A few days away from a crucial presidential poll, Nigeria’s physical and online landscapes are awash with campaigns, manifestoes, and banter among supporters of candidates and political parties. Undoubtedly, this is the country’s most crucial poll since 2015 when there was a change of baton at the Presidency. According to a timetable released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Presidential and National Assembly elections would take place on Saturday, February 25, 2023, and two weeks later, governorship and state legislative elections would hold on March 11, 2023. The 2023 general election marks 24 years of Nigeria’s return to civil rule since 1999 – the longest thread of uninterrupted democracy in the history of the West African giant. About 93.5 million people have registered to vote – 16.7 million bigger than the combined voters’ register of the other members of the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Unfortunately, the country’s Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI+) community is excluded from the crucial poll; according to activists and sexual minorities, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) does not acknowledge the existence of non-heteronormative people in its programming. This is despite the introduction of new technologies and a host of other measures to ensure a more transparent and inclusive electoral process. Although Nigeria’s Electoral Act 2022 makes copious provisions for vulnerable groups, none of these inclusionary provisions touches non-heteronormative persons. Speaking with Minority Africa, Zikora Ibeh, a research lead at Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), a civic group campaigning for inclusive democracy in Nigeria, says that Nigeria’s electoral management body has redefined what vulnerable groups are, thereby effectively pushing sexual minorities further back into the margins of society. “They categorize women, youth, People with Disability (PWDs) and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) as vulnerable groups but they do not recognize the LGBTQI+ identity. It doesn’t exist for them,” Ibeh adds. “This is a direct effect of Nigeria’s anti-gay law which effectively outlaws sexual minorities out of existence.” The anti-gay law, otherwise known as the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) 2013, was signed into law on January 7, 2014, by former president Goodluck Jonathan. It is a sweeping piece of legislation that criminalizes public displays of affection between same-sex couples and restricts the work of organizations defending gay people and their rights. With the law, “terror on LGBTQ+ people in Nigeria rose from 1 to 100,” social justice campaigner Chimee Adioha tells Minority Africa. Adioha, the founder of Masculinity9ja, works globally and in Nigeria to promote inclusion and LGBTQI+ rights. Speaking in the same vein, Marline Oluchi, an LGBTQI+ Gender Justice activist and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) consultant, opined, in an online conversation monitored by Minority Africa, that the law has reinforced deep-seated religious and cultural biases and legitimized violence against sexual minorities. “[With the anti-gay law] you are basically restricting everything about my life,” Oluchi says, “you are placing systemic barriers to any sort of conversation that comes up for LGBTQI+ rights, you are making it impossible to raise their conversation in policymaking spaces, in government spaces, in decision-making spaces.” Stereotypes are powerful and they can inform social behaviour and bias. That is exactly what the law does – it stereotypes sexual minorities and makes it impossible for them to exist, thrive and access any sort of resources that they should have access to. This explains why sexual minorities are absent in all government and civic programming including elections and census. “For a group of people Nigeria already criminalizes, it is like we are not recognized. So there is no way we would have spaces when programming for minorities [is]being done. We are not even counted among the minorities they are programming for,” Oluchi says. Likewise for Adioha, the exclusionary electoral climate only further shows that politicians have no interest in issues relating to gay people. “First, these people don’t understand the politics of [minorities], and it is so shameful of them,” Adioha says. “I am not saying that LGBTQ+ people should be boxed into PWDs, no, but I just think there is a very clear motivation that allows people in authority in Nigeria to not consider [sexual minorities].