They Signed A Peace Accord. Nigeria Has Signed One Before.
Ahead of campaigning opening, the presidential candidates and party leaders signed a National Peace Accord pledging issue-based campaigns and rejecting violence, hate speech and ethnic or religious incitement. The document has no enforcement mechanism.
Before the campaign could legally start, the men who will fight it signed a promise about how they would fight it. Presidential candidates and party leaders put their names to a National Peace Accord, pledging to run issue-based campaigns and to reject violence, hate speech, personal attacks, fake news, and ethnic or religious incitement.
Tinubu signed. Obi signed. Sowore signed. Others signed.
What the document does
It sets a public standard. That is genuinely worth something in a country where campaign rhetoric has historically escalated into something worse, and where the memory of post-election violence is not academic. Making candidates stand next to each other and commit in front of cameras raises the cost of the first person to break it.
What the document does not do
It does not bind anybody. There is no penalty attached, no adjudication body with teeth, no mechanism by which a candidate who runs an ethnically inflammatory advert in November faces a consequence in December. The accord is a norm, not a law.
Nigeria has been here before. Peace accords have preceded previous cycles, and the campaigns that followed were not free of exactly the conduct the accords disavowed. The signature is a ritual with real symbolic weight and no coercive force, and it is worth being clear-eyed about which of those two things is doing the work.
The honest measure will not be whether the three men insult each other. It will be whether any of them ever disowns someone on their own side.
The part that will be tested first
The hate-speech and incitement clause is the one under most pressure, and the pressure will not come primarily from the candidates. It will come from the layer beneath them: surrogates, party youth wings, paid social media operations and the enormous informal ecosystem of partisan accounts that no campaign formally controls and every campaign benefits from.
That is the loophole in every accord of this kind. A candidate can keep his own language clean for five months while an ecosystem he did not build and does not discipline does the other work. Holding a principal responsible for that is difficult, which is precisely why it keeps happening.
The honest measure of this accord will not be whether the three men on the podium insult each other. It will be whether any of them ever publicly disowns someone on their own side for doing it.
What previous accords produced
Nigeria has run this ritual before. Accords have preceded earlier cycles, signed with similar ceremony and similar language, and the campaigns that followed still featured the conduct the documents disavowed.
That record does not make the exercise worthless. Norms matter even without enforcement, and a public commitment raises the reputational cost of being the first to break it. But it does mean the accord should be read as a statement of intent rather than as a constraint, and coverage that treats the signing as a resolution of the problem is misreading it.
The layer the accord cannot reach
The conduct most likely to breach the accord's terms will not come from the candidates. It will come from surrogates, party youth wings, and the very large informal ecosystem of partisan accounts that campaigns benefit from without formally controlling.
That structure is not accidental. It allows a principal to maintain clean public language while material that would be unacceptable from him circulates at one remove. Every serious campaign in Nigeria understands this, and the accord's drafters certainly do.
Which is why the meaningful test is disavowal rather than restraint. Anybody can avoid saying the thing themselves. Publicly disciplining a supporter who said it, while it is working, costs something real.
Sources: Vanguard; allAfrica; TVC News Nigeria.
Signing a peace accord in front of cameras is free. Every candidate gains from it: it makes you look statesmanlike, it costs no policy ground, and it binds your rivals as much as you.
The expensive act is the one that comes later. It is telling your own surrogate, publicly, that what they said about an opponent's ethnicity or faith was unacceptable, and doing it when that surrogate is popular and the message is working.
That is the moment to watch for, and it is the moment that almost never arrives. Nigerian campaigns are usually happy to let the ugliest material circulate at one remove, close enough to benefit from and far enough to deny.
So do not score this accord in August. Score it the first time a campaign has an opportunity to discipline its own side and either takes it or does not. Everything before that is choreography.
