There is a season for everything under the sun, and in Nigeria, one of the most predictable seasons is the season of political awakening. Long before the formal declaration of any election, the signs begin to appear.
Politicians who were once invisible in the villages and streets suddenly materialise, bearing bags of rice, envelopes of cash, and the widest of smiles. They come with promises on their lips and inducements in their hands, appealing not to the mind of the voter, but to his stomach.
This season has returned to Nasarawa State. With another political cycle drawing near, political actors with varying ambitions are already making their rounds, consulting stakeholders and reaching out to ordinary men and women across the state. There is nothing wrong with this.
Canvassing for support is the very lifeblood of democracy. A politician who refuses to engage the electorate is one who does not deserve its mandate. The people of Nasarawa, like every Nigerian electorate, deserve to be spoken to, visited, and heard. This is as it should be.
What is deeply troubling, however, is the manner in which some of these political actors have chosen to prosecute their consultations. Agreed, it’s not yet time for political campaigns, still rather than come before the people with ideas, with policy, with a vision for where Nasarawa State should be in ten or twenty years, they come instead with money and food.
They believe, perhaps from experience, that the surest way to the voter’s heart is through the stomach. They distribute rice today in the hope of collecting loyalty tomorrow. They dish out money in markets and churches and mosques, not because they care about those beneficiaries, but because they are making an investment they expect to recoup from the public treasury once they gain office.
The practice now known as “stomach infrastructure” traces its coinage to the 2015 gubernatorial race in Ekiti State, where a candidate mobilised voters with food items on the assumption that people are more inclined to vote for a politician who reaches them with commodities than one who comes with ideas.
That election may have seeded a dangerous precedent across the country, including in states like Nasarawa where development-minded governance is making visible progress.
The question that every right-thinking person in Nasarawa State must pause to answer is this: what does it say about a man seeking your support that the best argument he can make for his candidacy is a measure of rice and some money?
If he truly had the capacity to govern, would he not come before the people with something more substantial? Would he not say: here is what I will do for education, for agriculture, for roads, for the economy?
The very act of vote-buying is an admission of intellectual and moral bankruptcy. It is the politician’s way of telling the voter that he has nothing of value to offer except today’s meal, and that once in office, the voter will hear from him no more.
Research has consistently shown that vote-buying leads directly to the emergence of incompetent leaders in office, with ripple effects on governance quality and the ability of government to deliver services to the people.
When a politician purchases his way into office, he arrives without the mandate of merit and without the obligation of performance. He knows he did not earn his position through the strength of his ideas. He knows that the people who voted for him did so not because they believed in him but because he paid them to.
This breeds a culture of impunity and underperformance. The elected official who bought his office will spend the better part of his tenure recovering his investment, leaving the people who sold their votes worse off than they were before.
Research by Chatham House has shown that vote-selling in Nigeria is largely driven by the individual’s immediate material circumstances, and that voters who engage in it are effectively choosing a short-term material gain over their long-term interest in good governance.
This is the trap that the people of Nasarawa State must be vigilant enough to avoid. A bag of rice consumed in a day cannot be weighed against four years of misgovernance, abandoned projects, unpaid salaries, and neglected schools and hospitals.
Analysts have described this pattern as a form of elite capture of democracy, where a self-serving political class uses financial resources to install itself in power and then appropriates the state for private benefit.
The irony is that the very money being used to buy votes is often itself looted from the public purse. The politician who shares money with you today has already calculated that the amount he spends will be multiplied many times over once he gains access to government funds.
The voter who collects that money is not receiving a gift. He is unknowingly accepting a fraction of what is already his, in exchange for surrendering the far larger portion that would have come his way through good governance.
Against this background, the trajectory of Nasarawa State over the past several years offers a sobering contrast. Under Governor Abdullahi Sule, the state has witnessed significant infrastructural transformation, including landmark projects such as the N16 billion Lafia Flyover and Underpass, the Lafia Modern Secretariat Complex, and the seven-kilometre Shendam Road dualization.
These are not handouts. These are the things that endure. A flyover does not disappear after election day. A road dualization does not go stale like rice in a bag. The governor has highlighted regular payment of salaries, clearance of pension arrears, agricultural development, and infrastructural transformation as among the key pillars of his administration’s record.
The administration has also broken ground for a the new Dalhatu Araf Specialist Hospital (DASH) in Akwanga, funded entirely from state savings — a feat that would have been unimaginable for a state that, by the governor’s own account, once had to seek bonds for projects as modest as five billion naira.
This is the kind of governance dividend that no bag of rice can replicate. It is the difference between a political leader who believes in the people of a state and one who merely seeks to use them.
Those who are now going about with food and money as their primary campaign instrument are making a very loud statement about the kind of governance they intend to offer. Vote-buying distorts and stunts the fundamental principles of democracy, with consequences for governance quality, leadership credibility, and public service delivery.
A leader who buys his way in will not feel accountable to the people he bribed. He will feel accountable only to those who funded his campaign. And those financiers will come calling once the election is won, as they always do.
Even the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has found it necessary to publicly caution Nigerians against trading their votes for money or material items, warning that such practices undermine the integrity of elections and hinder meaningful development.
This warning is not merely a legal formality. It reflects a genuine danger to the democratic aspiration of every community that falls for this manipulation.
The people of Nasarawa State are not gullible. They have seen what governance anchored on ideas and dedication can produce. They have seen roads, hospitals, schools, and institutions change their lives in measurable ways over the years.
They know the difference between a politician who respects them and one who considers them cheap enough to be pacified with a meal. The responsibility now falls on them to guard that knowledge jealously when the hawks arrive with their envelopes and their bags of grain.
To the people of Nasarawa State, this is a moment for clear thinking. The rice will finish in a week. The governance of a poor leader will last four years. The development trajectory being built today did not come from sentiment or stomach politics. It came from deliberate policy, hard work, and a commitment to leaving things better than they were found.
Any politician who cannot articulate what he will do for your children’s education, for your local economy, for your security, and for the future of your communities, but who can only show you what he can give your stomach today, is not a leader. He is a merchant, and you are the commodity he is buying.
