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As Nigeria slowly turns its gaze toward the 2027 general elections, a new kind of conversation is emerging, one that is less concerned with which candidate will emerge victorious and more preoccupied with whether ordinary citizens, especially the young, will have any meaningful say in how the country is governed. This was the central theme of a recent X Spaces session organized by ROUNDCHECK in collaboration with Civic Play and FactCheckHub, titled “MIL 2026: Strategies for Meaningful Youth Participation in Nigeria’s 2027 Elections.” It was not the usual political rally or a platform for partisan cheerleading. Instead, it was a sober, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable conversation about the state of Nigerian democracy, the fading hopes of its youngest citizens, and the quiet crisis of political disengagement that has been building for years. The numbers alone are enough to make anyone pause. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, voter turnout in Nigeria has been falling steadily and alarmingly: 43.65 percent in 2015, 34.75 percent in 2019, and a dismal 26.71 percent in 2023. These are not just statistics in a report. They represent millions of Nigerians, many of them young, who decided that showing up to vote was not worth their time, energy, or hope. The discussion did not treat this as a simple case of laziness or indifference. Rather, the speakers argued, it is a symptom of deeper structural failures: financial barriers, party systems that are hostile to new entrants, a pay-to-play culture that makes electoral office a game for the wealthy, and a flood of misinformation that makes it nearly impossible for citizens to trust the process. If the 2027 elections are to be different, these are the issues that must be confronted, not with slogans, but with strategy, organization, and sustained political education.
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One of the recurring themes of the conversation was the uncomfortable gap between young people’s ability to mobilize and their ability to actually influence decisions and institutions over time. There is no doubt that Nigerian youth can mobilize. They have proven it again and again, most memorably during the 2020 #EndSARS protests, when a generation took to the streets, occupied public spaces, and forced the conversation around police brutality and state violence onto the national agenda. It was a moment of remarkable courage and unity, and it showed what collective action can achieve in the short term. But as Samuel Faseyitan, President of the Association of Campus Journalists at Obafemi Awolowo University, pointed out, unity and protest are not enough. The energy that fills a street on one day must somehow be converted into the patient, often unglamorous work of building political influence over years. That means showing up at party meetings, understanding how budgets are made, learning how policies are shaped, and holding leaders accountable long after the cameras have gone. Faseyitan stressed that civic participation should extend far beyond protests and election campaigns. It should be embedded in the daily life of communities, in student unions, in local advocacy groups, and in the slow, steady process of organizing people around shared interests. Without that deeper engagement, he warned, young people risk becoming a powerful force that is easily scattered, a voice that is loud in moments of crisis but silent when it is time to make decisions. The problem, in other words, is not that young people do not care. It is that their care is often not structured into something durable enough to challenge the networks of money and power that dominate Nigerian politics.
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Then there is the machinery of exclusion itself, the set of institutional and financial barriers that make it so difficult for young aspirants to enter the political arena. The Not Too Young to Run constitutional amendment of 2018 was celebrated as a landmark achievement, and rightly so. It lowered the minimum age requirements for several elective offices and opened the door, at least on paper, to a generation that had long been locked out of formal politics. But a door that is open on paper can still be almost impossible to walk through in practice. As the speakers at the event noted, high nomination fees, patronage networks, godfatherism, and entrenched party structures continue to block young candidates before they even have a chance to present their ideas. Andrew Oaikhena, Stakeholder Manager at BudgIT, argued that meaningful youth participation requires young people to move beyond simply becoming voters or campaign workers and to insert themselves into the decisions that shape governance. That is easier said than done. The European Union Election Observation Mission’s final report on Nigeria’s 2023 general elections found that high nomination fees appeared to discourage youth candidacy, and while younger candidates did feature more prominently in some legislative contests, their representation remained strikingly low in higher-profile offices like the Senate and governorships. This is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a political culture in which longevity, wealth, and connections often matter more than ideas, competence, or energy. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to encourage more young people to show interest in politics. It is to ask hard questions about whether political parties and electoral structures are actually willing to create realistic opportunities for them to compete. And if those structures are not willing, then the task becomes finding ways to transform them from the outside.
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Not everyone agrees, however, on how young people should organize politically or whether being young is, by itself, a sufficient basis for political action. Femi Adeyeye, a public affairs analyst, challenged one of the comfortable assumptions that often goes unexamined in these conversations: the idea that youth automatically translates into a distinct political outlook or that a young candidate is naturally best suited to represent other young people. “Being young is not a political ideology,” Adeyeye said, and in that simple sentence he captured something important. Age alone does not determine a candidate’s program, priorities, or commitment to the public good. A young politician can be just as conservative, just as self-serving, just as detached from ordinary people as an older one. Are there young people in Nigeria who are deeply committed to justice, transparency, and good governance? Certainly. But there are also young people who are simply ambitious and willing to use whatever tools are available to get ahead. The distinction matters. Adeyeye called for young people to think beyond their shared age group and to consider the ideas, organizing structures, and political alternatives they want to advance. He also criticized the habit of talking about political change without building the organizations and relationships needed to achieve it. Change does not happen just because a group of activists gathers in a hotel room and issues a communiqué. It happens through the often-boring work of building alliances, listening to communities, understanding their needs, and developing a political platform that reflects something more than the aspirations of a narrow elite. He was also emphatic about the need to organize with affected communities rather than assuming that activists or political actors can speak on behalf of others without their full participation. The idea that a small group of well-meaning people can represent the voiceless without actually giving them a seat at the table is exactly the kind of paternalism that has alienated many citizens from politics in the first place.
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Even if the political environment becomes more open, there remains another obstacle that is often harder to see and more difficult to fight: misinformation. Nurudeen Akewushola, a senior fact-checker at FactCheckHub, warned that false claims and distorted narratives pose a serious challenge to meaningful political participation, particularly when they shape how citizens understand elections, political institutions, and the value of their votes. In a country where trust in institutions is already fragile, misinformation can act as a kind of acid, dissolving whatever confidence remains and convincing people that participating in the electoral process is a waste of time. Claims that votes do not count, that rigging is inevitable, or that all politicians are the same are repeated so often that they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe that their votes do not matter, they stay home, and when they stay home, the system becomes even less representative and even less accountable. Akewushola urged young people to avoid becoming sources or distributors of false information, noting that sharing a sensational rumor or an unverified claim is not harmless. It is a political act with real consequences. He placed media literacy and fact-checking alongside other forms of civic education, arguing that young people need to know not only how to participate in politics but also how to assess political claims, verify information, and distinguish evidence from manipulation. This is especially important in the age of social media, where false narratives can spread faster than corrections and where attention is the currency that drives engagement. The challenge of misinformation is not simply about individual gullibility; it is about the information environment in which Nigerian citizens make their political choices. Strengthening democratic participation, therefore, cannot be separated from the urgent task of building a more informed and critical public. A citizen who cannot tell the difference between a credible source and a rumor-driven campaign is a citizen who is easy to manipulate and easy to discourage.
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As the conversation drew to a close, there was no pretense that any of this is easy or that the road to 2027 will be smooth. The challenges are enormous: a political culture shaped by money, a party system that resists open competition, a citizenry battered by years of poor governance, and an information landscape that too often rewards lies over truth. And yet, the speakers did not retreat into cynicism. Their message was more demanding than that. It was a call for sustained engagement, for the kind of patient, long-term political work that does not produce immediate headlines but which is essential for real change. It was a call for stronger civic education, for inclusive party structures, for responsible information sharing, and for young people to begin now, not in 2026 or 2027, to build the organizations, networks, and relationships that will allow them to exercise genuine political influence. The conversation made clear that the goal is not simply to get young people to vote. That is only the beginning. The real goal is to create a democracy in which their participation matters, in which their concerns are taken seriously, and in which their voice can shape not only elections but the decisions that are made between elections. Nigeria’s young people are not absent from politics because they do not care. Many of them are absent because they have concluded, with reason, that the system does not work for them. Rebuilding that trust will take more than slogans. It will take real reform, real opportunism for new entrants, and a commitment from civil society, media, and ordinary citizens to do the long, difficult work of democratic renewal. The 2027 election is not a distant event. It is a test. And the question, as one participant in the discussion put it, is not whether young people will participate. They already are participating, in their own ways, through their conversations, their protests, their digital activism, and their refusal to be silent. The question is whether that participation will count for something, whether it will be translated into influence, and whether the young people who care so deeply about the future of Nigeria will finally be given a real seat at the table, not as spectators, but as architects of the society they want to build.