured terror must be broken. Not for the credit of any party or candidate, but because the people of Nigeria deserve a country in which their lives are treated as the priority on every day of the year, and not merely on the days when their votes are required.
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