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Image culled from ElectHER’s They Don’t Trust the Process. They’re Showing Up Anyway, which draws on responses from 805 women across Nigeria. |
There is something unsettling about asking people to keep believing in a process that has given them reasons to doubt it.
Yet this is often what democratic participation quietly demands.
Register.
Get your voter card.
Go to the polling unit.
Cast your ballot.
Trust the process.
Believe that your voice matters.
But what happens when the last two begin to disappear while the first four continue?
That question becomes difficult to ignore when we look at the findings from ElectHER’s They Don’t Trust the Process. They’re Showing Up Anyway, which draws on responses from 805 women across Nigeria.
The survey found that 60% of women intend to vote in the 2027 elections. Yet only 41% believe their vote can influence the outcome of an election.
The first number may sound encouraging. The second should make us pause.
Because it means a significant number of women are prepared to participate in an election without being convinced that their participation can actually influence its outcome.
And perhaps that is more troubling than a simple refusal to vote.
The person who still shows up may not be the person who still believes.
We often assume that when people continue participating, they must still have confidence in the process. But participation can have different meanings.
A woman may vote because she believes her vote can change something. She may vote because she considers it her civic duty. She may vote because she does not want to give up the small amount of influence she believes she still has. She may vote because, despite her doubts, she would rather try than completely withdraw.
From the outside, all of these women look the same.
They are voters.
Their ballots enter the box.
Their participation becomes part of the turnout figure.
But their expectations are not necessarily the same.
That distinction matters because the health of a democracy cannot be understood only by looking at what citizens do. We also need to pay attention to what they believe their actions can accomplish.
ElectHER's findings suggest that maybe civic duty, rather than institutional confidence, is helping sustain women's intention to vote, while 72% of the women surveyed have little or no trust in the electoral process.
That should concern us.
Not because civic duty is a bad reason to vote.
It is not.
The concern is that civic duty can keep the behaviour of participation alive even when confidence in the system underneath it is becoming weaker. A woman can continue doing what she believes a good citizen should do while becoming less convinced that the system deserves her confidence. And those two things can exist at the same time.
The danger may not look like withdrawal.
When we think about political disengagement, we tend to imagine people disappearing from the process.
They stop registering.
They stop voting.
They stop paying attention.
The polling unit becomes empty.
That kind of disengagement is visible.
But what if disengagement does not always begin with absence? What if it can begin with lowered expectations?
A woman may still register. She may still vote. She may still encourage other women to vote. But perhaps she no longer expects much from the outcome. She may participate because she feels she should, while privately believing that the result is unlikely to change the realities that concern her.
That is a different kind of political withdrawal. The person is physically present, but something in the relationship between citizen and democracy has shifted. She has not stopped participating. She may simply have stopped expecting participation to produce much.
And that is difficult to capture in a turnout figure.
What we count may not be what matters most.
Election statistics are built around things that can be counted.
How many people registered?
How many collected their voter cards?
How many voted?
How many ballots were cast?
How many women turned out?
These numbers matter.
But they tell us what happened at the point of participation, not necessarily what citizens carried into that moment.
A turnout figure cannot tell us whether a woman believed her vote mattered. It cannot tell us whether she trusted the process. It cannot tell us whether she felt represented by the candidates. It cannot tell us whether she was hopeful, frustrated, resigned or simply fulfilling an obligation.
This is why the 60% intention to vote should not be read in isolation. The more revealing question is what sits behind it. Because if 60% intend to participate while only 41% believe their votes can influence an election, then turnout may be telling us that women are still willing to participate even when confidence in its impact is much weaker.
That distinction should be investigated.
What happens when distrust becomes something citizens learn to live with?
Distrust can begin as disappointment. Perhaps a citizen loses confidence after an election. Perhaps a promise is broken. Perhaps the process feels unfair. Perhaps political leaders appear disconnected from the people who elected them.
But repeated disappointment can do something more subtle than simply make people angry. It can change what they expect. Instead of expecting the system to work differently, people may begin adjusting themselves to what they believe the system is. They learn to expect less. They become less surprised by disappointment. They participate while already preparing themselves for the possibility that their participation will not produce the change they hoped for. That is where distrust becomes particularly troubling. Because when distrust becomes normal, citizens may stop seeing it as something that needs to be corrected. It becomes part of the democratic experience. And that should concern us more than a single election statistic.
A democracy should not require citizens to permanently lower their expectations in order to remain participants in it.
The problem becomes even harder to ignore when women do not feel represented.
The survey does not only tell us that women have doubts about the electoral process. It also tells us something about the choices they are being presented with. 81% of the women surveyed said no candidate is addressing the issues that matter to them. That finding means that some women are approaching the 2027 elections with more than one uncertainty.
They may not trust the process. They may not believe their vote can influence the outcome. And they may not feel that the candidates are speaking to the issues that matter in their lives.
Yet they still intend to participate.
That should not simply be interpreted as admirable commitment. It should also force us to ask what women are being asked to endure in order to participate. If the available political choices do not adequately reflect the concerns of the people choosing among them, then voting can become less about confidence in a political direction and more about making the best decision possible within a set of options that may already feel unsatisfactory.
A woman may still choose. But choosing does not necessarily mean she feels represented. And voting does not necessarily mean she feels heard.
There is a difference between doing your duty and believing in its impact.
This may be the most uncomfortable part of the findings. Civic duty is powerful enough to keep people participating even when confidence is weak. That can look like strength. And in many ways, it is. But we should not make citizens' willingness to endure a weak system the measure of whether that system is functioning well. If a woman says, in effect, “I do not know whether my vote will make a difference, but I will still vote because it is my responsibility,” we can praise her commitment.
We can also ask why she has so little reason to expect more. Those two responses are not contradictory. In fact, they should exist together.
Her participation deserves recognition.
Her doubt deserves attention.
Because civic duty can sustain participation for a time, but it cannot substitute for institutional credibility.
Citizens should not have to carry the entire burden of keeping democratic participation alive. The institutions receiving that participation also have responsibilities.
And then there is the question of safety.
The survey found that 96% of the women surveyed are concerned about election-day security. This matters because participation does not happen in an abstract space. It happens in real places, under real conditions, with real risks.
A woman who is already uncertain about whether her vote matters may also be calculating whether going to the polling unit is worth the risk. She may be asking whether the process is credible. Whether her vote will count. Whether the candidate she chooses understands her concerns. Whether the outcome will change anything. And whether she can participate without putting herself in danger.
Yet the public conversation can still reduce all of this to one question:
Did she vote?
That is too small a question for the reality the survey is revealing.
We should be careful about celebrating the wrong thing.
There is nothing wrong with encouraging women to vote. Women should participate. Our voices belong in democratic processes. But encouragement should not become a substitute for accountability. If women are being repeatedly told that their votes matter, then the institutions and political actors involved in the process should also be willing to examine why so many women do not believe that they do. If women are encouraged to trust elections, there must be credible reasons for that trust. If women are encouraged to participate, their concerns should not become relevant only when campaigns need their votes. And if women continue voting despite their doubts, their persistence should not be used as evidence that the doubts themselves are unimportant.
A citizen's willingness to participate does not cancel out the reasons they have for being dissatisfied.
Sometimes, it makes those reasons more urgent.
What would it mean to take the doubts seriously?
As Nigeria moves towards the 2027 elections, we will undoubtedly pay attention to turnout.
We should.
But perhaps we should also pay attention to something less visible: the expectations people carry when they vote. Do they believe their vote can influence an outcome? Do they trust the process through which that vote is handled? Do they feel that candidates understand the issues that matter to them? Do they feel safe enough to participate? And after the election, do they believe that participating was worth it?
These questions do not replace turnout figures.
They give them meaning.
Because two women can perform exactly the same political action while experiencing democracy very differently.
Both can vote. One may leave believing she has contributed to shaping her country's future. The other may leave believing she has simply fulfilled her obligation.
The ballot box cannot tell us which one she is.
At Shades of Us, we believe meaningful development requires more than participation. It requires people to have confidence that their voices can influence the decisions that shape their lives. For women, that means looking beyond whether they continue to show up and paying attention to what their participation, doubts, and expectations are telling us. This is why we are making the film, Okweche: The Cost of A Vote.
The fact that women still intend to vote is important. But so is the fact that many are approaching that participation with limited trust, limited confidence in their electoral influence, concerns about security, and dissatisfaction with the candidates available to them.
As 2027 approaches, perhaps we should stop treating continued participation as the end of the conversation.
The more important conversation may be about what women believe they are participating in—and what they have been given reason to believe their participation can achieve.
Because if citizens continue to show up while steadily lowering their expectations of what showing up can accomplish, the numbers may tell us that democracy is still participating.
They may not tell us how much faith citizens still have in it.
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