The Tell-Tale Signs of Political Violence Before It Explodes
By Dakuku Peterside
Political violence never truly arrives unannounced. Before it explodes, it rehearses itself in smaller scenes: a rally disrupted, a convoy attacked, a party office torched at dawn, a polling agent killed for refusing to surrender a vote. Nigeria is hearing those rehearsals again. In recent days, gunmen invaded an ADC event in Benin City attended by Peter Obi and John Oyegun; in Rivers State, armed men attacked Rotimi Amaechi’s convoy and set an ADC office ablaze in Ubima; and in Abuja’s AMAC election, ADC figures alleged that their party agent, Musa Abubakar, was killed while trying to defend the vote at Gwagwa. None of these incidents should be dismissed as local drama or partisan exaggeration. They are the small tremors that often precede a democratic earthquake.
That is why the language of “isolated incidents” is so dangerous. Democracies do not usually collapse because one day violence suddenly appears from nowhere. They decay when violence is normalised in increments—first as intimidation, then as disruption, then as reprisal, and finally as a parallel language of politics. Once public life begins to reward menace more than persuasion, elections stop being contests of ideas and become tests of brute capacity. At that point, the ballot is still printed, the rallies are still advertised, and the parties still campaign, but the civic meaning of politics has already been hollowed out.
This is especially ominous in a country where voter confidence is already thin. Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election recorded a historically low turnout—about 27 per cent, according to official tallies reported by major outlets and election analysts. That figure is not just a statistic; it is a warning about the relationship between fear, distrust, and disengagement. Citizens do not queue eagerly to vote where politics looks like a battlefield. They retreat. They stay home. They tell themselves that preserving life is wiser than defending principle. And every citizen who withdraws from the democratic arena leaves more space for those who thrive on coercion.
The deeper tragedy is institutional. Violence not only injures bodies; it also erodes belief. When political actors are attacked in broad daylight, when party offices are burned hours before official activity, when security agencies appear reactive rather than preventive, the public receives a brutal message: the state may exist, but protection is negotiable. That crisis of confidence is not theoretical. I took part in the 2015 Rivers State elections and bore witness, firsthand, to what may be the worst loss of human life in our democratic history: over 200 people killed by political violence. A Rivers State commission of inquiry into those elections confirmed that political violence—including arson, injuries, property destruction, and killings—was central to the pursuit and retention of power. It warned explicitly of the “conflation of politics and criminality” and the impunity surrounding political crimes.
The commission documented a “well-established and persistent record of failure or neglect” by security and lawenforcement agencies in bringing perpetrators to justice, noting that offenders had grown emboldened by a belief that they were “above the law” or “untouchable.” That finding should unsettle every government in Abuja, regardless of party, because it shows that the violence was not only committed but tolerated by a system that refused to impose consequences. A decade later, the national memory of that episode is less about justice and more about the stark reality that blood was shed and the republic simply moved on. That is not just a historical footnote; it is a mirror held up to the present.
And once faith in official protection weakens, politics starts outsourcing security to the underworld. Candidates and parties seek “protection” from cult groups, gangs, informal militias, and street enforcers. The line between party machinery and criminal enterprise blurs. This is not speculation. A PLAC report on post-election violence in Nigeria notes that electoral violence is often carried out by gangs openly recruited, financed, and sometimes armed by politicians and party officials. A Global Initiative report on Nigeria’s 2023 elections similarly describes a complex interplay between gangs, political violence, and criminal markets in states such as Kano and Rivers. In other words, violence in politics does not merely distort an election season; it can build long-term criminal ecosystems that survive long after campaign posters are torn down.
Even when mass violence is not formally labelled “electoral,” its political meaning can still be unmistakable. In early February 2026, gunmen killed about 170 people in Kwara State after reportedly rounding up residents, tying their hands, and executing them; in Katsina, at least 21 people were killed after a local truce with gunmen collapsed. Reuters’ reporting on the Katsina killings showed how fragile elite-brokered “peace deals” can become when impunity persists, and the state’s coercive authority weakens. These atrocities may wear the labels of banditry or jihadist violence, but they also reveal what happens when armed actors learn that fear works, institutions wobble, and the lives of ordinary citizens can be negotiated like expendable collateral.
History offers no comfort to governments that flirt with such fire. Operation Wetie in the old Western Region did not begin as a neat constitutional crisis; it metastasised from rigged contests, public fury, retaliatory violence, arson, and the failure of authority to restore trust. Contemporary academic and institutional accounts describe how the falsification of the 1965 Western Region election results triggered mass riots, killings, abductions, and the burning of homes and vehicles with petrol, so notorious that the violence acquired the name wetie. Crucially, the federal authorities’ refusal to act with urgency deepened the lawlessness, and it was in that climate of anarchy that the military struck in January 1966, bringing the First Republic to an abrupt end. Nigeria must never forget that unchecked political violence once helped bury democratic order in this country.
The tell-tale signs, then, are not mysterious. They are visible long before the explosion. They appear when politicians begin to speak of rivals as enemies rather than opponents. They appear when party supporters become private armies. They appear when attacks on convoys, offices, journalists, agents, and community leaders are explained away as “provocation” or “youth restiveness.” They appear when security agencies intervene after outrage rather than before harm. They appear when turnout falls, and citizens start to see politics not as representation but as danger management. By the time ballots are cast under those conditions, democracy has already been wounded.
What makes the present moment particularly unsettling is that many of these warning signs are now converging. There is the weaponisation of rivalry. There is the public theatre of intimidation. There is growing political resentment in economically distressed communities. There is the temptation among desperate elites to retain relevance not through vision but through disruption. And there is the creeping social fatigue that makes citizens shrug at each new outrage as though disorder were now part of the constitutional order. That is how countries drift into democratic emergencies: not in one dramatic plunge, but through a sequence of tolerated abnormalities.
To the APC, the party in power, this is the moment for sober reflection, not partisan comfort. Power has a dangerous way of mistaking short-term political advantage for long-term national stability. A ruling party may be tempted to treat violence that intimidates rivals, scatters opposition gatherings, or suppresses dissent as an unpleasant but useful by-product of competitive politics. That would be a grave error. The government of the day is never merely a beneficiary of the political climate; it becomes its chief custodian and, in the eyes of citizens and history, its chief answerer.
That is why the present signs should not be trivialised. In Rivers, the arson attack on the ADC secretariat in Ubima was reportedly carried out by yet-to-be-identified persons, and Amaechi publicly called on security agencies to apprehend both perpetrators and sponsors. In Edo, even after the DSS arrested one suspect linked to the attack on Peter Obi and ADC leaders, the party itself argued that a single arrest could not answer the larger questions of who financed, organised, and benefited from the violence. That is the real test before government: not whether a single suspect can be identified, but whether the full chain of responsibility—from foot soldiers to sponsors—will be exposed and punished. Anything less tells Nigerians that violence remains a usable political instrument.
To the APCcontrolled Federal Government: do not mistake intimidation for strength, or opposition discomfort for national stability. Violence that seems to weaken rivals today can undermine the legitimacy of democracy tomorrow. When power is seen as defended by fear rather than earned by ballots, trust in elections erodes, civic engagement declines, and criminal actors become gatekeepers of power. In such a climate, no party rules securely—everyone simply holds office under everdarkening skies.
Nigeria still has time to interrupt this pattern, but only if it abandons the old hypocrisy of condemning violence in speeches while rewarding its beneficiaries in practice. The sponsors of political violence must become as vulnerable to the law as the foot soldiers they recruit. Security agencies must treat attacks on opposition figures, party offices, and polling actors as assaults on the republic itself, not as manageable partisan friction. Political parties must stop laundering criminality through the language of loyalty. Civil society, religious leaders, traditional institutions, and the media must function as early-warning sentinels rather than post-mortem commentators.
The republic is being warned in plain sight. A torched office is a warning. A murdered polling agent is a warning. An ambushed convoy is a warning. A frightened electorate is a warning. If Nigeria ignores these signs again, then when violence fully explodes in the run-up to 2027, it will be dishonest to describe it as unforeseen. It would be more accurate—and more painful—to admit that the nation saw the smoke, recognised the smell of petrol, heard the first gunshots in the distance, and still chose to call it politics.
Dakuku Peterside is the author of 2 bestselling books “Leading in a Storm” and “Beneath the Surface”.
