In behavioral science, there is a well-documented phenomenon known as the Intention- Action Gap; the measurable distance between what people say they want and what their actions reveal they actually pursue.
The gap is not the absence of action. It is the mismatch between intended outcomes and the actions taken to achieve them. Researchers have observed this across disciplines.
In health studies, subjects who insist they want to eat betterreach for processed food. In finance, people who declare a desire for savings continue spending. When probed further, or asked to physically demonstrate a behavior rather than describe it, their actions frequently contradict their words entirely.
Medicine offers one of the most visceral illustrations. When a doctor asks a patient to describe where they feel pain, the patient may say; my stomach,; yet when asked to show, to press their hand against the precise location, they touch somewhere else. This is not deception. It is a friction within the human mind between conscious articulation and embodied knowledge. People are not always lying when their words and actions diverge.
They are simply revealing how imprecise self-knowledge can be.
This gap is not confined to personal health or financial habits. It scales. It operates within communities, institutions, and most consequentially, within the machinery of democratic governance.
Consider what people universally acknowledge: that physical fitness requires discipline over comfort; that professional growth demands consistent investment in skill and relationship; that a better life tomorrow is purchased through deliberate choices today. These truths are
rarely disputed. The behaviors that make them possible, however, are routinely abandonedin favor of what feels familiar or immediately rewarding. The Intention-Action Gap does not
care how loudly a person, or a people, declares their desire for change.
Nigeria has long occupied a complex and promising space in the imagination of the African continent. For decades, it has been positioned at global forums as Sub-Saharan Africa’s inevitable economic titan, a nation whose population, resource wealth, and cultural force made its rise appear less like a possibility and more like a matter of time. The transition from military rule to democratic governance deepened that optimism. Democracy, at its most fundamental promise, offered Nigerians something military rule never could and that is the
collective power to determine their own trajectory.
That power, however, is a double-edged instrument. Democracy does not guarantee good outcomes. It guarantees chosen outcomes. In that distinction lies both its genius and its grief. A citizenry that votes wisely builds; one that votes carelessly dismantles. There is very
little middle ground between those two destinations, which is precisely why civic education, not merely literacy but a consequence-aware understanding of electoral choices, is not a luxury for a developing democracy. It is its foundation. What, then, does one make of a nation that has endured repeated cycles of democratic failures, of elected officials who looted rather than led, who divided rather than developed, and yet arrives at each new election seemingly unencumbered by the lessons of the last?
The Intention-Action Gap, it turns out, is not only personal. It is political. It is national.
The 2023 Nigerian presidential election placed three distinct choices before the electorate. The first was a persistent aspirant. A man who had sought the presidency multiple times across different political cycles and lost each time. Once a vice president, his singular brush with executive proximity had long since faded into the background of a career defined more by repeated rejection at the polls than by governance achievement. His persistence had, over time, come to resemble a personal mission more than a public benefit endeavour.
The second was a first-time presidential candidate, a political figure whose biography, upon even cursory scrutiny, was riddled with legal controversy, academic irregularities, and a familial background too murky to withstand serious public examination. His campaign was largely outsourced. Proxies spoke where he would not. Surrogates defended what he could not. And when he did speak, his remarks returned, again and again, to a singular slogan- backed theme: that the presidency was his by political inheritance, that he had made kings and was now owed a crown. His most credible qualification, according to his supporters, was
a governorship that ended years before the election and a reputation as a political Machiavelli who had placed people in positions of power across the country. That was the case for him. Not a vision. Not a national policy framework. A record of political chess- playing and the residual goodwill of a state tenure that, depending on who you ask, remains contested.
The third was the youngest of the three. He had a traceable financial record, a defined policy disposition, and ran a campaign that met citizens where they were. He logged more public engagements than his two rivals combined, spoke in specifics, and was by most measurable standards the most forward-thinking and substantively prepared candidate. He was also the most criticized. His governorship was dissected relentlessly. His ethnic identity was weaponized. His credibility was called into question by the very constituencies that stood to gain the most from his competence.
The electoral outcome reflected the preferences of the largest share of the voting public. And that public, in its majority, chose the second candidate; the one on his first attempt, controversies fully visible, whose claim to leadership rested not on a demonstrable national vision but on a mythology of political birthright. A man whose defining skill, by his own
supporters’ admission, was self-interested political maneuvering. The electorate looked at that description and said yes.
In doing so, a significant portion of Nigerian voters demonstrated the precise phenomenon with which this article began. Through years of protest, hardship, and collective outrage, they stated clearly that they wanted better roads, reliable electricity, affordable food, functional
schools, accessible healthcare, and physical security. Then, in the voting booth, they chose tribal kinship and religious solidarity over every single one of those declared needs. They abandoned rationality for immediate gratification, and sacrificed long-term wellbeing at the
altar of identity. This is the Intention-Action Gap at scale.
There is another dimension to this worth examining. Electoral choice, by its very nature, includes the option to deviate from the norm. When two dominant parties have cycled through power and repeatedly failed to deliver, the rational question becomes: why not try the third option, particularly when that option is grounded in a value-based, issue-driven
campaign?
The answer one often heard is dismissive and familiar: “not how it works” But how it supposedly works has not worked. Not for the roads. Not for the electricity. Not for the food on the table. The defense of a broken system on the grounds of tradition is not wisdom. It is the Intention-Action Gap wearing the costume of experience.
The third candidate in 2023 was initially waved away by the existing political machinery as a social media candidate, a digital enthusiasm with no real-world traction. The mockery was
confident and coordinated. Then something shifted. Ordinary citizens, unconvinced by the familiar options and willing to bet on a different direction, began pouring personal conviction and personal resources into his candidacy. The mockery graduated into attacks on his credibility, which is often the tell that a threat has become real. By election day, he had secured roughly 25% of the total votes cast. For a candidate written off as a hashtag, that is not a small number. That is a movement that was met with insufficient courage. And that number matters beyond the result itself. It points to something the defenders of the
old way would rather not confront: a different direction is possible when people choose it with intention. The ceiling on that 25% was not capability or credibility. It was the reluctance of enough people to fully trust what they could already see building in front of them.
So here is the question that lingers. If the political class and their loyalists understand so well how elections work, why do they keep producing governments that don’t? The expertise is always loudest about process and quietest about outcomes. They know how to win. They have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they do not know how to govern. At some point, fluency in the mechanics of a broken system is not a qualification. It is an indictment.
The more urgent question is what breaks the cycle. History offers a tentative answer. Behavior shifts when the cost of familiar choices becomes undeniable, when the pain of the chosen path finally outweighs the comfort of the known. But nations pay that cost slowly and spread it unevenly. The poorest citizens absorb the consequences of poor electoral choices most acutely, while those with the social capital to influence elections frequently insulate themselves from the worst of those outcomes. The people most harmed by the choice are rarely the people most responsible for making it. That asymmetry is part of what makes the cycle so durable.
There is also something worth naming plainly: a political Machiavelli, by definition, prioritizes the acquisition and retention of power above all else. That is a warning, not a character reference. And a citizenry that hands such a person the highest office in the land, not despite that quality but arguably because of it, has made a poor electoral choice and revealed
something about what it has been conditioned to believe power is for.
But here is what 2023 also revealed, quietly and incompletely: 25% of the electorate looked at the familiar options, rejected them, and chose differently. That is a foundation, not a footnote. The path toward a different outcome has already been partially walked.It did not
win, but it proved it could move. That is the first crack in a wall that many insisted could not be moved.
Until a critical mass of Nigerian voters decides that tribe is not a governance policy and religion is not an economic plan, the distance between what Nigeria says it wants and what Nigeria keeps choosing will remain the country’s most expensive and most self-inflicted wound.
The cycle is breakable. But it will not break through outrage alone, nor through the next wave of social media dissatisfaction. It breaks when citizens develop the discipline to want the right things and the courage to vote for them, even when those things do not come wearing a familiar face, and when enough people decide that the crack in the wall is worth
widening.
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Abayomi Akinbo writes on governance, public policy, and society in Africa and contributes to NewsWireNGR as an Expert analysts.
