It is that season again, the one Nigerians know too well. It’s the season of roasted corn, frying akara by the road side, glossy books and promises written in Dubai.
The air has changed, as it always does. Men who arrive in convoys of tinted SUVs, and who have not driven down your street in four years, suddenly remember your name. They crouch beside roadside vendors to buy roasted corn at Berger, fry akara alongside market women in Wuse, and pose for photographs with commercial motorcyclists in Oshodi, declaring a kinship they discovered only weeks ago.
This is also the season of improvised biography. One aspirant explains, at length, how a single pair of shoes worn through university proves his economic discipline. Another insists that trekking from his village to the city has given him a doctorate in the meaning of suffering. In their hands is always the same prop: a heavy, glossy document titled My Vision for a Better Nigeria, filled with polished graphs and pledges that sound like salvation, promises to turn darkness into light, to make the naira out muscle the dollar, to deliver free education from cradle to grave, and to build roads that will outlast our grandchildren. It is a season in which imagination substitutes for statistics and emotion overrides common sense.
Here is the truth many Nigerians already suspect and are tired of pretending not to know. Most of these documents were never written by the people who hold them aloft at rallies. Two months before an election, a candidate commissions a public relations firm in Abuja, engages a well-spoken relative in Lagos, or hires a policy consultant based in London. The brief is invariably the same: produce something that sounds serious, borrow from Singapore, mention youth and technology and poverty, and stretch it to a hundred pages.
The consultant then gets to work. An old World Bank report is repurposed, a health policy is lifted from Rwanda, and an entire chapter is transplanted from the United Arab Emirates smart city plan. Phrases such as Public private partnership model, Blue economy, and Disruptive innovation are inserted because they sound authoritative.
The document is bound in hard cover, the consultant is paid, and the candidate receives a book he has never actually read. What the public receives, in turn, is a set of promises never designed with Nigeria in mind.
The consequences surface whenever a camera is placed before these candidates. Recall the televised debates, when a journalist opened a manifesto to page forty-seven and asked a simple question: “you promised three million jobs annually through agro processing, what is step one, and where will the funding come from?” The room fell silent. The candidate looked left, then right, and offered a familiar deflection: “Nigerians are suffering, and agriculture is the backbone of our economy”. He could not answer, because it was, in truth, the first time he had encountered page forty-seven.
The manifesto speaks the language of graduate seminars, the candidate speaks the language of the campaign trail, and between the two the country continues to bleed.
The tragedy deepens the day after the swearing in. Once the certificate of return is secured, the manifesto is filed away in a drawer, its purpose served, having won votes and impressed foreign observers. Reality then intrudes. There is no chapter addressing what happens when fuel subsidies are removed and citizens grow furious, no page for the frustration of civil servants awaiting salaries, and no section acknowledging that a model copied from Dubai was never built for a federation of thirty-six states and roughly two hundred ethnic groups.
What follows is confusion by design. One month brings full deregulation, protests erupt, and palliatives return alongside compressed natural gas buses copied from Brazil, minus the infrastructure required to sustain them. Electricity tariffs are declared cost reflective one month and frozen the next. Investors withdraw, and darkness persists, the result of agovernment attempting to run a country on software designed for a saloon car but installed in a commercial minibus.The evidence is not difficult to find.
In 2011, one state government launched the Singapore Model of Education, complete with billboards and well-paid consultants. By 2015, an incoming administration dismissed that model as foreign and unveiled Our Own Indigenous Blueprint, requiring further consultants and further expenditure. By 2025, pupils in that same state still sit on bare floors. Only the cover of the document changed.
The federal government similarly adapted Canada’s health insurance framework for local use. The document was elegant, yet Canada has ninety per cent of its workforce in formal employment, while in Nigeria roughly eighty per cent operate informally, among them the pepper seller at Mile Twelve, the motorcyclist in Kano, and the tailor in Aba. The model faltered because its authors had studied Toronto rather than Wuse Market.
Every electoral cycle also revives the promise that Nigeria will become the food basket of Africa, usually accompanied by a rice policy borrowed from Thailand. Conveniently omitted is that Thai farmers benefit from irrigation, credit, and security, while a farmer in Benue is often fleeing violence rather than cultivating land. The outcome is predictable; rice remains priced near ninety thousand naira per bag, and importation continues.
Once citizens recognise that the manifesto is fiction, they stop engaging with its contents. Rallies cease to be forums for ideas and become concerts, contests in insult, and competitions over who can distribute the most cash. The voter, unsurprisingly, adjusts accordingly, preferring an immediate and tangible gift over a distant and doubtful promise. That exchange, a modest sum for a vote, is the direct offspring of the copy and paste manifesto. When the promise is dishonest, the vote becomes transactional.
This pattern can be broken, though not through outrage alone. It requires new standards. No candidate should receive our support unless he can explain his own manifesto, unaided and without a teleprompter, for three hours, in English and in Pidgin. If a trader at Mile Twelve cannot understand it, the document has failed its purpose.
Political parties must abandon drafting manifestos in hotel rooms three months before polling day, and instead build policy teams that meet monthly in local government areas, in Gusau, in Umuahia, in Ijebu Ode, engaging directly with the people the policies claim to serve. Every pledge should carry a means of verification, so that after a year in office citizens can ask plainly whether it was delivered or abandoned.
Nigeria does not require another imported blueprint. Lee Kuan Yew built Singapore because he authored its plan himself and invested his own labour in its execution. Paul Kagame transformed Rwanda because he understood every clause of his policy. What the country needs are leaders who have sat under the sun within their own communities and asked practical questions: how does this drainage get fixed, and how does electricity reach this particular street.
The year 2027 approaches. The consultants are already at their keyboards, and the glossy books are already at the printers. This time, the applause should be withheld from photocopies, and originals demanded instead, because a nation cannot develop on borrowed intellect. A Nation develops when its leaders own their vision, expressed in their own words and secured through their own effort.
Until that standard is enforced, Nigeria will keep watching the same production: handsome documents followed by disappointing outcomes, with citizens left to bear the cost.
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