“Anybody who refuses, who wants to stand on way from having those votes we intend to give to Mr President, AK-47, fire!” Those were the words attributed to Jarrett Tenebe, the APC state chairman in Edo, whose noticeably lightened complexion has earned him the nickname “Carol White”, in a video that has circulated widely, in which he threatened opposition supporters with an AK-47.

The words are crude, frightening and, coming from the chairman of a governing party in the middle of a general election campaign, ought to provoke something more than the familiar political shrug that greets the increasingly violent language of Nigerian politics.

The country is now 100 days away from the presidential election. That should be a period in which political parties persuade citizens, present their records, defend their candidates and ask Nigerians for the privilege of governing them. Instead, threats have begun to enter the campaign with an ominous regularity.

The ballot, which ought to be the peaceful instrument through which citizens decide who governs them, is being spoken of in the language of force. When a ruling party official tells citizens that anyone who stands in the way of votes intended for the president will face “AK-47, fire”, the words cannot be dismissed as ordinary campaign rhetoric.

The context makes the statement even more troubling. Activists associated with Tinubu Must Go, a campaign launched by citizens sympathetic to Atiku Abubakar, are currently in detention in Maiduguri. Their detention, whatever explanation the authorities may offer for it, has become part of a political atmosphere in which opposition activism appears increasingly vulnerable to coercion.

Democracy does not become less democratic merely because its government permits an opposition campaign to exist; it becomes less democratic when citizens begin to measure the personal consequences of supporting an opponent of the government against their civic duties.

In Delta State, members of the Obidient movement, a motley but formidable group pursuing Peter Obi’s presidential ambition, were recently attacked. The political character of the movement is hardly in doubt. Its supporters have demonstrated, with a stubbornness that Nigerian politics has often underestimated, that electoral allegiance can be built outside the traditional machinery of the established parties.

Their presence in the political space is neither a criminal act nor a threat to the republic. It is the very stuff of democratic competition.

The trouble begins when the ruling party starts behaving as though opposition is an affront to its entitlement to power. There is a dangerous distance between winning an election and possessing an election. The first requires citizens to choose you. The second assumes that their votes already belong to you and that anyone attempting to deny you those votes has placed himself in the path of force.

Tenebe’s extraordinary statement appears to cross precisely that line. “Anybody who refuses, who wants to stand on way from having those votes we intend to give to Mr President, AK-47, fire!”

Read carefully, the threat is not simply against an opponent who may seek to prevent the president from winning; it is directed at anybody who refuses to accept the votes that Tenebe says “we intend to give to Mr President”. His objectionable formulation contains the central pathology of the Nigerian electoral crisis: the conversion of the citizen’s vote from an instrument of personal political choice into something that a devious power imagines it can command.

An election is defeated at the moment citizens are no longer free to vote against the government without fear. The Constitution does not confer upon any political party ownership of the electorate. Votes do not belong to the president, the APC or any opposition party. They belong to citizens, and the sovereign act exercised through those votes is the choice of who should govern.

This is why the language of the AK-47 should concern everyone, including people who intend to vote for President Tinubu. A threat against an opposition voter is not only a threat against an opposition voter; it is also a threat against the freedom upon which the legitimacy of the eventual winner will depend. A victory secured in an atmosphere of intimidation carries a burden that no declaration by an electoral commission can entirely remove.

There is an especially grave responsibility upon the ruling party because the distinction between party power and state power is already painfully blurred in Nigeria. The party in government has access to institutions that opposition parties do not possess. Its officials therefore cannot speak with the same impunity as private citizens when they threaten violence during an election.

An opposition activist who makes an intemperate statement may face arrest; a governing-party official who invokes an AK-47 against political opponents should face scrutiny of an entirely different order. The reason is straightforward: when such threats come from those who control the machinery of government, they carry a meaning beyond the words themselves. They can be heard not merely as political rhetoric but as a warning backed, however implicitly, by the coercive authority of the state.

This is what makes the normalisation of such threats particularly dangerous before the first ballot is cast. Once citizens begin to believe that political intimidation may be backed by the power of government, violence becomes part of the electoral register and fear begins to compete with persuasion as a means of securing political advantage. Elections conducted in such an atmosphere risk becoming less a contest over competing arguments than a contest over who can frighten the other side into silence.

Nigeria has travelled this road before, and its history offers little reason to treat political violence as a temporary feature of an election. Once party loyalists begin to regard opponents as enemies rather than legitimate participants in the constitutional order, violence acquires a political life of its own.

An election may end with the announcement of results, but the consequences of violence rarely end there. Injuries, deaths and grievances remain long after the politicians who helped create them have moved on.

The approaching election therefore requires more than the routine condemnation of inflammatory speeches after they have gone viral. The authorities must make it unmistakably clear that an electoral campaign is not a licence to threaten citizens with firearms.

Political parties must understand that their candidates and officials will be judged not merely by the votes they win but by the means through which those votes are sought. The police and other security agencies must protect opposition supporters with the same seriousness with which they protect those who support the government.

No president should need an AK-47 to win an election, and no ruling party should need the threat of one to persuade Nigerians to vote for its candidate. If the people want the president, they will give him their votes. If they do not, no political party has the constitutional right to manufacture consent with fear.

The ballot paper is powerful precisely because it does not require a gun. The first duty of a government that claims democratic legitimacy is to ensure that the citizen can place a mark on that ballot without wondering whether an AK-47 is waiting on the other side of it.

• Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette