There is a peculiar comfort in blaming Nigeria. The politician is corrupt. The civil servant is inefficient. The police officer is extortionate. The regulator has failed. The lecturer is indifferent. The student is unserious. The driver is reckless. The voter is easily bought. The intellectual is detached. The leader has failed.
We say these things often enough that they have almost become the language through which we explain the country to ourselves. Once the culprit has been identified, there is very little left to do. We shake our heads, complain about the government, blame the system and go home. But what if the problem is not quite as simple as that?
The theme of this year’s edition of CAMPULSE, “Thinking Minds: Advancing Social Progress in a Society of Failing Leadership and Followership”, presents us with a question that is not particularly comfortable. If leadership has failed, what does that say about the society from which those leaders emerge? And if followership has failed, what exactly does that failure look like beyond the usual complaints about citizens who do not hold their leaders accountable?
Leadership and followership are often treated as two separate worlds: those who govern and those who are governed; those who make decisions and those who suffer their consequences. The distinction is useful, but it can also become too convenient.
There is no argument here that leaders and citizens carry the same responsibility. They clearly do not. A person entrusted with public office has a responsibility far greater than that of an ordinary citizen. Someone who controls public resources, makes policy or exercises state power cannot hide behind the misconduct of the people he governs. Yet leaders do not arrive from somewhere outside the society.
Before the minister became a minister, he was a citizen. Before the public official occupied an office, he lived in the same society as the people he now governs. The habits of cutting corners, seeking favours, bending rules when convenient and asking what can be gained from every situation do not necessarily begin with political office. Sometimes, public office simply gives those habits a bigger stage.
Chinua Achebe’s ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ remains one of the most important works for anyone trying to understand Nigeria’s leadership problem. Achebe placed leadership at the centre of Nigeria’s troubles and argued that the country suffered from leaders who had failed to rise to the responsibilities of leadership.
That argument remains difficult to dismiss, but there is another question worth asking alongside it: where do our leaders come from?
They come from us
The person who eventually sits in the government office was once a student who watched someone cheat and decided that honesty was for the naïve. The politician who eventually distributes patronage was once a young person who watched connections open doors that merit could not. The professional who later compromises his standards may have learnt that doing things properly was for those who could afford the inconvenience.
This is not to say that everyone behaves this way, nor that everyone who grows up in such an environment becomes corrupt. It is to recognise that societies teach people what is normal.
This is where the problem becomes more complicated than the familiar language of “bad leaders” and “bad followers”. A society is not merely a collection of individuals living under a government. It is also a network of expectations. We watch one another, we learn what is rewarded, what is tolerated and what is punished. We notice the behaviour that gets people ahead and we adjust ourselves accordingly.
Research on corruption and social norms in Nigeria has pointed to this problem. People can condemn corruption in principle and still participate in corrupt practices because of what they believe others are doing, what they expect others to expect of them, or the pressures created by their circumstances.
This helps explain one of the contradictions of Nigerian life: we can be deeply angry about corruption while participating in the small practices that allow corrupt systems to survive.
Consider the stop sign
At the traffic light in front of UI first gate, the lights turn red. One driver stops. Another looks around, sees no police officer and drives through. The next driver follows. Soon, the red light has become less of a command and more of a suggestion. The person who stops begins to look foolish.
And the problem is not only about the person behind the wheel. Someone on that road is driving without proper training at a driving school. Several driving schools treat training as a formality rather than an education and go ahead and complete the driving tests for their students. A licence may be obtained without the competence it is supposed to certify. An enforcement officer may see the paperwork violation not as an opportunity to enforce the law but as one to collect something.
Each person can explain his behaviour by pointing to somebody else. The driver says everyone else is doing it. The driving school says it has to compete. The official says there is little point in enforcing a rule that people will simply break again. The citizen says he would be foolish to obey a system that nobody else respects. And the cycle continues.
But there is a common idea beneath these actions: the belief that public systems are things to be negotiated when they stand in the way of what we want. This is how social problems become difficult to solve. There may be no single person who designed the system. Instead, thousands of ordinary decisions gradually produce an environment in which certain behaviours become expected.
We often speak of institutions as though they are buildings, offices and letterheads. They are not. Institutions are also patterns of behaviour. A traffic regulation exists on paper, but the institution of road safety is produced every day by drivers, pedestrians, driving schools, police officers, regulators and everyone else who interacts with the road in a place as simple as the crossing in front of the UI first gate.
It is easy to demand a better Nigeria. It is harder to ask what we do when nobody is watching. If we want institutions that work, we must consider why people constantly look for ways around them. If we want public officials who respect rules, then the culture that treats every rule as negotiable deserves scrutiny.
This is where the university becomes important.
The responsibility of the thinking mind
It is tempting to believe that intellectual life ends with understanding. We read about Nigeria’s problems, write essays about them, debate them in classrooms and lecture halls, and become very good at explaining why everything is wrong. But explanation is not the same thing as contribution.
A university should not merely produce people who can describe society’s problems in impressive language. It should produce people who can enter those problems and do something about them.
The engineer cannot be indifferent to whether infrastructure works. The lawyer cannot be satisfied with knowing the law while ordinary people cannot access justice. The economist cannot discuss inflation only as a figure on a chart without thinking about the household that has to decide what food it can still afford.
And the journalist has a particularly uncomfortable responsibility. Journalism cannot merely describe the fire. Sometimes, it has to ask how we built the house that now so easily burns. The Fourth Estate must continue to scrutinise power. But journalism also becomes weaker when every problem is reduced to the failure of whoever currently occupies an office.
There are questions beyond who is in power. Why do people behave this way? What incentives are at work? What behaviour has society quietly accepted? Why does someone privately condemn a practice and then participate in it when circumstances change? What makes doing the right thing difficult while making the wrong thing convenient?
These are also questions for journalism. And perhaps this is where the idea of followership deserves greater attention.
There is a peculiar habit in Nigeria of waiting for somebody else to begin. We wait for for the lecturer, for the leader, the government, for the institution, the next administration. Meanwhile, everybody is waiting.
Change begins with all
Achebe’s argument about leadership gives us an important starting point, but it should not become an excuse to imagine that citizens have no role in what happens after leaders are chosen. Achebe himself called on enlightened citizens to help find and support leaders with the will, ability and vision to move the country forward. The responsibility cannot therefore be transferred entirely upwards.
We cannot spend our lives demanding accountability from those above while treating accountability below as an inconvenience. We cannot complain that public institutions do not work and then constantly look for ways around the rules that make those institutions function.
This is not an argument for saying that everybody is equally responsible. They are not. It is an argument for asking whether the society we want can be built by people who practise the opposite of what they demand from their leaders.
Perhaps this is what it means to be a thinking mind. Not merely to possess intelligence, but to recognise one’s place within the systems one criticises. And not just identifying what is wrong, but understanding how the wrongness is reproduced. Not simply to demand better leaders, but to cultivate the habits that make better leadership possible. Not just following, but following intelligently. And not merely to lead, but to understand that leadership is ultimately an intensified form of citizenship.
The society we inhabit is, in part, an emergent consequence of millions of choices, some conscious, some habitual, some coerced, some opportunistic and some made simply because “that is how things are done”. Those choices accumulate. They become expectations. Expectations become norms. Norms become institutions. Institutions then shape the choices of the next generation. And the cycle continues.
That cycle can be broken, although not by speeches alone.
The driver can stop at the red light even when nobody else does. The pedestrian can stand by the red light even when it looks like no car is coming. The regulator can enforce a rule without turning enforcement into another opportunity for extortion. The student can refuse to cheat even when cheating seems to offer an advantage. The intellectual can leave the safety of commentary and enter the difficult terrain of public problem-solving. The journalist can question the government while also questioning the society that continues to produce the government.
None of these actions will magically fix Nigeria in an instant by themselves. But societies are not changed only through dramatic moments. They are also changed through ordinary decisions repeated often enough to become normal.
Perhaps, then, the question we should ask is not only, “Who will fix Nigeria?” There is another question. “What part of today’s Nigeria am I helping to reproduce?”
That question does not absolve leaders. It does not excuse institutions, it does not reduce the responsibility that comes with public power,it simply reminds us that responsibility does not stop at the government office. It does something more demanding, it returns responsibility to where it belongs: everywhere.
A thinking society is not one in which everybody has an opinion about what is wrong; Nigeria already has plenty of opinions. It is a society in which knowledge produces responsibility, where criticism is followed by participation, where leadership is understood as service rather than privilege, and followership is not confused with silence. It is citizens who are willing to examine the habits they have normalised instead of assuming that every problem must have been created by somebody else, and they recognise that the distance between the society they desire and the society they inhabit is bridged, every day, by what they choose to tolerate, practise and pass on.
The future of Nigeria will certainly require better leaders. But it will also require better followers, better citizens, better institutions and, perhaps above all, thinking minds willing to accept that they are not spectators to the Nigerian story. They are among its authors.
Editor’s note: This is an Editorial piece of the UCJ’s 2026 CAMPULSE. The Magazine is set to be launched on Saturday 19th September 2026, with this and several other insightful pieces. After the launch, the magazine will be available for purchase and enquires can be made to the UCJ Editor-in-Chief on +2349029542112
