There is a particular species of Nigerian outrage that deserves closer examination. You have encountered it on your timeline, at the office, at family gatherings, or just passively in a keke or bus. It is loud, it is fluent, it is morally certain. It speaks of stolen futures and broken systems as well as leaders without conscience. It invokes the suffering of the masses with the passion of someone who has studied that suffering from a considerable distance.
And then the distance closes. It does not always arrive as an appointment letter. Sometimes it is a contract, a brother gets the job, or a call comes from someone who now has the governor's ear. The form barely matters.
Not always dramatically, but something shifts. The rhetoric softens. The posts become less frequent. The outrage, which once seemed constitutional, turns out to have been situational. The system that was criminal last year is, on reflection, doing its best under difficult circumstances.
I want to be careful here, because this observation is easily weaponised. Critics of government in Nigeria are accustomed to a particular countermove: you are only talking because you have nothing better to do. This piece is not that. Bad governance is real. Corruption is documented. The failures of successive administrations are not imagined by people who simply need jobs. All of that stands.
But standing alongside it, equally real and far less examined, is this: a significant portion of Nigeria's most vocal critics are not opposed to the system. They are opposed to their exclusion from it.
The distinction matters enormously.
A person opposed to a corrupt system wants the system changed. A person opposed to their exclusion wants the door opened. These are not the same desire, and they do not produce the same behaviour once circumstances shift. One remains uncomfortable when power is offered on the wrong terms. The other takes the call.
This is not cynicism. It is observation. Nigerian political history is populated by figures who defined themselves entirely in opposition, right up until the moment opposition became unnecessary. The language of accountability gave way, almost overnight, to the language of partnership. The people who once asked hard questions became the people who made hard questions difficult to ask. And they made this transition without apparent embarrassment, because the outrage was never really about principle. It was about proximity.
What is more troubling is that this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is, in many cases, the dominant mode of political engagement in this country. We have built an entire civic culture around performed dissatisfaction, where the moral authority of criticism depends entirely on whether the critic has yet been invited inside.
This is worth sitting with, not because it should silence anyone, but because it should make us more honest about what we are asking for when we say we want change. If the demand for good governance disappears the moment the demander is accommodated, then what was being demanded was never good governance. It was a better position within the same bad system.
The government of the day is not absolved by any of this. Incompetence does not become competence because some of its critics are hypocrites. A pothole is a pothole regardless of whether the person photographing it quietly collected a constituency allowance last month.
But Nigeria will not be fixed by critics alone, and certainly not by critics whose criticism is contingent on their current address relative to power. The country needs people willing to hold the same position from outside the gate as they would from inside the office. People for whom the argument does not change with the furniture.
Those people exist. They are, however, outnumbered. And until we learn to tell the difference, we will keep mistaking appetite for principle, and noise for conviction.