Farooq Kperogi’s recent intervention is sharp, but it risks mistaking a symptom for the disease.
By John Onyeukwu |
Yes, there is a strand of Nigerian political behaviour that is deeply identitarian, where loyalty to personalities, regions, or symbolic figures trumps coherence of thought. That much is neither new nor controversial.
From the First Republic to the present, the gravitational pull of identity has often overwhelmed the discipline of ideology. But to conclude, from this, that “Tinubu’s policies aren’t the problem” is to flatten a far more complex political reality into a convenient provocation.
The truth is less tidy, and more troubling.
In Nigeria, citizens do not experience governance in the abstract. They experience it through inflation that erodes wages, through a currency that weakens purchasing power, through public services that fail in both design and delivery. When people complain about policies, they are often responding to lived consequences, not merely engaging in partisan theatre. To suggest that such discontent would simply evaporate if those same policies were implemented by a preferred political figure is to underestimate both the intelligence and the material anxieties of the Nigerian public.
However, Kperogi is not entirely wrong, he is just incomplete.
There is, undeniably, a crisis of political coherence within the opposition space. It is not merely fragmented; it is emotionally invested in personalities rather than programmatic alternatives. This creates a dangerous paradox: a citizenry that can diagnose pain but cannot agree on a prescription. In that vacuum, governance becomes less about contestation of ideas and more about competition of identities.
But this is precisely why policy still matters.
Take the ongoing restructuring of Nigeria’s economic framework, fuel subsidy removal, exchange rate liberalization, fiscal tightening. These are not trivial adjustments; they are foundational shifts with profound distributional consequences. The question is not whether such policies are inherently right or wrong. The question is whether they are sequenced, buffered, and institutionalized in a manner that protects the most vulnerable while sustaining long-term reform.
On that score, criticism of the current administration is not only legitimate; it is necessary.
Governance is not judged by the elegance of its economic theory but by the equity of its outcomes. A technically sound policy that produces widespread social dislocation without adequate mitigation is not politically neutral, it is a design failure. And in a constitutional democracy, design failures must be interrogated, regardless of who occupies the seat of power.
Where Kperogi’s argument gains traction is in exposing a deeper psychological truth: many Nigerians do not trust the political system enough to separate policy from personality.
This is not merely a flaw of the electorate; it is a reflection of a state that has historically personalized power. When institutions are weak, individuals become the system. And when individuals become the system, political allegiance inevitably becomes personal. But that is precisely the problem we should be confronting, not normalizing.
To say that critics would tolerate the same policies under a different leader may be true for some. But it does not follow that the policies themselves are beyond scrutiny. Nor does it justify a quietist acceptance of a second term on the grounds of psychological “liberation.” Democracy is not therapy. It is accountability.
The more dangerous implication of Kperogi’s conclusion is that it invites resignation, that since opposition politics is compromised by identity, citizens might as well make peace with the status quo. That is a seductive but corrosive logic. It lowers the bar of governance to the lowest common denominator of political dysfunction.
Nigeria does not suffer from an excess of criticism; it suffers from a deficit of structured, policy-driven opposition. The answer, therefore, is not to dismiss public discontent as identitarian noise, but to elevate it into coherent alternatives grounded in law, economics, and institutional reform.
If anything, the current moment demands the opposite of resignation. It demands a more disciplined politics, one that can hold power accountable without collapsing into personality cults, and one that can articulate credible pathways beyond protest.
In the end, the real question is not whether Nigerians can endure another four years. It is whether the state can justify them, legally, economically, and morally. That burden does not disappear because the opposition is fragmented, nor does it diminish because political loyalties are confused. Power must still answer to consequence.
And where policy imposes pain without protection or reform proceeds without legitimacy, criticism is not identity, it is citizenship.
Nigeria does not need emotional alignment with power. It needs disciplined accountability to it.
John Onyeukwu is a Lawyer and Governance & Social Impact Practitioner based in Abuja. Email: john@impactbridgeafrica.com
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