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.

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…