Plateau Jos, 2027 Elections vs Your Empty Pocket. What Nigerian Politicians Care About Most

People buried their children in Jos this week. Market women can't afford to stock their stalls. And somewhere in Abuja, a politician just finished his third strategy meeting about 2027. Let that sink in.

I want to tell you something I heard last week. A friend of mine let's call him Gbenga was trying to explain Nigeria to his eight-year-old daughter. She had asked a simple question. Why do we have light sometimes and not other times? Why do some people not have food? Simple, childlike questions. The kind that don't have complicated answers only ones we've convinced ourselves are complicated.

Gbenga sat quietly for a while. Then he said: "Because the people in charge are too busy thinking about staying in charge."

I've been thinking about that sentence ever since.

Plateau Jos Bled Again Last Night

If you haven't heard and many of us are so exhausted by the news cycle that we almost don't want to anymore gunmen attacked Chigwi village in Jos South Local Government Area during crossover night festivities, killing at least nine people including men, women, and children. Nine. Human beings who woke up that morning with plans. With people who loved them.

And this isn't a one-off. In Plateau State alone, armed groups carried out 38 attacks. In just two years, 167 rural communities were attacked across multiple local government areas. As a result, 65,000 people have been internally displaced some communities more than once, after even the IDP camps were attacked.

Let that number breathe for a second. 65,000 people. Displaced. From their own land. In their own country.

Meanwhile, Your Pocket Is on Fire

Let's talk about what's happening to money in this country because that's the other war most Nigerians are fighting every single day, quietly, at the market, at the filling station, at the school fees counter.

The World Bank confirmed that while Nigeria's macroeconomic numbers look better on paper, these gains have yet to translate into tangible improvements in people's lives. Poor households who spend up to 70% of their income on food have seen the cost of a basic food basket rise fivefold between 2019 and 2024.

Fivefold. Your garri. Your tomatoes. Your children's school lunch. Five times more expensive than six years ago. And inflation, even by the government's own revised numbers, is still running at over 15% which means the pain isn't slowing down, it's just slowing down its speed of arrival.

But 2027, Now That's Urgent

Here's the part that should make every Nigerian genuinely angry. In the middle of all of this the bodies in Plateau, the empty pots, the kids dropping out of school because fees are now impossible our political class has been in full 2027 mode since roughly the third week of 2023.

Defections. Declarations. Rallies. Consultations. Billboards going up in states where the governor hasn't fixed a single road in four years. The machinery of Nigerian politics doesn't sleep — it just redirects all its energy toward the next election the moment the current one ends.

And look, I understand politics. I've studied it for fifteen years. I know that positioning is part of governance. I know that electoral strategy doesn't stop just because there's a crisis. But when the positioning becomes the governance? When the strategy IS the administration? That's when ordinary Nigerians should get very uncomfortable very quickly.

Because here's what the data tells anyone willing to look: the further Nigeria gets from an election, the less urgency there is about insecurity, hunger, and unemployment. The closer we get to one, the more the roads suddenly develop potholes worth fixing, the more security convoys show up to communities that haven't seen a uniform in years.

We have seen this cycle so many times we've almost started to accept it as the natural order of things. It isn't.

So What Do We Actually Do?

I'm not going to end this post with a naive call to revolution. I'm also not going to wrap it in false hope and tell you that 2027 is different if we just vote right because we've heard that song before and most of us know all the words by now.

But I will say this, and I mean it with everything I have: an uninformed, emotionally exhausted electorate is the greatest gift you can give to a politician who doesn't deserve your vote. When you're too tired to pay attention, they win by default. When you've given up and decided all politicians are the same, they've already gotten exactly what they wanted from you.

The people of Jos don't have the luxury of political fatigue. The woman in Benue who can't go back to her farm because she might not come back she doesn't have that luxury either. The least those of us with safety and data and a voice can do is stay awake. Stay angry. Stay informed. And in 2027, vote like someone's life depends on it.

Because in this Nigeria, someone's life always does.