By Boma Lilian Braide

Every year, Nigerians abroad wire home upward of $21 billion. The Central Bank puts 2025 remittances at $21.8 billion, among the highest inflows on the continent. This is not an abstract macroeconomic data.

It is the nurse in Dublin paying her mother’s hospital bill, the Uber driver in Houston covering his younger sister’s WAEC fees, the software engineer in Toronto quietly keeping the family compound in Nigeria from falling into disrepair.

Diaspora money buys rice, pays rent, builds houses, and props up a naira that would otherwise be in far deeper trouble. Without it, credible economists agree, Nigeria’s external reserves and household economy would be in far worse shape.

Yet when it is time to decide who runs the country that money sustains, these same seventeen million citizens hit a locked door. They are trusted enough to bankroll the nation but not trusted enough to help choose who spends it. It is a modern, bureaucratic version of an old injustice which is, taxation without representation, dressed up in constitutional language. The message from Abuja to its children abroad has been consistent for a generation: send the money, but keep your opinions to yourself.

This is not a new complaint. Diaspora groups raised it loudly ahead of the 2015, 2019, and 2023 general elections, each time collecting promises from politicians courting their goodwill and campaign donations, and each time watching those promises evaporate once the votes at home were counted. The pattern by now is familiar enough to be its own kind of Nigerian tradition.

Look closely and the exclusion starts to look less like an oversight and more like a strategy. Nigerian elections still run substantially on patronage; cash transfers, food items, and intimidation at polling units are tools that work best on a captive, economically vulnerable electorate. They do not work on a doctor in Berlin or a civil servant in London. You cannot hand out five thousand naira and a bag of rice in Houston. You cannot deploy thugs to a polling unit that does not exist. The diaspora is, by circumstance, a harder electorate to manipulate, and a political class built on patronage has little appetite for voters it cannot manage.

Officials have long pointed cost and logistics as the reason external voting remains unworkable, and those concerns are not entirely without merit, organising secure balloting across dozens of countries is genuinely harder than running it within one. But smaller, poorer neighbours have already solved this problem. Senegal reserves fifteen seats in its National Assembly specifically for diaspora deputies. The Republic of Benin runs polling stations inside its embassies and consulates during presidential cycles.

Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Cameroon all allow citizens abroad to vote from foreign missions. If these countries, several of them with far smaller budgets and thinner institutional capacity than Nigeria can manage the logistics, the claim that Africa’s self-styled “Giant” cannot is harder to sustain as anything more than a lack of political will.

Consider a family compound where the eldest son has travelled to the city for work. Every month he sends home half his salary for food, for the leaking roof, for medical bills that would otherwise go unpaid.

Without that money, the compound struggles to survive. Then the family gathers to choose a new head of household, a decision that will shape everyone’s future, including his. He calls in and asks to be heard. The elders remind him, gently but firmly, that his voice does not count because he is not physically present on the mat in the village square, though they are careful to remind him that next month’s contribution is due on time.

That, in essence, is Nigeria’s relationship with its diaspora; fully welcome as a source of income, fully excluded as a source of judgment.

The mechanics of this exclusion sit in Sections 77 and 117 of the 1999 Constitution, which tie voter registration and voting to physical residency within Nigeria’s borders, a restriction the Electoral Act reinforces. In practice, this means a nurse in Dublin or an engineer in Toronto must fly home, navigate dangerous roads, and take unpaid leave simply to exercise a right that citizens of Senegal, Ghana, or South Africa can exercise at their nearest embassy. A diaspora voting bill has in fact passed second reading in the National Assembly, and versions of it have surfaced in previous electoral reform efforts, only to stall over the same cited concerns about cost, security, and administrative capacity. The bill’s repeated failure to cross the finish line says less about feasibility than about priority.

This is not only a matter of fairness; it carries a real economic cost. Nigeria is losing skilled professionals: doctors, engineers, academicians through the migration wave popularly known as “Japa.”

Every year that the country tells these citizens their political voice does not matter, it weakens the incentive for them to reinvest that knowledge, capital, and global network back home. Diaspora communities that feel politically enfranchised tend to invest more, not less, in their countries of origin, a pattern documented across Ghana, India, and the Philippines, where diaspora bonds and enfranchisement have gone hand in hand with rising diaspora investment.

Continued exclusion does not protect Nigeria’s democracy; it slowly erodes one of its most valuable assets, one departure lounge at a time. None of this requires reinventing the wheel. The path is well-tested by Nigeria’s own neighbours.

The National Assembly should prioritise amending Sections 77 and 117 of the Constitution, alongside the relevant provisions of the Electoral Act, to permit registration and voting from abroad. The Independent National Electoral Commission should be given the legal mandate and the budget, phased in, starting with embassies in countries with the largest Nigerian populations, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to pilot external voting ahead of the next general election, rather than citing cost as a permanent veto.

A phased rollout, tested first in a handful of missions and expanded over two or three election cycles, would answer the logistical objection without requiring the country to solve every problem at once.

The diaspora, for its part, cannot remain a passive donor to a system that excludes it. Nigerians abroad have the associations, the financial leverage, and the global visibility to organise a sustained, coordinated campaign around a simple demand: if the money counts, the vote must count too. And Nigerians at home have a stake in this fight as well.

A diaspora with a vote is a diaspora with a reason to stay engaged, to demand accountability, and to channel resources into local investment rather than remittance alone will yield an outcome that benefits everyone who lives within Nigeria’s borders, not just those who send money into it.

Seventeen million Nigerians abroad are already carrying part of the weight of this country’s economy. Extending them the ballot is not a favour, and it is not radical. Nigeria does not need a constitutional revolution to get there, only the political will its neighbours have already found. It is simply consistent with what the country already asks of its diaspora everywhere else; full commitment, and nothing less than full citizenship in return. The iron door has stayed shut for long enough. It is time Abuja found the key.

Braide is a lawyer and founder of The Surge Youth Advocacy Group