There is a line every democracy must guard jealously: the line between persuasion and coercion, between mobilising citizens and intimidating them. As Nigeria moves toward the 2027 general election, that line is being tested with unusual frequency. It is not yet the full fury of election season, but the vocabulary already creeping into our politics, of people being made to leave communities, fingers being broken, opponents shown “real threat”, loyalists enjoying “the honey” and marriages sacrificed on the altar of party allegiance, is not the vocabulary of a healthy democracy. It is the vocabulary of fear.
A succession of such statements, mostly attributed to figures associated with the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, has surfaced from different states and different circumstances. Fairness requires that they not be flattened into a single indictment. Several of the officials involved have offered explanations, clarifications or apologies, and those responses deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved aside as damage control. But when comparable language recurs across unconnected states and unconnected actors, prudence demands that we stop laughing, or shrugging, long enough to ask what political culture is being normalised.
In Kuje Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory, Chairman Danjuma Shekwolo was recorded telling residents that they were either “doing APC” or should leave the council. He later explained that he had been addressing party loyalists at a closed meeting, that the clip was taken out of context and that he neither possessed the authority nor the intention to disenfranchise anyone.
The explanation should be recorded fairly. But the underlying question survives it: how did support for a political party and the right to belong to a Nigerian community end up in the same sentence? Kuje belongs to Nigerians, not to the APC, just as an opposition-controlled council elsewhere belongs to neither the PDP nor the Labour Party. Parties govern places. They do not own them.
In Osun State, Senator Francis Fadahunsi attracted police attention over a viral recording interpreted as threatening supporters of a rival party. He disputed that reading and offered his own account of what he meant. That, too, belongs in the record. But politicians might usefully be reminded of an elementary fact about public communication: intention is only half of meaning. The rest lies in how a reasonable audience receives what was said. In a country with Nigeria’s history of electoral violence, a senior politician who casually reaches for the vocabulary of violence cannot be surprised when citizens hear violence.
Then came Borno, where Commissioner Sainna Buba, who oversees Poverty Alleviation, Youth Empowerment and Sports, was reported warning that a finger pointed at his political camp could be broken, that loyalists would “enjoy the honey” and that those who refused would be “flogged”.
He later explained the language as figurative, denied intending physical harm and apologised. The apology matters and should be acknowledged. But it also illustrates exactly why officials who sit inside government must hold themselves to a higher standard of rhetorical discipline than a private citizen at a rally. When someone who administers public welfare programmes talks about loyalists enjoying “the honey”, the uncomfortable question is unavoidable: what, precisely, is the honey? If it is only a colourful turn of phrase, it is a reckless one. If it gestures, even rhetorically, at the benefits of incumbency, then it exposes something more troubling: the quiet assumption that the resources of the state are the private harvest of whichever party temporarily occupies office.
Ebonyi supplied its own entry to this dictionary. Responding to allegations that opposition figures were being harassed, Governor Francis Nwifuru reportedly said Nigerians would “see real threat at the right time”, and told newly inaugurated local government chairmen not to let the opposition win their councils in 2027.
Wanting one’s party to sweep every available seat is unremarkable. That is what politicians do. The problem is vocabulary. A governor can say, “go and convince the people” or “show them our record”. What he should not do is reach for “threat”, not because the word is unfamiliar to Nigerian politics, but because a governor is not an ordinary party canvasser. He presides over the machinery of the state, and citizens cannot always tell, from where they stand, whether a threat is bluster or a preview.
Yobe presented the most unusual case. APC Chairman Muhammad Gadaka reportedly urged women whose husbands might block them from voting for the party to leave those marriages, adding that he would personally pay their bride price and marry women divorced on that account.
One can imagine the defence: political theatre, rally exaggeration, an overzealous attempt to energise a crowd. But leaders’ jokes deserve scrutiny precisely when the punchline risks social rupture. The democratic principle here should not be diluted by the crudeness of its packaging. A woman’s vote belongs to her alone, and no husband, father, cleric or traditional authority may dictate it. But the correct answer to domestic political control is not for another politician to turn the marriage itself into a campaign battlefield. Democracy is meant to protect the independence of individual conscience, not to conscript the family into partisan warfare.
No single one of these episodes will necessarily detonate into violence, and treating each as an isolated scandal risks missing the pattern. The deeper danger is habituation. In their study of democratic collapse, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt observe that modern democracies rarely die in a single dramatic coup. They die by the slow erosion of unwritten norms, mutual toleration of opponents and forbearance in the exercise of power, long before any law is formally broken.
Each transgression that draws only an apology rather than a consequence resets the baseline for what counts as normal. What shocks a society in one election cycle becomes background noise in the next, and what is tolerated eventually hardens into political culture. That is how democratic guardrails move, not by demolition, but by a thousand small permissions.
At the centre of democratic theory sits a deceptively simple idea: those who govern do so because the governed consent to be governed by them. John Locke grounded legitimate authority in that consent, arguing that government exists to protect rights the individual already possesses, not to manufacture obedience. Jean-Jacques Rousseau located sovereignty in the collective will of the people rather than in the ruler, insisting that authority divorced from that will forfeits its legitimacy.
John Stuart Mill, writing later and more concerned with the “tyranny of the majority” than with kings, defended the individual’s right to dissent as the precondition for any society’s moral and intellectual health. Political scientist Robert Dahl later distilled the operational core of these traditions into what he called polyarchy: genuine democracy requires not just participation but contestation, the real, unpunished ability of citizens to oppose those in power.
Each tradition arrives at the same destination by a different road: a citizen must be free to say no. Where saying no invites exile, deprivation, physical danger or loss of livelihood, what remains may retain the outward form of democracy while its moral substance quietly drains away.
This is why the secret ballot is such a remarkable invention. For a few private seconds inside a polling booth, most of society’s inequalities are suspended. The billionaire gets one vote; so does the bus conductor. The professor gets one vote; so does the apprentice. The governor gets one vote; so does the woman selling vegetables by the roadside.
Wealth, title and influence cannot lawfully purchase a second ballot. Democracy reduces citizens, wonderfully, to political equals. But that equality is a fiction if one citizen enters the booth free while another carries fear inside it.
Fear, moreover, does not need violence to succeed; it only needs to change behaviour. If a civil servant votes a certain way because she believes her job depends on it, intimidation has already worked. If a trader avoids a polling unit because he fears what happens afterward, intimidation has worked. If a citizen believes access to a government programme hinges on party membership, coercion has entered the relationship between state and citizen before a single vote is cast. The fist need never land for the threat to have done its job.
Nigeria has more reason than most nations to take these warnings seriously because our history offers repeated illustrations of where this road leads. “Operation Wetie” in the old Western Region did not erupt from nowhere. It grew out of a climate in which political disagreement had already curdled into enmity and electoral competition had acquired the character of war.
