The National Peace Accord was signed last week Wednesday the 19th of August 2026, in Abuja, officially opening the campaign season for Nigeria’s 2027 general elections.
That evening, sitting alone in my living room, I watched the footage multiply across every screen I owned. From my X page, to Instagram Reels, WhatsApp status updates and TikTok. Thirty second loops of the country’s most powerful men, laughing together. The clips were mesmerising and, in equal measure, unsettling. I honestly did not know whether to laugh at the absurdity of it or grieve quietly for my country. What flashed across my screen did not look like a solemn state function. It resembled an exclusive gala for the very wealthy.
In that hall, were the presidential candidates from different political parties, I mean the same parties that have spent the last 4 years throwing insults and blame at each other. They are now standing shoulder to shoulder, laughing, and shining their teeth in bright, flawless flashes of white smiles. They were throwing their heads back in shared, roaring laughter, playfully slapping each other’s backs, and shaking hands with a deep, rhythmic warmth like childhood friends who had just reunited at an exclusive country club.
If you were a stranger visiting Nigeria for the very first time and you knew absolutely nothing about our history, you would look at those viral clips and think these fine gentlemen had spent the last three years working day and night to build free hospitals, fix our broken electricity grids, and construct world class schools for the poor. You would never guess that these are the exact same individuals whose political warfare, policy choices, and endless arguments and online jabs have made life an unsparing, daily struggle for the average citizen on the street.
The air inside that Abuja Conference Center auditorium was thick with an undeniable sense of sweet friendship and elite brotherhood. But as I sat in my room watching the video loop over and over again on my phone, the entire spectacle felt completely fake, highly insulting, and deeply manipulative. It looked like nothing more than a private gentleman’s club where the big bosses of Nigeria meet to enjoy themselves, trade jokes, and reassure each other of their safety, while the rest of the country is left to burn and suffer outside in the scorching heat of an unprecedented economic crisis.
What made the videos even more interesting, and infinitely more revealing than the fake handshakes and laughter, was not just the people who were there flashing their teeth, but the specific people who were completely missing from the frame. Some major presidential candidates and heavy weight opposition leaders chose to totally boycott the event. They did not show up, leaving their designated name cards sitting on empty tables and their highly visible chairs totally vacant. In the cold, calculated world of Nigerian politics, when a major political actor refuses to sit at a peace table, it is never an accident, a scheduling mistake, or a coincidence. It is a message, deliberate and unmistakable, aimed at the grassroots. By staying away, an aspirant signal that he does not recognise the accord’s authority and intends to keep every option, however unorthodox, open as the contest sharpens. Those empty chairs were not simply unfilled furniture. They were an early warning that the coming campaign season may test the resilience of the Fourth Republic as severely as any before it.
The ritual itself has a longer history than the actual event suggests. Nigeria’s National Peace Accord dates to January 2015, when the administration of the day convened the first signing ahead of that year’s general election, still shadowed by the memory of the 2011 post-election violence that killed more than eight hundred people nationwide.
General Abdulsalami Abubakar, a former head of state respected across party lines, has chaired the National Peace Committee ever since, shepherding fresh accords through the 2019 and 2023 cycles and now the 2027 one. In principle, it functions as a moral covenant: a public undertaking that party structures, from state directors down to local organisers, will restrain violence and let citizens vote without fear. In practice, the ceremony has hardened into ritual. It carries no legal force. No candidate has ever been disqualified, fined, or otherwise sanctioned for violating its terms. Tellingly, even some of this year’s signatories voiced open skepticism as they signed, one dismissing the exercise as a ritual bound to be followed by renewed bloodshed, another insisting that no accord matters without justice for violations of the peace accords past.
Signing costs a candidate nothing beyond an afternoon and a well-tailored agbada, and it buys considerable goodwill from foreign missions, election observers, and an international press that reads the ceremony as evidence of democratic maturity. The tragedy is that the document offers no protection to the people who need it most. It reassures the elite while leaving undisturbed the machinery of local violence, the motor park enforcers, the funded thugs, and the entrenched cult networks.
This is the paradox that gives the peace accord its name. A candidate can sign a peace pledge in the full glare of national television at eleven in the morning and, by nightfall, preside over a campaign apparatus that funnels cash to local enforcers instructed to prepare for trouble at polling units where the opposition runs strong. It is a familiar pattern in Nigerian electoral politics, one that domestic observer groups such as YIAGA Africa and the Centre for Democracy and Development have documented after nearly every cycle since 1999, most recently during this year’s off-cycle governorship polls, where field monitors again flagged cash changing hands within sight of polling units. Even as the Abuja stage projected unity, digital campaign teams in Lagos and Abuja were already at work, seeding Facebook, X, and WhatsApp with fabricated claims and ethnic provocation designed to inflame rather than inform. The accord has no mechanism to address this newer, less visible warfare, just as it has nothing to say about the hunger that makes political violence possible in the first place. It is that hunger, the product of decades of weak governance, that leaves jobless young people vulnerable to a few thousand naira, a bottle of cheap spirit, and a crude weapon in exchange for becoming foot soldiers for the same men who shook hands on Wednesday.
None of this absolves the rest of us of responsibility. A handful of signatures on a document in Abuja cannot, by itself, restrain the thousands of local actors who carry out electoral violence at the ward level, nor can it substitute for citizens who accept inducements at the polling booth and then complain about the government that inducement buys. The civic institutions built to hold power accountable, a free press, election observer missions, professional associations, religious and traditional leaders with standing in their communities, have a role that outlasts the ceremony in Abuja. Where they have pushed back forcefully, as during the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and the push for real-time result transmission, the political class has been forced to concede ground it would not have surrendered voluntarily. That history suggests reform is possible. It simply has never come from the peace accord itself.
Nigerians have watched this ceremony repeat itself often enough to recognise its limits. Real peace will not descend from a chandeliered hall in the Federal Capital Territory. It will come from institutions willing to enforce consequences: An Independent National Electoral Commission with the capacity and independence to sanction infractions as they happen, a police and security architecture that treats electoral violence as a prosecutable crime rather than a seasonal inconvenience, and a judiciary prepared to resolve election disputes on a timeline that matters to citizens rather than to political calendars. None of this is possible while poverty remains a recruitment tool and impunity remain the default outcome for political violence.
Real stability cannot be built in a moral or economic vacuum. A peace accord that ignores the weaponisation of poverty, the commercialisation of the vote, and the impunity of the political class is not a peace accord at all. It is an exercise in elite self-preservation, dressed up as statesmanship.
Nigerians would do well to stop watching the pens on that stage in Abuja and start watching the footprints that follow it, in the wards, the motor parks, and the polling units where the real contest for 2027 will actually be decided. Until the signatures on that document carry the weight of law, the annual ceremony will remain what it has always been: a beautifully staged performance, and nothing more.
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