Five Months Of Promises Start Now. Keep The Receipts.
Campaigning is legal from today. Between now and 16 January, Nigerians will be promised a great deal. A short guide to reading what is coming.
From today, everything said by a Nigerian presidential candidate is campaign material. That is not a criticism; it is simply what a campaign is. But it changes how the next five months should be read.
Four questions worth applying to every promise
The first is whether the thing promised is within the power of a president to deliver. A great deal of what gets pledged in Nigerian campaigns sits with state governments, the National Assembly, or independent regulators. A president cannot unilaterally fix most of what people are angriest about, and a candidate who implies otherwise is either misinformed or counting on the audience being so.
The second is the funding source. Any promise involving significant spending should be accompanied by where the money comes from: new borrowing, reallocation, or revenue that does not currently exist. If the answer is not offered, it is usually the third.
The third is the timeline. Promises without dates cannot be broken, which is why so many of them do not have dates.
The fourth is whether it was promised before. Three of the leading figures have contested previous presidential elections and made previous commitments. The record exists.
What will dominate
Cost of living, at N1,600 a litre for petrol and a naira near N1,350 to the dollar. Security, across banditry, insurgency and farmer-herder conflict. Electricity. Jobs.
What will be neglected
Food insecurity affecting an estimated 34.7 million people during the lean season. Education outcomes. Health infrastructure. Judicial reform. The unglamorous administrative capacity questions that determine whether any promise can be implemented at all.
The one to watch for
Toward December, expect a marked increase in visible government spending: contracts, arrears settlements, palliative distribution. Some will be legitimate. Some will be the electoral cycle doing what it always does.
The useful discipline is to note what is being promised now and check in February.
Sources: INEC timetable; Vanguard; Pulse Nigeria; ACAPS.
Nigerian journalism is good at covering what politicians say and poor at remembering it. Each cycle begins as though the previous one did not happen, promises are made that closely resemble promises already broken, and almost nobody produces the receipt.
This is a solvable problem and the solution is boring. Keep a public, structured list. Every significant campaign promise, with the date, the speaker, the venue, the specific commitment and the stated timeline. Publish it. Update it. Return to it in twelve months and again in three years.
It is not glamorous work and it will not perform well on the day it is published. It is the single highest-value thing a newsroom can do in an election year, because it converts rhetoric into a record that can be checked.
The reason it rarely happens is that it requires sustained attention across years, and the incentives in digital media reward the opposite.
This publication intends to keep such a list from today. Readers are invited to hold us to it, which is rather the point.
