The democracy we were promised, and the one we got

By Dotun Olayemi

On Wednesday, February 4, 2026, the Nigerian Senate made a decision that perfectly encapsulates everything broken about African democracy. While passing the Electoral Act 2022 (Repeal and Reenactment) Amendment Bill through third reading, senators rejected Clause 60, subsection 3, the provision that would have made electronic transmission of election results directly from polling units mandatory.

Think about that for a moment. In 2026, with smartphones in nearly every pocket and internet connectivity spreading across the continent, Nigeria’s lawmakers decided that election results should not be transmitted electronically. They chose opacity over transparency, manual processes over digital clarity, the shadows over the light.

This isn’t a technical decision. It’s a political one. Because when results must be physically transported from polling units to collation centres, they can be altered, swapped, or simply disappear. When technology is banned from the one place it could ensure transparency, you know the system isn’t broken, it’s designed this way.

This is Neo-Liberal Democracy in action: the performance of reform without its substance, the appearance of progress masking determined regression.

Democracy, in its purest form, is beautifully simple. Abraham Lincoln captured it in eleven words: “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It’s a system where citizens choose their leaders freely, where power rotates peacefully, where election results can be verified in real-time, where the hungry can protest without fear of treason charges, and where a nurse cursing the president in a moment of pain doesn’t spend Christmas in prison. That’s the democracy we were promised. It’s not the one we got.

The elite’s version

“As Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’, that is not the democracy that we have,” says Juwon Sanyaolu, National Coordinator of Nigeria’s Take It Back Movement, speaking with the clarity of someone who has watched the dream curdle. “What we currently operate is government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite and that is what is described as Neo-Liberal Democracy. This exactly is the form of democracy being rejected by people in Nigeria and across Africa alike.”

Neo-Liberal Democracy. The phrase sounds academic, almost sterile, until you understand what it means in practice: elections that legitimize power without transferring it, constitutions that protect the powerful while criminalizing dissent, institutions that serve wealth rather than welfare, and senates that reject electronic transmission of results while claiming to champion electoral reform. It’s democracy as performance art, where citizens are extras in a play written by elites, for elites.

The Senate’s rejection of electronic transmission isn’t an aberration, it’s a feature. It sits comfortably alongside Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan winning 98% of votes in October 2025, Cameroon’s 92-year-old Paul Biya securing his eighth term, and Central African Republic’s President Touadéra claiming a third term with Russian Wagner mercenaries intimidating voters at polling stations.

And across Africa, people are tired of the performance.

When the young stopped believing

Something shifted in 2025. From Nairobi to Antananarivo, from Lagos to Kampala, young Africans, the so-called Gen Z, decided they’d had enough. In Kenya and Madagascar, their protests toppled governments. These weren’t your traditional opposition movements with party structures and manifestos. These were spontaneous eruptions of frustration, coordinated through WhatsApp groups and Twitter threads, united by a single demand: we deserve better.

Nigeria knows this anger intimately. In October 2020, the #EndSARS movement exploded across the country as young people protested police brutality and corruption. For two weeks, they occupied streets, organized food distribution, provided medical care, and showed the country what community could look like. Then came the Lekki Tollgate massacre, the night bullets silenced songs and the government denied what the world had watched on Instagram Live.

Five years later, the trauma remains. And the frustration has deepened.

“In numerous states across Africa and within ECOWAS we have seen increased military coups, and it has been accompanied by popular support,” Sanyaolu observes. “Like you know, there was a failed military coup in Nigeria, if you can see the responses of young people on social media, the response is mostly that people are wishing that the coup succeeded. This tells you that people are rejecting the idea of Neo-Liberal democracy.”

It’s a damning indictment. When educated young people would rather gamble with military rule than endure one more rigged election, one more Senate decision that protects elite interests, you know democracy has lost its meaning.

The ledger of failure

But why this desperation? Sanyaolu doesn’t traffic in abstractions. He speaks in numbers that land like body blows.

“By the constitution of our country, it is stated clearly what should be the primary objective of any government, security and welfare of the citizens. But what is the state of our security and welfare? The scorecard is that Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world, the scorecard is that over 130 million Nigerians are living in abject poverty.”

One hundred and thirty million people. In a country swimming in oil, blessed with arable land, bursting with entrepreneurial energy. How does democracy deliver this?

“The state of security today in the country is completely abysmal. So bad that it has been described as mass genocide,” Sanyaolu continues, his voice carrying the weight of countless funerals. “Nigerians are dying in thousands weekly. The country is unsafe. Our farms, our roads and highways have been overtaken by bandits and terrorists. People can no longer travel by road safely. So bad is the security of our country, that even our sovereignty has been threatened not only by internal insurgents, but also by external aggressors.”

These aren’t campaign talking points. This is daily life for millions. A farmer who can’t access his land because Boko Haram controls the road. A mother who sends her child to school wondering if this is the day kidnappers strike. A trader who must choose between poverty at home or death on the highway.

This is what democracy has delivered. And yet, anyone who complains too loudly faces another weapon in the elite’s arsenal: digital repression.

When your words become crimes

Enter Olamide Thomas, a nurse whose crime was feeling pain. During the fourth anniversary of the EndSARS protests in 2024, she participated in demonstrations that police violently repressed. “She was particularly molested during her arrest,” Sanyaolu recounts. “During her repression and harassment, the pain made her rain curses on the president, the president’s son and the Inspector General of Police.”

For this, for words spoken in anguish, police travelled from Abuja to Ogun State to arrest her. “Olamide Thomas spent Christmas and New Year in prison. It took the intervention of the Take It Back Movement to confront the state at the federal level to regain her freedom.”

Her case isn’t isolated. Dele Farotimi, a lawyer, wrote something that offended Afe Babalola, a powerful figure in Ekiti State. “Police was deployed from Ekiti State, abducted Farotimi from his Lagos office and taken to Ekiti State and later to prison. He almost spent Christmas in prison before intervention.”

Omoyele Sowore, activist and publisher, criticized the Inspector General of Police. “His international passport remains seized.”

Then there were the protesters, young people who carried signs saying they were hungry. “In this same country, federal judges were to be tried for treason because they were protesting that they were hungry but for public outrage and intervention from organizations like the Take It Back Movement. They were starved in police detention and were collapsing.”

Eleven End-Bad Governance protesters faced treason charges. Their crime? Wanting an end to bad governance.

“Civil society organizations like the Take It Back Movement are at the frontline of resisting this wave of digital oppression particularly under the government of Tinubu,” Sanyaolu explains. “Some immediate indications of on-going digital repression is Section 24 of the Cybercrimes Act, which runs at variance with Section 39 of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which guarantees freedom of speech and expression.”

The Take It Back Movement didn’t just complain. “In 2024, we started a nationwide campaign calling for the review of the Cybercrimes Act. We organized press conferences, protests and we will continue to do so. We are directly involved with people who have been hounded by this Cybercrimes Act.”

The irony is suffocating. A government that rejects electronic transmission of election results, fearing transparency, embraces digital tools when they can be weaponised against citizens. The Cybercrimes Act becomes a cudgel to beat down dissent while electoral technology is deemed too risky for democracy.

“Executive lawlessness is not only at the centre of the foundation of our democracy,” Sanyaolu states bluntly. “At the helm of deliberate distortion of our democracy is the judiciary, they are the ones trying children for treason, they are the ones sanctioning the impunity of our democracy.”

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The continental picture

Nigeria isn’t alone. The contradictions pile up across Africa. Nigeria leads ECOWAS interventions to stop military coups, as it did in Benin in December 2025, deploying forces to foil a coup attempt, while running what activists call a “civilian dictatorship” at home.

“Indeed, I think on paper, ECOWAS is taking strong stance against military coups; but in practice ECOWAS is not taking a stance against civilian coups,” Sanyaolu notes. “What we are experiencing in Nigeria is civilian coup, civilian dictatorship, seemingly sanctioned and recognized by ECOWAS.”

He drives the point home: “There is no fundamental difference between civilian coup and military coup. For instance, virtually all the elections conducted under former President Obasanjo were civilian coups, and as it stands 2027 most likely will be another civilian coup waiting to happen.”

And how could it be otherwise? When senators can reject electronic transmission of results with impunity, when opposition leaders are arrested for social media posts, when hungry protesters face treason charges, what else is this but a coup in slow motion?

Professor Toyin Falola, the eminent Nigerian historian and Fellow of both the Historical Society of Nigeria and the Nigerian Academy of Letters, offers a more philosophical but equally troubling assessment. Speaking while evaluating South Africa’s Government of National Unity, he pulls no punches.

“Democracy brings out the worst in human beings everywhere,” Professor Falola contends. “The western device of democracy is by sheer fraud, while Africans have bought into the western conception of democracy I do not understand, by its very nature, democracy is very messy.”

His analysis traces democracy’s challenges to Africa’s fundamental nature: “Plural societies are very difficult to manage. You have many ethnic groups, religious identities. We don’t even look alike. You have to deal with even color differences, racial differences, gender differences.”

And when he turns to electoral results, his skepticism sharpens. “There is also the dual society, like Rwanda, where our friend won 98.5% votes, you know that is not possible. Even if you go to heaven, you know Satan lives there. Angels live there. A 98% vote for a single candidate is not realistic.”

It’s a critique that extends across the continent. In Tanzania in 2025, President Hassan won with 98% of the vote, then unleashed security forces who killed hundreds of protesters. In Madagascar, Gen Z protests toppled President Andry Rajoelina in October, only for the military to execute a coup and install a transitional government.

Professor Falola’s verdict echoes across these cases: “Contrary to what you read in books, democracy revives ethnic division.”

What comes next?

So where does this leave us? Sanyaolu doesn’t sugarcoat the options.

“Who says a coup is the solution, definitely not, it is like jumping from frying pan to fire,” he insists. “As a matter of fact, the problem Nigeria faces today, the problem of lack of governance, broken democracy, and completely shattered system were created by the military. The alternative to neo-liberal democracy we experience today is not military dictatorship.”

But something must change. “There is no alternative to democracy,” he continues. “What Nigerians and Africans are yearning for is the popular democracy where indeed the power belongs to the people.”

The pathway there, however, won’t come from existing power structures. Not from a Senate that rejects electoral transparency. Not from an ECOWAS that condemns military coups while ignoring civilian ones. Not from regional bodies protecting elite interests.

“ECOWAS will not save us, the elites will not save the common man. And that is because the system serves them,” Sanyaolu declares.

His final words carry both warning and challenge: “Nigeria and Africa risk a revolution if we continue on this unfortunate trajectory of Neo-Liberal democracy.”

That Wednesday in February when the Senate rejected electronic transmission will be remembered. Not for what was debated, but for what was revealed: that African democracy’s greatest threat isn’t military coups or external interference. It’s internal sabotage by those entrusted to protect it.

Somewhere tonight, another young African is weighing their options. They’ve watched their parents’ generation vote in election after election, only to watch the same faces recycle through power, the same promises evaporate, the same poverty deepen. They’ve seen activists jailed for tweets, protesters shot for carrying signs, journalists arrested for reporting truth, and now senators rejecting the very technology that could make elections credible.

They know the democracy they inherited is broken. What they don’t yet know is whether it can be fixed, or whether it must be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

The elites, comfortable in their legislative chambers, insulated by security details, enriched by systems they’ve rigged, still have time to choose reform over revolution. But time is the one currency Africa’s youth are no longer willing to spend on empty promises.

As Olamide Thomas discovered in that prison cell over Christmas, democracy isn’t measured by constitutions gathering dust, Electoral Act amendments that gut transparency, or ECOWAS resolutions that condemn military coups while ignoring civilian ones. Democracy is measured by whether a nurse can curse power without losing her freedom, whether hungry people can protest without facing treason charges, whether election results can be transmitted electronically without senators panicking, whether young people can imagine futures beyond survival.

By that measure, we don’t have democracy. We have its ghost, haunting institutions built for justice but occupied by interests hostile to it.

And the living, as they always do, are learning to stop fearing ghosts.

•Dotun Olayemi, a public affairs analyst, he writes from Lagos