By Uche Amadi
If billboards could vote, government would give them free. But billboards can’t vote.
Because billboards cannot vote, but Nigerians do, the price for being seen by Nigerians has been put out of reach, without some government in power considering that millions of voters already know who they are voting for, and coincidentally, there are no faces of candidates on the ballot papers!!
What is being done with political billboard advertising is no longer regulation. It is a tollgate on democracy.
Look at the published fee schedule for 2027 campaigns billboards:
Abia State: N200 million for presidential, N150m for governorship, N100m for Senate. Enugu and Kogi: N150 million for president. Cross River: N150 million. Rivers: N75 million for president, Anambra: N50 million.
Meanwhile, Kano charges N1.15 million flat and does not distinguish between political and commercial billboards. The difference between Abia and Kano is more than 170-fold.
In Rivers, it is worse. Advertising practitioners themselves cried out this year at the Port Harcourt Stakeholders Summit that some Local Government Chairmen demand as much as N30 million per billboard stand, and that opposition adverts are removed and replaced with government messages without consent.
If a for example, a presidential candidate pays Abia’s N200m in all 36 States and FCT, permits alone will gulp N7.4 billion. That is 74% of the N10 billion spending ceiling allowed by the Electoral Act 2026, and this before you hire one bus, print one poster, or hold one rally.
INEC has already said it lacks power to sanction States for this. And when opposition parties went to Court in Enugu to challenge the N150m fee, the Federal High Court in Enugu on September 1, 2026 dismissed their suit, saying the State Assembly can regulate outdoor advertising.
So what do we have?
Only President Tinubu’s billboards and the APC Senatorial candidate’s adorn the streets of Abuja.
State-owned media funded with taxpayers money becomes the governor’s personal megaphone.
Public space becomes the president and governors’ album.
Private billboard owners are intimidated into denying opposition space, claiming prime locations are “already booked”.
You say you want issue-based campaigns, but you are hiding the issues and the candidates behind a paywall.
ARCON itself has said State agencies have no authority to approve political adverts before they are displayed. The law says no one should use State apparatus to the disadvantage of any party. Yet here we are disallowing opposition parties from outdoor advertising.
If you are performing, you should not be afraid of a poster. Let all billboards stand. Let Nigerians, not signage agencies, decide who has performed.
Because at the end, it is not the billboard that votes.
It is the hungry man in Diobu, the keke driver in Mile 1, the fisherwoman in Bonny, the millions hoping for a better Nigeria, and the farmer in Benue who is scared of venturing to his farm. Yet, you price them out of seeing their choices.
The good thing about this however, is that the face of the president millions of Nigerians believe is the architect of their misery, daily smiles at them in mockery of their predicaments.
Uche Amadi
The Narrative Force
