For decades, the Nigerian political narrative has been imprisoned by a single, convenient villain: the leader. From military despots to civilian presidents, from state governors to local government chairmen, the default diagnosis of our national malady has always been “bad leadership.” We chant it in op-eds, we scream it on radio talk shows, and we vote it out only to vote it back in. But after sixty years of independence and twenty-five years of unbroken democracy, a far more uncomfortable truth has emerged. Nigeria’s greatest political challenge is not the quality of its leaders, but the character of its followers. In short, we get the leaders we deserve.
We have built an elaborate intellectual scaffolding to excuse ourselves. Every mismanaged naira, every collapsed bridge, every kidnapped schoolchild is laid at the feet of a political class we describe as predatory. And yet, that same predatory class is re-elected, celebrated, and even deified. The uncomfortable question remains: “If the leaders are so terrible, why do they keep winning?” The answer is as bitter as it is simple. We, the followers, have failed democracy. We have created a reward system where incompetence and corruption are consistently incentivized, and then we feign shock when the harvest matches the seed.
The cult of followership is a neglected tragedy in political science. We obsess over transformational leadership while ignoring that leadership is merely a mirror reflecting the values, tolerances, and demands of those below. A nation gets the leadership it deserves, not the one it prays for. In Nigeria, we have cultivated a followership defined by three pathologies: political apathy, transactional loyalty, and the silent complicity in corruption. Until we confront these pathologies, no amount of “good leader” hunting will save us.
Consider the voter turnout. In the 2023 general election, despite the hype and the “Obi-dient” movement, only 29 percent of registered voters actually showed up at the polls. Seventy-one percent sat at home. This is not an aberration; it is a trend. When citizens disengage, they do not punish bad governance; they empower it. Low turnout is a gift to political machines. It means that a candidate does not need to win the majority of Nigerians; he only needs to mobilize a tiny, desperate, or easily bribed fraction. Political apathy is the soil in which authoritarian tendencies grow. When we refuse to vote, we sign a blank cheque for the worst among us to rule. Besides signing a blank cheque for the worst among us to rule, apathy gives the politician the room to rig. We get the leaders we deserve because we cannot be bothered to choose otherwise.
But apathy is only the first layer. Beneath it lies the rot of transactional followership, the willingness to sell a birthright for a mess of portage. The phenomenon of vote-buying is often framed as a failure of the electoral commission or the security forces. In truth, it is a profound moral failure of the follower. We have watched with our own eyes as grown men and women, in broad daylight, trade their voter cards for 2,000 naira (less than two dollars), a bag of rice, or a used mobile phone. This is not coercion; it is calculation. It is the cynical decision that the short-term benefit of a few thousand nairas outweighs the long-term cost of bad governance. When you sell your vote, you are not robbing the politician; you are robbing your children’s future. You are telling the leader that accountability has a price, and that price is laughably cheap. And so, we get leaders who treat governance as a marketplace because we have taught them that every conscience has a price tag.
Furthermore, the ethnic coloration of Nigerian followership has paralyzed national progress. We are ferociously loyal to the wrong things. We defend a corrupt governor not because he built roads, but because he is “our son.” We excuse a president’s incompetence not because of his policies, but because he shares our regional dialect. This is the tyranny of blind loyalty. It turns governance into a zero-sum ethnic competition rather than a collective enterprise. In a healthy democracy, a follower criticizes their leader when the leader fails. In Nigeria, criticism of a leader from your ethnic group is often framed as betrayal. This followership style creates fiefdoms where leaders are immune to consequences, knowing that their followers will tolerate any sin as long as the “other tribe” does not take power. And so, we get the leaders our ethnic loyalty deserves, men and women who know they can steal with impunity as long as they wave the right flag.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of Nigerian followership is our complicated relationship with corruption. We profess to hate it, yet we are intimate with it. The man who bribes a traffic warden to avoid a ticket, the woman who pays a “sorting” fee to get her child into a public university, the business owner who lies on a government contract, these are not leadership failures. These are followership failures. We have created a nation where the citizen is the politician’s accomplice. We demand accountability from Abuja, but we refuse to keep a receipt from the market. We want the president to stop looting, but we look away when the village chief embezzles community development funds. Corruption is not a vertical crime committed by elites against the masses; it is a horizontal ecosystem where the masses are active participants. We deserve leaders who steal because we have normalized stealing in our own daily lives.
The youth, often celebrated as the future, are the most disappointing followers of all. Yes, poverty and insecurity are real. Yes, the system is rigged. But disillusionment has become a comfortable excuse for abdication. Many young Nigerians have adopted a posture of cynical detachment, believing that “nothing will change.” This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By withdrawing from political parties, by refusing to serve as polling unit agents, by dismissing civic engagement as “waste of time,” the youth hand power back to the very godfathers they claim to despise. You cannot defeat a corrupt system by tweeting from your balcony. You defeat it by showing up, by running for local council, by becoming a delegate, by monitoring the budget of your ward. Until the youth accept that they deserve better and must act to claim it, they will continue to get the leaders they tolerate.
The antidote to weak followership is active citizenship. This is not a vague philosophical concept; it is a set of demanding behaviors. Active citizenship means registering to vote and ensuring your vote is counted, even when it rains. It means refusing a bribe, even when you are hungry. It means holding your tribal champion accountable when he fails, rather than defending him out of ethnic solidarity. It means joining a community development association, paying your taxes, and demanding to see the receipts. It means moving from being a passenger to being a driver. It means understanding that the leader is not your father or your savior; the leader is your employee, and you are the boss. And bosses do not beg, they demand.
We have to dismantle the myth that democracy is a spectator sport. Democracy is not the act of electing a messiah every four years and then returning to the couch. Democracy is the daily, grinding work of followership. It is the parent who questions the school principal about missing supplies. It is the mechanic who refuses to pay an illegal levy at a police checkpoint. It is the journalist who does not take a “brown envelope” to kill a story. It is the voter who goes to the tribunal to challenge a flawed election. It is every Nigerian who refuses to accept that “that is just how things are.”
Until Nigerians accept the mirror test, until we recognize that the face staring back at us in the glass is the real source of our dysfunction, no leader will save us. We can impeach the president, recall the governor, and jail the minister, but if the followership remains passive, transactional, and apathetic, a new set of identical predators will simply take their place. Leadership is a function of followership. Change the follower, and you change the leader. We will continue to get the leaders we deserve until we decide that we deserve better.
It is time to retire the lazy lament of “bad leadership.” It is time to embrace the harder, more heroic path of good followership. Nigeria is waiting not for a savior, but for a citizen. Because in the final analysis, we do not get the leaders we pray for. We get the leaders we tolerate, we enable, and we vote for. And that is the most unforgivable truth of all.
