2027: Ballot or blood?

Résumé détaillé

Political violence in Nigeria is on the rise, with attacks on candidates and party members becoming common. This report details a pattern of unpunished cri Read More:…

Seventy days to an election, and already the campaign is beginning to look like a war.

Not a contest of ideas. Not a battle of manifestos. A battle for survival — where convoys are stoned, meetings are shot up, party offices are torched, and young men armed with machetes decide who can speak and where.

From Calabar to Benin, from Idanre to Enugu, the message is getting clearer and more chilling: in Nigeria, to campaign is now to risk your life.

If we cannot guarantee a candidate’s right to travel, to gather, to talk, what exactly are we guaranteeing the voter on election day?

In a report by the CLEEN Foundation, cited by the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room on November 5, Nigeria recorded 70 physical election-related incidents across 19 states and the Federal Capital Territory between January 1 and October 27. Twenty-seven people are dead. Not from an accident. Not from disease. From politics. From 20 distinct incidents of violence.

September alone recorded 14 incidents. Campaign rallies attacked. Party offices targeted. This was the month the country was told, yet again, that politics is not for the faint-hearted.

It came a day after the convoy of Peter Obi was attacked in Calabar, Cross River State, as he travelled to attend a town hall meeting. Suspected hoodlums, reportedly armed with machetes and sticks, descended on vehicles in the convoy around Watt Market, smashing windscreens.

Calabar is not an isolated case. It is not even the first time Obi has been attacked. And after each attack, the script is the same: government and security agencies promise to investigate. The investigations vanish. The attacks continue.

Why do these incidents keep happening? Because in Nigeria, political violence has become a crime without consequence.

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