With less than one month left until the Lagos local government elections, there is a typical silence surrounding not only the voters, but of those who ought to know better: the media. In print, on radio, television, and online, there is only a faint whisper about the candidates and their platform. There is no urgency, no sense of the critical importance of these grassroots seats. It’s a silence that feels as deadly as it is deliberate.
The local government is the tier closest to the people. It repairs your roads, manages your garbage, support traders, and brings governance to your doorstep. How it beats any political pundit that when it comes to reach and accountability, it remains the least transparent.
While national polls get primetime slots, hot debates, and day-and-night coverage, the LGA elections are usually mentioned in passing, or relegated to news categories that do not make headlines, unless when a bloody event occurs. The media barely feature local candidates, scrutinize their manifestos, or even provide basic voter information. Most Lagosians, at the moment, don’t even know who is running in their ward.
In ignoring local elections, the media forsakes its watchdog role. We are guilty of sustaining a system where governors run local councils like personal fiefdoms. We allow parties to do as they please with amorphous primaries, candidates winnowed in secret and rammed down everyone’s gullet. We watch local councils sink beneath incompetence, but turn our cameras only towards Abuja or the governor’s office as though they are all that matter in governance.
Can we not see how this default gives protection to inefficiency, godfatherism, and mass disconnect between the led and the leaders?
The Media need to recapture it’s role in governance at the grassroots. We need a media reckoning. We must begin to ask important questions such as:
• Who are the candidates?
• How did they emerge?
• What are their qualifications?
• What are they proposing, and how will we hold them accountable?
Even when political parties are not forthcoming with the information needed to support this kind of reporting—often failing to voluntarily provide details about their candidates—the media still has a duty to push past those blockades. It must navigate the difficult terrain and beam its light on the issues surrounding local government elections. If the media can host presidential debates, it can organize community town halls. If we can cover scandals and power plays at the national level, we can and must do the same at the grassroots.
We apply intensity and fervor for presidential debates, general election-day monitoring, and party platforms, but ignore what is happening in our own backyard. By not asking questions about who controls our neighborhood budget, who manages our central health facilities, or who gets to decide which roads are fixed, we are betraying the very principles of participatory democracy.
When the glare of media attention hits the local stage, voters become alert, candidates act more decently, and institutions function better. Ignoring LG elections is a choice that has cost Nigeria decades of lost development. The consequence is inevitable: ghost schools, phantom budgets, vanishing allocations, dirt roads, and a people ever more bereft of any sense of governance.
Until the media rises to its duty, those in charge of local governance will continue to treat it as a playground for personal gain and political apprenticeship. Meanwhile, the people will go on believing it doesn’t matter.
The media has a critical role to play, not just in informing, but in awakening the locals. To inspire religious groups, civil society groups, youth clubs, and market associations to take responsibility and ask candidates the tough questions.
The Lagos July 12 elections are no side show. They are an experiment in democracy at its most intimate level. And the media must treat it as such.
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Spot on. The media has failed in this regard.