Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of civic passion. What we suffer from is civic fragmentation. Across the country, civil society organisations launch campaigns, build platforms, train citizens, protest injustices, and track public officials with admirable energy. Yet, after decades of activism and democratic rule, the everyday experience of democracy for most Nigerians remains weak, inconsistent, and largely unaccountable. Elections come and go, promises are made and broken, and public trust continues to erode.

This failure is often blamed on bad leadership, voter apathy, or lack of funding. While these factors matter, they miss a deeper and more uncomfortable truth: Nigeria’s civic ecosystem is structurally broken. We have built our activism, and increasingly our civic technologies, in silos rather than systems. The result is a sector that generates attention but struggles to produce lasting political outcomes.

Civil society in Nigeria is rich in ideas but poor in coordination. Multiple organisations chase the same donor funds to solve the same problems with parallel tools and overlapping programmes. This competition fragments resources, duplicates efforts, and reinforces dependency on external funding. Even worse, it traps knowledge inside organisations. Lessons learned, data gathered, and networks built remain isolated instead of compounding into collective intelligence. Without coordination, civil society’s voice becomes scattered noise, easy for politicians to ignore, co-opt, or divide.

Nowhere is this fragmentation more visible than in civic technology. Over the past decade, Nigerian organisations have built voter education platforms, election monitoring tools, budget trackers, transparency dashboards, citizen-reporting apps, and, more recently, AI-driven civic tools. The innovation is impressive. But most of these tools exist as standalone products, designed in isolation, unable to communicate with one another, and often abandoned once funding cycles end.

This horizontal growth, many tools spread thinly across the same problem space, has diluted impact. It contradicts the very principles of openness and collaboration that civil society claims to champion. More importantly, because civic tech is largely driven by civil society organisations, this fragmentation weakens civil society’s collective power. We are building more apps, but not more leverage.

What if the problem is not that we lack civic technology, but that we lack civic infrastructure?
Instead of treating each tool as a complete solution, we should be designing civic tech as interconnected layers, what can be called a civic stack. In this model, tools are not built to compete, but to complement and amplify one another. Technology becomes a means of integration, not just innovation.

An integrated civic tech ecosystem signals something deeper: a coordinated civil society capable of mobilising citizens at scale, sustaining advocacy beyond election cycles, and applying consistent pressure on government using shared data and strategy. To achieve this, civic infrastructure must be thought of in layers that reinforce one another.

The first layer is civic education. This goes beyond voter sensitisation before elections. It is about building critical thinking, political literacy, and a systemic understanding of how governance works, and how it should work. Without this foundation, citizen engagement remains shallow and easily manipulated.

The second layer is engagement. Education must translate into sustained action, not just voting every four years. Engagement platforms should enable citizens to interact year-round with representatives, institutions, and policies, asking questions, tracking decisions, and making demands collectively rather than individually.

The third layer is organisation. Democracy does not respond to isolated individuals; it responds to organised power. Civic participation must be channelled into disciplined, accountable political and civic organisations with clear theories of change. Without structure, mobilisation fizzles out. Without accountability, it becomes self-serving.

The fourth layer is accountability. This includes tools and mechanisms that track promises, monitor budgets, measure performance, and create consequences for public officials. Accountability closes the loop, ensuring that participation leads to results and that power responds to pressure.

When these layers function in isolation, impact is limited. But when they work together, they create a flywheel. Educated citizens engage more effectively. Organised engagement generates political pressure. Political pressure enables accountability. Accountability improves governance, which in turn deepens trust and participation. The system reinforces itself. This is the strategic unlock Nigeria’s civic ecosystem has yet to fully embrace.

Imagine what an integrated civic tech stack could look like in practice. A citizen learns about candidates and policies on a civic education platform. Verified campaign promises are automatically captured and fed into a public promise-tracking system. That system connects to open-budget dashboards showing whether funds were allocated to those promises. Community feedback tools allow citizens to report whether projects were delivered. Performance scorecards then rate public officials based on data, not rhetoric.

In such a system, citizens, journalists, activists, and policymakers work from a shared source of civic truth. Advocacy is no longer based on anecdotes alone, but on verifiable, interconnected data. Pressure becomes harder to ignore because it is coordinated, consistent, and evidence-based.

To enable this, Nigeria’s civic ecosystem needs a shared civic data layer, a repository of standardised, open datasets on governance, budgets, elections, and public policies. Above this can sit an engagement layer, where citizens interact with data through apps, chatbots, USSD, or SMS, ensuring inclusion beyond urban and smartphone-heavy populations. On top of that, an innovation layer allows civic startups and organisations to plug in through shared APIs, authentication systems, and analytics tools.

This idea is not theoretical. Nigeria’s fintech sector offers a powerful parallel. Before shared payment infrastructure, digital banking was fragmented and inefficient. Today, thanks to systems like the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System and emerging open banking frameworks, money moves seamlessly across banks and fintech apps. No single company owns the ecosystem, but everyone benefits from the shared rails.

Globally, India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, popularly known as India Stack, demonstrates how layered systems can transform public service and civic participation. Built around digital identity, payments, and data consent layers, it allows both private and civic innovators to build on a common foundation. Estonia’s X-Road provides another example, linking government databases, civil society, and businesses through secure interoperability standards. These systems did not eliminate innovation; they multiplied it.

The benefits of such an approach for Nigeria are profound. For civil society organisations, shared infrastructure reduces redundancy, lowers costs, and enables collaboration rather than competition. It allows groups to coordinate campaigns, pool insights, and present a united front when demanding reforms. For funders, it offers a chance to invest in systems rather than one-off projects, creating scalable and sustainable impact. For citizens, it simplifies participation, allowing learning, engagement, and accountability to happen within a connected experience rather than across disconnected platforms.

Most importantly, for democracy itself, integrated civic stacks enable sustained pressure. Governments can ignore isolated protests and fragmented demands. They struggle to ignore organised citizens armed with shared data, coordinated messaging, and visible public support.

However, building civic stacks requires more than technology. It demands a shift in mindset from Nigeria’s emerging civic leaders. We must prioritise impact over ownership, collective outcomes over individual recognition.

We must practice ruthless prioritisation, focusing on the highest-leverage interventions instead of trying to solve everything at once. We must also embrace political realism. Civic education without political organisation is an academic exercise. Political organisation without accountability becomes corrupt. Civil society cannot remain “above politics” while expecting political results. Power must be engaged, structured, and constrained, not merely critiqued.

Equally critical is local ownership. Civic systems must be built with communities, not just for them. This means designing for rural and urban realities simultaneously, enabling community contributions, and embedding sustainability beyond donor cycles. And finally, we must measure what matters, policy wins, institutional change, and accountability outcomes, not just workshops held or users onboarded.

Nigeria does not need another disconnected civic app. It needs shared civic infrastructure. But before we can build stacks of technology, we must first build stacks of trust, trust among organisations, funders, technologists, and communities willing to align around shared standards and shared goals.

The future of Nigeria’s democracy will not be saved by a single perfect solution. It will be shaped by our willingness to move from silos to systems, from noise to organised power, and from isolated innovation to collective strategy. The question is no longer whether we can build these civic stacks, but whether we have the humility and discipline to do so together.
 Akinleye and Sheidu wrote from Lagos.