Some of us do not want leadership as it was in 2015 or 2020 — or at any recorded time for that matter. We adamantly reject imperfect options on the path to perfection. In 2023 and beyond, we did not pick between our two portions: Progress we can live with, or less progress. Our own Biden versus Trump moment. In overwhelming numbers, we still watch at home on election day, waiting for someone who does not underwhelm us — someone who will feel perfect.
Traditional wisdom says the power of young Nigerians lies in our ability to influence the best ideals of politics. From 2020, Nigeria’s new generation claimed a more pragmatic power: Not being influenced by the worst realities of politics. Progress followed.
In 2023, social media helped to identify violent actors or people destroying ballots. Corrupt election officials were exposed by name, face, and badge on live stream broadcasts. People who tried to violate our votes were turned into digital villains, and then taken into police custody. Social media became a sacred tool of statecraft with a new responsibility: Defending our democracy. We demanded that observers – youth, foreign and local – gain access to all stages of the voting process. No more secret rooms for anything concerning ballots. Now? The worst manifestations of politics that previously influenced our apathy, influence us no more.
Nigerians have also come to accept individual accountability for voting in leaders who failed us; leaders who turned out to reverse progress. Our votes and beliefs became separated from our identities after 2020. So that when a leader did not achieve progress, or when a treasured argument was no longer cogent, we could recognise our decision was wrong. Not us, but the decision. Our guiding allegiance shifted from blind-faith and affinity to logic and reason. We claimed the freedom to change.
Young people registered en masse to join the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), becoming the majority members of Nigeria’s two main political parties and staging a takeover in the run-up to 2023. Fresh faces are the new body politic in both of our existing power structures. We gained a seat at the table as young people, yet we kept the seat by governing for all.
Did you notice we also managed to break a national spell where the only people who over a million of us follow on Instagram are in entertainment? We now also have millions of Nigerians on social media following inventors, engineers, economists, journalists, investors, lawyers, data scientists, and by doing so, they have created a culture of launching absolutely everyone who can launch us. We acknowledge the entertainer-to-public-office template as one example of what happens when online followership translates offline. Then we extended that template to cover more diverse national contributors.
Now we look back at the 2020 protest, it actually succeeded in making the police in Nigeria more responsible, and it improved their working conditions too. Officers now think obsessively before they act with a heavy hand, including toward Nigerians with dreadlocks, tattoos, and flashy accouterments. As a corollary, it is incumbent on us all to also live out the underlying message we sent to the police – focus on the content of character – by making our social contribution as discernible as our dress sense.
Our journey to 2030 is largely explained by a message the Lord gave to Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” At the end of 2020, all Nigerians prayed for this new heart in the cross-over service. Not everyone got one because that would be perfection; but the critical mass has finished 2030 with this new heart. It knows the Nigerian next door is no more perfect than we are; yet we do ask that they deliver progress, especially when in power. With open hearts, we stopped thinking about which side is wrong and joined sides to achieve progress with making things right.
The Nigerian Nightmare
The year is 2030. We remain a country of perpetual potential. “Soro soke” turned out to be a fad. We have gone back to the default Fela dubbed “Shuffering and Shmiling”.
Let us reflect on a huge opportunity we missed. On August 23, 2020, policemen in Wisconsin shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. Days later, American basketball and baseball leagues were postponed. Naomi Osaka announced she would not play her upcoming semi-final match. Their message was clear: It is no longer acceptable to use Black people as entertainment but do little to demonstrate that their lives matter. The basketball players returned only after their bosses pledged to work with officials to turn arenas into voting locations for the next general election.
In Nigeria? We recorded too many dropouts on the journey from moment to movement to machine. The greatest numbers were only there for the moment. Many celebrities – home and abroad – finished 2020 with immense capital reserves in public perception and grandstanding. However, when the pandemic ended, too many went back to entertaining politicians at their birthday parties and children’s weddings, even when those politicians had done nothing to reform the police since 2020. The bank alert promised was too sweet. Those wedding venues did not become sites where celebrities turned out the electorate in any subsequent years. In a way, we cannot blame celebrities, civil society is still in the business of only producing reports. They are not recording data on senator’s records, which are publicly accessible; companies are not funding them either.
The journey from protest to the polls did not hold true for most. Too many inverted our power hierarchy, relegating the highest power we have in the office of the citizen. What rose to the top of the pyramid? We are now the world-famous “King of the protest”, crowned as global successors of the Arab Spring. Akin to our predecessors in the Arab world, ten years after ranking first in the world for protests, we also now rank at the bottom of progress scorecards that citizens hold dear. Protests, and her symbiotic twin, social media, have become the perfunctory land where we mark present as with the class register in school.
We marveled at the story widely told in 2020 where Stacy Abrams registered new voters in Georgia for two unglorified years, and eventually made the difference for delivering the state to Biden, but it did not inspire any local imitation.
Sometimes, we donate Lucozade to protestors on the ground, whenever they careen from one crisis to the next. We even sponsor ambulances on standby to take them to hospitals when they get injured. Too many times, the ending is worse than injury. In the legendary words of late Bola Ige: Nigeria is worth living for but not worth dying for. We continue to see people and peaceful protestors experience both ends of the spectrum Ige articulated. We remain tactical, strategy is dismissed as “grammar”.
Our leaders and progressives celebrated Biden’s 2020 win but rejected his pragmatic DNA, which gives the other side a face-saving path to compromise. Like Biden’s opponents in the 2019 Democratic primary, we are on a race to an extreme in ideals; the race generates popular fervour but produces no fruit for the people. The national climate has rejected advice most of us know to be true from our own unfortunate, personal experiences: Violence is never how we claim power but evidence of our realisation that we no longer have it.
For those who went on to vote in 2023 and 2027? Young Nigerians fragmented into dozens of youth parties, each of which individually claimed the magnificent promise of delivering a young president for Nigeria in both elections. Ultimately, each of these new youth parties could only claim shares in the enterprise of diluting the youth vote. Young Nigerians splintered across dozens of idealistic movements in 2023 and 2027. This stopped what could have been a decisive voting bloc, strategically crowning a king out of either of Nigeria’s two main options; and changing the crown as they wish each season, based on progress — effectively becoming the equivalent of America’s Industrial Mid-West. By not consolidating, we created an exceedingly consequential power vacuum. It is routinely filled by leaders Chimamanda described as radiating a contempt that suggests engaging with Nigerians is beneath them. They predicate this contempt on the premise that we played no part in their rise to power.
Disenchanted, we went from spending our personal money to register 900 million votes for Big Brother Nigeria in 2020 to doubling that spend – every single year thereafter. Now, we vote for Big Brother in the billions (USD).
Elections aside, when panels or inquiries were set-up to correct systemic, legal, or human rights issues, we do not know the names of any young lawyer (outside of entertainment law) or young operatives with experience in the Nigerian Senate who could turn the lively panel discourse into legislative bills with a realistic chance of passing both houses and becoming law. Instead, we perpetually invite Twitter giants — despite intelligence indicating the everyday Nigerian is not a citizen of Twitterati.
Some of us do not want leadership as it was in 2015 or 2020 — or at any recorded time for that matter. We adamantly reject imperfect options on the path to perfection. In 2023 and beyond, we did not pick between our two portions: Progress we can live with, or less progress. Our own Biden versus Trump moment. In overwhelming numbers, we still watch at home on election day, waiting for someone who does not underwhelm us — someone who will feel perfect.
Daniel Akinmade Emejulu is a Nigerian citizen who has written about Nigeria for The Financial Times, The Economist Group, Brookings Institution, Huffington Post, among others.
The long version of this article originally appeared in Business Insider Africa as a four-part series.
