Professor of Political Economy Pat Utomi has called on Nigerians to prepare for massive turnout in the January 2027 presidential election, warning that widespread poverty is increasingly being exploited to buy votes ahead of the polls.
Utomi, Convener of the Big Tent and Movement for Credible Election, made the appeal at a media briefing in Lagos on Wednesday, days after INEC confirmed its election timetable. The presidential and National Assembly elections are scheduled for January 16, 2027, with governorship and state assembly elections following on February 6.
His central argument was that large-scale participation is the clearest way for citizens to counter both economic hardship and the manipulation that tends to follow it. “The state of our country is troubling. The pain, the hunger, and the anger in the land is so palpable,” he said, describing the current moment as one where saving Nigeria has become “a matter of desperation.”
That desperation, Utomi argued, is exactly what makes voters vulnerable to manipulation. “Even as power continues to weaponise poverty through the buying of votes of those so hungry,” he said, urging Nigerians to resist that pressure and instead use turnout itself as a form of accountability.
He backed the warning with figures from international institutions, citing IMF data putting 35 million Nigerians in food insecurity and World Bank projections suggesting close to 139 million people could be living in poverty by the end of 2026. He said the strain was visible well beyond economic indicators, pointing to a recent, personal example: over a short period, he received more than a dozen requests for financial help from people he had once considered middle class. He initially assumed he was being targeted, until he learned the same thing was happening to others across the country. He described it as evidence that begging, once carrying real stigma, has become normalized as hardship deepens.
Utomi tied the turnout appeal to a broader concern about institutional credibility, saying confidence in the judiciary, police, and EFCC has fallen sharply, and that many Nigerians no longer view INEC as sufficiently independent. “Our institutions are crumbling,” he said, adding that compromised institutions need to be forced to act correctly or face consequences at the ballot box. “Impunity must end in Nigeria if Nigeria is to survive,” he said.
To support transparency during the vote itself, Utomi said the Big Tent and MCE are working to live-stream proceedings from every polling booth in 2027, an effort intended to cut down on malpractice and address weaknesses in INEC’s existing IREV results-viewing platform. He said the system would need sufficient redundancy to avoid the kind of technical failures that disrupted the 2023 elections.
