Nigeria is not lacking in civic passion or energy. The real challenge facing the nation's democracy is a profound fragmentation within its civic space. This is the core argument presented by analysts Mayowa Akinyele and Habib Sheidu in a recent commentary dated 9 January 2026.
The Problem of Civic Fragmentation
Across Nigeria, numerous civil society organisations are actively campaigning, building platforms, and tracking government activities. Despite this vibrant activity and decades of democratic practice, the everyday democratic experience for most citizens remains weak and unaccountable. Public trust continues to decline as electoral promises are routinely broken.
While poor leadership and voter apathy are often blamed, Akinyele and Sheidu point to a more structural issue: Nigeria's civic ecosystem is broken. Activism and technology are developed in isolated silos rather than as interconnected systems. This leads to a sector rich in innovation but poor in coordination and lasting political outcomes.
Organisations frequently compete for the same donor funds to solve identical problems with parallel tools. This wastes resources, duplicates efforts, and traps valuable knowledge and data within individual organisations instead of building a shared intelligence.
Civic Tech: Innovation Without Integration
This fragmentation is starkly visible in the realm of civic technology. Over the last ten years, Nigeria has seen a surge in voter education platforms, election monitoring tools, budget trackers, and AI-driven civic apps. However, most exist as standalone products, unable to communicate with each other and often abandoned when funding ends.
This 'horizontal growth' of many thin solutions dilutes overall impact and contradicts the collaborative principles civil society claims to uphold. The authors pose a critical question: What if the issue isn't a lack of civic tech, but a lack of civic infrastructure?
The Solution: Building a Layered Civic Stack
The proposed solution is to move from building isolated apps to designing an integrated civic stack. This model involves creating interconnected technological layers that reinforce each other, turning technology into a tool for integration, not just innovation.
The envisioned stack has four essential layers:
- Civic Education: Building deep political literacy and critical thinking beyond just election-time voter sensitization.
- Engagement: Platforms enabling year-round citizen interaction with representatives and policies, fostering collective action.
- Organisation: Channeling participation into disciplined, accountable political and civic groups with clear goals.
- Accountability: Tools to track promises, monitor budgets, measure performance, and ensure consequences for public officials.
When these layers work in synergy, they create a powerful flywheel effect: educated citizens engage better, organised engagement generates pressure, pressure enables accountability, and improved governance deepens trust, restarting the cycle.
Global Precedents and the Path Forward
This concept is not merely theoretical. The authors point to Nigeria's own fintech sector as a parallel. Shared payment infrastructure like NIBSS and open banking frameworks now allow money to move seamlessly across different platforms, benefiting the entire ecosystem.
Globally, models like India's Digital Public Infrastructure (India Stack) and Estonia's X-Road demonstrate how layered systems can transform public service and civic participation through secure data interoperability.
Building such a civic stack in Nigeria requires more than just code. It demands a fundamental mindset shift among civic leaders: prioritizing collective impact over individual ownership, embracing political realism, ensuring local community ownership, and measuring real policy wins instead of superficial metrics like app downloads.
The future of Nigeria's democracy hinges on the willingness to move from isolated silos to integrated systems, from scattered noise to organised, evidence-based power. The necessary technology can be built, but it requires the humility and discipline to build it together, the authors conclude from Lagos.
