Omoyele Sowore's ₦500,000 minimum-wage promise is easy to applaud and easy to dismiss. Neither response is good enough. The harder question is what would have to happen inside the Nigerian economy for the figure to become more than a campaign number.
The SDP candidate's newly launched blueprint promises to revive three state refineries that have failed every restart attempt for over a decade, cap petrol at N200 a litre while Nigeria's own largest refinery has been raising prices in step with global crude, and hit an electricity figure roughly thirteen times the country's actual peak output, all inside a single presidential term. Weeks earlier, discussing the same number with a different audience, he described it as a target for 2050.
The ADC candidate wants to bring back fuel subsidy under a new name, tied to domestic refining rather than imports. His own campaign has yet to agree on whether it is temporary, and the plan surfaced as a rebuttal to Dangote Refinery rather than as a costed proposal.
The Northwest ADC Governorship Candidates' Compact commits seven separate campaigns to a ₦110,000 minimum wage, 21 new specialist hospitals and a regional drone network. Several of the states involved only recently, and reluctantly, met the far smaller ₦70,000 wage they are already legally required to pay.
The ADC candidate has called Nigeria's student loan scheme "witchcraft economics" and promised forgiveness for qualifying debts. NELFUND is a revolving fund kept alive by the repayments Atiku wants to cancel, and his campaign has not said what replaces that money, or who would still have to pay.
The NDC candidate says a written agreement with his running mate makes his one-term pledge different from the ones other Nigerian politicians have broken. The Constitution disagrees, and so does the record of two men who made an almost identical promise before him.
The ADC candidate's pledge to launch a $10 billion stimulus fund in his first 100 days is not a new idea for 2027. He made an almost identical promise ahead of the 2019 and 2023 elections, was publicly asked both times how he would raise the money, and has not answered on the record since.
Two named security programmes, 5,000 AI-enabled cameras for Plateau and 2,000 forest guards split between Plateau and Oyo, were announced within six weeks of each other in 2026 as direct responses to mass killings and a mass abduction. The candidate attacking Tinubu over both programmes has not yet explained how a drone would function as his own Minister of Defence.
The former Kaduna senator's list of promises Nigerians should never believe has circulated widely as civic wisdom. It is also, on close reading, a fairly precise map of the pledges his opposition rivals have made this cycle, published by a man who is himself contesting a Senate seat for the ruling APC.
The president's fullest recorded 2023 remarks on power tied a second term to ending estimated billing, with one condition attached that keeps disappearing whenever the opposition quotes it back to him.