On Saturday, 12 July 2025, Lagos—the city that powers Nigeria’s economy—shut down completely from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Nine full hours of silence in streets that are always alive. The financial hit will never be fully tallied, but credible analysts peg it in the tens of billions of naira once lost turnover, cancelled freight, stalled ride-hailing trips and idle factories are added up. The deepest pain was borne by the millions of informal workers who depend on today’s hustle for tonight’s meal.
And for what? Local government elections whose outcome everyone already knew. No AI algorithm, spreadsheet or crystal ball was needed to predict that the All Progressives Congress (APC) would claim every chairmanship and councillorship seat in Lagos. The official results now confirm exactly that. If a miracle occurred, the opposition might have scraped one or two wards—but history, and Saturday’s tally, said otherwise.
Nor is this only a Lagos story. Pick any state: when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) controls the governor’s office, the PDP “wins” every council. Same for Labour Party (LP), New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA)—whoever sits in Government House sweeps it all. Across Nigeria, local polls have degenerated into an expensive ritual, a rubber-stamp exercise that drains the treasury and wastes citizens’ time.
The irony is tragic because local councils should matter the most. They are responsible for waste collection, primary-school maintenance, markets, feeder roads and basic health centres—the everyday services that determine whether children sit on dry benches during the rainy season or patients find essential drugs in the primary health care centres. When elections at this tier feel pre-arranged, accountability for those services evaporates.
Imagine diverting even a fraction of tomorrow’s election budget. We could patch leaking roofs in some primary schools, buy desks for some pupils who now learn sitting on bare floors, or stock community clinics with basic medicines. Instead, we bankroll a performance whose ending is already scripted.
Enough. Let’s scrap the State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs) and return council elections to the Independent National Electrical Commission (INEC). For all its imperfections, INEC at least produces mixed results: no one party controls every governorship or every seat in the National Assembly. A similar pluralism at the grassroots could re-energise local democracy and reassure voters that their choices matter.
Critics say INEC is already stretched, but the solution is to strengthen, not sideline, the only referee with some distance from state executives. Assign a dedicated department for local polls, ring-fence its funding in the federal budget and subject its procurement to full public disclosure. That is still cheaper—and far more credible—than the current cycle of predictable sweeps.
Local government reform must begin with statutory financial autonomy: an elected council is powerless if its purse strings are still held by state ministries, so the share due to each LG under the federal revenue formula should flow directly— and transparently—into its account. Credibility also rests on radical openness, which means publishing polling-unit tallies online in real time; sunlight remains the cheapest disinfectant. In the same spirit, we should pilot electronic voter accreditation and secure e-transmission of results—if citizens can move money instantly on their phones, votes can be moved just as safely. Finally, democracy at the grassroots needs more than ballots; it needs dialogue. Chairmanship hopefuls ought to face independent debates and town-hall scrutiny, defending their budgets before the very people whose lives those budgets will shape.
Whenever a megacity like Lagos shuts down, headlines focus on the formal sector—banks, telecoms, ports. Yet the true shockwave radiates through the informal lattice: the pepper-soup seller unable to open her stall, the vulcaniser who patches tyres for passing okadas, the young photographer who earns by the event. A single lost Saturday can wipe out an entire week’s disposable income for a low-wage household. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of families and the social cost becomes sobering.
Meanwhile, disengagement grows. Turnout in many wards was reportedly very low. Citizens have begun to treat council polls as theatre—interesting only to the actors. Democracy cannot flourish on resignation; it thrives on competition, consent and consequence.
Nine hours of economic paralysis for a foregone conclusion is bad governance, not democracy. Our republic deserves better than predictable coronations. A system that shutters its economic engine merely to rubber-stamp power is no democracy at all.
By embracing credible reforms—starting with transferring the process to INEC and ensuring genuine fiscal autonomy for councils—we can rebuild trust where it matters most: on the streets where children study, traders sell, and families strive. That is how we turn elections from spectacles into engines of local development.
I so move.
***Tony Agenmonmen, is a marketing strategist and public policy analyst and writes from Lagos