Revolution isn’t cooking spice. It is not something you purchase in small nylon sachets on a busy street. Yet, folk sell it like spices, summoning its aroma in flavoured words, promising to make everything taste new.
The sellers shout and the crowd leans in, clutching their coins and heady fantasies. But Nigeria is not a kitchen stall; it is an ecology of households and habits, of private demons and public horrors.
If Nigeria is to mark 65 years of independence with anything resembling true rebirth, let that rebirth be a deliberate, internal jihad. It’s about time we shunned the fireworks of rage and mob grandeur frequently broadcast by conflict profiteers and romanticised by the disillusioned.
Revolutions that do not tend to the seedbed of civic character result in anarchy. The consequences are better imagined: ethnic cleansing, random murders, rampant rape, burning markets, crushed neighbourhoods, displaced families and orphaned children.
We must reject the rage-fuelled template. History and recent memory establish that uprisings, especially in a fragile polity, can be a match that sets dry tinder aflame; and the fire rarely knows the difference between palaces and boondocks. The so-called Arab Spring began as an earnest cry against corruption and tyranny; in places it yielded openings, but elsewhere it snowballed into protracted internecine wars, destructive vacuums and authoritarian relapse. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, among others, show how revolutionary fervor without robust institutions or measured stewardship can produce catastrophe as often as it produces reform.
The lesson is not that people must never act, but that action divorced from civic preparation and a plan for long-term governance risks annihilation of the very goods people seek: safety, livelihoods and dignity. Those who romanticise a fast, thunderous overthrow: demagogues, disgruntled election losers, and entrepreneurial rabble-rousers who dress ambition as moral crusade are desperate actors, who are less interested in the public good than in the power and patronage that follow breakdown.
Others, sometimes foreign actors or ideologues, exploit youthful anger and digital fervour to accelerate outcomes that suit external agendas. Movements started online can be genuine, righteous and necessary; they can also be manipulated, redirected and weaponised. The #EndSARS movement of 2020, for example, began as a clarion call against police brutality and produced powerful civic energy and urgent reforms. But like most mass uprisings, its narrative was complex: genuine grassroots anger, social media amplification, and contested claims of outside manipulation and incendiary messaging all coexisted. The movement’s tragic collapse is a reminder that popular protest can be a force for accountability and also a prism through which external interests and local secessionist tensions play out, often leaving scars between communities.
Nations do not emerge fully formed from constitutions or borderlines. Nations are neither remade nor redeemed by violent uprisings, but by the character of the citizenry. And the latter, in turn, are shaped by their most intimate institution: the family. The family is the receptacle in which the values of a nation are first kindled or corrupted. It is where character and social conscience are either nurtured or strangled in the cradle. The integrity of our public life, therefore, depends on the morality of our private lives.
Family is key. From this sacred unit, a people’s sense of self, place, and purpose begins. If the family is compromised, then society itself becomes a ghost town of ethics: full of laws but lacking justice and compassion; rich in rhetoric but bankrupt of vision. Societal growth, therefore, cannot be engineered solely by policies or economic indices. It must be cultivated through the slow, careful evolution of the human spirit.
Our collective persona as a nation is reflected in the governor who once stole $4.2 million from his state’s coffers and stashed it to fund his vanities abroad, not minding what good such loot could do in resolving the educational, healthcare, and infrastructure woes of his state. It is reflected in the shenanigans of the former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor who currently seeks a plea bargain to escape punishment for fraud running into billions of naira, among others.
It is reflected in the former female Minister of Petroleum, who aggravated fuel scarcity and economic recession through reckless looting of public fund. Yet she fights to walk free.
Our collective personae flourishes in the antics of youths feverishly flying ethnic flags in defense of their ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lawmaker, governor, minister, and ex-CBN governor irrespective of the atrocities committed by them and the criminal charges levelled against them.
Our public offices aid and abett dubious citizenship. They legitimise our culture of being, which enables and justifies a public officer’s immediate descent into a basement of opportunism right after emerging as an elected representative. The latter locks himself or herself in that amoral cellar and embarks on a quest of inordinate acquisition, counting his spoils in material possessions.
Such characters are, however, mere fragments of our bigger cultural dilemma. They are our decadence; our disease.
Yet even as we have rightly identified their emergence as an affliction of the eye and disease of the mind, our chances at healing are hindered by chinks in our surgical armour: the fissures of ethnoreligious bias, illiteracy, willful degeneracy, greed, poverty, savage ego, and sheer malevolence.
Nigeria’s geographic, religious and ethnic fault lines make reckless upheaval especially dangerous. Where social trust is thin, identities are layered and historical grievances fester unhealed, the romanticised revolt too often degenerates into intercommunal violence.
We must therefore be honest: to overthrow a corrupt structure is not the same as constructing a just polity. Too often the poor pay the heaviest price for our experiments in instant remaking. Thus, must teach a new civic grammar: that the right to revolt is philosophically bound to responsibility and respect for rule of law.
President Bola Tinubu’s administration,on his part, must build institutions that make governance responsive, humane and honorable. His government must measure policy success by lives improved, not by patronage expanded. The incumbent ruling class must avoid financial recklessness and obscenities while urging the citizenry to tighten their belts.
The youth on their part must be sceptical of leaders who promise instant catharsis. They must look beyond what their rhetoric destroys to see what it builds. Those who live by humiliation, intimidation and petty cruelty will never make a humane state.
The revolution Nigeria needs must be borne of patience. It will not photograph as readily as a burning barricade, but its fruits are durable: trust, predictable markets, better schools, safer streets, and a political class kept honest by a public unwilling to tolerate theft.
If Nigeria is to become a decisive actor in Africa’s future, economically, culturally and politically, it must first become a more decent assembly of persons. Nations rarely thrive by grand treaties and trade deals; they are made by how neighbours treat each other, how families rear children and citizens stand for truth. Every country’s reach in the world is directly proportional to the nature of its civic interior.
It’s about time we renounced our easy romance of rage. We must stop inciting our youths to equate destruction with virtue and instead cultivate a different heroism: the courage to be honest when it costs us convenience and the patience to build institutions that outlast us. That is the revolution we must espouse; the type that moulds citizens into caretakers of our common destiny and Nigeria into an inheritance worth passing on.