Every election season in Nigeria produces the same flood, and by now I know the shape of it before it arrives. The screenshots that are not screenshots of anything real. The video clips trimmed at the exact second before context would ruin them. The thread that begins with "I don't usually do this but" and ends with a claim so specific it sounds true, except nobody can find where it came from. I used to chase these things down one at a time, fact-checking in the replies like a man trying to empty a flooding room with a spoon. I have mostly stopped. Not because the lies stopped mattering, but because I realised the volume itself was the strategy, not a side effect of it.

All three camps do this now, and I will not pretend otherwise to protect anyone's feelings. The propaganda machinery around the leading candidates has become so sophisticated that distinguishing organic enthusiasm from coordinated messaging takes actual work, the kind most people on their phones at the end of a long day are not willing to do. So they absorb what confirms what they already wanted to believe, and the algorithm, sensing appetite, feeds them more of the same, and within a few months a person can find himself fully convinced of things that simply did not happen, because everyone in his feed agreed they did.

I watched this play out clearly a few days ago. There was a podcast appearance, a long sit-down interview where the host, known for asking the kind of pointed questions most Nigerian media figures are too polite or too compromised to ask, pressed one of the candidates on specifics. How would the electricity target actually be hit. What was the plan for the insurgency. The candidate's answer, more or less, was that he would not say. That Nigerians did not need to know the how, only to trust the man saying the what. It was a remarkable thing to hear from someone asking for the most powerful job in the country, and for a brief moment I thought the clip would do what clips like this are supposed to do, which is force a reckoning.

It did not. Within hours his supporters had reorganised the entire moment into a victory. He was being deliberately vague to protect strategy from his enemies. He was too principled to perform for cameras. He was playing chess while the host, and by extension anyone who found the answer thin, was playing checkers. I watched grown adults, smart people, people who in any other context would recognise a non-answer as a non-answer, perform increasingly elaborate gymnastics to avoid saying the plain thing, which is that their man had been asked a direct question and had refused to answer it.

This is the part of the noise that troubles me more than the propaganda itself. Propaganda is expected. Every campaign manufactures a version of its candidate designed to be loved. What troubles me is the refusal, among otherwise intelligent supporters, to ever once say the man got it wrong. Not the policy, not the vision, just this one specific evening, this one specific answer, this one specific failure to do the bare minimum of explaining himself. A movement that cannot tolerate a single admission of weakness in its leader is not a movement built on evaluation anymore. It is a movement built on protection, and protection eventually curdles into denial, and denial is how countries end up governed by men nobody around them was ever honest with.

I do not say this from a place of superiority, because I am certain my own side, whichever side that is taken to be on a given day, performs its own version of this dance when the cameras catch its man unprepared. Sifting through the noise is not a one-time act of cleverness, it is a discipline you have to keep choosing, conversation by conversation, clip by clip, because the moment you decide your candidate is beyond honest scrutiny, you have stopped being a citizen evaluating a leader and become a fan defending a brand.

What I try to hold onto, in the middle of all this manufactured certainty, is a simple and unglamorous habit. Watch the actual footage before reacting to the summary of it. Ask what a defender would have to ignore to keep defending. Notice when an answer is long but says nothing, because length is often where evasiveness hides. None of this is sophisticated. It does not require special access or insider knowledge. It only requires the willingness to be uncomfortable, sometimes, with what your own eyes show you.

The noise will not stop before the votes are counted. It will likely get louder. But somewhere underneath all the manufactured outrage and the manufactured loyalty, the actual answers a man gives, in his own voice, on his own terms, are still sitting there for anyone patient enough to look.