*Photo:Lauratu Umar Abdulsalam ,Ph.D*
A ceremony in Abuja was never going to be the difficult part. What happens next in rallies, newsrooms, WhatsApp groups and polling units will decide whether Nigeria’s 2027 peace accord means anything at all.
The signatures have dried on the peace accord. The cameras have moved on. The real test begins now.
On 18 August 2026, Nigeria’s political parties and key political actors gathered at the International Conference Centre in Abuja and signed a peace accord ahead of the 2027 general elections under the auspices of the National Peace Committee, led by former Head of State General Abdulsalami Abubakar, they committed to respecting the Constitution and the Electoral Act, and to running campaigns free of violence, hate speech and misinformation.
This commitment matters because Nigerian political competition has, at different times, come with violence, intimidation and rhetoric that pushed communities to the edge. Getting rival camps into one room to make that promise publicly is not a small thing and Nigerians should welcome it, without cynicism. However, it invites a harder question which the applause in Abuja cannot answer; what happens after the signing?
A peace accord is a commitment, on its own, it is not a mechanism. It cannot monitor a rally, stop a dangerous message from spreading on WhatsApp or calm a community once a rumour has taken hold, or hold a candidate to account when rhetoric tips into incitement. People and institutions have to do that work, and that is where the real work begins.
This accord will earn its credibility not from what happened in Abuja, but from what happens in the months ahead at rallies and party meetings, in communities, in newsrooms, and increasingly on social media. Who is watching for breaches? Where does a citizen take a threat? Who moves when dangerous speech starts circulating, and how fast?
These questions matter because Nigeria has been here before. The National Peace Committee has promoted peaceful elections since 2015, with further accords ahead of subsequent polls. The lesson from that history is not that peace accords fail; it is that a peace accord needs machinery built around it. Without one, it repeats the same cycle: a strong ceremony, then silence, until the next election brings everyone back into the same room to sign the same kind of promise.
Nigeria does not need another peace initiative that lives mainly in a signing ceremony; it needs a process that runs from the signing table to the polling unit, the community square, the newsroom and the timeline on people’s phones.
While it is highly commendable, the role played by Bishop Matthew Kukah in the just concluded Osun State Gubernatorial election by continuously relaying security concerns raised to him by the siting Governor to the Inspector General of Police for necessary actions during the heat of the electioneering campaign; this would have been more efficient with established mechanism in place where citizens could easily and timely raise alert of imminent danger, this may have saved some of the lives that were lost.
A practical starting point is a credible mechanism for tracking implementation at national, state and local level, with the National Peace Committee playing a central role, working alongside relevant institutions and civil society to flag emerging risks and report publicly on progress. Many states already have some version of a peace structure or an early-warning desk. What they need is strengthening and utilisation, not reinvention.
Citizens also need a simple way to report a threat; a phone line, a short code, an online form and none of it needs to be sophisticated. What matters is that people know where to send a warning, and that someone is responsible for what happens after it lands: verifying it, deciding who responds, and moving quickly enough that the response still means something.
A report that reaches an institution after violence has started tells us something useful for next time, but it has not prevented anything. Early warning only earns its name when early action follows it, alongside some form of community engagement and continued watching. Filed and forgotten is not prevention; it is paperwork.
There is one actor in this conversation we tend to skip: ourselves. Politicians, INEC and security agencies do not protect peace alone; ordinary decisions, made daily by people who never sign anything shape it too, what we forward on WhatsApp before checking it, whether we challenge the person in our political group who starts making threats or let it pass because they are “on our side,” whether we report a credible warning or simply pass it along the chain.
Nigerians have real rights during elections to vote without intimidation, to campaign and associate peacefully, to disagree loudly without fear. Alongside those rights sits a responsibility often left unspoken not to become an instrument for spreading violence, hate or deliberate falsehood, and to hold our own preferred candidates to the same standard we apply to their opponents. Seeing citizens as peace actors, not only as voters, changes the question. It stops being only “will politicians keep their word” and becomes something closer to home i.e. what happens if millions of us decided that protecting the peace of this election was also our job?
A signature in Abuja does not settle a leader’s responsibility it opens it. Nigerians will judge parties and candidates by what they say at rallies, what their spokespersons publish, and what they tolerate from their own supporters. A candidate cannot sign a peace accord and then look away when supporters threaten an opponent. A party cannot condemn violence from a rival camp and go quiet when the same conduct comes from its own side. Peace requires that kind of consistency rejecting misinformation even when it favours you, and settling disputes through the courts and tribunals the law already provides, rather than the street.
The accord’s credibility will rest more on this than on anything written on the page signed in Abuja.
Words create tension long before violence does. An ethnic insult at a rally becomes a social media campaign by evening. A false allegation becomes a community rumour within days. A threat repeated often enough starts to feel inevitable rather than avoidable. 2027 adds a newer complication via synthetic media, Deepfake videos, manipulated audio and fabricated screenshots which makes it harder for ordinary citizens to tell what is real from what was manufactured for effect.
The answer is not panic, and it is not censorship it is media literacy, faster fact-checking, more disciplined political communication, and accountability where the law is actually broken. Sometimes the most useful habit a citizen can build is pausing to ask, before sharing anything political, whether it is actually true. That pause alone has stopped more than one falsehood from becoming a crisis.
The media will shape the emotional temperature of this election as much as any politician does. Journalists have to report what political actors say, but reporting is not the same as amplifying. Conflict-sensitive journalism means asking, before a story runs, whether a claim has been verified, whether repeating an inflammatory statement adds anything voters actually need, and whether coverage gives as much space to policy as it gives to controversy and also thinking about the safety of journalists who cover conflict and often carry more risk than the story appears to warrant. None of this asks the media to drop its watchdog role it asks for judgement alongside it.
No single institution can carry this tasks, formal responsibility for the process sits with electoral and security agencies; political responsibility for conduct sits with parties and candidates. Civil society and the media carry a public-interest duty to inform and to warn, while communities and citizens carry a civic responsibility no law can substitute for. Traditional and religious leaders, technology platforms, youth groups and women’s organisations sit somewhere inside that same picture, and none of them can carry it alone. That is why coordination matters as much as capacity. When a credible threat surfaces, someone has to know whose job it is to act on it, and move before the next news cycle overtakes the story, not after.
Nigeria should be willing to sit with a few uncomfortable questions as 2027 approaches. Who is actually monitoring this accord, and will compliance reports be made public rather than kept internal? What happens, in practice, when a signatory breaks the commitment, and where does a citizen take an emerging threat? State-level peace structures need resourcing that goes beyond a name on paper. Journalists need the training to cover election-related conflict responsibly, and citizens need enough confidence in their electoral rights to use them. Young people deserve engagement before political actors try to recruit them for something else entirely, and women deserve a genuine role in these decisions, not a symbolic one.
None of these are partisan questions. They test whether Nigeria is serious about what was signed in Abuja, not who signed it.
It pertinent to think about the road ahead in six simple steps; sign, monitor, engage, respond, account and sustain. So, the signing has happened, what follows is monitoring, what happens next is engaging citizens and communities as participants rather than as an audience, and responding to tension before it becomes violence, not after. Accountability will look different depending on who breaks a commitment public reporting, a party disciplining its own members, hard questions from the media, or in some cases the courts and tribunals the law already provides.
Sustaining the structures built for this election matters just as much, so Nigeria can stop rebuilding its peace infrastructure from zero every four years.
Civil society has a place inside this, without needing to be the whole of it. At the Root Foundation for Peace Building Initiative, our work sits in that space; civic education, community dialogue, early-warning monitoring, and conversations with media houses about conflict-sensitive reporting. We cannot replace the state or the security agencies. What we can do is stay present between election cycles rather than only around voting day, connect communities to the institutions meant to protect them, and keep a record of what is actually happening on the ground, not just what is announced from Abuja.
The real test of this accord will not be the number of signatures on the document, it will be whether those commitments hold when a candidate is attacked online, when a rally turns tense, when a manipulated video goes viral, when results are disputed and supporters are angry. Those are the moments when the words signed in Abuja either mean something or they do not.
Political leaders should honour what they signed, in speech as much as on paper, and institutions should build the mechanisms to monitor and respond before the campaign season reaches full heat. The media should report responsibly without giving up its watchdog role, and civil society should keep citizens engaged past the ceremony.
Security and electoral institutions should treat early warnings as instructions to act, not paperwork to file, and citizens should simply refuse to be used, by anyone, as instruments of political violence.
The peace accord should not end at the signing table — it should follow us into our communities, our newsrooms, our political parties, our social media timelines and our polling units, because peace is not something Nigerians should wait for politicians to deliver. It is a democratic responsibility we build, demand and protect together.
The cameras in Abuja will eventually move on. Our responsibility to peace must not.
*Lauratu Umar Abdulsalam (Ph.D) is
Executive Director, Root Foundation for Peace Building Initiative (RF4PI)*