“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” — Emma Goldman The Quadrennial Carnival of Hope The recent off-cycle governorship election in Osun State has ignited a familiar wave of euphoria across Nigeria. In fact, there is something almost ritualistic about Nigerian elections. Every four years, a country burdened by poverty, insecurity, unemployment and institutional distrust suddenly becomes consumed by politics. Families quarrel, friendships fracture, ethnic and religious identities harden, social media becomes a battlefield, and millions of citizens invest extraordinary emotional energy in the hope that one candidate’s victory will transform the country. The latest Osun governorship election has once again produced that familiar national euphoria. For many Nigerians opposed to the All Progressives Congress (APC), Osun is being interpreted as a possible warning shot ahead of 2027: proof, they argue, that the ruling party can be defeated if citizens unite around an alternative. That excitement is understandable. But it may also be dangerously misleading. The deeper problem confronting Nigeria is not simply who wins the next election. It is the system through which Nigerians select leaders, the incentives under which those leaders govern, and the social contract between government and citizens. Nigeria’s electoral cycle has become too short for the kind of national planning that development requires. Governments are constantly looking toward the next election. Long-term infrastructure projects, industrial policies, education reforms and institutional restructuring are subordinated to projects that can generate immediate political returns. Continuity becomes difficult because every administration wants to distinguish itself from its predecessor. The result is a country that repeatedly starts again. This is why the euphoria surrounding elections deserves scrutiny. Nigerians are repeatedly encouraged to believe that changing the occupant of political office is synonymous with changing the system. It is not. The global neoliberal problem is larger than Nigeria. This is not a uniquely Nigerian problem. Across the globe, the neoliberal democratic model is showing signs of profound crisis. In the United States, political polarisation has reached levels unseen since the Civil War era. In the United Kingdom, Brexit has exposed deep fissures in the body politic. Across Europe, popular alternatives are gaining ground, while traditional ruling parties are losing support. The social contract that once underpinned Western-style democracies—the understanding that citizens would trade certain “freedom” for security, welfare, and opportunity—is fraying at the edges. For decades, neoliberalism has promoted a political philosophy centred on limited government, market discipline, privatisation and reduced direct state intervention. Yet the experience of many countries has exposed a fundamental contradiction: markets can allocate resources efficiently in some circumstances, but they cannot by themselves provide the public goods, social cohesion and strategic direction required for national development. A state that retreats too far from its responsibility to provide healthcare, education, security, infrastructure and economic opportunity eventually weakens the very social contract that gives government legitimacy. The Neocolonial Question If the EU is, on this reading, a declining power increasingly deferential to Washington — and if Tinubu’s government has functioned as a reliable partner to European, and specifically French, interests in the region — then the hope that European election observers or diplomatic pressure from the European Commission to save Nigeria’s constitutional democracy ahead of the election in 2027 rests on a shaky premise. The EU, after all, was quick to congratulate Tinubu’s victory in 2023 even as its own election observation mission raised serious concerns about the process. Nigerian opposition figures who look to Brussels or Paris for validation, in this view, are appealing to an actor with every incentive to prefer continuity in Abuja over uncertainty. Nigerian politicians should not imagine that European election observers possess the power to rescue Nigeria’s democracy. International observers can document problems and make recommendations, but sovereignty ultimately rests with Nigerian institutions and, more importantly, with Nigerian citizens. The deeper argument, though, isn’t really about foreign patrons at all. It’s about whether unseating one party in favour of another, within a system critics regard as structurally unreformed, changes very much. Osun’s result may reflect genuine anti-incumbent sentiment and real organising on the ground — Governor Adeleke’s margin was not narrow. But the argument that a change of party alone, without a change in how leadership is selected, how wealth is distributed, and what the state owes its citizens betw
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