Indeed, ‘don yau gobe ta ke’ – tomorrow exists because of today. What you do today determines what you reap tomorrow. The chickens we have been tracking in this series are not just the skeletons in political closets. They are the chickens of our own making, the consequences of a nation that has spent 66 years groping in the dark after the colonisers left, never quite deciding what we wanted our Republic to be.
The political developments of recent weeks have been nothing short of theatrical. The FBI has formally acknowledged that President Tinubu was a subject of a criminal investigation in the early 1990s. The agency has produced 399 pages of records, with portions redacted under exemptions covering personal privacy, confidential sources, and law enforcement methods. Atiku has hired lobbyists to dig for more, spending $1.2 million on a 12-month retainer. But as the Presidency rightly pointed out, this is a civil records-disclosure dispute, not a criminal case, and no court has found the President guilty of any criminal wrongdoing .
The opposition is fragmented like a broken mirror. Peter Obi and Kwankwaso have jumped ship to the NDC, earning Peter Obi the epithet of ‘a political rolling stone that gathers no moss’. The APC controls 32 out of 36 states, a dominance that has led political analyst o warn that this could open the door for a military takeover, drawing parallels to the First and Second Republics. The ADC has accused the APC of systematically shrinking Nigeria’s democratic space, engineering crises in opposition parties to entrench a one-party state.
But here is where I differ from the doomsayers. The narrative that Nigeria is condemned to an eternal abyss is a lazy suggestion, not an order.
We were so eager to kick out the colonisers that we never really made plans beyond the handover of power. There was no elite consensus about what we wanted out of our new Republic and how to get there. As one academic study put it, Nigeria’s crisis has been driven by a ‘toxic and extractive elite consensus and failure of leadership across the board’. We largely groped in the dark, and partly because of that, we never developed a consciousness about the definition and responsibilities of both the demand and supply sides of leadership. Plutocracy became the default in the absence of a functional covenant.
But consider this: our current leadership philosophy is almost entirely foreign, sometimes even antithetical to the ideas of leadership and followership developed and practiced in this part of the world. Scholars have documented the clash between imported notions of liberal democracy and traditional African systems of governance, where consensus-oriented decision-making and sacred kingship once held communities together. For instance, in Yoruba tradition, the Oba receives his authority from Olódùmarè rather than from the electorate, yet the people held him accountable through councils and rituals. In Hausaland, the Sarakuna ruled with the counsel of elders and the consent of the governed. These systems were not perfect, but they understood something we have forgotten: leadership is stewardship, not ownership.
So, naturally, there would be a long learning curve characterised by painful trials and errors. The question is whether we are learning anything at all. Many have argued that we deserve the kind of leaders we have, or that leadership is a socio-anthropological reflection of a given society. Both points are false. No one deserves the yoke of evil. And if the second point were true, every square inch of this earth would still be a jungle. Leaders can be born and made. Either way, they come into being. A leader is the material echo of a society-its principles, values, and ambitions.
Again, by the law of equilibrium, natural phenomena will always seek equilibrium automatically if not effected deliberately. Necessity is the mother of invention. A crisis of leadership will sooner or later spontaneously produce the leader the time and place require. This suggests that a rotten society is in fact in a better position to produce the best of the best of leaders-given enough time. And as followers of Abrahamic faiths, this should be an epistemological no-brainer to us. All the prophets sent by Allah or Jehovah as the Judeo-Christian came at a time when society was lost or on the verge of doom.
Recently, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria warned that a weakened democratic space makes it increasingly difficult for citizens to hold government accountable. But accountability is not just the job of institutions; it is the job of citizens. The first installment of this series noted that the boys are not smiling under T-Pain. The second installment discussed the aftermath of Osun. The third installment tracked the FBI files. This fourth installment concludes the first arc by reminding us: Nigeria is not condemned to an eternal abyss so we must metaphysically reject that notion as the 2027 elections loom on the horizon.
The APC will almost certainly win the presidency in 2027, not because they are popular, but because there is no viable alternative. The opposition is fragmented, the ruling party has the advantage of incumbency, and the game is rigged in ways both subtle and overt. But victory in 2027 is not the end of the story. It is just another chapter. The chickens will keep coming home to roost, and if the APC thinks they can stuff the closet forever, they are in for a rude awakening.
I think about the generation that lived through the civil war, through military coups, through the slow erosion of hope. A popular refrain among them is, ‘kowa ya san inda ruwa ya kai sai ya tsaya’ – everyone knows where the water has reached and must stop. The water has reached the neck. But we are still breathing. And as long as we are breathing, we have a choice.