The Minority Decides

Bola Tinubu became president of 230 million Nigerians with 8.8 million votes. Out of 93 million registered, fewer than one in ten chose the winner. Sifon Bassey, Inskriba editor and researcher, spent a research paper asking how the minority came to decide for the majority, and Jii walks through what he found.

Turnout fell from 43.7 percent in 2015 to 26.7 percent in 2023, the worst in our history, and Sifon's uncomfortable conclusion is that the real numbers were always this low; the technology just stopped inflating them. They get into why the insecure North still turns out while the calmer South stays home, the difference between not being able to vote and not bothering to, and why we may be the first generation building a voting culture to hand our children. Projections for 2027 included.

Read the research and the panel data at inskriba.com. How We Live is an Inskriba production.

Jii: Good day, and welcome back to Inskriba Conversations: How We Live. Today I'm with one of the editors at Inskriba, an editor and researcher. Do you want to introduce yourself before we jump in?

Sifon: My name is Sifon, from Akwa Ibom State. I work with Inskriba as an editor, a researcher and a writer. Apart from that I do operations work, compliance, KYC. I also work in tech, and I write to express how I feel about things. You may agree with me, you may not agree with me, but at least you read what I wrote. So that's a little about me.

Jii: For writing, especially because we mostly don't write or record in our local or mother tongue, is there a set of rules you must follow? Of course what you write must make sense, the sentences must be correct. But is there a professional governing guidance, say in Nigeria?

Sifon: I don't think there is, actually, because literature as a discipline is supposed to be something that allows people to express themselves, no matter how they choose to express themselves. So I don't think there is a particular set of rules. Just like you said: let the reader know what you are talking about. And the reader doesn't necessarily have to understand it from your own perspective; as long as they understand what is going on, I think that passes for good writing.

Jii: Can you write in any other language?

Sifon: Pidgin, yeah. I don't write in Ibibio, my mother tongue. Maybe in the future. Maybe in the future I'll add some elements of Ibibio to my writing, just a sentence or two.

Jii: Do you think it affects your writing, your expression? Or do you think you would express certain things better if you were writing in it?

Sifon: I would, I would. But then I feel it would be very limiting for readers from other cultures, because if you take a particular sentence and put it in Google Translate, it may not give you the context of how I'm using it. But maybe in the future I could try.

Jii: Cool. Let's go into the policy research paper that you wrote. Do you want to give a brief overview before we jump in?

Sifon: The title of the paper is "Declining Participation, Shifting Registers: Voter Turnout Patterns in Nigeria's 2015, 2019, and 2023 Presidential Elections and Projections for 2027." What drove me to do this research is that I'd been looking at the numbers, and they did not make sense to me. We say we have over 230 million people. We have millions on the INEC register. We see continuous voter registration, everybody going to register, and then on election day you look at the numbers we get. So I wanted to see: is this a trend, or has it always been happening?

This research really opened my eyes, because I came out of it thinking that maybe, just maybe, we have not always been participating in elections in Nigeria in our numbers. That's my key takeaway.

Jii: Anything that has to do with voting or elections triggers more than just voting for Nigerians. It triggers more than just going to the polls. And yet, when you ask people randomly, "what's up with voting," they say it as if it's just voting. It's funny what it triggers in the group, but how trivially they take it individually. Even just reading your abstract: between 2015 and 2023 the turnout fell from 43.7% to 26.7%.

Sifon: The fall was really drastic. You would expect this kind of fall to happen over five or six or seven election cycles, or in an area where there's a crisis, people fighting, places like Sudan or the Congo where there's obvious crisis, or a country recovering from a coup and trying to go back to democracy. But we don't have those issues in Nigeria. In fact, if you go in depth, the people who came out to vote most in 2023 were in the North East and the North West, the areas with all the Boko Haram and banditry. They still came out in their numbers. But in the South, where there wasn't really any problem of banditry or terrorism, they had low numbers. And it has always been historically so for the South, because I think people in the South just feel other regions decide elections for them. There's this thing inside a lot of Nigerians who don't come out to vote: they think, if I don't come out, whoever they want will still get in.

Jii: So what is voting, and what does it mean? I don't mean the act of going to thumbprint. What does it mean for your country?

Sifon: Voting for a country is a referendum on the leadership: do we want this leadership to continue, or do we want them to step aside? That's what voting should mean. But voting in the Nigerian context means a lot of things. It is not always a referendum on the leadership. When you break it down, people vote for different things. This is something I always tell people online. People can vote for a candidate simply because the candidate is good-looking. They can vote for a candidate because he wore their favourite colour that day. When you bring it down to bigger issues: because he's from my tribe, because he's a Christian, because he's a Muslim, because he's a traditional worshipper. If you examine these people, you see that voting means different things to them at different times.

Jii: And that's why politicians segment people. They rally a base. And beyond that, whoever wins decides your future, literally.

Sifon: Yes, whoever wins decides your future. But in Nigeria, from this research, what I saw is that we always say the majority will decide the winner. In Nigeria, it's the minority that is deciding who leads the majority. How is it that out of 93 million people on the INEC register, only about 8.79 million voted for the current president? Less than 10% of the people on the register voted for him. That means the minority of Nigerians who came out made him president.

Jii: So from a registered base of 93.4 million, about 8 million decided who became president.

Sifon: Exactly. Only 8.79 million people voted for Tinubu for him to be president.

Jii: So the problem isn't even that people aren't registering. People are registering. They're just not voting.

Sifon: People are registering to vote. I think by the end of this continuous voter registration, the register should get to around 102, 103 million people. Bear in mind some may have double registrations, but let's say roughly 101 million on the register, and then on election day the total number of votes will be less than 26 million. He had 36.6% of the votes cast that day. He didn't even get the majority; he got the highest number, but the votes were divided among three candidates. That was about 9.4% of the total number of registered voters that he got. How do you lead a country this diverse when it's just a minority that puts you there? There's always going to be discontentment, a lot of people who obviously didn't want you but didn't come out to vote. So they'll be left complaining at everything you do. Even if you go to their house and feed them honey and milk, they'll say you're trying to kill them.

Jii: Which leads into the whole premise of the paper. You register to vote, but there's low voter turnout, and, like you said, they probably didn't want to. You said it's not that they didn't want to vote, it's that they already feel it doesn't count. We'll get to institutional distrust. So those people are part of the problem: people registering but not voting, or people already of voting age who never vote. Registering isn't enough; you actually need to carry out the civic duty. That's why I was asking what voting is, so we can draw the line from "I went to the polling booth" to "it determines your future for the next four years and beyond."

Sifon: There's something else I discovered: some people register just to have an extra identity document. For those who don't have a driver's licence or an international passport, the next means of identification is the voter's card, especially before the NIN became popular. And I don't think there's really voter suppression in Nigeria. Voter suppression would be knowing your election is going to hold, knowing that if you go out your vote will count, and still being stopped. With BVAS and IReV, even with one or two problems here and there, if you then decide not to go out, that's not suppression. That's voter apathy: you just don't want to vote. Now, if you go out to vote and your vote doesn't count, and you say "I'm not coming out again," that's when I'd call it disenfranchisement. I'm not saying there are no such cases.

Take me, for instance. The first time I ever went out to vote was in 2015. I'm standing in line, waiting under the sun, little drizzles start, and we don't have materials at our polling unit as at twelve o'clock on election day. You go online and see people posting results from their polling units, and you're standing there with no INEC officials in sight. They came in around two o'clock. I think that was the election where they had to extend voting hours to six or seven, because it was logistically bad. The 2015 election was really poor: some people didn't have materials on time, the card readers weren't working.

Jii: That was the first time for Buhari, the one that ousted President Goodluck Jonathan.

Sifon: Yes, Jonathan. The card reader wasn't working; you had to tap your voter's card three times on the reader for it to come on. That was the election where even the president's card didn't work and they had to redo it. As a first-time voter, when you experience that, you say maybe this process isn't for me, I'm not coming out again. That would qualify as disenfranchisement. But in 2019 the process was markedly better than 2015. Materials got to my polling unit on time, I went, I voted, I counted my votes. I even did a bit of work for one of those groups where you snap your polling-unit result and upload it, and they pay you five thousand. I got my five thousand that time. I used that money for suya.

Jii: It's part of civic involvement.

Sifon: Then 2023 was actually one of the easiest elections I'd voted in. Before I even got to my polling unit at eight o'clock, INEC was already there. I'm not saying it was the case for everybody, just my own case. We started voting, they set up the cubicles, we voted, they snapped it and uploaded it on IReV. I went on IReV and saw my results from my polling unit exactly the way it was. But that doesn't mean other people's results weren't manipulated. I saw some very questionable results where the total tally didn't match what was written.

So when you think about all this, you ask: why are people not turning out? And then you look at the numbers from 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015. In the era before the stringent voter verification and authentication protocols came in, we were having up to fifty-something percent in 2011, sixty-something million total voters. The number of votes would swing so much to the winning party. But when IReV and BVAS came into play, when you have to carry your voter's card to the polling unit, be accredited, and vote yourself, that's when the numbers started dwindling. That's what made me conclude that maybe we have not really been having so many people come out to vote. We'd just been having inflated numbers. Now we're seeing the real numbers staring us in the face. And the puzzle is: how do we get more people to come out on election day?

Jii: So is it rational for people to sit out and say it's best not to vote? Or is that laziness?

Sifon: It's a civic right, it's your franchise. You can choose to exercise it or not; nobody is going to come to your house and beat you. But it's a question of responsibility. Are we responsible enough for our society, for our country? When you come out to vote, you're saying: I'm responsible for my choice, and if my candidate becomes president tomorrow, I'm responsible for putting him there. And do we care enough to stand in the rain? You know how that January-February period is in Nigeria, a lot of rain. Are we brave enough to come out? And with the issue of violence, are we patriotic enough not to mind a few busted noses that might come through the process? When people factor all that in, they decide it's not worth it and stay home. That's what leads to people not coming out.

Jii: In section two, you talk about how there wasn't enough literature on the variables that shape voter turnout in Nigeria, which basically means there wasn't enough material for you to check what causes people to come out or not. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation, to start building it out. One thing that came to mind: we gained independence in 1960, became a republic in 1963, went through a series of coups, and officially returned to democracy in 1999. Before we move into the 2027 projections, I want to talk about section two, because this is a policy research paper and you were recommending policy changes. You talked about how most foundational literature on voter turnout was built on data from North America and Western Europe.

Sifon: Yeah.

Jii: It makes sense, because most of those countries are the ones that practise and push the ideology of democracy: fair, majority carries the vote. So I was thinking: aside from the literature and data, do you think one of our problems is that, let's face it, we're a very young nation when it comes to voting? We went through independence, a series of coups, a bloody civil war that lasted over two years, and then military rule with no end in sight, until somehow in 1999 we went back to civilian rule. You mentioned around 57%, and I thought that was the highest turnout we've ever seen.

Sifon: No, that was 52%. The high was in 2003, about 69%, I think, or 67%.

Jii: Okay. So where I'm going is: do you think this could be attributed to the style we're practising? A lot of people say democracy is not for us, it was imposed on us. So it's two questions in one. The style we practise is obviously something we learned from colonial masters. If you look at how we ruled ourselves before, in different segments or tribes, nobody was practising this style. We had a governing body that would decide for the people, a monarchy. I won't say it was working or not, but that was the culture. So could this whole voter-turnout issue be more cultural?

Sifon: Probably. I wouldn't want us to compare ourselves to democracies like the United States, which just celebrated 250 years of democracy. They have generations that grew up knowing to go out and vote on election day, and they passed it down, twenty, thirty generations down the line. We, in this generation, are the first who will pass it down to our kids: that they have to vote on election day. The first election I wanted to go and vote in, my grandmother, of blessed memory, warned me: don't go out to vote, they'll mistreat you, they may do this or that. That was what was passed down to them, the fear from military rule or the colonists. Now we're the ones who will pass down the opposite. So it's a growing culture. We can't really say it's what we're used to; it's what we're building.

Democracy in the US or Europe didn't just spring up from the ground. They were under monarchy too. The UK is a famous monarchy; the Danes, the Swedes, all historical monarchies. But they transitioned into democracy over time, and we've seen those institutions being built and strengthened over time. I predict that's what will happen to Nigeria. Building a democracy is a continuous process, built over time. Unfortunately, sometimes in our African clime a coup comes and crumbles everything like a pack of cards, and you have to start building again. But look at how our elections have progressed: from snatching ballot boxes, to the point where you now know that snatching a ballot box even harms your own candidate. So that stopped. Then it went into physical intimidation, and physical intimidation stopped working. Now the new trend is vote-buying: "we can't intimidate you, so how much for your vote?" And I think people are catching up. Some people will collect your money and still insist on voting for who they want. When you look at those things, you realise they built their culture over time, and we're building ours. By the grace of God we'll get there, where we have 50 million turn out, maybe one day 70 million. When I see election numbers in the US I'm always shocked. Eighty-six million people voted for Trump? That's crazy. We'll get there one day.

Jii: We'll get there one day. It's not as if every nation has it, and there's no one right way. Where I'm getting at is that at the end of the day, we need to do what's culturally fit for us. Even in the US, a section of people say the Electoral College is outdated. We saw it in the last two elections: the first one Trump won, that Clinton lost, she won the popular vote.

Sifon: Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.

Jii: So every system has its pros and cons. For us, maybe our own is peculiar, because we have so many cultures and backgrounds to consider. But if anything, this is the first step. You've really gone into primary and secondary data to look at what's really happening, because there's no way we can move forward without understanding what's happening. It's easy to say people aren't coming out because they don't feel secure, but like you said in this paper, the North, one of the least secure places in Nigeria, turns out in numbers, and the South, where it seems safer, doesn't. Enough of that. Let's go into 2027, because the election year practically determines how the year goes. Looking at 2023, that was our lowest ever.

Sifon: Worst ever.

Jii: And now the projection is between 22% and 28%, with the highest-ever voter registration, roughly 100 to 103 million registered. Do you want to dive into your projection of what 2027 looks like?

Sifon: I presented my projections in two scenarios. The first: if nothing changes, if everything remains the way it is now, where people feel their votes won't count, I believe we'll have lower numbers than 2023. Basically, if people have less trust in INEC than they have now, we'll get lower numbers. But if people have more trust, that INEC will make sure their vote counts, that materials will be waiting when they get to the polling unit, that what's announced at the collation centre matches what they saw at their unit, then we'll have at least, being generous, 38% turnout. But I don't see us getting above 40%, no matter the scenario.

Jii: One of the numbers you highlighted is that two-thirds of new registrants are under 35, a very young population. A lot of the youth are coming out, and a lot of the younger generation who couldn't vote last time will be able to now. Another interesting number: women outnumbered men in phase three.

Sifon: Yes, it's a growing trend. Our women will come out to vote. If you go to any polling unit in Nigeria, women will always outnumber the men. I've gone around polling units on election day: older women, market women. The reason they come is secondary; the women always seem to outnumber the men. So it's not surprising that we have more women registered in phase three than men. And people aged 18 to 35 having the highest number of new registrants is an expected trend. It's the same trend we'll see next time, as fresh eighteen-year-olds keep coming in to register. So the register keeps absorbing younger people. Eventually I'd say we'll get to a point where 80% of those registered are between 18 and 45. Hopefully that will inspire more numbers to turn out.

Looking at the numbers: students 35.9%, business owners 20.4%, farmers 18.3%. It's spread between students, workers and business owners. Will we see them turn out? Students account for 35.9% because people between 18 and 34 are probably university students, so obviously they account for that number. I think we're going to have more voters within this age bracket. But for a reversal in the trend, the new registrants have to vote more than the people already on the register. You're coming in to meet 101, 102 million fellow Nigerians. And maybe the young people who come out aren't up to 10 million, and that 10 million isn't voting for one candidate, it's split three ways. Then the older men and older women come out and add their numbers, split along their own lines. So whoever wins the election will probably come out with roughly 10 to 11 million. That's my projection: the winner will edge just above that, 10, 11, maybe 11.9 million. If the winner crosses 12 million, I'll be really surprised.

One more thing. If you look at the data of who's registering, the regions with notoriously low turnout, the South South and the South East, aren't having encouraging registration numbers either. Compare South East and South West, North East and North Central: the registration data doesn't add up for the South East and South South. That means those areas will still give us low numbers of votes.

Jii: I wanted to go into logistics for the next election. There's a whole other episode on the Electoral Act and the reforms, where someone will come and critique the policies that dictate how the next election will go. But for the logistics, does it seem encouraging?

Sifon: I won't use the registration process to judge the logistics. I'll use the off-cycle elections: Anambra, Ekiti, and next month the Osun State election. In those, we've seen INEC actually deliver on logistics. The Ekiti election was a masterclass for me; I barely saw people complaining that INEC wasn't at their polling unit or that BVAS or IReV wasn't working. And the Anambra election was free and fair. How you know an election is fair is by the litigation that follows: if someone was beaten, they know they were beaten, and there's no need to go to court. So in the off-cycle elections they've done well. But it's the scale of a presidential election that overwhelms them. When the presidential election happens on the same day as the Senate election, it gets overwhelming and you get logistical problems. I just hope the logistical problems in 2027 are reduced to as low as 2.5% or 3% across the polling units. If they can have a 2.5% logistics-failure rate, the election will be good. But if someone is waiting for election materials by 4 p.m. in a city like Port Harcourt or Enugu, imagine what's happening in the hinterlands. Then you know it's a failure. So I pray they don't have a lot of logistical problems.

Jii: One of my last questions, from your numbers: Yiaga Africa found that 76% of Nigerians still believe their votes can make a difference. So the belief is there, which is one of the reasons you say this low turnout isn't disenfranchisement, because people still believe. And most said they intend to vote in 2027.

Sifon: Yes.

Jii: We don't know how people answer surveys, and things change, but it's encouraging if 76% say they'll vote. And looking at the last election, on both sides, the winners and the losers, they didn't expect it to be that close. The ruling party didn't expect it, and the opposition didn't know they were that close. Hopefully that carries on, because one consequence of a keenly contested election is that whoever wins knows the opposition is that close, which changes the pressure on the government of the day. It's interesting to see that 76%, because at some point the chorus was "there's no need to vote, whoever's going to win will win, my vote doesn't count." But that culture is changing.

Sifon: It's changing. One thing I'd say: the 2027 election won't be the same as the 2023 election in terms of who people choose and how they vote, because there's a difference between a new government and a referendum on the current one. In a new government, everybody's hustling to get in. With the current government, some people have seen, "okay, maybe this guy isn't that bad," and decide to vote to continue. Let me give an example. I have a friend, I'll describe him vaguely, who was preaching candidate B to me, saying this guy is good, he'll do this and that. Then candidate C won. And today he tells me: this project is passing through my village; if I vote for somebody else, he may come and stop it, so for that reason this guy has to continue. So his mindset has changed. Issues like this will play out. And messaging matters. Imagine someone who hasn't voted before, and someone tells him, "you know this project happening in your village today? If this other man wins, they'll stop it." He says, "no, I'm going to come out and vote for this person." That's another dynamic that goes into messaging. So in terms of how the votes are spread and how people turn out, it's going to be a different election from January 2023.

Jii: No two elections are the same, really. That's why politicians try, through messaging and a whole campaign period, to put out the right message to convince different groups. If you had to sum up your whole policy research paper in a few sentences, what would that be?

Sifon: I'd say this paper is part of the academic literature that will be used in the future. I said in the paper that we don't have enough documents and academic work to study voter patterns. I think this is just one of many that will be done or referred to in the future. I also believe more work needs to be done. We've seen the problem, we know the solutions, we need to implement them. We need to get more people out. And we need to study the problem more, because an in-depth study would reveal issues we don't see right now, and we'd be able to solve them at the units where they occur, one by one, to get more people to turn out. So I hope this paper acts as a platform that inspires more research in this field.

One thing I noticed: like you said, 76% of people from that survey say they'll vote. What happens between the point of registration and when they vote, or when they don't? That needs to be studied. When we study it we'll know: maybe the person moved, or travelled, or fell sick, or had a change of mind. I hope in the future we'll be able to understand what happens.

Jii: I agree. Thank you for coming on. This is a series of three: you, and another writer from Inskriba, Dan, is going to come on and talk about the policy change, and then we bring both of you together. And again, we're not here to profile solutions. Like you said, hopefully this serves as a foundation for wherever we're trying to build as a country. Now when people search for whether anybody has done anything on declining participation, there's your research on Inskriba to start from. One thing we didn't touch on, and I know we're out of time, is the recommendations for these institutions. I'd like you to quickly go through them.

Sifon: My recommendations are mostly on INEC, because the National Assembly will always bring legislation. INEC should ensure they become more transparent and more credible, so people trust them. They need to make Nigerians know: on election day you'll come out, you'll vote, your vote will count, and what you voted for is what you'll see on IReV. That's the major recommendation, more transparency, so people believe in them more. Then the National Assembly needs to give us more serious laws. We're living in an era where everything is electronic; we should slowly move away from doing everything with EC8 forms and all those things used to collate elections. And for civic societies like Yiaga and the others, we need to study more and get the message out: let people know their vote will count, come out to vote. With these little adjustments we could have more people coming out on election day. For academic institutions too, we need more study, on the behavioural gap between voter registration and election day, on why people in the South East aren't coming out even with a popular South Easterner on the ballot. We need to study all of that.

Jii: We'll put the link to this research in the description. Nigerians should read; everybody should read more, even one or two pages a day. It helps. Reading the comment section of social media is not reading; you actually need to read. And I like how you ended the paper. It says: the 2027 election offers a choice, treat their investment as urgent, or continue along a trajectory that has already produced a president elected by fewer than one in ten of his country's registered voters. That says a lot. Voting is not just thumbprinting or confirming that your card works; it determines your future for at least ten, fifteen years. I do hope people come out to vote, and that this conversation continues. Thank you, Sifon, for coming on, and thank you for writing this.

Sifon: Thank you, thank you for having me.

Jii: We'll see you next time.