Between 2014 and 2023, I worked on political communications at every level of Nigerian elections: presidential, gubernatorial, legislative. Across enough campaigns to recognise a pattern that keeps repeating itself with troubling consistency.
Candidates commission campaign films with cinematic colour grading. They hire social media teams to flood timelines with quote cards and behind-the-scenes footage. They book slots on television programmes and prepare talking points for the questions they expect to be asked. And then the moment arrives when a question they did not expect, or a narrative they did not anticipate, lands squarely in public view, and everything unravels.
Not because the candidate lacks substance, but because substance was never translated into story.
I am convinced the problem is structural, not individual. Nigerian political communication, for all its increasing sophistication in production quality, remains almost entirely reactive. Campaigns invest heavily in what people see: videos, graphics, and media appearances. But they invest almost nothing in the architecture of what people believe.
Think about how many campaigns have been derailed by identity questions that any competent strategist could have seen coming from a mile away. A candidate’s ethnicity, faith, fluency in a local language, and spouse’s state of origin. These are the most predictable lines of assault in Nigerian politics, as reliable as rain in July. And yet, cycle after cycle, candidates walk into them as though nobody on their team thought to look at the battlefield before the fight.
The 2023 presidential election laid this bare on multiple fronts, and I want to be clear: that election also carried real pain, irregularities that shook public trust and violence that cost lives. I do not diminish any of that. But alongside the institutional failures, there was a communications failure that deserves its own honest examination.
One campaign had enormous grassroots energy and a compelling candidate, but no coherent narrative to counter the structural question: that enthusiasm alone cannot overcome political machinery. Another had machinery and resources but could not build a story that made voters feel anything beyond obligation. The candidates who struggled most were the ones whose ideas lived in policy documents rather than in the public imagination.
And this goes well beyond the presidential race. Gubernatorial campaigns across the South-West have repeatedly stumbled over language and identity questions that were visible years before the election. Candidates in the North have been undone by sectarian narratives they never bothered to get ahead of. The pattern is everywhere, and it always looks the same: a campaign that confused being visible with being understood.
So if the problem keeps showing up in the same form, what exactly is missing? I have come to think of it as narrative architecture. The deliberate, upstream work of constructing a public story about a candidate that is so well-built and so deeply embedded in how people talk about them that predictable attacks land on prepared ground rather than open wounds.
Media training is part of it. Content strategy is one of its tools. But narrative architecture sits beneath both: the foundational work of deciding what a candidate means in the public mind and then building that meaning systematically, long before the first debate or interview.
The discipline starts with studying the battlefield before you step onto it, by cataloguing every line of attack your opponents will use, especially the obvious ones, because in Nigerian politics the obvious attacks are usually the ones that land hardest. Then you build a public story, consistently and early, that makes those attacks feel like footnotes rather than headlines.
If a candidate’s background makes them vulnerable on the language question, for instance, the work begins months before anyone asks the question. You construct a narrative so rich in other dimensions of identity and connection that by the time the question arrives, it feels small; it feels like a footnote to a story the public has already accepted.
I should be clear: narrative architecture is the opposite of spin. Spin is reactive and dishonest. This work is proactive and, at its best, true. It takes what is genuinely good about a candidate, their vision, their competence, their character, and gives it a structure that the public can hold onto, repeat, and defend on the candidate’s behalf.
Too many good candidates with genuine vision are losing elections, or worse, losing the public conversation entirely, because they believe that good intentions speak for themselves. They do not. The gap between what you mean and what people hear is a communications problem; if you are not solving it deliberately, your opponents are solving it for you.
Every election is a contest of stories before it is a contest of policies, and the candidate who understands this, who builds the architecture before they build the house, is the one who gets to govern. The rest are left wondering why nobody listened.