As Nigerians commemorate Democracy Day, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has declared that three decades after the historic June 12, 1993 presidential election, democracy remains under severe threat in the country.

In a strongly worded press statement issued on Thursday, the PDP paid tribute to the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history and the sacrifices made by citizens who defended the people’s mandate.

The party recalled the remarkable enthusiasm displayed by Nigerians during the 1993 polls, when citizens transcended ethnic and religious fault lines to vote for national progress.

The statement, signed by Comrade Ini Ememobong, National Publicity Secretary of the PDP Interim National Working Committee, noted that undemocratic forces aborted the popular will, triggering a prolonged resistance that claimed many lives.

“Thirty-three years later, the lessons of June 12 ring out more resoundingly than ever,” the PDP said, urging the Federal Government to uphold democratic principles, guarantee civil rights including the right to peaceful assembly and protest, and protect the rights of the opposition.

The party also reminded the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of its sacred duty to conduct elections with “transparent impartiality and unimpeachable fairness,” describing these as minimum standards rather than mere aspirations.

However, the PDP expressed deep disappointment over what it described as the current administration’s failure to learn from history.

“Reality check, however, provides damning evidence that under this APC-led Federal Government, the lessons of June 12 remain painfully unlearnt,” the statement read. “Today, of all days — a day set aside to honour the blood of democratic martyrs — peaceful protesters were teargassed and assaulted in Abuja.”

The party highlighted the case of activist Omoleye Sowore, who was reportedly injured and hospitalised while demanding the immediate release of schoolchildren and teachers held hostage in different parts of the country.

The PDP accused the Tinubu administration of prioritising “optics over action, propaganda over policy,” and living in “a dangerous utopian self-delusion,” thereby reducing Democracy Day to a mere historic remembrance instead of a celebration of democratic consolidation.

Looking ahead to the 2027 general elections, the opposition party called on all citizens to remain vigilant and unrelenting in their demand for genuine democratic consolidation.

“The sacrifices of the past must not be reduced to ceremonial memory. They must be active warnings that this country must never again travel the path of state-engineered anti-democratic actions,” the PDP warned.

Comrade Ini Ememobong, mnipr is the National Publicity Secretary, Interim National Working Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party.

By DrJoseph Onoja

Every rainy season in Nigeria now arrives with a familiar sense of anxiety. Roads disappear beneath floodwaters, homes are submerged, businesses are disrupted, and lives are displaced.

What was once considered a seasonal inconvenience has become a recurring national emergency.

But Nigeria’s flooding crisis is no longer simply about rain.It is the result of a dangerous collision between climate change, environmental degradation, and weak urban planning.

Climate change is intensifying rainfall patterns across Africa, but human activities like deforestation, wetland destruction, poor drainage systems, and uncontrolled development on floodplains are multiplying the scale of destruction.

The uncomfortable truth is this: flooding in Nigeria is becoming structural.

Climate change may trigger the rainfall, but environmental degradation determines whether rain becomes disaster.

Climate Change Is Intensifying the Risk

Scientific evidence continues to show that extreme rainfall events are becoming more intense across Africa.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), both the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events are projected to increase as global warming accelerates.

In cities like Lagos, the impacts are already visible. Urban flooding has become more widespread, with both short-duration high-intensity rainfall and prolonged rainfall events increasing flood risks.

However, climate change alone does not explain the scale of devastation we are witnessing.

Ordinarily, heavy rainfall should not automatically become a disaster.

Healthy wetlands, functional drainage systems, protected floodplains, and well-planned urban infrastructure are designed to absorb and manage excess water.

” In Lagos, this issue is particularly critical. Water bodies, lagoons, creeks, and wetlands cover more than 62% of the state’s land area, while another significant portion remains seasonally flood prone.”

But when these natural and engineered systems fail or are deliberately compromised, communities become increasingly vulnerable.Nigeria’s flood challenge is therefore not only a climate issue. It is also a planning and governance issue.

Nigeria Is Destroying Its Natural Flood Defences

One of the most overlooked aspects of flood resilience in Nigeria is the role of nature itself.

Forests, wetlands, mangroves, and floodplains act as natural flood buffers. They absorb excess water, slow runoff, reduce erosion, and minimize flood peaks.

In many ways, they function as invisible infrastructure protecting communities from disaster.

Yet across Nigeria, these ecosystems are being degraded at alarming rates.

Deforestation reduces the soil’s ability to absorb water, increasing surface runoff and erosion. Sediments washed into drainage systems reduce their capacity and worsen urban flooding.

At the same time, wetlands and floodplains are increasingly being sandfilled and converted for construction and urban expansion.

The irony is embedded in the name itself: floodplains exist to absorb floods.

In Lagos, this issue is particularly critical. Water bodies, lagoons, creeks, and wetlands cover more than 62% of the state’s land area, while another significant portion remains seasonally flood prone.

When these ecosystems are filled, degraded, or built over, floodwater has fewer places to disperse safely. Instead, it ends up in homes, roads, and communities.

Wetlands are not vacant land waiting for development; they are natural infrastructure protecting cities from collapse.

The implications are enormous. Sensitive ecological areas such as the Lekki Conservation Centre continue to serve as natural buffers by receiving, retaining, and absorbing water from surrounding environments.

If such ecological buffers are lost to uncontrolled development, entire communities become significantly more exposed to flooding risks with attendant consequences for human health, livelihoods, wellbeing, infrastructure, and property.

Nigeria’s Adaptation Gap Is Growing

Nigeria is not standing completely still. There are signs of progress.

The Lagos Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan identify dozens of adaptation projects and estimates financing needs between US$9 billion and US$16 billion by 2035.

This reflects increasing recognition that climate resilience must become a development priority.

But adaptation efforts are still not keeping pace with the speed of urban growth and climate risk.

Rapid urbanization, inadequate drainage systems, weak urban governance, and insufficient climate-resilient infrastructure continue to increase exposure across many Nigerian cities.

The next 10 to 20 years are likely to bring even more dangerous combinations of intense rainfall, river flooding, urban flooding, and coastal flooding/erosion.

Sea level rise will further worsen risks in low-lying coastal cities, especially Lagos.

Without urgent intervention, the economic, social, and environmental costs will continue to rise.

The cost of protecting ecosystems today is far lower than the cost of rebuilding cities tomorrow.

Nature-Based Solutions Must Become National Policy

Nigeria cannot engineer its way out of this crisis through concrete alone. Flood resilience requires a combination of infrastructure investment and ecological protection.

Nature-based solutions must become central to national and subnational climate adaptation strategies.

This means:

• • Protecting and restoring forests, wetlands, mangroves, and floodplains

• Strengthening drainage and storm water systems

• Enforcing risk-sensitive urban planning regulations

• Preventing development on ecologically sensitive areas

• Improving solid waste management to prevent blocked drainage systems

• Investing in low-carbon and climate-resilient growth pathways.

These actions are not optional environmental luxuries. They are essential investments in public safety, economic stability, and national resilience.

The future of flood resilience in Nigeria will depend as much on ecological protection as on engineering.

A Defining Choice for Nigeria

Floods are no longer isolated disasters. They are warning signs. They reveal the growing consequences of ignoring environmental limits while cities expand faster than resilience systems can keep pace.

They expose the cost of treating ecosystems as expendable rather than essential.

Nigeria still has a choice. We can continue reacting to flood disasters after they occur, or we can invest in prevention, resilience, and nature-based infrastructure before the next crisis arrives.

Protecting Forests, wetlands, restoring degraded ecosystems, and strengthening climate adaptation systems are not simply environmental priorities.

They are national development imperatives.The future resilience of Nigeria’s cities may well depend on how seriously we take them today.

• Dr Joseph Onoja , a conservation scientist, is the Director – General of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF).

Fela’s “Government Magic”

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had a word for it: “Government Magic.”

In the track, the Afrobeat pioneer captured a Nigerian political tradition that predates the Fourth Republic—the sudden transformation of figures, narratives, and outcomes to fit the ambitions of those in power.

He was singing about the 1979 and 1983 elections, but the chorus feels uncomfortably familiar today. The instruments have changed. The stage is bigger.

Yet the choreography of doubt around election results remains.

The political class, as Fela dissected in song after song, has always understood the value of controlling the story before, during, and after the polls.

The Goal

The goal is not just to win, but to win in a way that makes dissent look irrational. When the numbers bend to serve whims and caprices, the public’s faith in the process bends with them.

That is why the credibility of internal party primaries matters. They are rehearsals for the national performance. If the rehearsal collapses into farce, the main show risks losing its audience.

Striking Figure

The recent All Progressives Congress presidential primary result has reignited that old conversation.

According to reports circulating from the party, President Bola Tinubu emerged as the APC candidate for the 2027 presidential election with a tally exceeding 10 million votes.

On its face, the figure is striking. It is also the source of the current controversy. Across social media, videos and screenshots purporting to show the counting process have fueled questions about the arithmetic behind the result.

The clips show delegates and officials tallying votes in what appears to be a linear, one-by-one sequence.

Then, without a visible change in method or volume, the totals jump to figures in the tens of thousands.That kind of progression violates basic expectations of how counting works.

Mechanics of counting

Arithmetic progression moves step by step: one, two, three, four. What people observed looked closer to geometric progression—small, manageable numbers suddenly leaping into magnitudes that do not match the visible process.

To the average voter watching at home, it does not read as a technical anomaly. It reads as a sleight of hand. And in politics, perception is often as consequential as procedure.

The problem is not the ambition of a large turnout. A party primary with millions of participants is plausible if the structure supports it.

The problem is the disconnect between what was seen and what was announced. When the mechanics of counting defy standard arithmetic, the burden falls on the party to explain the method.

Was this an aggregation of state-level results? Were multiple counting centers involved? Was there a digital component that was not visible in the clips? Without that context, the silence becomes an explanation in itself, and not a reassuring one.

Why it matters

This matters because the signal from a party primary extends beyond the party. It sets a tone for the general election that follows.

If internal contests normalize questionable tallies, it becomes harder to draw a line at the national level.

It erodes the cultural expectation that numbers should add up, that observers should be able to follow the process, and that the loser should be able to concede without feeling gaslit.

Once that expectation erodes, every subsequent election starts from a deficit of trust.

Nigeria’s elections history

Nigeria’s history with elections makes this sensitivity unavoidable.

Fela’s “Government Magic” resonated in the 1980s precisely because voters had watched results shift between the polling unit and the collation center.

The trauma of that era did not disappear because new technology arrived. It evolved.

Today, the magic happens in parallel—on the field and on timelines. A video can travel faster than a press statement. A 30-second clip can frame a narrative that a 10-page report cannot undo.

In that environment, transparency is not a luxury. It is risk management.The APC’s position as the ruling party increases the stakes.

When the party in power announces results that strain credibility, the opposition, civil society, and international observers all take note. It feeds into a broader narrative about democratic backsliding that Nigeria has been working to resist.

It also gives ammunition to those who argue that elections are theater and that the outcome is decided long before voters mark a ballot. That is a dangerous argument to validate, even unintentionally.

Generational dimension

There is also a generational dimension. The younger voters who make up a growing share of the electorate are digital natives.

They expect processes to be visible, verifiable, and timestamped.

They are not satisfied with appeals to tradition or authority when the data does not align.

For them, a counting process that leaps from single digits to five figures without an explanation looks less like “strategy” and more like contempt for their intelligence.

That is not a base you want to alienate before a general election. None of this is to say that the APC intended to undermine its own credibility.

Party primaries are complex, high-pressure events.

Aggregating results from 36 states and the FCT, coordinating delegates, managing security, and communicating in real time is not simple.

Mistakes happen. Miscommunications happen. But the response to those mistakes determines whether they become scandals.

A prompt, detailed breakdown of how the 10 million figure was reached—with state-by-state tallies, observer sign-off, and a clear explanation of the counting method—would close the loop. Silence and defensiveness keep it open.

When the party in power announces results that strain credibility, the opposition, civil society, and international observers all take note. It feeds into a broader narrative about democratic backsliding that Nigeria has been working to resist.

The political class would do well to remember that legitimacy is a renewable resource, but only if you invest in it. Every election cycle offers a chance to rebuild trust or deplete it further.

The current moment is a test. If the APC can demonstrate that its primary was both massive and methodical, it strengthens the case for its own mandate.

If it cannot, it hands its opponents a narrative that will outlast the 2027 campaign.Beyond the APC, the broader lesson is for all parties.

The era where results could be announced and accepted without explanation is over.

The public has access to more information, more cameras, and more ways to compare what was said with what was seen. That is not a problem to be managed through messaging. It is a reality to be designed for.

That means building primaries and elections around verifiable processes: clear protocols, independent observation, real-time data release, and audit trails that can withstand public scrutiny.

Leadership also requires admitting when the process has gaps.

A leader cannot succeed without a good support team, but that team must include people willing to say, “This does not look right, and we need to fix it.”

The younger generation watching these events is not asking for perfection.They are asking for honesty. They are asking for a system that respects arithmetic and respects them.

Giving them space in leadership means giving them a process they can believe in, even when they lose.

The danger of ignoring this is not abstract. When vote counting looks arbitrary, voter turnout suffers.

When turnout suffers, governance suffers. When governance suffers, the cycle of disillusionment deepens.

Nigeria cannot afford another decade where elections are seen as rituals rather than decisions.

The country’s challenges—security, economy, education, healthcare—require a public that believes its vote can influence who makes those decisions.

Fela’s critique was not about cynicism. It was about accountability. He held up a mirror to power and asked it to recognize itself. That is still the task.

If the APC’s primary result was legitimate, prove it with the kind of transparency that makes “Government Magic” impossible. If there were errors, correct them publicly and show how the process will change. That is how you turn a moment of doubt into a foundation for trust.

2027 election

The 2027 election will not be decided on social media. But the climate in which it is contested is being shaped there now.

Every unexplained anomaly, every dismissive response, every jump from one to ten thousand without a visible step in between, adds weight to the narrative that the game is rigged.

And once that narrative takes hold, even a perfectly conducted election struggles to overcome it.

The political class has been called upon to ensure that their supporters do not cause mayhem as the country heads for the polls.

That responsibility starts long before Election Day. It starts with how parties conduct their own affairs, how they count their own votes, and how they explain their own results.

Democracy is not just about winning. It is about winning in a way that the country can recognize as its own.

Nigeria needs more people of conscience in positions where they can influence process, not just outcomes. People who understand that a clean process is the best defense against a dirty result.

People who are willing to give the younger generation not just a seat at the table, but a table that is built on rules everyone can see and follow.

If the APC wants its 2027 candidacy to be judged on policy, record, and vision, it must first secure the legitimacy of the path that produced it.

That is not a favor to the opposition. It is a service to the country. Because in the end, the only magic that sustains democracy is the ordinary, unglamorous work of making the numbers add up—and showing your work while you do it.

• Emeka Monye Is A Journalist