By Ken Ihedioha
In marketing, there’s an uncomfortable truth every brand manager already understands: if people don’t see you, they cannot remember you. And if they cannot remember you, they are unlikely to ever choose you.
Politics is not fundamentally different. It just has higher stakes, and, as it turns out, a much steeper price list.
“I Dare Anyone to Touch My Billboard”
In Abia State this past July, a governorship candidate stood in front of state officials and simply refused to comply. Doris Ogala of the African Action Congress had just been informed that mounting a campaign billboard anywhere in the state would now cost her ₦150 million in permit fees alone — on top of production, printing, and mounting. Her response, delivered on the record and widely reported: “I dare anyone to touch my billboard.” She went further, calling the fee a policy that “does not empower our youth or foster economic growth,” but instead “deliberately shuts the door on ordinary citizens and entrepreneurs while systematically extorting political rivals.” Her closing warning was blunt: pay it, or campaign with no billboards at all.
That single confrontation captures, in miniature, exactly what’s unfolding across Nigeria as the country moves toward 2027: the cost of simply being seen has become a genuine political story in its own right — not a footnote to one.
The Numbers, State by State
Abia’s published schedule sets the presidential permit at ₦200 million, governorship at ₦150 million, senatorial at ₦100 million, with lower offices scaled down from there. Anambra charges ₦50 million for a presidential permit. Enugu has fixed a flat ₦150 million campaign permit covering billboards, branded vehicles, and campaign materials alike — a fee significant enough that the South-East zone of the National Youth Council of Nigeria has publicly flagged it as a threat to youth political participation. Cross River sits at ₦150 million for presidential candidates, ₦100 million for governorship. Kwara has landed at ₦100 million presidential, ₦50 million governorship. Benue and Oyo came in lower still, at ₦40 million and ₦50 million respectively for presidential hopefuls.
There is, in other words, no national consensus on what this kind of visibility should cost — only 36 separate, uncoordinated answers, several of them now openly contested in public.
One Nigerian newspaper did the aggregate math across the states that have disclosed figures so far and arrived at a striking national total: roughly ₦7.4 billion in combined billboard levies nationwide, a figure stakeholders have described not merely as steep, but as a calculated attempt to commercialise democratic participation itself before a single vote is cast. Run a narrower, simpler calculation — just one candidate paying Abia’s ₦200 million presidential rate in all 36 states — and the number still lands close to ₦7.2 billion, for outdoor permits alone, before a single billboard is actually designed, printed, or mounted.
These are, to be fair, government-imposed permit and signage charges, not the full production cost of the advertising itself. Even so, the numbers are large enough to reshape the entire economics of visibility in Nigerian politics.
The Billboard Is Not Just Decoration
Outdoor media works through repeated exposure. The same face, colour, and slogan, seen day after day, builds familiarity — and familiarity is itself a form of brand equity, the political equivalent of top-of-mind awareness. When the regulatory price of that exposure rises this sharply, it stops being a simple advertising decision and becomes a market-entry question: who can afford to compete for attention at this scale, and who gets quietly priced out before the race even starts?
Lagos offers a concrete, present-tense answer to that question. As National Assembly and presidential campaigning formally kicked off, reporting found that many opposition candidates in the state simply hadn’t placed a single signboard — not from lack of effort, but because the Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency’s fees, including a non-refundable ₦500,000 application charge for anything over 15 square metres, had already priced them out before the campaign properly began. That is not a hypothetical chilling effect. That is an empty billboard, standing in for a message nobody could afford to mount.
Commercial brands already pay substantial sums for premium outdoor sites — location determines value, and attention has always had a price tag. Politics has now fully entered that same marketplace, with one critical difference: a soft-drink company can simply choose not to advertise in a particular state if the price doesn’t make sense. A presidential candidate does not have that luxury. Every state is also a ballot box.
Regulation Versus Barrier
There’s nothing inherently wrong with regulating outdoor advertising. Cities need to control visual clutter, protect public infrastructure, and maintain order along their roads. The harder, more uncomfortable question is at what point regulation quietly becomes an economic filter on political participation itself.
This is no longer a fringe concern, and it is notably not a one-party complaint. In Abia, the opposition has rejected the new fees outright, with the PDP describing the policy as “an outrageous commercialisation of the democratic space” — the same party, worth noting, that governs several other states now imposing comparable charges of its own. The Nigeria Democratic Congress has separately condemned what it called an “arbitrary” fee increase nationally. In Kwara, civil society group CODWA has warned that fees beyond the reach of opposition parties’ amount to “a shrinking of the civic space” that structurally favours whichever party already controls the machinery of government. When ADC officials, PDP officials, NDC officials, youth councils, and independent civil society groups are all raising the identical objection in different states, the complaint stops looking partisan and starts looking structural.
A wealthy, well-funded campaign can absorb a ₦200 million permit and still fund television, radio, digital, influencers, and grassroots mobilisation on top of it. A leaner campaign must choose. Billboards or radio? Digital or rallies? National reach, or a tightly targeted set of constituencies where the money can actually stretch? Money begins to shape not only how loudly a candidate can campaign, but whether that candidate can be seen at all, in each state, at any price — which is precisely the complaint Doris Ogala made standing in front of Abia’s signage agency.
Digital Doesn’t Eliminate the Money Game
We’re often told that digital media has democratised political communication. To an extent, it genuinely has — a compelling video can travel across the country without a single state permit standing in its way. Yet algorithms, paid promotion, professionally produced content, and influencer networks all still cost real money, just routed through a different budget line. The digital revolution hasn’t abolished the money game in Nigerian politics. It has simply changed its shape, and in some ways made the spending harder to see and harder to regulate at all.
Visibility Is Not Persuasion
The deeper strategic question for 2027 is return on visibility, not volume of visibility. Commercial marketers ask this constantly, almost by reflex. Political campaigns should learn to ask it just as automatically. A candidate can dominate every roadside in a state and still fail to answer the one question that decides votes: why should I trust you? Visibility is not the same thing as persuasion. And persuasion is not the same thing as trust.
The smartest campaigns heading into 2027 will treat billboards as only one channel inside a genuinely integrated architecture — outdoor, radio, earned media, town halls, WhatsApp communities, social video, and direct voter contact, all anchored to one clear, consistent political proposition rather than scattered across disconnected tactics. When the price of physical visibility rises this fast, strategic discipline becomes considerably more valuable than raw spend.
The Real Contest
The 2027 election will, without question, involve enormous amounts of money. That was never in doubt. The far more interesting question is what kind of money will actually matter, and who will be able to afford the rising cost of simply being seen in all 36 states at once — and who, like the opposition candidates quietly going without signage in Lagos, will instead be seen only by their absence.
Attention remains the scarce commodity it has always been in both marketing and politics. The billboard is merely one way of buying a share of it — an increasingly expensive one, and, if Doris Ogala’s defiance in Abia is any indication, one that some candidates are now simply refusing to pay for at all. The lasting advantage in 2027 will ultimately belong to whoever can occupy the voter’s mind without first exhausting the entire war chest just to get noticed.
That is the real money game of 2027.
