By Udentu Oroso
In the mill of human actions, the intrinsic appeal of democracy as a system of governance lies in the sense in which it accords the citizenry a liberalised space for association, self-identity and how they are governed.
It represents that singular impulse which situates collective aspirations within the ambit of socio-political choice and the right to enforce it as a constituent of what society frames as a legitimate framework of shared interests and values.
Though the democratic experience is grounded in enlightened self-interest from the outset, the way other societies express this in affairs of state differs markedly from what obtains in the Nigerian context.
Here, the conflation of values and the contradictions between what is ideal and what obtains are glaring, precisely because those thrust by the winds of providence as custodians of collective trust are neither interested in upholding democratic tenets to any meaningful standard, nor willing to subject their own posturing to the light of civilised conduct.
Without suggesting that this breed lacks global awareness, for the evidence indicates otherwise, what emerges is a calculated instinct for self-preservation, monolithic in outlook and hegemonic in reach.
History has repeatedly offered us figures at the corridors of power, across different climes and spheres of human endeavour, whose unpretentious empathy, unifying words, and commanding presence transformed ordinary exchanges with those they lead into rare and emotive encounters, charged with hope and the quiet force of change.
These are not an exceptional breed set apart from humanity, but men and women who understand the primacy of the social enterprise: the necessity of embodying empathy, and of projecting a responsiveness that steadies the anxious and restores faith in leadership.
Our dawns, however, are the kinds that have ushered in the opposite. We are yet to see the same panache or elegance of speech, words and deeds in the same breath as evidenced elsewhere. What often spews from the mouths of those leading or aspiring to lead a great country such as ours has been nothing short of the ribald or uncouth, if not outright derisive of the people.
It is an indication of power’s intoxication; a spell that blinds those who wield even some influence on a national scale, irresistible and entirely self-serving. And it inflates the ego of those enthroned at the higher pedestals of leadership, imbuing them with the unquestioned authority of gods ensconced at revered thresholds.
The state of affairs in which we toil daily as Nigerians is emblematic of this irony, where anyone in the corridors of power can, with a wave of the hand, mock our circumstances so glibly, as if our humanity were beside the point. This is what scalds the rational mind.
And such scalding remarks in our body politic gave birth to the gospel according to “agbado” – hence the “agbadonomics” of the “kuli-kuli and akara” singsong in national space.
Let it be recorded, in the annals of this republic, that when the prophet of Renewed Hope ascended the campaign rostrum, he did not promise his suffering disciples roads, or hospitals, or a currency that could look the dollar in the eye without flinching. He rather promised them corn.
In the fullness of his wisdom, the candidate once mused that fifty million idle youths might be absorbed into the nation’s barracks, there to be sustained on cassava in the morning, yam by afternoon, and agbado whenever the harvest obliged.
It was an agrarian utopia conjured from a podium, delivered with the easy confidence of a man who has never once stood in a queue for fuel or watched a generator swallow his salary in diesel.
His ever industrious handlers rushed to baptise the gaffe as a necessary doctrine. An “agbado revolution,” they called it, as if roasted maize might yet do what decades of oil wealth could not.
And so the corn cob became a kind of national scripture, mocked in the streets, parodied on timelines, yet strangely prophetic. For three years on, as insurgents raid villages with the same impunity as before, as ransom notes arrive faster than salary alerts, as the naira sheds its worth with the indifference of a man shedding a borrowed agbada, the people have indeed been fed, not on bread, but on metaphor. The granary had always been rhetorical. The harvest had always been somebody else’s.
The symmetry has an almost seductive appeal via a government that deregulates the price of fuel while regulating nothing about the price of patience; a government that floats the currency while sinking the citizen; and a president who once offered his countrymen corn now governs a country where even the corn has become a luxury, priced beyond the reach of the bricklayer who used to roast it for lunch. Of course, the agbado revolution arrived, in the end, but it only revolved entirely around the cost of agbado itself.
The akara and kuli-kuli doctrine then arrived. If the husband dreamed in corn metaphors, the wife has chosen to dream in bean cake and kuli-kuli realities. Where the President once gestured toward the farm, the First Lady has gestured toward the frying pan, counselling a hungry nation that prosperity might yet be found at the bottom of a pot of boiling groundnut oil.
Akara, she informed her audience, does not require much capital. Neither does kuli-kuli. Neither, presumably, does dignity, judging by how casually it was offered up alongside the bean cakes.
There is, of course, nothing shameful in selling akara. Generations of Nigerian mothers have built houses and sent children through university on the proceeds of a frying pan set up before dawn.
The insult was never in the trade, but in the timing, and in the tone; the breezy suggestion that a citizenry under siege from kidnappers, battered by terrorist raids in its northern villages, flattened by an inflation rate that makes a loaf of bread feel like a luxury item, and watching its currency dissolve like sugar in hot water, might find its salvation neither in security, nor in governance, or in a functioning economy, but in a vat of bubbling oil.
One pictures the scene with great imagination: a nation’s First Lady, standing before cameras in the comfort of whatever fora, dispensing entrepreneurial wisdom to women whose husbands have been kidnapped on highways, the government has failed to secure, whose savings have been devoured by a currency in free-fall, whose markets have been hollowed out by the cost of the very cooking gas the akara requires.
To such women she offers not policy, but a recipe. Not security, but a side hustle. The grant, we are assured, was not a loan, as if the absence of debt repayment might somehow offset the presence of armed men on the expressway.
It is the peculiar genius of this administration that it has discovered, in akara and kuli-kuli, an inflation hedge more durable than any the Central Bank has yet devised, for while the naira may collapse and insecurity may metastasize, the nation’s capacity to be served snacks in place of solutions appears, alas, inexhaustible.
Most Nigerians consider this a shared recipe for insensitivity. Husband and wife, in their own dialects of detachment, have together composed a peculiar national menu: corn from the President, bean cake from the First Lady, and from the citizenry, an appetite for neither, only a hunger, the real, gnawing, unmetaphorical kind, for leadership that does not mistake a frying pan for a development plan.
Agbado and akara were never the problems that buffet the already brow-beaten citizens. The problem is a government that, faced with terror in its villages and free-fall in its currency, keeps offering crumbs from the kitchen when the nation is asking, quite reasonably, for the keys to the house.
One is compelled to ask, with all the gravity the moment demands: will this mass yearning for security on the highways, for a currency that holds its value past breakfast, for an economy that does not require its citizens to fry their way out of despair, be fulfilled in this dispensation?
There’s a telling arithmetic in where an administration invests its urgency: a government truly seized by the scale of this crisis would be rebuilding the dysfunctional architecture of security, currency, and production that has brought the nation to its knees, not polishing the optics of an election two years out.
Nowhere is this preoccupation with retention over repair more starkly illustrated than in the ruling party’s treatment of dissent itself. The hounding of opposition figures and parties through a judiciary too often weaponised rather than independent, coupled with the backroom arm-twisting that has become the APC government’s signature instrument of political management, stands as a prime example of overarching power, the kind that mistakes the silencing of rivals for the strengthening of the state.
A democracy is not sustained by the elimination of opposition but by its toleration, even its protection, for a ruling class that spends its energy engineering courtroom victories over political rivals rather than economic victories over hardship has already revealed where its true anxieties lie, and it is not with the citizen frying akara by candlelight to survive.
