By Nnaoke Ufere, PhD*
For over twenty-five years of this so-called Fourth Republic, we Nigerians have been running in circles, chained by our own hands, blinded by our own fears, divided by tribal and religious sentiments, imprisoned by ignorance, trapped by apathy, and betrayed by our own choice of leaders.
Across these two decades, we have repeated the same mistakes, returning the same crooked hands to power and expecting change from those who profit from our misery. Something deep inside our national conscience has died. It increasingly seems that something is fundamentally broken within us as a people.
It is as if the very air we breathe numbs our sense of right and wrong. We no longer feel outrage; we normalize it. We no longer demand justice; we adapt to injustice. Instead of standing to fight, we choose to flee from our responsibilities as citizens endowed by God with the power to demand truth, justice, and accountability.
We live in a country where the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) alone is facing Senate audit queries over a staggering ₦210 trillion in unaccounted funds from its audited accounts covering 2017 to 2023. According to Senate insiders who have read the company’s recent response to Senate queries, NNPCL offered little more than high-level, self-exonerating explanations, the familiar ritual of evasion dressed up as accountability. Yet even this mind-boggling amount does not move Nigerians to anger, protest, or even sustained curiosity.
The Auditor-General confirms ₦514 billion spent without authorization, while $32 million from a World Bank-funded water project has simply vanished. The IMF warns that $5 billion, about 3 percent of GDP, is missing from our national balance sheets, yet there is still no explanation or reckoning. No outrage. Just business as usual.
The former Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, stands accused of embezzling ₦109 billion from the national treasury, but life in the streets goes on as if nothing happened. The case has dragged on for years, waiting to disappear as many before it. Even when the NDDC can’t account for trillions or ministries are caught mismanaging billions meant for the poor, outrage dies before it’s born.
Hardly any criminal cases are prosecuted to completion. They drag on until the next administration, when they become forgotten, dismissed, or quietly withdrawn. Each criminal revelation becomes just another headline in our endless parade of impunity, yet Nigerians say little and do even less, accepting each scandal as routine, as if public theft were simply part of daily life. Yet more, we return the same faces to power, rewarding the looters with votes and the victims with excuses.
We have become like zombies, the dead undead, moving without thought, following without question, and surrendering our power to those who manipulate us. And this, indeed, is the acme of foolishness.
From Olusegun Obasanjo to Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, and now Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the story has remained painfully unchanged for the vast majority of Nigerians. Our choices at the ballot box have yielded the same tragic results: unending poverty, deepening misery, spreading hopelessness, and the daily anguish of hunger.
For millions of our citizens, life in Nigeria feels like a slow, grinding torment. Pastors and Imams who preach about fire and brimstone in hell need look no further than here in Nigeria. Our leaders have wrought their own version of hell upon millions of innocent people in our nation.
Never in the history of humanity has a people been so abused, so deceived, and yet so forgiving of those who plunder them. Our leaders loot in daylight, mock our poverty, and dance on our suffering, while we cheer, defend, and even vote for them again. What kind of madness is this?
Can someone explain what we ever saw in Buhari or Tinubu that justified putting them in power, if not our collective blindness, the sway of emotion over reason, and our tribal and religious loyalties disguised as conviction?
What are we now seeing in Tinubu that makes some of us willing to endure another four years of the same ruin that clear thinking in 2023 could have spared us? And worse still, what could we possibly see in Atiku or Jonathan that we do not already know, that they are no different from Buhari or Tinubu?
Atiku, undeterred by years of rejection at the polls, continues to parade himself as the nation’s saviour, clinging to ambition even as the people’s faith in him withers. Yet, astonishingly, there are still many who consider him presidential material.
Jonathan, too, appears to be angling for a return, as if the nation has forgotten the weakness, corruption, and squandered opportunities that defined his tenure. He remains the same man who stumbled into the presidency by accident of fate, unchanged, unprepared, and certain to fail again.
To support either of them — Tinubu, Atiku, or Jonathan — would be an act of suicidal foolishness, a deliberate return to the very hands that helped shape our national decay. In a country gasping for renewal, clinging to the same old faces is not just ignorance; it is a reflection of something deeply broken within us as Nigerians.
Yet some still chant “four more years” for Tinubu. Others dream of Jonathan’s return. And unbelievably, some insist Atiku should run a seventh or eighth time, as if repetition will somehow redeem character flaws.
What Exactly is Wrong With Us?
We have lived too long in learned helplessness, where we keep entrusting our future to the same leaders who steal our common wealth and still demand our loyalty and vote. Every election season, they feed us manufactured hope, stirring our emotions with promises of change, exploiting tribal and religious divides, and offering crumbs of generosity to briefly dull our hunger. Then, once they seize power, we’re left to starve, suffer, and watch many perish through four or eight years of their reckless rule.
This pattern has repeated itself over and over again. Are we too blind to see, too ignorant to know, too desensitized to feel, too paralyzed to speak, and too docile to act? Herein lies the paradox of Nigerians: a people who suffer endlessly yet somehow find the strength to endure the very pain they should resist.
Today we watch in silence as politicians who failed in their previous roles defect to parties they believe will keep them in power and provide immunity from prosecution. This betrayal has become routine, normalized by them and tolerated by us.
Can someone please tell me why the shameless and corrupt defections to the APC do not arouse our collective disdain and anger?
When our elected officials abandon the very platforms that brought them to office, it is nothing short of treachery—an act of betrayal against us, the people who entrusted them with power, and against the very principles of democracy we are bound to defend. Yet we bury our heads in the sand as though their betrayal were not our burden to bear, refusing to see that our silence and indifference are the lifeblood that sustain their corruption.
Why is carpet-crossing so common? Because defectors see us as blind followers, like goats, easy to herd in any direction. When Sheriff Oborevwori of Delta and Umo Eno of Akwa Ibom defected from the PDP to the APC, they bragged that their people would follow them wherever they went, as if the people of Delta and Akwa Ibom were their personal property.
And sadly, they are often right. Like obedient flocks, we trail behind them wherever they go, instead of using our own agency to think critically and choose who truly deserves our vote.
Worse, we have become like a people addicted to our own abusers, choosing the familiar pain of exploitation over the challenge of breaking free. We have become the abused who loves their abuser. There is a name for this condition: Stockholm Syndrome — a psychological state in which victims, after prolonged captivity or abuse, begin to identify with and even defend those who oppress them. But the Nigerian variant is far worse: ours is a national affliction, where generations have learned not only to endure their tormentors but to celebrate them.
In our case, we have learned to praise the very hands that impoverish us, to defend those who exploit us, and to glorify endurance under oppression as a form of resilience. To see fellow Nigerians prostrate before Tinubu, the tormentor-in-chief, or to watch members of the National Assembly sing “on your mandate we stand,” while the APC chorus echoes in blind loyalty, is enough to make one sick to the stomach. But not Nigerians. We simply shrug, adjust to our misery, and march on, as though suffering were our national destiny.
President Tinubu often praises “the resilience of the Nigerian people.” That is political nonsense. The truth is, this is not resilience at all, it is stupidity. Out of fear, poverty, and exhaustion, we have mistaken our life of misery for progress, and in doing so, we have legitimized those, like the president, who feed on our ignorance and profit from our silence.
This is not just about our attitude toward Tinubu. We have become a people conditioned to applaud mediocrity at all levels of government.
We cheer and clap with boundless excitement when a state governor paves a road that should have been repaired years ago, forgetting that it was left to rot because the funds were stolen. We celebrate when long-overdue salaries and pensions are paid in fragments, as though we are being done a favour rather than receiving what we rightfully earned.
From Abia to Anambra, Ekiti to Oyo, Kaduna to Borno, Bayelsa to Delta, and across every corner of this nation, governance mediocrity is not just tolerated, it is celebrated. We shout for joy when electricity flickers briefly after weeks of blackout, only to vanish again into darkness. The bare minimum has become enough for us. It’s no surprise that performative governance has become the norm, not the exception.
We have been conditioned to measure the performance of our leaders against the failures of their predecessors rather than the standards of excellence our people deserve. No, we must hold them accountable to the highest benchmarks of governance, not the lowest examples of incompetence. The bare minimum has become enough for us. We have learned to measure leadership not by excellence but by relief from the pain and suffering it created. Our low expectations have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, producing low performance from those who rule over us. We compare today’s mediocrity with yesterday’s failure and call it progress. Until we demand better, we will continue to be governed by the mediocrity we tolerate.
Our problem is not just the politicians. It is us, the citizens who refuse to think, who refuse to learn, who refuse to hold anyone accountable. We have become experts at complaining and amateurs at action. We hide behind tribe, worship empty titles, and mistake loud prayers for deliverance and progress. We hide behind screens, spewing vile on social media, as though electronic outrage were action. We pray to God endlessly to fix the ruins created by our cowardice and permissiveness. We have forgotten that nations are not built by miracles but by men and women who refuse to live as slaves.
Apathy Is Our Shared Identity
This one breaks my heart. In 2023, over 93 million Nigerians registered to vote, a historic number. Yet only about 25 million actually showed up. How do we explain this failure? We love to blame bad leadership for our problems, but the real problem is also us.
When we sink into unhealthy pessimism during elections, we effectively surrender our agency and become spectators instead of participants. We tell ourselves that no matter who we vote for, nothing will change, our voice won’t matter, and the system is rigged against us. Such beliefs feed our apathy, because if our vote “won’t make a difference,” why bother showing up? Studies show that when people believe the political system is broken and their vote won’t count, they’re far less likely to engage.
In that mindset we drift into silence and inactivity, giving space to the very leaders who exploit our frustration and sense of helplessness. We choose not to question, not to demand better, because we assume better is impossible. Over time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: our disengagement weakens accountability, lets corruption flourish, and reinforces our belief that the system cannot change. Pessimism thus becomes the fuel of our own political imprisonment.
Voting is not a favour to anyone; it is a civic duty and a personal act of liberation. We were handed the power to change our destiny, and we threw it away. That is not just negligence; it is self-betrayal. We cannot keep complaining about bad leaders when we are the ones who refused to stand up and vote for better ones. Only in Nigeria. Only by Nigerians.
Look at what the National Assembly, the judiciary, INEC, and the CBN have become under Tinubu: mere appendages of the executive branch. That was never the original intention. These institutions were meant to be independent, the safeguards of our democracy. Not anymore.
Again, we look away and delegate our responsibility to God, saying, “Only God can save Nigeria.” That is not faith; it is fatalism. It is an insult to God. He has already given us everything any nation on earth could ever need — vast resources, fertile land, intelligence, and strength. We are the ones who squandered it all.
We would be better advised, contrary to the claims of charlatans who falsely speak in God’s name, to leave God out of our man-made disasters. Nigeria’s problems are not divine; they are the handiwork of selfish men and the silence of a complacent people.
What We Have Become
What have we become? A people so broken that we smile through our suffering? Have we reduced ourselves to useful idiots, applauding our own humiliation? Who have we become? These are the questions we must confront if we are ever to reclaim our dignity and our destiny.
We have turned political stupidity into a national tradition. Every election cycle, we trade our future for a bag of rice, a few naira notes, or empty promises wrapped in ethnic and religious deceit. We shout about corruption on Monday, and by Saturday we are wearing the campaign T-shirts of the same thieves who robbed us blind. We curse bad leadership online, yet in the ballot box, we reward it. Tell me, what curse is this that makes a people love their abusers?
Around the world, people are asking hard questions about us. In Washington, London, and other capitals, officials and commentators wonder why Nigerians are not staying home to build their country or returning to turn it around. They ask why a people with so much talent, education, and global success have not created their own Dubai or Singapore.
They say Nigerians abroad today possess more knowledge, skills, and expertise than the United States had at the height of its industrial rise. The same question echoes across the world, especially now that nationalism and populism are taking hold in the West: if we have everything it takes to rebuild Nigeria, what then are we waiting for?
Only Us Will Save Nigeria
But the truth is this: no savior is coming. No angel will descend from the clouds to fix Nigeria. The responsibility is ours. Until we, the people, rise up with courage and clarity, reject tribal and religious manipulation, and demand accountability with our votes and our voices, we will remain prisoners in a rich land.
Until we, as a people, rise above the narrow boundaries of tribe, religion, region, and emotion and begin to make our political choices based on character, competence, and vision, we will continue to suffer under leaders who serve only their own while the rest of us bear the consequences of our collective blindness.
It is time to wake up. Time to reclaim our dignity. Time to stop acting like victims and start behaving like owners of this nation. If we do not, history will remember us not as the generation that suffered, but as the generation that surrendered.
Stop complaining. If possible, stop praying for a redeemer. Stop fasting, stop waiting, stop pretending that things will fix themselves. Instead, start educating those in your churches and mosques, your marketplaces, schools, community centers, social clubs, businesses, and offices. Teach them that 2027 is the year to free ourselves, our children, and generations yet unborn from the yoke of suffering and death that has weighed on us for more than sixty years. Our freedom begins in 2027, if only we choose it.
No more excuses. No more prayers for miracles. 2027 is our revolution.
*About the Author
Nnaoke Ufere is a leading voice in African public thought and policy. He writes a weekly opinion column for the African Mind Journal, where his work shapes national conversations on leadership, governance, and reform. He is the author of Covenant With Nigerians: Reversing Our Country’s Decline. Nnaoke graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka with a first class honors degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering in 1981. A Harvard MBA alumnus and PhD holder in Strategic Management from Case Western Reserve University, Ufere is an influential author, public intellectual, and global development analyst whose insights on U.S.-Africa relations and institutional accountability continue to challenge the status quo and inspire change.
