Mandatory voting, the idea that a citizen must cast a ballot in an election, is not new. Of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s 181 members, about 20currently practice some form of it.
Compulsory voting ensures a higher voter turnout. Where they feel that they have something to lose, voters obey the law to avoid the consequences.
A law such as the one sought by Abbas Tajudeen and Daniel Asama Ago in “A Bill for an Act to Amend the Electoral Act, 2022 to make it Mandatory for Nigerians of Maturity Age to Vote in All National and State Elections and for Related Matters” (HB.1930), will, in principle, empty more Nigerians into the streets on election day.
What this law aims at is that Nigerians would no longer vote as a matter of choice, which is the essence of democracy, but because of the consequences of not voting. It will basically criminalise even the act of staying in your own home in disdain for disgusting politicians. Little wonder it has been received with general revulsion.
The bill, which passed the second reading last week in the House of Representatives, appears to be important to the Nigerian political establishment.
I conclude that from seeing that it is led by the Speaker, Abbas Tajudeen, a man with no legislative honour: even his own page on the House website shows no legislative interests, no target achievements, no awards and honours, and no other bills sponsored.
There is no record of the Zaria Federal Constituency representative being outraged about the age-long killings in his Southern Kaduna neighbourhood or the insecurity that has now grounded Nigeria, threatening to make hunger our story.
Abbas does not have a National Assembly phone number by which Nigerians, particularly his constituents, can reach him.
His email, embarrassingly enough, is a This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. While he is in office through the 1999 constitution, 20 years earlier in Lagos, even as a reporter taking his first steps, I walked into the office of Speaker David Ume-Ezeokeand interviewed him.
Today, no reporter can simply walk through the gates of the National Assembly.
Abbas’s personal immortality comes from his swearing-in as Speaker when he brought the tumult of his own life to the stage with his two wives jostlingfor a place with him in the limelight. This is the man who wants every Nigerian adult to vote in elections.
I have reported the national legislature for 46 years. That includes: “How to Buy A Senator” (2002), “Is the House of Reps for Sale, or Rent?” (2021), and The National Assembly is in Decay (2022).
Only recently, I argued that the legislature was no longer an arm of governance in Nigeria, having morphed into the executive.
That is what the current focus of the Abbas’ House on compulsory voting vindicates.
And this misguided focus reminds Nigerians why they are reluctant to vote in the first place: that when they send people to Abuja, they are mis-representatives.
Think about it: Among the most populous democracies, Indonesia in February 2024 held the world’s largest single-day election to produce a president. Indonesia is an archipelago: the world’s largest: over 18,000 islands and islets, of which 6,000 are inhabited, straddling three time zones of often treacherous terrain.
For the election, in that one day, the General Elections Commission had to manage over 204 million registered voters, including Diaspora voters, who speak about 150 languages. Voter turnout was still a remarkable 81.78 per cent
Later in November, the Simultaneous Regional Elections were held in one day to elect 37 governors and vice-governors, 415 regents and vice-regents, and 93 mayors and vice-mayors across the country’s 545 regions.
Similarly, in the 2024 India elections, the world’s most populous country featured over 960 million eligible voters and over 2,700 political parties, including six national and more than 70 state parties. Because of distances, terrains, cultures, religions and climates, the electoral commission faced tricky scheduling that it overcame in six weeks of implementation.
India’s voting is also electronic. Unlike ours, however, theirs involved over one million polling stations and 15 million election workers who travelled by air, rail, road, boats and camels to make sure that every eligible voter could vote. With the voting calendar concluded on June 1, the votes were tallied on June 4, and the results announced the following day. Voter turnout: 65.7 per cent.
Compare that, then, to Nigeria’s 2023 election, which saw Bola Tinubu take the presidency in a mismanaged election in which voter turnout was an abysmal 25.7 per cent. According to Chatham House, “President-elect Bola Tinubu received the least number of votes, and lowest winning percentage, of any victor in the Fourth Republic (1999 to date), taking just 36.6 per cent of the total votes cast.”
In other words, Tinubu sits in the presidency on the weakness of a rather humiliating 8.8 million votes, about one-half of what his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, received in 2015.
If their APC truly cared, this is the question to which the federal legislature would be responding: that government and key institutions such as the electoral commission have no credibility.
The challenge is: how do we establish public trust and make voting attractive? Sadly, APC thinks that, instead, it can beat voting into the electorate.
In 2015, the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the dispossessed dragged themselves to the polls nationwide for the APC, seeking to defeat the ruling PDP.
Over the decade which followed, APC has responded by being the filthiest a party can be. Citizens who could leave did.
In the next two weeks, the party will step up preparations for the 2027 elections when it celebrates Tinubu’s two years in office.
In these 10 years, Nigeria has become increasingly insecure, and is listed among the Most Dangerous Countries in 2025. Throughout the land, people are afraid to go to their markets or the next village. Children are afraid to go to school. Farmers cannot farm, let alone harvest.
But for the deluded APC, this is harvest season on the journey to a one-party state, where every Nigerian will be mandated to vote for its candidates. That is the objective, and they are preparing for it by encouraging every defective politician elsewhere to defect to them.
The Patron-Saint of political defection, Adams Oshiomhole, who announced this Sinner-to-Saint philosophy in 2017, here is the proof, was last week blaming Buhari for Tinubu’s troubles, a blame Tinubu has never found the courage to admit, having been the National Leader.
APC seems to believe that if they inflict this dagger blow, voters who cannot feed their families will drag themselves through blood and hunger and forests and poverty and kidnappers and militia to vote for it.
The bill proposes a six-month imprisonment or a fine of up to N100,000 for defaulters. But they forget two things: to recruit millions of new soldiers and build thousands of prisons. The first will be to ransack all of Nigeria, including Sambisa Forest, on election day, and the other to house those arrested.
In 2023, there were 67.4 million voters in 2023, with 29.4 million votes cast. At the same rate of attrition, there will be over 60 million refusing to vote in 2027.
Come arrest us!
Punch