To hold a microphone in a bleeding nation is to hold a moral responsibility.
Nigeria has never lacked for public intellectuals and opinion shapers. We have brilliant analysts on television, radio, newspapers and social media. They command large audiences. The question is no longer whether they are speaking, but whether their speaking is making the people who listen to them better.
The true work of the public intellectual is not to be popular. It is to be useful. The test is simple: if ten thousand people listen to you, do ten thousand people become more informed, more capable, more human than you met them? Do they earn more, think clearer, live better?
To hold a contrarian view is legitimate. Democracy requires it. But to hold a view that departs radically from the lived experience of the people without offering evidence, without showing your workings, without mapping a practical pathway to the future you claim to see that is intellectual abandonment.
“We have different opinions” is not analysis. It is laziness. Opinion without obligation is just noise.
In a serious republic, disagreement is not the end of the conversation; it is the beginning. Why we disagree is where nation-building begins. The intellectual owes the public an explanation of the divergence, a higher-order understanding, and a bridge to persuasion. That is the labour of leadership.
We must remember what politics is.
Politics is not Premier League banter. Banter ends after ninety minutes. No one loses their home because Arsenal lost. No one goes to an IDP camp because Manchester United lost.
But Nigerians are dying in large numbers because of political choices. They die in hospitals without drugs, on roads without security, in an economy without opportunity. Maladministration is not an abstract word in a newspaper column. It is lethal. It is counting bodies daily.
Criticism without construction is entertainment. And Nigeria does not need more entertainers.
If the intellectual class, blessed with education, platform and access, will not tell us how to stop the dying, who will?
Citizen Richard Odusanya is Curator of WITNESS 2026, a civic doctrine platform focused on Conscience, Competence, Character.
