The politics of absence
In February 2023, roughly three-quarters of Nigeria's registered voters did not vote. Amongst other aggregation of factors that could have caused this — they simply did not come. The Independent National Electoral Commission recorded a turnout of around 27%, the lowest in the country's democratic history. The obvious question "who won?" dominated the headlines. The more important one went largely unasked: who stayed away, and why?
A cheap answer would be laziness/indifference, yet a pattern unveils beyond this atypical presumption. Those most absent were largely young, urban and economically precarious ; precisely the groups that Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report identifies as living under the greatest daily strain. In Nigeria, 55–57% of workers report significant stress on a typical day, compared with 40% globally. Only 17% say they feel engaged at work. Just 19% describe their lives as "thriving", figures that place Nigeria well below the sub-Saharan African average. The weight of these pressures falls hardest on 18–34-year-olds, who make up roughly 39.7% of registered voters and 84% of the 10m new registrants ahead of the 2023 poll (INEC). Add to that urban informal workers, students, and women managing both jobs and caregiving, and the pattern boldens. The demographic core of Nigeria's electorate is living under chronic stress; and it is staying home.
To understand why that matters, it helps to know what chronic stress actually does to the brain, of course beyond the inevitable and renowned emotional strain.
Research by Amy Arnsten at Yale and Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University has spent decades tracing what happens when the brain is flooded with stress hormones like cortisol. One key effect is on the prefrontal cortex: the part of the brain responsible for planning, weighing consequences and making decisions. Under sustained stress, inhibitory signalling (the brain's chemical "brake" system) increases in this region, effectively dimming the very circuitry we rely on for rational, forward-looking choices. A separate pathway, linking the anterior cingulate cortex to the brain's reward centre, is also dulled: which is why, as Levy and Dubois showed in 2006, chronically stressed people struggle to initiate actions with significant stakes even when they understand the benefits. The brain shifts into a kind of conservation mode: where horizons begin to narrow, and effort feels disproportionate, essentially anything that requires upfront cost for uncertain reward starts to seem like an awry bargain.
Voting, it turns out, fits that description nearly perfectly. It means taking time off, finding transport, standing in a queue, navigating logistical uncertainty ; all for an outcome that, for most voters in most elections, feels remote. When more than half the population is already running on empty, the mental calculus tips against it.
The data bears this out in a striking way. Ahead of 2023, Nigeria saw an unprecedented wave of youth registration:10m new voters, with 18–34-year-olds rising from around 35% of the roll in 2019 to roughly 39.7%. Civil society organisations, social media campaigns, and a genuine surge of political energy drove young Nigerians to sign up in numbers not seen before. Yet on election day, that energy did not translate into ballots — particularly in cities, as documented by Dataphyte and the Election Data Hub Nigeria. Registration and turnout moved in opposite directions. The EU Election Observation Mission's post-poll analysis pointed to the same gap. Meanwhile, older and more rural voters, who face different, often less acute daily pressures, continued to show up in greater proportion. As one observer put it, democracy becomes "government by the majority who participate." In Nigeria, that participating majority is a structurally advantaged minority.
This creates a tilt that compounds itself. When certain regions and demographics vote reliably, politicians listen to them. Resources flow their way. The concerns of the absent; crumbling infrastructure, economic insecurity, overcrowded public services, get deferred. And that deferral, in turn, sustains the very conditions that made those people too stressed and too sceptical to vote in the first place. Mancur Olson's classic theory of collective action describes exactly this trap: organised minorities, with clear interests and the means to coordinate, consistently out-muscle larger but more diffuse majorities. Nigeria's youth, though they represent roughly half the population, remain underrepresented at the ballot box for precisely this reason. Afrobarometer surveys show that public trust in Nigerian institutions is among the lowest on the continent – which both reflects this cycle and keeps it inevitably in motion.
The problem runs deeper still.
Nigeria has not conducted a credible national census since 2006. Every piece of planning that depends on population data; hospital capacity, school funding, constituency boundaries, federal allocations, rests on projections of a country that the UN now estimates at over 220m people, with levels of internal migration and urban growth that two-decade-old numbers cannot begin to reflect. One analyst put the problem plainly: "electoral boundaries, federal allocations, legislative seats and political representation are fundamentally tied to population data, yet the country has not accurately counted [its people] in 20 years." Demographic researchers applying standard data-quality tests to the 2006 figures have found significant age-heaping and statistical unreliability, meaning the baseline is not just old but structurally unsound. The result is visible to anyone who has visited a public hospital in Lagos or Abuja: facilities built for populations that no longer exist, in towns that have been left behind, while the cities that have absorbed millions burst at the seams.
One might charitably call this administrative inertia. Less charitably, a population count that remains permanently deferred, despite repeated promises and budgeted funds, is also a count that cannot disturb existing power arrangements. Outdated maps keep incumbents safe. Unmeasured communities remain undemanded. The chaos serves someone.
The NBS's 2025 rebasing of its consumer price index, which produced sharply revised inflation figures at odds with what most Nigerians were experiencing at the market, only deepened this scepticism. Inevitably when official numbers consistently diverge from lived reality, people stop trusting the whole apparatus of public data. As one columnist put it: "in a democracy, numbers are power - when those numbers are outdated, representation becomes distorted."
What emerges, then, is not apathy in an ordinary sense. It is something more pointed: a rational withdrawal, shaped by biology and reinforced by experience.
Research by Husain and Roiser (2018) describes one of the less-discussed effects of chronic stress as motivational anhedonia: a state in which the brain, depleted by sustained cortisol exposure, stops initiating effortful actions even when the person is physically capable of them. The dopamine pathways that normally drive goal-directed behaviour weaken. The anterior cingulate system, which weighs whether a potential reward justifies the effort required, begins to misfire. The result is a person whose brain has assimilated, from repeated exposure, that costly actions rarely pay off, and has adjusted/withdrawn accordingly. That is to say when civic participation returns disappointment or danger often enough, the brain stops volunteering for it. Even citizens who genuinely want to engage quietly step back, because their own biochemistry is, in a very real sense, working against them.
All of these forces: chronic economic stress, an obfuscated population, biological withdrawal from civic life, feed one another. Failing public services (the product of planning built on phantom data and misallocated spending, as World Bank assessments of Nigerian infrastructure have noted) deepen daily stress. Deeper stress erodes the will to vote. Lower turnout reduces political pressure to fix the services. The accountability mechanism breaks down entirely. Today's 26.7% turnout is not an anomaly. It is the stable output of a system running exactly as its internal logic dictates.
None of this is fated to continue. But fixing it requires naming the problem correctly. The challenge ahead of 2027 is not, at its core, about mobilisation. Telling an exhausted 26-year-old in Lagos or Kano to go and vote - as though the barrier were motivational, is a bit like urging someone caught in a riptide to swim harder. The current has to change.
Three things would help. First, restore the baseline: a real, technology-assisted census: long promised, endlessly deferred, would give every arm of government a denominator it can actually trust, and allow electoral wards to be redrawn to reflect where Nigerians actually live, as the National Population Commission has itself acknowledged is overdue. Second, reduce what participation costs: more polling stations in dense urban areas, better security, transport provision, or simple workplace allowances for election day would remove friction for the people most likely to stay home. Third, ease the daily burden: credible action on inflation, which IMF and NBS figures show has compressed real wages sharply since 2022, along with investment in transport and basic services, would restore the mental bandwidth that civic engagement requires. When voting feels less like a journey down the rings of hell, more young people will be inspired to exercise their franchise.
Civil society has a particular role to play here, not in running voter-registration drives, though those matter, but in making the structural argument loudly and persistently: that low turnout is not a cultural failure but a policy consequence; that the census delay is not bureaucratic drift but a political choice with political beneficiaries; that the loop can be broken if the conditions that sustain it are dismantled. Chatham House's analyses of Nigerian electoral cycles have consistently found that institutional reform, not mobilisation campaigns, is what produces durable gains in participation. The two are not in competition - but sequencing matters.
There is an old saying: when elephants fight, the grass suffers. Nigeria's stressed, undercounted, underrepresented urban youth are the grass. They are not disengaged from democracy because of lack of interest. Democracy, as currently configured, fails to reach them, and is being run, in their absence, by and for the elephants. Changing that means resetting the ground beneath them, not just asking them to stand taller on it.
Sources: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace (2024–26); INEC, 2023 General Election Report; Dataphyte / Election Data Hub Nigeria; EU Election Observation Mission Nigeria 2023; Arnsten (2009, updated); McEwen (chronic stress & brain plasticity); Levy & Dubois (2006); Husain & Roiser (2018); Afrobarometer surveys; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action; UN DESA population projections; World Bank Nigeria development reports; NBS / IMF inflation data; National Population Commission; Chatham House.