ABUJA is used to protests, but usually, they have a certain look.
You have seen them. It is the kind of crowd born from empty pockets and the kind of broken promises that have become part of our national DNA. You see it in the worn-out rubber slippers and the tired feet of people who have trekked from the outskirts, moving under a sun that does not care if you have a title or not. There are no convoys for those people. No sirens. Just dust, sweat, and the raw noise of people who have nothing left to lose but their voices.
But what did we see at the INEC gates recently? That was something else entirely.
This one did not come on foot. It arrived in a hum of high-end engines, long, sleek lines of armoured glass and steel that cleared the road long before you could even see who was inside. When the doors opened, it wasn’t the “common man” stepping out. It was men in starched, heavy agbadas that looked like they had just come from a dry cleaner in Maitama. These are not people who just “witness” how Nigeria works, these are the men who designed the blueprints. They have spent years mastering the system, stretching it, and, more often than not, benefiting from every one of its contradictions.
This is the walk of the elephants.
And yet, there they were, protesting.
The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife. It is almost surreal to watch the very people who installed the locks on the doors now standing outside, banging on them and demanding to be let in. These guys are fluent in the language of the machinery. They know every trapdoor, every unwritten rule, and every “administrative” silence. They have played the game when it was murky and won when the rules were pliable.
Now, they are standing on the hot asphalt in the Maitama District, talking about “fairness” and “neutrality.” They are warning against “interference” in the ADC’s internal crisis as if they have not seen or directed that exact same play a hundred times before.
There is a stillness that follows that kind of irony. It makes you wonder, what does it mean for the rest of us when the people who used to move the levers of power are now reduced to shouting at the gate?
The immediate drama is about the ADC factions, court orders, and which group INEC decides to recognise. It’s the same old Nigerian script we’ve been watching since ’99. But this feels bigger than a party squabble.
There is a gnawing feeling in the gut of the public. If the ground is already shifting and the goalposts are being moved this far ahead of 2027, then what exactly are we supposed to trust?
We have seen this dance too many times. The closer an election cycle comes, the smaller the opposition space suddenly begins to feel. “Internal crises” appear almost on cue, and before long the fingerprints of institutional influence are everywhere. By the time we finally arrive at the polling units, the real contest has often already been settled in a boardroom or a judge’s chambers. The vote then becomes little more than ceremony, because the real work of exhaustion has already been done.
Elections do not run on paperwork, they run on belief. s that invisible deal we all make, the idea that even if the system is messy, the referee isn’t actively playing for the other side. Once you lose that, the soul of the thing just leaks out. It doesn’t die with a bang; it dies quietly, in moments like this where the rules start to look like suggestions.
There is also something a bit funny, if you have a dark sense of humour, about the language being used here. For years, ordinary Nigerians have been shouting about bias and “arrangements” that favor the powerful. Back then, those voices were mocked or just ignored.
But look at us now.
The same words from the margins are being spoken by the men at the center. The grammar is a bit better, and the delivery is more cinematic, but the complaint is the exact same one the man in the worn slippers has been making for decades.
Is this a real “awakening”? Do they finally realize that a lawless system eventually comes for everyone, even its creators? Or is this just what happens when the architects realize they built a house without enough exits?
Maybe it is both.
There is a confessional vibe to this protest, even if they do not mean it to be. It is an admission that the structure isn’t predictable anymore. And that’s the scary part. If the people who know the system best do not trust it, why should the guy at the bus stop in Berger? It confirms what we have always suspected, that outcomes are shaped in the shadows long before the first ballot box is even opened.
We shouldn’t just laugh this off as “elite theater,” though. Sometimes, history uses the strangest messengers. Maybe it is only when the shoes start to pinch the feet of the big men that we actually get a conversation about fixing the foundation. If this mess leads to even a tiny bit of real institutional independence, then maybe it is worth the drama.
But let’s not get distracted by the starched agbadas and the cameras. This isn’t just about the ADC or INEC. It’s about the creeping question of whether political competition in this country is still a real thing, or if it’s being quietly choked out by forces we cannot see.
That’vds the question that stays in the air long after the convoys have driven back to their mansions and the cameras have been packed away. It would not be settled by a press release or a court ruling. It will be settled by what happens next, by whether our institutions can actually act with enough clarity to make us believe again.
Until then, that image of the powerful men at the gates will stick. It is a role reversal that would have been impossible a few years ago. And that might be the most unsettling part of the whole thing.
When the elephants start walking in circles like this, it is not just the grass that gets trampled.
It is the illusion that anyone is actually in control.
Shaakaa can be reached through shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
