Nigeria’s Political System Is Selling Power to the Highest Bidder, and Its Youth Are Paying the Price

Consider the arithmetic before you consider anything else. Sixty-three percent of Nigeria’s population is under the age of 25, according to the United Nations Population Fund. The median age of Nigeria, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, is 18.3 years. This is not a young country in the rhetorical sense that politicians deploy when they want to sound progressive. It is a young country in the mathematical sense, the kind where the majority of people alive today have never known a Nigeria without a mobile phone, and where the generation that built the current political system is already well past retirement age in every professional field except the one that controls public resources.

Nigeria’s entire population under the age of 44, encompassing Generation Alpha, Generation Z, and Millennials, represents approximately 85.7 percent of the total population. Gen Z alone accounts for 25.8 percent of Nigerians, while Millennials make up 24.3 percent. These are not statistics about the future. They are statistics about the present electorate, the present taxpayer, and the present casualty of every policy failure that filters down from a government formed almost entirely by people who belong to the 14.3 percent.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the world, with a rate of approximately 35 percent in recent years. Nigeria’s population is expected to expand at a rate of about 2.6 percent annually, meaning over four million new job seekers enter the workforce every year. That four million figure is not being met by four million new jobs. It is being met by a government whose leadership pipeline consistently recycles men and women who were already old when many of those job seekers were born.

The Business Day feature whose photograph and content grounds this investigation states it plainly: Nigeria’s current political system prices young people out of power. This is not a metaphor. It is a financial transaction, documented, quantifiable, and deliberately constructed. The question is not whether it is happening. The question is how it works, who profits from it, and whether anyone in the position to change it has any intention of doing so.

The Architecture of Exclusion, How the System Was Built

Nigeria did not always have these age barriers in their current form, and the partial reform that addressed them left most of the structural exclusion intact.

Before 2018, the Nigerian Constitution required presidential candidates to be at least 40 years old, governorship candidates 35, senatorial candidates 35, and candidates for the House of Representatives 30. The Not Too Young to Run Act, signed by President Muhammadu Buhari on May 31, 2018, reduced these requirements: the presidency from 40 to 35, governorship from 35 to 30, the Senate and House of Representatives by five years each.

The law was celebrated. Civil society coalitions that had campaigned for it for years described it as a breakthrough. Its impact was immediate in the 2019 elections, with ten of 72 presidential candidates falling between the ages of 35 and 40, and 1,515 young individuals under 35, accounting for 23 percent of all candidates, running for seats in the House of Representatives.

But the age barriers were never the deepest part of the wall. They were the visible face of it. Behind them, and far more effective at keeping young Nigerians out of power, was a financial architecture that the Not Too Young to Run Act did not touch and that INEC’s own regulations have been unable to enforce.

For the 2023 general elections, the All Progressives Congress fixed the cost of its presidential nomination form at N100 million. Its governorship forms were sold at N50 million. Senatorial forms cost N20 million. House of Representatives forms cost N10 million. State Assembly forms cost N2 million. The Peoples Democratic Party pegged its presidential nomination forms at N40 million, governorship at N21 million, senatorial at N3.5 million, House of Representatives at N2.5 million, and State Assembly at N1.5 million.

From 2015 to the 2023 elections, the cost of APC presidential nomination forms rose by over 300 percent. For governorship forms, the increase was more than 800 percent. Senatorial forms rose by 506 percent, while House of Representatives forms increased by 354 percent.

The APC chairman was explicit about the intent, noting that “if you don’t have N100 million, you have no business becoming president.” International IDEA, which monitors political participation globally, described the situation as the evolution of a state governed and existing to serve wealthy elites at the detriment of popular participation.

The discounts offered to youth aspirants did not change the fundamental equation. Although some parties announced a 50 percent reduction in nomination costs for young aspirants, such costs were only a tiny fraction of the total financial demands of running for office in Nigeria’s monetised electoral process. A 50 percent discount on a N50 million governorship form produces N25 million, which remains N25 million more than the median young Nigerian professional earns in five years of formal employment.

INEC’s own Regulation 2 on the Conduct of Political Party Primaries explicitly states that political parties must not impose conditions or set high expression of interest or nomination fees that could exclude aspirants on the basis of sex, religion, ethnicity, circumstance of birth, or wealth. Despite this clear regulatory prohibition, the major parties continued to impose fees that met every practical definition of wealth-based exclusion, and no sanctions followed.

The Human Cost, What Exclusion Produces

The consequence of pricing youth out of formal political participation is not simply a representation deficit. It is a governance failure with measurable human costs.

The unemployment problem in Nigeria is compounded by a constantly expanding youth population. With population growth of approximately 2.6 percent annually, over four million new job seekers enter the workforce yearly. The gap between job seekers and open opportunities will keep growing if demographic pressures are not addressed, raising the possibility of social upheaval and economic stagnation. Frustration brought on by a lack of employment opportunities creates conditions conducive to criminal activity, including cybercrime and insurgency.

The connection between youth exclusion from governance and youth vulnerability to radicalisation is not hypothetical. Due to the extensive cost of party nomination forms, youth often turn to odd jobs during elections. Some of them, vulnerable to material attractions, resort to ballot snatching, violence, and killing. People who perpetrate these activities receive little compensation and are usually abandoned after each election. The consequent frustration has made some youth take to crime, as political financiers lure young people to orchestrate political violence during elections and then sacrifice their interests afterward, exacerbating their exclusion.

The pattern is a closed loop. Young people are excluded from governance by financial barriers. The resulting unemployment and despair make them available as instruments of the same political actors who built the barriers. After each election cycle, they are discarded, and the structural conditions that produced their desperation remain unchanged.

According to a 2022 publication in ResearchGate, since independence, Nigerian rule has remained in the hands of elites who recycle themselves in power, creating the impression that the nation’s political sphere is the preserve of a select group who are typically male, above retirement age, and able to wield wealth for influence. Africa, as Foreign Policy observed, has the world’s youngest population and its oldest leaders. Nigeria does not merely illustrate that contradiction; it institutionalises it.

Civil society groups including the Youth Electoral Reform Project (YERP-Naija) have called for a constitutional amendment to reduce the minimum age for contesting governorship and senatorial elections from 35 to 30 years, arguing that lowering the age limit would open Nigeria’s political process to a generation whose exclusion represents a structural failure of democratic representation. That call, presented at the National Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Electoral Reform in Abuja, included the Nigerian Bar Association, the Nigerian Labour Congress, and the Nigerian Union of Journalists among its signatories. The National Assembly was urged to finalise reforms by December 2025.

As of April 2026, no such reform has been enacted.

What a Real Fix Would Require

The framing of this problem as simply an age issue is itself a form of misdirection. The age barriers, while real, are secondary to the financial architecture. A 30-year-old Nigerian who cannot raise N25 million gains nothing from a constitutional amendment reducing the governorship age threshold. The wall has more than one layer.

As long as money, not competence, character, or popular appeal, operates as a fundamental variable in leadership recruitment, voters will refrain from participation because commercialised political processes are more likely to produce unpopular, unaccountable, and incompetent candidates. A highly monetised process hamstrings youth and women and infringes on the spirit behind the Not Too Young to Run Act.

A genuine reform agenda for Nigeria’s youth political exclusion would require at minimum three things that no administration has so far been willing to deliver simultaneously. First, a statutory cap on nomination fees, enforceable by INEC and backed by sanctions that political parties actually fear. Second, a public campaign financing mechanism that allows qualified candidates to access structured funding that does not originate from the same moneybag networks that currently control access to party tickets. Third, meaningful internal party democracy reform, because even the cheapest nomination form is irrelevant in a system where the actual selection of candidates happens in hotel rooms between godfathers, irrespective of what the primary ballot says.

Freedom House’s 2024 Nigeria report noted that while constitutional amendments in 2018 lowered the age of eligibility to run for office, a lack of internal party democracy and high fees make it difficult for prospective candidates to vie for major-party nominations. This is the international democratic monitoring community’s verdict on Nigeria’s youth political participation, that the formal legal changes have been absorbed and neutralised by the informal financial and institutional structures that the formal changes were never designed to challenge.

Nigeria has the youngest median age of any large economy on earth. At 18.3 years, it is a country whose dominant lived reality is youth, uncertainty, and the specific frustration of knowing that the decisions being made about your life are being made by people who have no structural accountability to you.

The market woman in Kano who pays taxes on her stall. The graduate in Lagos who cannot find work. The young engineer in Yola who understands infrastructure better than the politician who controls the infrastructure budget. They are all paying the price of a political system designed to price them out. The form fees are the invoice. The governance failure is the product.

The most powerful weapon that political exclusion deploys is not the rule that keeps you out. It is the normalisation of a system that convinces you that this is simply how things work. It is not. It is how things were built, by specific people, for specific purposes, at a specific cost to everyone else.

The data shows it. The question is whether anyone with the power to change it is watching.