Rethinking campaigning: Fielding the winning eleven

The campaign season has returned, bringing with it the familiar spectacle: convoys winding through dusty streets, party colours fluttering like restless flags, praise singers rehearsing their refrains, and candidates mounting stages to denounce opponents as incompetent, corrupt, tribalistic, and guilty of every national malaise since independence.

Then come the promises – roads, jobs, electricity, food – accompanied by a litany of mantras: “Power to the People,” “Renewed Hope,” “Forward Ever, Backward Never,” “Nigeria First,” “Progress, Justice, and Fairness,” “Arise and Shine.” Nigeria’s major parties wield slogans as shorthand for identity, yet there is little to distinguish APC’s emphasis on progress from PDP’s invocation of people’s power, Labour Party’s resilience, or PRP and APGA’s calls for unity and brotherhood. By the end of the rally, everyone is exhausted, and very little has truly been said. It is the political equivalent of changing the wrapper while selling the same product. No one is better than the other; it is simply the kettle calling the pot black.

The entire Nigerian political system and its actors are a farce. As a colleague once blurted, there is no difference across the board – same rats in different holes! He added in Yoruba: Irúìrón’ìborún, ìkannáànikáún, kòs’òfàñn’óje! Àfínkìís’òyìnbó, àrùnojúni – “The wrapper and the shawl are the same cloth; six behaving like seven; there is no difference in essence. An albino is not a white man; it is simply an eye condition.”

The problem is not that Nigerian politicians campaign too much, but that they campaign in the same language. To upstage a rival, the superior strategy is not louder attacks but making the opponent’s vocabulary obsolete – offering something loftier, more memorable, and transformative.

Like a football team, every serious campaign council must field its strongest side. Here is the winning eleven – the side Nigeria’s campaign councils must field if they are to win credibility rather than applause.

1. Campaigns as meaning-making, not noise-making

Politics is not merely about promises; it is about shaping the grammar through which citizens understand their condition. Nigerian politicians often mistake volume for vision. Yet history shows that transformative leaders did not win by shouting louder, but by reframing the national question.

Nelson Mandela’s genius lay not in the size of his rallies but in the moral clarity of his language: he reframed apartheid from a racial contest into a moral argument about reconciliation. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” transcended electoral mechanics because it offered an America people could inhabit imaginatively.

Chinua Achebe reminded us: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” The lesson for Nigeria is not to imitate Mandela or King, but to become our own historians – to give citizens sentences with which to explain their hopes. Yet Nigerian campaigns rarely achieve this reframing. Instead, they remain quarrels over personalities, while potholes remain unfilled and universities deteriorate into glorified nursery schools, producing graduates who scavenge for crumbs due to joblessness.

The electorate is not hungry for slogans; they are hungry for sentences that explain their lives and offer horizons of possibility. A campaign must therefore move from performative rallies to conceptual clarity. The candidate who merely repeats grievances will sound like everyone else. The candidate who gives Nigerians a new grammar for understanding them may command the conversation.

The principle is simple: do not compete for the loudest microphone. Compete for the most memorable idea.

2. Citizens as shareholders

Citizens must be treated not as spectators but as shareholders in a national enterprise. This metaphor is powerful because it implies accountability, dividends, transparency, and co-ownership. A shareholder does not clap for entertainment; they demand quarterly reports.

Imagine a campaign that publishes its promises like a corporate prospectus: “Here is the cost of educating one child in this state. Here is the dropout rate. Here is the intervention. Here is what it will cost. And here is how you will know if we delivered.” That is politics of accountability, not rhetoric.

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew insisted governance must be judged by tangible outcomes: housing, education, infrastructure. His campaigns were not about slogans but about proof. Nigeria must learn that lesson.

Consider the difference between “I will fight corruption” and “Let us build a state in which no citizen needs to ‘know somebody’ to receive what the law already guarantees.” The first is a slogan. The second is a philosophy.

Likewise, “I will create jobs” is pedestrian. “Government must stop treating employment as patronage and start treating productivity as national infrastructure” is deeper – a proposition that can be examined, tested, and remembered.

As the Yoruba say, Orúkọ rere san ju wúrà àti fàdákà – a good name is better than silver and gold. In politics, a good idea can be wealthier than a thousand posters because people carry it from the rally ground into the marketplace, the motor park, and the family WhatsApp group.

3. The opponent should not be your main character

One of the least imaginative habits in Nigerian politics is making the opponent the centre of the campaign. Candidate A spends weeks proving Candidate B incompetent. Candidate B spends the same weeks proving Candidate A dangerous. The electorate becomes an audience to a quarrel, while tangible projects are unattended to and kidnappers and bandits seize towns and villages.

A more sophisticated campaign reverses this: it makes the country the protagonist.

Instead of “Look at what my opponent did,” the question becomes: “What should Nigeria look like in five years, after my four-year term, and what must change to get there?”

This forces rivals to respond to your agenda rather than define it. It also aligns with the law: the Electoral Act 2022 prohibits language likely to inflame ethnic, religious, or sectional feelings, and restricts abusive rhetoric. INEC has repeatedly urged issue-based campaigns. Restraint, therefore, is not weakness but differentiation.

4. Replace promises with receipts

The Nigerian electorate has heard every promise politicians can conjure. What they need is receipts. Every major pledge should answer four questions:

• What exactly will be done?
• How much will it cost?
• Who will be responsible?
• How will citizens verify it?

Numbers turn applause into accountability. A promise without a baseline is a journey without a signpost. This transforms politics from phatic talk to a ledger, forcing candidates into measurable commitments and empowering citizens to hold leaders accountable.

When Barack Obama promised healthcare reform, he did not stop at slogans. He produced a detailed plan, costed it, debated it, and allowed citizens to measure delivery. Nigerian campaigns must aspire to that level of specificity.

5. Strategic silence

There is another instrument: refusing to answer every provocation.

Campaigns reward the fastest reaction. Accusation at noon, statement by 1pm, online brawl by 2pm, and by evening the provocation has become the day’s entire politics.

A candidate who responds to everything is governed by everybody.

Strategic silence can be more powerful than perpetual rebuttal – provided it is not used to dodge legitimate scrutiny. The task is to distinguish criticism that deserves an answer from provocation that deserves no oxygen. The aim is to preserve the campaign’s intellectual centre. In Nigeria’s political theatre, provocation is constant. Candidates waste energy rebutting every insult, rumour, and social media jab. Yet strategic silence can be more powerful than perpetual rebuttal. Silence denies oxygen to trivial quarrels and preserves intellectual focus.

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Kwame Nkrumah understood this during Ghana’s independence struggle: he did not respond to every colonial provocation; he kept his eyes on the larger narrative of freedom. Nigerian campaigns must rediscover that discipline – knowing when to speak, when to ignore, and when to redirect. Silence, properly deployed, is not weakness but wisdom.

6. Upstaging without humiliation

The deepest political contrast is not humiliation. It is making comparison inevitable.

Candidate One: “My opponent is incompetent.”

Candidate Two: “Here are my five commitments. Here is the evidence. Here is the cost. Here is how you can audit me.”

No insult has been offered. Yet the comparison is already made.

That is upstaging. The strongest campaign does not say, “Look how bad the other person is.” It says, “Look what political seriousness could look like.”

Nigeria has enough slogans, billboards, rented crowds, and accusations that evaporate after election day.

What would be genuinely disruptive is a campaign that treats citizens not as an audience to be entertained, a crowd to be mobilised, or a bloc to be captured, but as co-travellers on a journey to recover nationhood.

Such a campaign would publish its promises, debate its assumptions, admit uncertainty, invite hostile questions, disclose financing within the law, reject ethnic provocation, measure its claims, and give voters something more durable than excitement: a standard by which to judge leadership.

7. Competence as theatre

Nigeria understands theatre, but only of noise. Imagine a campaign where competence itself becomes theatrical: forums where experts interrogate assumptions, budgets presented transparently, deadlines published.

It may not draw the largest crowd, but it would produce the most important headline: “Vote for us not because we are louder, but because we are measurable.”

In Ghana, televised presidential debates have become part of campaign culture. Candidates are forced to present ideas, not insults. Nigeria must adopt such practices, turning competence into spectacle.

8. Media strategy beyond noise

The 2023 elections revealed the disruptive potential of alternative media. The Labour Party’s digital mobilisation showed that relevance can be manufactured outside the old machinery. But emotional energy on Twitter or TikTok must translate into policy capacity.

Campaigns must therefore treat digital mobilisation as a bridge to governance, not a substitute. The village square and the smartphone must converge: ideas intelligible in a WhatsApp group must also survive interrogation in a policy forum. A policy must be intelligible on Radio Nigeria in Kano, at a town hall in Enugu, in a market conversation in Lagos, and in a WhatsApp group of graduates in Sagbama.

Obama’s 2008 campaign mastered this balance: digital mobilisation created excitement, but policy detail created credibility. Nigerian campaigns must learn to walk that tightrope.

9. Generational shifts

Nigeria is a youthful nation, with Gen Z and millennials forming the majority of the electorate. Campaigns that ignore this demographic risk irrelevance. But youth politics is not just about hashtags; it is about ownership of the future.

The #EndSARS protests demonstrated the organisational power of young Nigerians. They mobilised digitally, raised funds transparently, and articulated demands with clarity. Yet the political class largely dismissed them. A resonant campaign must speak to education, the digital economy, climate resilience, and social justice – issues defining the horizon of younger Nigerians.

Kenya’s youth mobilisation propelled new narratives into mainstream politics. Nigeria must learn that lesson: youthful energy must be translated into institutional reform, not just rallies.

The 2023 election offered a precedent. The Labour Party, with far fewer traditional resources, disrupted the duopoly of APC and PDP. Its digital mobilisation resonated with younger Nigerians, turning “Obidients” and “Obi-Datti” into a political identity. The warning, however, is clear: a movement can generate enormous emotional energy without automatically producing governmental capacity. The task now is to convert excitement into institutional credibility.

10. Changing the script

The objective is not to perform better within the existing script, but to change the script. Instead of convoys and slogans, imagine campaigns as national conversations: structured debates, citizen audits, participatory budgeting.

In the United States, town hall meetings became a way for candidates to engage directly with citizens. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s Grand Débat invited citizens to interrogate policy directly. Nigeria must adopt similar innovations. The missing link is architecture: building platforms where citizens can interrogate, not merely applaud. This is how campaigns become laboratories of democracy rather than carnivals of noise.

11. Democracy as proof

Ultimately, Nigerian democracy suffers from a deficit of proof. Citizens have seen promises, but not evidence. A reimagined campaign would insist that democracy is not theatre; it is a combination of empirical survey, validation of plebiscites, and pay-back time for good and bad times in office or out of it. Every pledge must be measurable, every claim testable, every policy auditable.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, he did not merely promise jobs; he created programmes with clear metrics – Social Security, public works, housing. Nigerians deserve the same: not vague assurances, but proof.

As John Milton wrote: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” The task of Nigerian democracy is to create that free and open encounter where competence, not convoys, prevails.

Conclusion

The rallies will roar, the slogans will echo, but the campaign that dares to treat citizens as shareholders, silence as strategy, competence as theatre, and receipts as proof will redefine political competition. It will not merely seek office; it will engineer a new method of campaigning, one worthy of a republic that longs for renewal.

Nigeria does not need louder campaigns. It needs smarter ones. It does not need more promises. It needs receipts. It does not need convoys. It needs competence. And it does not need theatre. It needs proof. That is the winning eleven. That is the side Nigeria deserves.