By Wahab Kunle Shittu

As Nigeria marked its 27th Democracy Day, we should be careful not to mistake survival for justice. The harder, and more urgent, half of the story is the work we have left undone.

On the twelfth of June, Nigeria marked twenty-seven unbroken years of civilian rule. Before anything else is said, that fact deserves to be stated plainly, because it is the longest stretch of constitutional government we have ever known. Consider what came before it. A civil war. One coup after another. A people who spent the better part of their independent life under the boot of the military, and who then watched the freest election in their history annulled in 1993.

After all of that, this country has governed itself by the ballot and not the bullet for more than a quarter of a century. The young Nigerian entering the workforce today has never seen a soldier in Aso Rock. That is no small thing, and in a season of hardship it would be easy, and wrong, to wave it away.

But an anniversary is for accounting, not applause. We lawyers like to say that justice delayed is justice denied; the political cousin of that maxim is that democracy celebrated is not the same as democracy delivered. To mark twenty-seven years honestly is to ask what the years have taught us, what they have built, and what they have left unfinished, and to ask it without flattery. The honest answer is that we have survived. Survival, though, is the floor. It was never meant to be the ceiling.

What we have truly won
Around that achievement a whole scaffolding of institutions has gone up. The Independent National Electoral Commission, for all that is fairly said against it, is a far more capable body than the one that ran the discredited elections of 2003 and 2007. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission did not exist before this republic; whatever their flaws, they have made the looting of the treasury a riskier business than it once was. The courts have stood up to executive power with a regularity that would have been unthinkable under a military decree. Add to all this a combative press, a loud and inventive civil society, and a generation of young people who found their political voice on the streets and online. None of it was inevitable, and all of it belongs on the credit side of the ledger.

Democracy is a process, not an event
And yet the harder lessons of these years are written on the other side of the page. The first is one we keep having to relearn: democracy is a process, not an event. Our recurring mistake is to treat an election as the destination when it is only the gateway. We pour enormous energy into winning a mandate and very little into honouring it once it is won. A vote cast once in four years cannot, on its own, keep a government honest through the 1,460 days in between. The things that can keep it honest, a legislature that truly oversees, courts that will enforce the law against the powerful, a press that exposes what the powerful would rather bury, are not decorations on a democracy. They are its substance. Where they are weak, the ballot stops being an instrument of control and becomes a mere ritual of consent.

The rule of law is not the rule of numbers
The second lesson follows closely from the first. The rule of law is the indispensable partner of the rule of the people, and the two are not the same thing. A majority that ignores the constitution is not democratic; it is merely numerous. Sometimes painfully, these years have taught us that the citizen’s real protection lies not in the goodwill of whoever happens to hold office, but in the binding force of the law upon him. An independent judge willing to tell power “no” is worth more to the ordinary Nigerian than any party manifesto. Where our courts have been bold, liberty has been safe. Where they have been timid, or bought, no electoral mandate has ever been enough to keep it so.

The gap between procedure and welfare
The third lesson is the most uncomfortable to put into words. Our procedural democracy has raced far ahead of our substantive democracy, and the distance between them is widening. We have learnt how to hold elections, transfer power and litigate the disputes that follow; we have not yet learnt how to turn any of that into security, prosperity and dignity for the mass of ordinary people. The farmer who cannot reach his land for fear of bandits, the graduate with no work, the family broken by the price of food: none of them meets “democratic governance” as an abstraction.

They meet it as a system that has failed to protect them, feed them and employ them. A democracy that secures the form of consent while neglecting the welfare of those consenting is building on sand, because legitimacy that rests on procedure alone will not survive a long collapse in the conditions of daily life. We are now at the midpoint of the present administration, with growth returning to the national accounts even as inflation and insecurity bear down hard on households. This is precisely the moment to insist that reform be judged not by the elegance of its statistics, but by the quality of an ordinary citizen’s life.

Stop rewriting the rules on the eve of the game
The fourth lesson is one the legal profession is duty-bound to press, for it goes to the electoral architecture itself. We have fallen into a ruinous habit of rewriting the rules of the game on the very eve of the game. In fairness, the new Electoral Act of 2026, signed in February, carries real advances: a dedicated funding stream for the electoral commission, the early release of that funding ahead of a general election, compulsory technology for voter accreditation, the electronic transmission of results, and stiffer penalties for falsifying figures and buying votes.

These were lessons the wreckage of 2023 forced upon us, and they deserve their credit. And yet a reform passed in the shadow of the next contest, however sound its content, always invites the suspicion that the rules are being adjusted for advantage rather than for fairness. A rule changed just before the whistle does not look like a neutral foundation. It looks like a tactic. If our electoral law is ever to command real confidence, we must settle the principle that its fundamentals are fixed well in advance and then left alone while the candidates take their marks.

When elections move from the polling unit to the courtroom
This brings me to a connected worry, and the one that should trouble lawyers most of all: the steady migration of our elections from the polling unit to the courtroom. It has become almost routine for the decisive question of who governs to be answered not by the count on election night, but by a judgment handed down many months later. There is, of course, an essential place for the courts in resolving genuine electoral grievance, and more than once they have rescued the popular will from those who tried to steal it. But when an electorate increasingly expects judges to choose its leaders, that electorate has begun to distrust its own vote; and a judiciary asked, again and again, to do the choosing is drawn into pressures and suspicions that eat away at the very independence on which its authority rests.

The answer is not to weaken the courts. It is to make the count itself so transparent, and so trustworthy, that the courts are needed far less often.

That, in the end, is the whole point of electronic transmission and of letting the public watch the results come in: it carries the moment of legitimacy back to where it belongs, the polling unit, and away from the tribunal. Credibility depends far less on what the law permits than on what the voter sees with his own eyes on the day.

The unfinished republic
All of these lessons point in one direction. The task of the coming years is not to celebrate that our democracy has survived, but to deepen it, and deepening is much harder work than surviving. It means making the institutions we built across the first twenty-seven years independent in fact and effective in practice: an electoral commission insulated by reality and not merely by its name, anti-corruption agencies that pursue the powerful as readily as the weak, a judiciary that is timely, fearless and beyond purchase, and a legislature that oversees the executive instead of serving it. Above all, it means making the dividend of democracy visible, in the safety of the village and in the prospects of the young, because no people will defend for long a system that does not defend them.

The 2027 elections will be the next great test. They will measure not the promise of the new electoral law but how it holds up under pressure, and a law is only ever as strong as the people who insist that it be obeyed: the officials who administer it honestly, the judges who read it impartially, the citizens who watch it closely. Twenty-seven years ago a generation of Nigerians, some of whom paid with their freedom and some with their lives, won for us the right to choose those who govern us. The debt we owe them is not a row of candles on an anniversary. It is the patient, unglamorous, day-after-day labour of making that choice mean something. That labour is the unfinished republic, and it belongs to every one of us.

Dr Shittu is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos.