The insults started coming in around the time I made it clear I was not joining the chorus. Not aggressive insults at first, just the soft kind, the ones people deliver with a smile because they think you are confused and need correction. You just don't understand what this man represents. You're on the wrong side of history. I read them all and felt nothing in particular, which told me something.
I have been on the unpopular side of a political opinion before. A few years ago, I was one of the very few people publicly backing a governorship candidate in my state at a time when the consensus on Nigerian Twitter was that he was the wrong choice, or not interesting enough, or simply not the person the moment required. I said what I believed. I took the ratio. I kept saying it. The man won, and he has governed in a way that has largely borne out what I saw in him then, which is not a thing I say to feel clever about myself, only to say that I have some experience with what it feels like to hold a position while the crowd goes the other way, and what it feels like when that position is eventually vindicated without fanfare.
So when people inbox me now calling me a saboteur, a hater, a tool of the establishment, a sellout, I am mostly unbothered, because I have been here before. I know what it feels like to be wrong under social pressure versus what it feels like to be right under it, and right now I feel the second thing with the kind of quiet certainty that does not need an audience to sustain itself.
The man whose name I will not write has something around him that I do not trust, and I want to be careful about how I say this because it is not about hating him or wishing him ill, it is about governance, which is a specific and demanding thing that has very little to do with how many young people chant your name at rallies or how clean your reputation appears on the surface or how many think pieces have been written about what you represent for a generation. Governance is about the boring, unglamorous mechanics of running a complex state, managing competing and often violent interests, knowing which battles to fight and which to leave alone, building systems that outlast you, delivering services to people who will not thank you for it, and doing all of this inside a country that has spent decades perfecting the art of breaking idealists. I have watched this man in every forum I can find. I have read what he has said and, more importantly, what he has not said. I have looked at what he built when he had power and what quietly fell apart when the cameras left. I have listened to the answers he gives to hard questions and noticed how often those answers are long without being substantive, confident without being specific, and warmly received without actually saying anything that would bind him to a course of action. My honest assessment, arrived at slowly and revised several times before I settled on it, is that the gap between this man's appeal and his actual governing capacity is wide enough to swallow every hope that has been loaded onto him.
That is not a comfortable thing to write. I am aware that some of the people who will read this and feel anger are people I know personally, people whose intelligence I respect, people who have made the decision I have not made and believe in it with something close to religious conviction. I do not think they are stupid. I think they want something real badly enough that they have decided this man is the vessel for it, and I understand the feeling because Nigeria has a way of exhausting you into needing a symbol, and he arrived at the right time with the right optics and the right biography and the right enemies, and that combination is intoxicating if you let it be. But a symbol is not a plan. An image is not a record. And the record, when you sit with it honestly rather than selectively, is not the record of a man who is ready to govern 200 million people through the specific and grinding difficulty of what Nigeria actually requires right now.
His followers will say I have been paid. They will say I am afraid of him and the no-nonsense future he will bring. They will say I represent exactly the kind of stale thinking that has kept Nigeria in this condition, which is a remarkable accusation to level at someone who is simply asking that a candidate be evaluated on the basis of demonstrated competence rather than Twitter momentum. I have noticed that the loudest voices in his corner are often the most allergic to that kind of scrutiny, and I have noticed that the movement around him has developed a theology of its own, where to question is to betray, where evidence that complicates the narrative is dismissed as propaganda, where the devotion itself has become the point rather than what the devotion was originally for. That is not a political movement anymore. That is something else, and it does not end well, and the people who will suffer most when it does not end well are not the ones currently in my DMs.
I believed once when it cost me. That belief turned out to be right. I do not believe now, and the not-believing also costs me, and I am at peace with that cost because the thing I am protecting is not a political position. It is the right to look at a man clearly and say what I see, without apology, without the need for the crowd to agree before I trust my own eyes. I owe him nothing. I owe his followers less. What I owe, to myself and to whatever small audience reads what I write, is honesty, even when honesty is the lonelier choice.
The insults will keep coming. I will keep reading them. I will feel nothing in particular.