For decades, our electoral choices have been driven by gamblers’ instincts. Every election season, we operate like gamblers trying to predict the winner, aligning ourselves with the craftiest dice thrower in the hope of celebrating his victory. When the master dice throwers appear, we forget our worries; we forget our woes. We forget that after the dice is cast, dice throwers usually disappear to enjoy their winnings alone. But our worries don’t disappear; our woes don’t. We failed to realize that ours is not a gamblers’ playground; ours is a nation in distress.
Our duty this week is simple: let us list, one by one, those who seek to govern Nigeria. Then let us honestly list our national woes: insecurity, unemployment, inflation, poverty, hunger, a failing education system, a struggling healthcare sector, corruption, weak institutions, poor infrastructure, environmental degradation, injustice and the growing loss of hope among our people.
Having placed these problems before us, let us bring each aspirant forward, not for applause, not for sentiment, not for ethnicity or religion, but for examination.
Who truly understands these problems? Who has demonstrated the character to confront them? Who possesses the ideas, courage and discipline required to tackle them?
Let us interrogate who merely seeks power and who is genuinely prepared to govern. Who has the audacity to dare what has not been done, to do new things and to break from the politics of routine?
Only after we have undertaken that exercise should we return to the question of electability. At that stage, one may honestly say, “This candidate is the fittest, but for political reasons I may still vote for another.” That is a legitimate political calculation.
What is intellectually dishonest is to begin and end the conversation with, “Who can win?” while never asking whether the likely winner is the person best equipped to rescue the country.
Perhaps the more important question is not why one candidate can win. It is why another candidate, despite possessing superior fitness, competence and capacity, is considered unable to win.
That is the conversation serious citizens should be having now. We cannot continue to recycle the same disappointments under the lazy justification of, “Only he can win!”
Until then, our politics will continue to offer familiar failures disguised as inevitable choices under the guise of, “Who has structure?” and “Who can win?”
Tope Temokun
27th July, 2026
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