Lagos shuts down for local government elections with predictable APC wins. Critics call for INEC to take over and end wasteful, scripted exercises

Tomorrow, Saturday 12 July 2025, Lagos will shut down completely from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m.—a full nine hours in the city that powers Nigeria’s economy.

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The financial hit will run into billions of naira, but the worst pain will be felt by the struggling poor who need “today’s hustle for tonight’s meal.”

And for what? Local-government elections whose results we already know. You don’t need AI, spreadsheets or a crystal ball to predict that the APC will claim every chairmanship and councillorship seat in Lagos.

If we witness a miracle, the opposition might scrape one or two wards—but history says otherwise.

Nor is this only a Lagos story. Pick any state: when the PDP controls the governor’s office, the PDP “wins” every council. Same for LP, NNPP, APGA—whoever sits in Government House takes it all.

Local polls in Nigeria have become an expensive ritual, a rubber-stamp exercise that empties the treasury and wastes citizens’ time.

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 and hand council elections back to INEC. For all its imperfections, INEC at least produces mixed results: no one party owns every governorship or every seat in the National Assembly.

Nine hours of economic paralysis for a foregone conclusion is bad governance, not democracy. Our democracy deserves better than predictable coronations.

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A democracy that shuts down its economic engine to rubber-stamp power is no democracy at all. It’s time to end the farce and insist on elections that mean something—or spend the money where it can actually change lives.