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Abia State Governor Alex Otti stood before one of Nigeria’s most distinguished gathering of minds Thursday and said the quiet part loudly: the country’s economic crisis is not a mystery to be solved but a consequence to be owned, and the citizens who have disengaged from the political process bear more responsibility for that consequence than they are comfortable admitting.
Delivering the 2026 annual lecture of The Niche at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos, Otti built his argument around a single statistic that he said should alarm every Nigerian who claims to love the country. Voter turnout across the last five general elections has fallen from 57 percent in 2011 to less than 30 percent in 2023. “So what that means is that just about three of us out of 10 decide who governs us,” he said. A nation of over 200 million people, its leadership determined by a fraction of its adults, and then the same adults wondering why the leadership is what it is.
“As stakeholders in the Nigerian project, we ought to be worried,” he said. “The majority of our compatriots are increasingly shying away from participation in the political arena.”
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The connection Otti drew between electoral disengagement and economic decline was not rhetorical. It was causal, and he stated it as such. When citizens withdraw from the political process, accountability disappears. When accountability disappears, leaders operate without consequence. When leaders operate without consequence, institutions decay, investment retreats and poverty deepens. The chain is not complicated, and Otti did not dress it up. “It is impossible to separate incompetent political leadership from the manifestations of economic decline, such as widespread unemployment and reduced investment,” he said.
He went further, targeting the specific culture of vote-buying and electoral transactionalism that has become normalised in Nigerian political cycles. When election season is treated as an opportunity to extract cash and benefits from candidates, the candidates who win arrive in office with a recovery mentality rather than a service mentality. “It becomes inevitable that the primary pursuit of those who win elections will not be to serve the community, but to recoup what has been invested,” he said. The bazaar metaphor was deliberate — the idea that democracy has been turned into a market where the commodity being traded is the future, and Nigerians are selling it cheap.
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Otti was careful not to offer easy comfort. He rejected the cynics who insist the situation is hopeless, but he was equally dismissive of the optimists who speak of imminent turnaround. “I refuse to submit to the position of cynics who insist that our situation is entirely hopeless because it is not. Given that, I would also not take the overly optimistic view that the turnaround is imminent because that could be misleading.” Sixty years of poor political choices, he said plainly, cannot be reversed in a single administration or a single election cycle. “If you have behaved badly for over 60 years, then it will take you time to correct yourself.”
The prescription he offered was not a policy package but a civic reorientation. Active citizenship, he argued, does not begin and end at the polling booth. It requires sustained vigilance between elections, informed engagement with candidates’ economic philosophies and track records, and the willingness to hold winners accountable through legitimate channels long after the results are announced. “Political participation is far beyond what happens at the polling booth where the final decision is made. It is about the vigilance to keep the victors on their toes through legitimate channels of engagement.”
He addressed those who consider political aloofness a form of dignity or protest directly. “You cannot claim to love Nigeria, or your state, or the city where you reside, and yet remain aloof in critical matters such as leadership selection and the debates around it.” The disengagement that feels like a principled refusal to participate in a broken system is, in practice, a delegation of power to those most willing to exploit it.
Emir of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi, who chaired the occasion, reinforced the governor’s diagnosis from a different vantage point, lamenting that Nigerian politics had been converted from public service into private enterprise — a space for accumulation rather than legacy. The Obi of Onitsha, Nnaemeka Achebe, said public officeholders spent too much time on politics and too little on governance, and that the country was in serious trouble that only better choices of leaders could begin to address.
The room was full of people who already know all of this. The challenge Otti left unanswered — as all such lectures ultimately do — is how to make those who do not know it, or do not care, engage with a process they have decided has nothing to offer them.
“Things will continue to deteriorate if we insist on staying away from the field of play,” he said. The field, for now, remains largely empty.
