By Tunde Kolajo
“In Nigeria, elections are not simply civic events; they are moral laboratories. They test whether power can be earned legitimately or merely captured. The post-2023 election cycle revealed the now-familiar Nigerian pattern: voting, accusations, and litigation. International reporting noted how opposition challenges to the presidential outcome moved through courts and were dismissed for lack of evidence; the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the election result. Whatever one’s partisan interpretation, the ethical question is larger: when electoral legitimacy is repeatedly contested in court, what happens to democratic trust? A democracy can survive disputed elections and electoral conduct if institutions are trusted. It struggles when citizens believe institutions are aligned with power rather than principle. For a recent example, a high court judge can defy the higher (Appeal Court) court’s order and proceed most recklessly to order the deregistration of five opposition parties in the thick of electoral preparations for a fast-approaching national election, against the backdrop of looming national political tensions! The appellate court calls it ‘the highest form of judicial impertinence,’ stressing that the Supreme Court previously held that a judge who acted in such a manner ‘is unfit for the bench as it amounts to judicial rascality”.
Nigeria, definitely, is not short of politics; it is short of ethical politics. We vote, we litigate elections, we inaugurate, we reshuffle, we announce reforms, and we form committees. Yet the citizen’s daily question remains stubborn: Where is the moral centre of power? Not in sermons, not in manifestos, not in televised pledges, but in the lived conduct of authority: how contracts are awarded, how security forces behave, how elections are protected, how dissent is treated, how public money is traced, and how consequences are applied. In mature democracies, politics is ideally the contest over ideas within a framework of rules and restraints. In Nigeria, politics too often becomes a contest over access: access to state resources, patronage, immunity, and the power to decide who gets what, when, and why. Ethics, in that environment, is not merely personal virtue; it is institutional oxygen. When ethics is absent, power suffocates the public realm.
Chatham House, in a 2025 analysis, captured the persistence of Nigeria’s problem in blunt terms: decades of attempted reforms have not dislodged corruption from the institutional bloodstream, and it continues to undermine democracy and growth. But corruption is only one face of an ethical crisis. The deeper crisis is the normalisation of impunity, the idea that power is its own justification. So, Nigerian politicians jostle without restraint for power by all conceivable means as an end in itself. The jostling sadly includes wicked silence, callous non-representation, and incredibly insensitive behaviour even in the face of the gravest evils against citizens for whom they exist in the first place!
Nigeria’s state is unusually attractive because it is so unusually central. The federal structure concentrates prestige, security control, fiscal allocation, regulatory authority, and the symbolic weight of national destiny. When a state is this central and when the economy is shaped by rents and scarcity, politics can begin to resemble a high-stakes investment: spend heavily to win office, then recover costs through access, contracts, appointments, and influence. This is where ethics collapses first: in the conversion of public office into private ROI. The language of “godfatherism” captures part of this machinery: the political financier or patron who funds candidates and expects obedience and payback. Scholarly work continues to describe godfatherism as corrosive, undermining electoral integrity and governance by turning office-holders into debtors to private sponsors. The tragedy is not only that the “godfather” exists. It is that the system often treats him as normal, an unofficial ministry of political finance, operating outside transparency, beyond sanction, and above civic shame.
Nigeria’s Constitution anticipates ethical governance through institutions like the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and the Code of Conduct Tribunal. The CCB’s mandate includes maintaining high standards in government business and enforcing the Code of Conduct for public officers, which requires asset declarations and limits on conflicts of interest. Yet Nigerians know the gap between law and lived reality: rules can exist without biting. Ethics becomes a document rather than a discipline. An ethics regime fails when three things happen: disclosure is weak or unverifiable, conflicts of interest are normalised, and enforcement becomes selective or politicised. In such an environment, a public official can be investigated but still be powerful; can be accused but still be invited; can be indicted but still be negotiated with. And once a society learns that consequences are optional, ethics becomes theatre of the awada kerikeri sort.
In Nigeria, elections are not simply civic events; they are moral laboratories. They test whether power can be earned legitimately or merely captured. The post-2023 election cycle revealed the now-familiar Nigerian pattern: voting, accusations, and litigation. International reporting noted how opposition challenges to the presidential outcome moved through courts and were dismissed for lack of evidence; the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the election result. Whatever one’s partisan interpretation, the ethical question is larger: when electoral legitimacy is repeatedly contested in court, what happens to democratic trust? A democracy can survive disputed elections and electoral conduct if institutions are trusted. It struggles when citizens believe institutions are aligned with power rather than principle. For a recent example, a high court judge can defy the higher (Appeal Court) court’s order and proceed most recklessly to order the deregistration of five opposition parties in the thick of electoral preparations for a fast-approaching national election, against the backdrop of looming national political tensions! The appellate court calls it ‘the highest form of judicial impertinence,’ stressing that the Supreme Court previously held that a judge who acted in such a manner ‘is unfit for the bench as it amounts to judicial rascality’.
At subnational levels, electoral disputes have increasingly involved technology and evidence battles, such as BVAS-related controversies, including the Edo governorship petition context widely reported in the media. Technology alone cannot save ethics. But the ethical core of electoral governance is clear: transparent processes, accountable administration, timely dispute resolution, and sanctions for malpractice that are real enough to deter imitation.
If you want to understand why ethics fails in Nigerian politics, follow the money, not only the stolen money, but the campaign money. Nigeria’s Electoral Act contains provisions on campaign finance and reporting obligations, including guidance documents from INEC on parties’ and candidates’ finances and election expenses. Yet across many democracies, campaign finance is the frontier where legality and legitimacy wrestle. The world has learned, from examples ranging from the United States to Europe, that when political money goes unchecked, power becomes purchasable. The U.S. Federal Election Commission’s own data summaries show the scale and regularity of campaign finance reporting and spending in the American system, useful as a global comparison point, not as a moral superior. In Nigeria, the ethical dilemma is sharpened by poverty, unemployment, and scarcity. Vote-buying thrives where survival is negotiable. The citizen sells a vote not always out of greed, but out of exhaustion because the state has already sold his future. So political money becomes both a symptom and a cause: it reflects weak welfare systems and deepens weak accountability.
No institution tests ethics like a security agency. The state’s right to use force must be restrained by law and accountability, or it becomes organised intimidation. The #EndSARS protests and the unresolved accountability questions surrounding them remain a defining ethical case study: citizens demanded policing consistent with human dignity, and the state’s response, then and after, exposed the gap between power and responsibility. By late 2025, civil society voices were still describing the #EndSARS accountability agenda as unfinished, with calls for justice and meaningful reform. A major international feature reported that victims and families still viewed promised accountability and compensation as unmet five years on. Amnesty International has continued to argue that police abuses and impunity persist beyond the protests, framing it as a systemic failure requiring urgent action. There is also an important regional dimension: Nigerian discourse has cited a reported ECOWAS Court ruling in July 2024, which allegedly found rights violations and ordered reparations for protest-related abuses, highlighting how governance ethics can spill into regional legal arenas when domestic accountability stalls. When a state cannot transparently account for violence used in its name, ethics collapses into fear. And fear is the most convenient political currency, as it appears to be the case in current-day Nigeria.
Nigeria’s political crises, including corruption scandals, election disputes, insecurity, and mistrust, are not separate storms. They are different weather patterns produced by the same climate: a power culture that too often outruns ethical restraint. The ethical problem is not that Nigerians do not know right from wrong. The ethical problem is that public systems have not made wrongdoing reliably costly. And when wrongdoing is not costly, it becomes strategic. Nigeria has agencies tasked with ethics and accountability. But even when institutions perform, they must overcome the public’s suspicion that enforcement is selective or politicised. ICPC’s recent public communication on ethics compliance, through instruments such as an Ethics and Integrity Compliance Scorecard, signals a growing institutional effort to measure integrity in the public sector rather than merely chasing scandals after the fact. That kind of preventive integrity architecture matters: ethics cannot be only punitive; it must be structural. But institutions will not earn trust through publications alone. They earn trust through predictable consequences that do not bend for status. Nigeria’s anti-corruption ecosystem also faces design questions: overlapping mandates, duplication, and political interference pose risks, as noted in policy analyses. The ethical standard in a democracy is simple to state and hard to practice: the law must be stronger than the powerful. Where the powerful are stronger than the law, governance becomes a marketplace, as we have in Nigeria. Nigeria’s judiciary carries enormous political weight because election disputes and elite accountability often end there. That makes judicial ethics, independence, clarity, and procedural discipline central to national stability. Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC)’s 2025 report launch on election petition litigation from the 2023 general elections underscores how deeply electoral legitimacy is now mediated by tribunals, appellate courts, and the Supreme Court. This is not inherently bad; court review can be a safeguard of democracy. But it becomes dangerous when citizens come to believe that courts merely ratify power rather than interrogate it. When trust in the judiciary declines, politics becomes more volatile: losers stop believing in peaceful dispute resolution, and fraudulent winners become more arrogant. That is how societies drift toward democratic fatigue, where citizens disengage not because they hate democracy, but because democracy feels like a script already written. I lament over Nigeria.
No honest essay about Nigerian political ethics can pretend that citizens are saints and leaders are devils. Ethics is a shared ecosystem. A citizen may sell a vote because school fees are due. A politician may buy votes because winning office is the only reliable path to wealth and immunity. A party may field the same discredited figures because “structure” matters more than character. A community may defend “its son” even when he steals because representation has been reduced to extraction. But notice the asymmetry: the citizen’s ethical compromise is usually driven by desperation; the elite’s ethical compromise is driven by appetite. That is why the cure cannot be moral scolding of the poor. It must be structural reform that reduces desperation and increases consequences.
A working ethics agenda for Nigeria is therefore not a manifesto; it is an ethical spine, a set of reforms that make politics less predatory and power more accountable. In my reasoning, Nigeria’s ethical recovery depends on five practical shifts. First, political finance must become visible and enforceable. INEC’s frameworks and statutory provisions must translate into real monitoring and sanctions, or campaign money will keep capturing governance. Second, public procurement must become legible to citizens. Procurement is where policy becomes cash. Debates in Nigeria’s public space continue to frame procurement reforms as central to national performance. The ethical question is not whether contracts exist; it is whether contracts deliver value and whether deviations are punished. Third, asset declaration must move from ritual to verification. The CCB’s constitutional mandate is only as strong as its ability to verify and prosecute breaches consistently. Fourth, security sector accountability must be real enough to restore dignity. The #EndSARS legacy remains the clearest national exhibit of what happens when policing ethics collapses. Reports and advocacy continue to describe unresolved accountability as a continuing wound. Fifth, civic space must be protected, especially for journalists and whistle-blowers. Ethics cannot thrive where truth-tellers are unprotected or treated as enemies. A society that punishes scrutiny or makes scrutineers vulnerable after the fact trains its thieves to be confident.
Nigeria’s struggle is not for perfect leaders. It is for a political culture where leaders cannot easily become predators. Politics will always involve ambition. Power will always attract those who desire influence. The ethical question is whether the system restrains ambition through rules, transparency, and consequences, or rewards it with immunity. A nation does not collapse only when leaders are corrupt. It collapses when citizens stop expecting integrity and begin to treat dishonesty as realism. Nigeria is not doomed. But Nigeria is tired. And in that fatigue lies a warning: when ethics fails, politics becomes warfare by other means. But when ethics holds even imperfectly, politics becomes governance: a contest of ideas, restrained by law, accountable to the people. I close with this line that Nigerians must continue to emphasise until it becomes policy: Power without ethics is violence in slow motion. And a democracy that cannot discipline power will eventually be disciplined by crisis. I doubt that is where Nigeria is at. TheConscienceChronicler.
