Democracy does not collapse only when ballots are stolen. It collapses when truth is suffocated and evidence is rendered irrelevant. In Nigeria’s electoral arena, disinformation has become both strategy and spectacle, a parallel power structure that shapes outcomes before votes are cast. What should be a solemn civic exercise has degenerated into a polluted information marketplace where facts are optional, accountability is evasive, and deception enjoys institutional protection. The result is a democracy loud with noise but thin in legitimacy, where citizens doubt outcomes even before they are announced.
This crisis did not emerge by accident. Disinformation thrives in Nigeria because political leadership has repeatedly abandoned the ethical tenets that sustain democratic order. False narratives are not merely tolerated; they are engineered, amplified, and deployed with precision. Fabricated claims race ahead of verified results. Ethnic and religious anxieties are deliberately weaponized to fracture national cohesion. Digital platforms, weakly regulated and aggressively exploited, have become theatres of psychological warfare where virality outweighs verification and influence substitutes for integrity. In such an ecosystem, truth is not defeated by counterargument but buried beneath repetition and strategic silence.
The human cost is most evident among Nigeria’s youth. Hyperconnected yet deeply disillusioned, young citizens approach elections armed with smartphones but starved of credible information. Many no longer ask whether their votes will count; they assume they will not. Participation retreats into cynicism, protest voting, or total withdrawal. This erosion is fatal. A democracy that loses the faith of its youth forfeits its future. When misinformation becomes normalized, civic engagement decays into performative outrage or resigned apathy, neither of which can sustain a republic.
At the national level, disinformation acts as a corrosive solvent, dissolving the fragile bonds of shared citizenship. Elections should reaffirm a collective commitment to rules, institutions, and peaceful competition. Instead, they deepen suspicion between regions, religions, and generations. Every unchecked lie, every opaque declaration, every delayed clarification reinforces the belief that power, not process, determines outcomes. Trust once broken does not heal easily. A nation cannot indefinitely survive on contested truths and institutional evasions.
As the 2027 elections approach, Nigerian citizens are not merely preparing to vote; they are bracing themselves. Anticipation is shaped less by hope than by anxiety. Many expect not clarity but confusion, not persuasion but propaganda. Long before campaign posters dominate public space, disinformation has already begun its rehearsal, testing slogans, probing fault lines, and conditioning the public to distrust whatever evidence eventually emerges. When citizens expect deception as a default feature of elections, democratic trust collapses even before the first ballot is cast.
For young Nigerians, 2027 stands as a crossroads between engagement and abandonment. The expectation of a familiar cycle; viral lies, elite moral evasions, selective outrage, and post election fatigue; has numbed political imagination. When anticipation is defined by inevitability rather than possibility, participation becomes symbolic at best. A generation that should be mobilized by stakes is instead anesthetized by predictability.
Restoring democratic trust before 2027 requires more than fact checking slogans or digital literacy campaigns. It demands moral leadership willing to submit to evidence, institutions prepared to communicate with clarity and speed, and legal consequences for those who deliberately poison the information space. Disinformation is not free speech; it is a civic crime against the collective future. If lies are allowed to set the tone for 2027, the election will be lost long before votes are counted. Nigeria’s democracy will survive only if evidence is defended with courage and truth is allowed to speak louder than power.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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