By Nnaoke Ufere, PhD
I have followed our Nigerian pundits’ analysis of this week’s US midterm elections, and it is embarrassing. Column after column, panel after panel, they all say the same thing: Republicans lost because Trump did this, Democrats won because their candidates did that. They are acting as if the lesson for Nigeria is to copy American campaign tactics: better messaging, better candidates, better voter turnout operations.
That is not our problem.
Nigerian candidates already know how to win. They buy our votes and we sell them. They mobilize their ethnic and regional base. They get the pastors and imams to tell the faithful, like sheep, who to vote for. When that is not enough, they hire thugs to intimidate voters and rig the count.
But rigging works best against a divided, apathetic or bought electorate. In 2015, we proved that a determined and united electorate can beat even a sitting president. Since then, we have gone back to selling our votes.
Here is the lesson the pundits keep missing. American voters are smart. Nigerian voters are among the dumbest in the world. I will not soften that, because softening it is how we got here.
Look at what Americans just did. They watched the party in power, judged its record on the cost of living, corruption and a sluggish job market, decided they did not like it, and voted against it. Many of them had voted for that same party two years ago. They did not owe it their loyalty. They owed it a verdict, and they delivered one. That is what a rational, mature electorate does. It knows what it wants, it measures the people in office against that, and it votes its interests.
Now measure the APC the same way. Fuel, food, rent, medicines, school fees and transport are beyond the reach of ordinary Nigerians. There is no electricity. Bandits and kidnappers roam freely. Graduates have no jobs. Corruption goes on as usual. Americans punished the Republican Party for a fraction of this.
So here is the only question that matters for every Nigerian voter: Are you better off today than you were when Tinubu and his APC took office? If the answer is no, why would you vote for them again?
Yet history tells us they will. Let the APC share money and play the tribe and religion card in the final days of the campaign, and Nigerians will hand it four more years. Why?
Because the Nigerian voter never delivers a verdict. He never judges a record. He trades his vote for a bag of rice, then spends four years complaining about the price of rice. For a few naira notes, he returns incompetent politicians who have stolen from him for years rather than risk voting for strangers who might actually fix the country. Then he curses the politicians, forgetting that he put them there and will put them there again.
And our politicians know it. They know four years of hardship can be erased with four days of cash and tribal appeals. They even gave vote buying a respectable name: “stomach infrastructure.” So they do not bother to perform. They steal, they fail, and they win again.
That is why American politicians fear their voters and ours do not. Fail an American electorate and it throws you out, as it just did. Fail a Nigerian electorate and it re-elects you, provided you remember to pay. How dumb is that?
So stop telling Nigerians what the Republicans and their leaders got wrong. It is irrelevant. The only lesson from America is this: a country gets the leaders its voters are smart enough to demand. Until Nigerian voters stop voting with their stomachs, their tribes, their regions, and their religions, no pundit, no election tribunal, and no foreign example will save us. The thieves in Abuja did not steal our future. We sold it to them, one vote at a time, at the polling unit.
