When state betrays citizens: The shadow over 2027

Picture this. It is the early morning of February 25, 2023. Somewhere in Lagos, Kano, Enugu, or Port Harcourt, a Nigerian — let us call her Fatima — wakes up earlier than usual. She has her Permanent Voter Card. She has followed the campaigns, argued online, maybe even volunteered. Something about this election feels different. The streets had come alive with a kind of hope many Nigerians had not felt in a long time. She queues. She waits. She votes.

Three months later, on May 29, 2023, Fatima sits before a television and watches a new president take the oath of office. She leans in for the promised renewal. What she gets instead is a three-word sentence that will rearrange the economics of her entire existence: “Subsidy is gone.”

Ask Fatima today if she will vote in 2027. Listen carefully to what she says — and what she does not say.

There is a concept in psychology, developed by Jennifer Freyd in 2008, called institutional betrayal. It describes a particular kind of harm: the experience of being taken advantage of, wounded, and abandoned by an institution that was theoretically built to care for you. The harm is not merely what the institution did or failed to do. The deeper wound comes from the violation of an implied contract — the slow, sickening recognition that the institution never really saw you as someone worth protecting.

Nigeria has been living inside this story for a very long time. But as the country tilts toward the 2027 general elections, the story has entered a more dangerous chapter. And we must tell it honestly.

The Nigerian state does not need to hand every citizen a written contract. The 1999 Constitution speaks clearly enough. So do twenty-six years of campaign posters, inauguration speeches, and budget preambles invoking “the welfare of the people.” Citizens are owed basic things: security, education, health, infrastructure, and an economy managed with at least minimal regard for the survival of the poor.

These are not excessive demands. They are the ordinary expectations of citizenship — the minimum terms of the social contract. And election after election, Nigerians have shown up to renew that contract, armed with voters’ cards and diminishing but resilient hope.

The numbers tell the story of what happened next. Voter turnout has fallen from 69 per cent in 2003 to a historic low of 27 per cent in 2023. That is not a coincidence. That is a response.

The betrayals have not been random. They have been structural, layered, and remarkably consistent across administrations and party labels.

Consider the economic dimension. When President Tinubu declared “subsidy is gone” on inauguration day, economists could debate the long-term merits of the policy.

Far less defensible was the manner of its implementation. Fuel prices surged overnight, the naira weakened further, and household purchasing power collapsed. The consequences are now visible beyond inflation statistics. The 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, jointly published by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, estimates that the number of Nigerians unable to afford a healthy diet rose from 137.5 million in 2017 to 191.2 million in 2025. Put differently, more than four out of every five Nigerians can no longer afford the minimum diet required for healthy living. That is what reforms look like when they arrive at your kitchen table.

The government promised, in a national broadcast in July 2023, that subsidy savings would fund infrastructure, transport and social protection. More than two years later, despite over N14tn reportedly shared across the federation, little had translated into visible improvements in public services. Debt servicing in the 2026 federal budget exceeded the combined allocations to health and education.

This is what institutional betrayal looks like in practice: you are told the pain is necessary and temporary; you absorb the pain; the temporary never becomes permanent relief; and the officials who inflicted the pain are photographed at a lavish function.

Electoral reform promised a different kind of hope. BVAS was supposed to reassure you that your vote would finally be protected. Yet disputed results, inconsistent implementation, and court rulings that weakened those safeguards left many Nigerians wondering whether anything fundamental had changed. The message was unmistakable: the protections you trusted could still be set aside when they mattered most. This, too, is institutional betrayal.

Equally corrosive is the spectacle of mass defections to the ruling party, justified as political pragmatism but widely understood as an admission that power is secured less through voters than through proximity to the state. When politicians behave as though your vote is a formality to be managed rather than a mandate to be earned, they are telling you exactly where you stand. Nigerians have been listening.

Security represents perhaps the deepest institutional betrayal. The state’s first obligation is to protect its citizens, yet millions continue to live with insurgency, banditry, kidnapping and communal violence. Elections, rather than moments of civic confidence, have often become periods of heightened fear. As one respondent in Yiaga Africa’s 2025 survey puts it: “This election is coming at a time when insecurity is even worse than before. Count me out. I will use election day as a break to rest.” That is not political apathy. It is what happens when you no longer believe the state can protect you.

This is the part that Nigerian public discourse consistently gets wrong. Voter apathy is almost always framed as a character flaw — the laziness of a people who complain but will not act, who bleed on social media but stay home on election day. It is the favourite accusation of political elites and their apologists, and it has become a convenient way to shift moral responsibility from those who broke the system onto those who were broken by it.

But apathy, in the context of repeated institutional betrayal, is not laziness. It is a protective response. When you invest hope and receive harm often enough, your psyche learns to ration hope. The withdrawal is not indifference; it is self-preservation. Fatima is not staying home in 2027 because she does not care about Nigeria. She is staying home because caring about Nigeria has cost her too much, too many times, and the institution that was supposed to honour her care has shown no comparable loyalty to her. Voter apathy is not the disease. It is the symptom.