A Nation of Lamenters

BY DAKUKU PETERSIDE

A government can survive the anger of its people if that anger never acquires organisation. This is the uncomfortable possibility Nigeria must confront as 2027 approaches. We know how to describe our distress. At kitchen tables, in markets and across social media, the complaints converge: the cost of living, insecure livelihoods, fear on the roads, disappointment with public institutions. Yet agreement about what hurts has not become agreement about what we will demand, whom we will trust or how we will hold power accountable. Our grievances meet more readily than our efforts.

Lamentation has its uses. It bears witness, punctures official complacency and reminds people that their suffering is shared. But testimony alone cannot repair the conditions it exposes. When every scandal produces another burst of outrage without sustained scrutiny, those responsible learn something dangerous: they need only outlast the noise. A public that remembers its pain but forgets its demands makes accountability easier to evade.

This is not an indictment of citizens for failures imposed upon them. Leaders control public resources, appoint officials and exercise powers ordinary Nigerians do not possess. They bear the principal responsibility for the consequences. Electoral manipulation, poverty, intimidation and institutional weakness are real constraints, not excuses invented by an unwilling electorate. Any argument about citizenship that ignores these realities becomes a sermon delivered from safety. The question is how citizens can retain agency within unequal conditions and organise to change them.

Shared suffering does not automatically produce shared political purpose. People can agree that hunger is intolerable while disagreeing about its causes and remedies. Ethnicity, religion, partisan attachment and dependence on political patrons shape those disagreements. Disagreement itself is not a democratic failure. The failure comes when loyalties make evidence irrelevant: when conduct we condemn in an opponent becomes defensible in an ally. We do not need identical political preferences. We need standards that survive a change of names, parties and beneficiaries.

The most disabling expression of resignation is the declaration that votes will never count. Such distrust must be taken seriously. People who have experienced electoral misconduct cannot be talked into confidence through patriotic exhortation. Electoral institutions must earn trust through their conduct; security agencies must protect participation; parties must organise competently and defend credible competition. The citizen cannot be asked to compensate indefinitely for institutions that fail to perform their duties.

Yet distrust and surrender are different decisions. Withdrawal does not punish a political system that benefits from public disengagement. It can leave the field to those best equipped to dominate it. Participation offers no guarantee of victory or fairness, but absence forfeits opportunities to influence outcomes, document failures and build pressure for reform. The practical response to a vulnerable election is organised scrutiny: informed voters, trained party agents, lawful observation and credible documentation. None makes manipulation impossible. Together, they can make it harder to conceal and easier to contest.

Faith presents another question, and it deserves care. Nigerians do not need to choose between religious conviction and civic responsibility. Faith can sustain courage where institutions inspire fear; religious communities can nurture solidarity, defend dignity and challenge injustice. The problem begins when spiritual reassurance becomes an instruction to stop asking earthly questions. “Leave our leaders to God” may express trust in ultimate justice. Used to silence scrutiny, it grants public officials an exemption their offices do not confer.

A governor must explain expenditure. A legislator must account for representation. A president must defend policies and their consequences. These obligations do not disappear because an officeholder shares our religion or receives a religious endorsement. Prayer can accompany a demand for answers. It cannot answer a budget question, investigate a failed contract or relieve an official of responsibility. The civic test of religious leadership is whether it helps people examine power with moral clarity, including when the powerful are friends, patrons or members of the congregation.

Money complicates the argument further. Consider a struggling citizen who accepts N5,000 to attend a political rally. It is easy to condemn the transaction from a position of comfort. Hunger shortens the distance between an immediate need and a difficult choice. Attendance also tells us little about how that person will eventually vote. The more consequential question concerns those who turn deprivation into a political resource: who benefits when access to basic relief depends on loyalty rather than entitlement?

A crowd assembled through inducements cannot establish that a programme has earned public confidence. Nor does temporary assistance discharge a politician’s obligations to the public. But shaming the recipient leaves the machinery of dependence intact. Challenging it requires scrutiny of political financing, credible alternatives to patronage and civic organisations that people can join without purchasing access. Economic insecurity limits political freedom; any serious programme of democratic renewal must address that relationship rather than lecture its victims.

Our political memory also needs organisation. A promise remembered only when it is broken again is a weak instrument of accountability. Communities can keep a simple record: what was promised, by whom, when, and what followed. A proposed health centre should generate questions about its budget, completion, staffing and services, not merely photographs of a foundation stone. Citizens need to distinguish an announcement from an allocation, an allocation from expenditure, and expenditure from something that improves lives.
This work need not wait for a national movement or a charismatic organiser. A residents’ association can follow one drainage project. A professional body can scrutinise one policy affecting its members and the public. Journalists can return to an abandoned promise after its news value has faded. Civic groups can translate public documents into language communities can use. These efforts gain strength when they share evidence and persist. Their value lies in making evasion more difficult, one specific question at a time.

Such participation carries costs. People may face threats, lose income or lack access to information. Not everyone can protest openly, and nobody should be casually instructed to risk their livelihood or safety. Collective organisation matters partly because it can distribute burdens that would overwhelm an individual. Protecting civic space is therefore a responsibility of institutions and political leaders, as well as a demand citizens must sustain. Democracy cannot depend on exceptional personal bravery to exercise ordinary rights.

Citizens must also examine the exceptions they make for themselves. We weaken the case against nepotism when we celebrate it as opportunity for our relatives. We weaken electoral standards when misconduct becomes acceptable because our preferred candidate benefits. This does not make a private inconsistency equivalent to abusing state power. It does reveal how public wrongdoing acquires social protection. A standard becomes credible when we apply it where doing so costs us something.

As 2027 approaches, scrutiny should become more specific. What problem does a candidate propose to solve? What will the remedy cost, where will the money come from, and what trade-offs follow? What does the candidate’s record establish? How will citizens recognise progress or failure? Opposition parties must offer more than fluent descriptions of suffering. Incumbents must submit results to examination. Neither the promise of change nor the defence of continuity should excuse an absence of evidence.

The election itself will settle less than campaign rhetoric suggests. No victory can instantly repair weakened institutions or resolve every policy conflict. The habits established before polling day must therefore survive it. Supporters should remain able to question those they helped elect. Defeated parties should retain the discipline to scrutinise government and improve their alternatives. Citizens should resist the idea that casting a ballot exhausts their role, or that celebrating a winner requires surrendering independent judgement.

Nigeria’s predicament is not that its people have complained too loudly. Too much of that complaint has been denied a durable political form. Leadership failure must remain at the centre of the reckoning, but it cannot become the reason citizens abandon every means of demanding better. We are entitled to mourn what bad government has taken from us. We must also decide what we will organise to recover. The next question after “Nigeria is suffering” should be specific: what will we demand, from whom, and how will we keep asking until we get an answer?
•Dr Dakuku Peterside is a management and leadership turnaround expert.