Nigeria’s 2027 general election may still look distant on the formal calendar, but economically, the pre-election season has already begun. In countries like ours, elections do not start when INEC blows the whistle; they begin when political actors start repositioning, when investors begin to price uncertainty, when civil servants become cautious, and when governments become tempted to substitute long-horizon reform with short-horizon optics. That is why 2026 matters so much. Nigeria enters it from a mixed position: headline inflation has eased to 15.10 percent, the policy rate has been cut to 26.50 percent, growth reached 4.07 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, and official projections for 2026 still lean on improving stability. Yet the same economy is carrying a large fiscal deficit, heavy debt-service obligations, persistent poverty, and unresolved structural bottlenecks in power, food systems and investment confidence. Elections do not create these weaknesses, but they often expose them, and sometimes deepen them.