By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma
1.
I woke up on the morning of Wednesday, February 18th, after my usual quiet time of spiritual grounding and reflection, and I did what most of us do these days – I reached for my phone to check the news, catch up on information, and scroll through the messages scattered across my various social media handles. This daily ritual of digital archaeology has become the modern equivalent of gathering at the village square, that virtual meeting place where the soul of a people is now laid bare for all to see. As I scrolled, I noticed that Igwe Lawrence Agubuzu was trending everywhere. His biography was circulating across platforms like wildfire, with people copying, pasting, tweaking, and reposting until the sheer volume of noise had almost completely blurred the essence of the original signal. I still wasn’t entirely sure what had actually happened to him or what he had done until I came across a video of him speaking at a high-profile event with President Tinubu and other important figures present. What had suddenly thrust him into the limelight was his vocal demand for the release of Nnamdi Kanu, delivered with the quiet, steady confidence of a titled Igbo man whose intimidating curriculum vitae – as chairman of the Enugu State Council of Traditional Rulers and as a retired diplomat with decades of experience – could genuinely choke a horse.
Well, well, well. My response to all of this wasn’t as upbeat as the news spreading everywhere, nor did it match the angle that almost every Igbo social media platform had been spinning it to be. The internet had erupted with celebration, an almost euphoric wave of posts and comments and shares, yet as I sat there with my morning coffee, my response remained stubbornly muted, refusing to join the chorus of praise. I found myself asking a cold, uncomfortable question that wouldn’t leave my mind: what was so unusual about what he actually did? What did he say that hasn’t already been voiced by every town union meeting, every diaspora group gathering in living rooms across the world, and every weeping mother in the villages and cities of the Southeast? What was this act of heroism that had everyone so excited, so quick to celebrate, so ready to elevate him to the status of a champion?
We have seen this pattern before, many times, in many different forms. Before Agubuzu captured our attention, Governor Alex Otti had flown to Sokoto a few months earlier. That trip made waves across social media, trended for days, divided opinions sharply among commentators, and then gradually evaporated into the dry Sahel air like morning mist, leaving no lasting change behind. Before him, many others had made similar moves or statements that briefly captured our collective imagination. I recall Chief Mbazulike Amaechi, that towering first Republic parliamentarian, a voice of reason and living history, making that passionate plea for the same thing – asking for Nnamdi Kanu’s release as an old man’s dying wish, as the final request of someone who had given his entire life to public service. Reports from multiple news outlets at the time record that Mbazulike, despite his advanced age and failing health, led or participated in appeals to the federal government and publicly stated that releasing Kanu was among his last wishes before he would meet his ancestors.
It was a moment of profound pathos, laden with the weight of a lifetime of service and sacrifice, and it trended for about a week before being buried with him when he went to meet his makers with that wish still unfulfilled, still hanging in the air like an unanswered question. His plea, which should have been a monument to his legacy, was something we as a people seemed to walk past, pausing only briefly to acknowledge its existence before continuing on our way as if nothing had happened. After his death, Ohanaeze Ndigbo and various other Igbo organizations explicitly invoked his plea and urged the president to honor that dying wish, but the institutions that should have translated such immense moral authority into concrete action remained completely unmoved, as if his words had never been spoken.
I have been lost in thought ever since I caught up with the Agubuzu news, wandering through a deep, dark forest of questions and reflections that seem to have no easy exit. What is it about this endless cycle of viral excitement followed by systemic silence that characterizes so much of our public life? Why do certain gestures – an elder’s dying plea, a governor’s visit to a distant city, a monarch’s public rebuke of power – ignite such feverish debate among Ndi Igbo, consuming our attention for days and weeks? Why do we amplify some acts into acts of legendary heroism while letting others, equally important, fade quietly into the background without a second thought? I have written as I have written many times before on the need to release Nnamdi Kanu, making the case from different angles and in different contexts. I wrote before Otti made his visit to Sokoto. I wrote after he returned. I have made random and impromptu comments on this issue across various platforms. But the thing is, it still feels as if nothing is being said about nothing, as if all our words and all our passion are simply disappearing into a void that swallows everything and gives nothing back.
I came to a conclusion that has been forming in my mind for some time now, a conclusion that feels uncomfortable but necessary to speak aloud. There is a desperate need among Ndigbo for a hero, a deep and urgent hunger for someone to look up to, someone to follow, someone to believe in. What we crave is a form of heroics that draws us in, speaks directly to our deepest needs and longings, and drives us to the point of symbolic unity, making us feel for a moment that we are one people with one purpose. There is a dearth of men, a scarcity of the kind of leadership that used to seem more common. That is what these trendings mean to me, these viral moments that capture our collective attention so completely. There is a loss of manliness and manly actions among us to the point that when the obvious is finally said by someone with a title or a position, we magnify it so much and with such frenzy that we end up looking so so naked, so exposed in our desperation. This nakedness is not of the body, which can be covered with clothing, but of the spirit, which cannot be hidden so easily. It is the exposure of a profound vulnerability, a collective anxiety that has been growing for decades, a feeling that we have been wandering in the wilderness for too long, leaderless and directionless, without a clear sense of where we are going or how we will get there.
By manliness, I do not speak of gender alone, of men as opposed to women, but of that Igbo quality of courage grounded in conviction, the willingness to stand up and speak out even when it costs something, the ability to move beyond mere rhetoric into the realm of transformative action that actually changes things. When Igwe Agubuzu speaks, it is not merely the content of his speech that resonates with people, but the form, the image of a titled Igbo man standing in a position of authority and uttering words that align with our deepest, most suppressed desires, the things we wish we could say ourselves but cannot. He becomes, for a fleeting moment, the embodiment of the Igbo man we wish we still had, the kind of leader we remember from stories of the past: the one who could walk into the lion’s den and speak truth to power, not with the desperation of a supplicant begging for favors, but with the quiet confidence of an equal who knows his worth and will not be diminished.
2.
We are, in essence, a people suffering from a crisis of scale, a problem of proportion that affects how we see ourselves and our place in the world. Our history is filled with titans, with figures whose achievements still inspire us decades after they have passed from the scene. We speak of the Ziks, the Akanus, the Okparas, the Mbazulike Amaechis, the Justice Oputas, the Dim Chukwuemeka Ojukwus. These were men who built universities with their vision and determination, who led entire regions through times of tremendous change, who shaped national discourse with their ideas and their oratory, and who commanded respect not just with their titles and positions but with their intellect, their ability to move crowds, and their audacity to attempt what others thought impossible. They were men who played on the national stage, and sometimes on the international stage as well, representing not just themselves but an entire people with dignity and force. They were architects of ideas, builders of movements, not just commentators on social media offering opinions from the sidelines. When they spoke, their words carried the weight of institutions behind them, of movements that could mobilize thousands, of a people’s collective will focused through their voice.
Today, our public square is crowded with voices, but our giants are few and far between. The stage has shrunk dramatically, from the national assembly and the regional parliament where our predecessors debated the fate of millions, down to the town hall and the Facebook timeline where we now conduct so much of our public conversation. Consequently, our heroes have shrunk with it, becoming smaller figures who would not have commanded the same attention in earlier times. We are now a people who celebrate a man for stating the obvious, for doing what should be the baseline expectation of any leader worthy of the name. It is as if we are starving people who have been given a single grain of rice and we celebrate it as if it were a feast, as if one grain could satisfy the hunger of millions. The frenzy surrounding Agubuzu’s speech makes us look naked because it reveals just how low our bar has fallen, how little it now takes to be considered heroic among us. When the mere utterance of the obvious by a man of status is treated as a messianic event, a moment of salvation, it confirms that we are living in a leadership vacuum so profound that we have forgotten what genuine leadership even looks like. We have become a people who cheer for the roar because we have forgotten how to hunt, who applaud the performance of courage because we no longer remember what real courage costs and requires.
To understand how we became this version of ourselves, how we arrived at this place of desperate searching and easy celebration, one must look at the long trajectory of the Igbo mind in the years after 1970. The Nigeria-Biafra war was not just a military defeat, though it was certainly that, a crushing loss that left tens of thousands dead and whole communities destroyed. It was also a psychic amputation, a wound to the collective soul that has never fully healed. It scattered us across the face of the earth, destroyed our economic base that had taken generations to build, and introduced a deep-seated insecurity into our collective psychology that continues to shape our behavior in ways we may not even recognize. The post-war slogan of “No Victor, No Vanquished” was a necessary balm for national healing, a way of moving forward without endless recrimination, but for the Igbo specifically, it was also a call to a very specific kind of survival: silent, industrious, and politically invisible. We were told, implicitly through government policies and explicitly through the warnings of those who wished us well, that the path to reintegration into Nigerian life was through commerce and individual achievement, not through politics and collective assertion. We were encouraged to be seen but not heard, to contribute economically but not to demand politically.
We emerged from that war with our physical infrastructure shattered but our spirit of onye aghala nwanne ya, the principle that no one should abandon their brother or sister, still remarkably intact. However, the subsequent decades of what might be called mercantile survivalism have subtly but profoundly rewired our collective psyche. We became traders, professionals, and technicians of survival, excelling in business and education and the professions, but we largely retreated from the grand theatre of political power where the fate of nations is actually decided. Our traditional republican and democratic instincts, which once produced the likes of Nnamdi Azikiwe and the other great nationalists, were suppressed in favor of a quieter, safer approach to existence.
The village square, where men once gathered under ancient trees to debate and decide the fate of the community through hours of discussion and consensus-building, lost its potency as a site of genuine political decision-making. Its echoes can still be heard in our town unions, which remain powerful social and developmental bodies in many communities, but they are now focused primarily on the internal, on building schools and maintaining roads and settling local disputes within the community. They rarely project power outward into the broader Nigerian polity, rarely engage with national issues in a way that could shift the balance of power. The energy that should be channeled into forging a cohesive political strategy that could advance Igbo interests at the national level is instead dissipated into a thousand micro-communities, each focused on its own narrow concerns.
We have moved, over the decades, from a society oriented toward communal achievement to one that celebrates individual excellence above all else. The Igbo man today is a global titan in many fields – he builds business empires in Lagos that employ thousands, constructs skyscrapers in Dubai that touch the clouds, and conducts groundbreaking research in laboratories in the United States that advance human knowledge. But back home, in the homeland that gave him birth and formed his identity, the collective we is fractured, unable to act with unity or purpose. Because we have found it so difficult to achieve political synergy, to coordinate our actions across the many divisions that separate us, we have outsourced our hope to heroic moments that briefly light up our screens. This is why we over-celebrate a speech, why we treat a single public statement as if it were a victory. It is simply easier to trend a hashtag about a courageous traditional ruler than it is to do the hard, gritty, often frustrating work of rebuilding the socio-political structures of the Southeast from the ground up. We have become a people who are loudly helpless, who make a great deal of noise about our grievances but cannot seem to translate that noise into effective action.
Consider our current traits and how they interact with each other: we are industrious, renowned across Nigeria and beyond for our business acumen and hard work, yet our homeland is often a theatre of insecurity where farmers cannot farm and traders cannot trade in safety. We are educated, with one of the highest literacy rates in the country and a diaspora filled with professors and professionals, yet our political strategy is often reactive rather than proactive, responding to crises after they happen rather than shaping events to prevent them. We are religious, filling churches and mosques on Sundays and Fridays with fervent worship, yet we lack the secular faith required to trust one another in a common cause, to believe that collective action can actually achieve what individual effort cannot. Our obsession with these heroic outbursts, these viral moments of apparent courage, is a symptom of our collective trauma, a sign that we are still struggling with wounds that have never properly healed. We feel trapped in a political cul-de-sac where Nnamdi Kanu’s prolonged detention has become a metaphor for our own perceived marginalization, our own sense that we do not fully belong in the Nigerian project. Because we feel we cannot move the mountain ourselves, cannot shift the weight that presses down upon us, we wait for a David to emerge with a sling, a single figure who will do what the community cannot do for itself. But when David turns out to be just another elder statesman making a polite request that is easily ignored, the disappointment – hidden under the guise of trending posts and enthusiastic sharing – only deepens the forest we are lost in, making it harder to find our way out.
3.
This brings me to consider the lost architecture of Igbo unity, the institutional scaffolding that once gave shape and direction to our collective voice but now exists only in fragments and fading memory, like the ruins of an ancient city that tourists visit but no longer inhabit. We tried organizing around groups, associations, and umbrella bodies, formal and informal networks that once provided Ndi Igbo with a coherent public presence in the national arena, a way of speaking with one voice that could not be easily ignored. In the colonial and early post-colonial era, the Igbo State Union, often simply called the Igbo Union, and its affiliated city and town unions provided that architecture with remarkable effectiveness, achieving things that seem almost miraculous in retrospect. These were not mere social clubs where the elite gathered to drink tea and discuss philosophy, nor were they simply talking shops where people exchanged opinions without action. They were dense civic infrastructures that coordinated education drives across vast regions of Igboland, pooling resources from farmers and traders who had very little to give in order to build secondary schools in areas that had previously had none. They created scholarship programs that sent bright children from humble homes to universities in Nigeria and abroad, transforming the life chances of generations. They established a shared platform for political and economic advocacy that could make even colonial administrators pause and listen, that could command attention in Lagos and London.
The historical record, preserved in archives and memoirs and the memories of the oldest among us, shows how the Igbo State Union and its precursors emerged in the 1930s and 1940s precisely to unify Igbo interests across the artificial administrative boundaries that colonial rule had created for its own convenience. Before these unions began their work of connection and coordination, an Igbo man from Onitsha might have had little formal connection to one from Umuahia, separated by colonial boundaries that treated them as belonging to different administrative units with different policies and priorities. But the union movement changed all that by fostering a consciousness of shared destiny, a recognition that despite the artificial divisions imposed by colonial maps, they were one people with one language and one culture and one future. They promoted education with an almost religious fervor, understanding with deep clarity that in a colonial system designed to marginalize and exploit native peoples, the pen and the book were weapons of liberation more powerful than any gun. They encouraged commerce by connecting traders across regions and creating networks of trust that facilitated credit and market access, allowing Igbo traders to dominate markets across Nigeria and beyond. They published newsletters and organized cultural festivals, sent delegations to Lagos to press for better roads and more schools and fairer treatment, and created a sense of common purpose that transcended local loyalties. By the time the First Republic approached in the early 1960s, these unions had created a reservoir of educated, politically aware citizens and a cadre of leaders who understood deeply how to organize people across distances for common purposes, how to build consensus among diverse groups, and how to translate collective will into effective action.
But over time, those structures were weakened by forces both external and internal, pressures that came from outside the community and from within. The political bans of the 1960s, first imposed by the colonial administration nervous about nationalist mobilization and then continued by post-independence governments equally nervous about ethnic organizing, disrupted their operations and forced them underground. The rise of regional political parties in the late 1950s and early 1960s created competing centers of power and loyalty; where the unions had once been the primary vehicles for Igbo political expression, they now had to contend with parties that claimed broader national mandates but often served narrower interests, dividing the community along party lines. Then came the traumatic events of 1966, the pogroms against Igbo living in the North that shattered confidence in the Nigerian project and sent hundreds of thousands fleeing back to the Southeast with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the memories of horror in their minds. In that chaos, the institutional continuity of the unions was broken irreparably – offices looted and burned, records destroyed, leaders killed or displaced, members scattered across the countryside. The civil war that followed completed the demolition, scattering the people even further and making any form of organized collective activity deeply suspect in the eyes of a federal government determined to prevent any future challenge to its authority. After the war, the unions could not simply resume where they had left off; too much had been destroyed, too many had been killed, too much trust had been broken.
After the war, as we emerged from what can only be called the forest of death and defeat, picking our way through the ruins of our former lives, Igbo leaders consciously sought a new umbrella under which to rebuild and protect the people. The trauma was still fresh and raw in every mind – the starvation that had killed children and adults alike, the bombs that had fallen from the sky, the loss of loved ones buried in unmarked graves, the confiscation of currency that wiped out savings and left families destitute overnight. There was an urgent, pressing need for an institution that could coordinate the work of reconstruction, advocate for the successful reintegration of Igbo into national life, and preserve a sense of cultural identity in a country where suspicion of Igbo ambitions remained dangerously high.
That effort culminated in the formation of Ohanaeze Ndigbo in the 1970s, conceived as a successor to the earlier unions and as a post-war vehicle for cultural revival, economic reconstruction, and political representation. The founding leadership included figures of immense stature who commanded respect across all divisions: Dr. Akanu Ibiam, the medical missionary and former governor of Eastern Region, a man of such unimpeachable integrity that even his enemies respected him and could find no fault in his character; Professor Ben Nwabueze, the constitutional lawyer whose intellectual firepower commanded attention in any forum, whose arguments could shape national debate; and others of similar caliber who intended Ohanaeze to be the institutional home for pan-Igbo coordination in a fundamentally changed Nigeria.
4.
Yet the organization’s trajectory since then has been uneven at best, marked by occasional flashes of relevance and long stretches of marginality where its voice seemed barely audible in national debates. It has served as a forum for advocacy and identity, issuing statements on national issues, hosting meetings of elders and leaders, and occasionally sending delegations to Abuja to press Igbo concerns with whoever would listen. But it has struggled mightily to translate its moral authority, which remains considerable, into consistent policy wins or to rebuild the dense civic infrastructure that once delivered schools, scholarships, and coordinated development across the length and breadth of Igboland. The reasons for this struggle are complex and multiple, not reducible to any single cause. The political environment of military rule that prevailed for much of Ohanaeze’s existence was fundamentally hostile to independent ethnic organizations; generals preferred to deal with individuals they could co-opt or intimidate, not with institutions that claimed to represent millions of people and might develop independent power.
The fragmentation of authority among traditional rulers, elected politicians, and self-appointed spokespersons diluted the organization’s claim to speak with one voice, creating confusion about who actually represented whom. Internal leadership disputes, sometimes fueled by personal ambitions or regional rivalries within Igboland, consumed energy that might have gone into programmatic work and institution-building. And perhaps most fundamentally, the post-war strategy of survival through individual achievement rather than collective assertion had so deeply penetrated the Igbo psyche that even well-intentioned leaders found it difficult to mobilize the community for sustained collective action. The habits of organization had been broken, and new habits had not yet formed to take their place.
The invocation of Mbazulike Amaechi’s last wish – that Nnamdi Kanu be released – brings this institutional gap into sharp and painful relief, illuminating just how far we have fallen from the organized capacity of earlier generations. Multiple contemporary news reports record that the late chief publicly pleaded for Kanu’s release in the months before his death, using whatever strength remained in his aged body to make the journey to Abuja and press the case with officials who might have listened to a man of his stature. After his passing in November 2022, Ohanaeze and other Igbo bodies explicitly invoked his dying wish and urged the federal government to honor it as a moral request from a revered elder statesman who had given his life to the nation. The extensive media coverage and the subsequent calls to actualize that wish show how elder authority is still used to press political demands when formal channels appear stalled or completely unresponsive. Framed as a dying wish, the appeal carried enormous symbolic weight precisely because Mbazulike’s long life had bridged the era of anti-colonial activism, the First Republic ministerial office, and decades of elder statesmanship lived with dignity and consistency through all the changes and chances of Nigerian history. He was not just any old man making a final request; he was a living archive of the struggle for Nigeria’s independence, a witness to the promises made and betrayed that had shaped the country, and his final plea therefore resonated across generations and across the internal divisions that so often fragment Igbo responses to national issues.
But the memory of the Igbo Union era – when coordinated civic action built schools that still stand today and educate thousands of children, when pooled resources sponsored students who became doctors and engineers and professors who contributed to national development, when organized efforts engineered local development that transformed villages into thriving towns – now reads like ancient history to many, especially to the young who have grown up in a Nigeria where such collective efficacy seems unimaginable, a relic of a vanished golden age. The pre-independence and early post-independence networks had certain advantages that are easy to overlook but impossible to recreate in the present circumstances. They operated in an environment of concentrated leadership, where a relatively small number of educated elites could command the attention and trust of the masses because there were few competing voices and sources of authority. They had clearer institutional aims, focused on concrete projects like building schools and securing scholarships rather than the diffuse and often contradictory demands of modern identity politics that pull in many directions at once. And they functioned in a political environment where ethnic unions could operate as mass organizations without the constant suspicion and surveillance that later became normal under military rule. The colonial state, for all its oppressiveness and exploitation, was actually less threatened by native associations focused on education and development than by political parties demanding independence and self-rule, and this gave the unions valuable space to grow and institutionalize their operations.
Those conditions no longer obtain in our world, and pretending they do is a form of nostalgia that prevents clear-eyed diagnosis of our actual situation. The fragmentation of authority I have already described – the multiplication of voices claiming to speak for the people, the competition between traditional rulers and elected officials for the right to represent community interests, the rise of social media influencers who can command attention without any institutional backing whatsoever – means that no single organization can easily claim the mantle of representing Ndigbo in the way the Igbo Union once did. The rise of partisan competition, with different Igbo politicians aligned with different national parties and factions that have competing interests, means that any collective position is immediately vulnerable to being undercut by those whose immediate political interests lie elsewhere. And the repeated interruptions of civic life by long periods of military rule – the decades when independent organizing was dangerous, when meetings could be broken up by soldiers at any moment, when leaders could be detained without trial for months or years – removed the scaffolding that allowed collective projects to scale and sustain themselves across generations. The result is a civic landscape where associations exist on paper, where meetings are held and communiques are issued and photographs are taken, but where the capacity to deliver region-wide projects or to sustain long-term campaigns for justice is severely limited compared with what the Igbo Union achieved in the 1940s and 1950s with far fewer resources and a much smaller educated class.
That institutional debacle, that long and painful erosion of organized capacity over decades of war and military rule and political marginalization, explains why symbolic acts keep filling the vacuum in our public life. When formal mechanisms for redress, representation, or development are perceived as slow, captured by special interests, corrupt beyond repair, or simply ineffective at producing results, communities naturally revert to what remains available to them: moral theatre, symbolic gestures, performances of courage that briefly satisfy the emotional need for action even when they produce no lasting change. Elder pleas become freighted with hopes that properly belong to institutions, carrying a weight they were never designed to bear. Monarchs’ public entreaties are scrutinized obsessively for signs of courage that should be routine, that should not require comment because they are simply what leaders are supposed to do.
Governors’ dramatic visits to distant political capitals are celebrated as diplomatic breakthroughs when they are merely the performance of basic representation, the minimum we should expect from those we elect to office. Viral social media moments are treated as victories when they are, at best, the beginning of conversations that need sustained follow-through over months and years to produce any actual change. These acts are powerful because they are simple to understand and emotionally resonant in ways that complex institutional processes are not – a dying wish touches the heart in ways that a legal brief cannot, a traditional ruler speaking truth to power makes for satisfying video in ways that patient coalition-building does not. But they are also fragile and ultimately insufficient: they can mobilize attention for a news cycle or a week without producing durable policy change, and when the attention inevitably fades, as it always does, the underlying grievances remain untouched and the community feels once again exposed and naked, wondering why nothing ever changes despite all the noise.
Analysts and commentators who study these dynamics have repeatedly observed this pattern in our public life – Ohanaeze and other bodies amplify elder appeals precisely because those appeals can momentarily focus national attention, even if the follow-through is uncertain and the outcomes unpredictable. When Mbazulike’s dying wish was invoked after his death, it was a strategic attempt to convert moral authority into political pressure, to shame or persuade the government into action by wrapping a political demand in the sacred mantle of an elder’s last words, a request that carried the weight of a lifetime of service. But the limits of this strategy are painfully evident in the outcome that we can all observe: the wish remains unfulfilled, the detained leader remains in detention, and the community cycles on to the next viral moment, the next trending speech, the next symbolic act that promises deliverance but cannot guarantee it. This is not to blame Ohanaeze or any other body for trying; in an environment where institutional levers are weak and unreliable, moral theatre is one of the few tools available to those who seek change. But it is to recognize that the repeated recourse to such theatre is itself a symptom of the institutional weakness that prevents the community from achieving its goals through more reliable and sustainable means. We use moral theatre because we have nothing else, but using it repeatedly without results only deepens the underlying problem.
Psychologically, the pattern exposes a deep hunger and an abiding emptiness that coexist in the Igbo public consciousness, often in the same minds and hearts. The appetite for heroes – figures who can embody dignity, memory, and moral clarity in their own persons – grows precisely when institutions fail to translate communal pain into concrete outcomes that improve people’s lives. We look for a man who can stand and speak because we no longer have organizations that can negotiate and deliver on our behalf. We project onto individuals the hopes that properly belong to collective processes, to movements and institutions that outlast any single leader. We treat a single speech as a breakthrough because we have lost the capacity for sustained campaigns that move step by step toward defined objectives over years and decades. As one commentator put it, reflecting on the trajectory of pan-Igbo organizations over the decades, the post-war hopes invested in these bodies have not fully materialized, and that persistent sense of unfulfilled promise fuels both nostalgia for the Igbo Union’s tangible achievements and impatience with contemporary leadership that seems unable to replicate them. The repeated recourse to last wishes and viral gestures is therefore both a symptom and a strategy: a symptom of institutional weakness that leaves the community without effective tools for advancing its interests, and a strategy to force attention where formal levers seem unresponsive, a way of making noise in the desperate hope that someone, somewhere, will finally listen.
5.
If the hunger persists, and it does, gnawing at the edges of every conversation about Igbo prospects in Nigeria, then the remedy must be both structural and cultural, addressing the deep causes rather than just the surface symptoms. Honoring the memory of the Igbo Union and the moral authority of elders like Mbazulike means more than simply repeating their pleas or circulating their videos on social media; it means building the durable mechanisms that make such pleas effective in the real world. Rebuilding a credible pan-Igbo capacity requires reviving institutions that can convert moral capital into legal and political leverage that actually moves the levers of power. This means legal teams that are ready not just to file briefs that will gather dust in court registries but to pursue cases through every available court, to coordinate strategies across multiple jurisdictions, to develop jurisprudence that protects Igbo interests within the Nigerian constitutional framework.
It means civic organizations capable of sustained advocacy – not just issuing press releases when a crisis erupts and then falling silent until the next crisis, but maintaining permanent offices in Abuja and state capitals, tracking legislation as it moves through the National Assembly, building relationships with sympathetic actors across the country, and mobilizing citizens to engage with political processes at all levels consistently. It means development funds that finance schools and clinics and roads and markets, not as charitable handouts that create dependency but as strategic investments in the human and physical capital that will determine the region’s future prosperity and power. It means leadership pipelines that pair elder mentorship with technical competence, that identify young people with potential and train them not just in rhetoric and speechmaking but in governance, negotiation, and the patient art of building consensus across differences.
These are not romantic projects that can be accomplished by proclamation or funded by wishful thinking and good intentions. They require the kind of sustained, unglamorous, often frustrating work that the Igbo Union generation understood intimately because they lived it every day. They require pooling resources from those who have benefited from the system and are now in positions to give back, to invest in the future as earlier generations invested in them. They require trusting each other enough to commit to long-term goals even when immediate returns are invisible, even when it seems that nothing is happening despite all the effort. They require accepting that the work may not bear fruit in our lifetimes, that we may not see the results of our labor, but that it must be done nonetheless for the sake of those who come after us, for the generations yet unborn who will inherit what we build or fail to build. This is the opposite of the viral moment, the trending speech, the heroic individual performance that dominates attention for a day and then fades. It is slow, collective, and anonymous, the kind of work that produces no headlines and attracts no crowds, that happens in meeting rooms and on conference calls and in the careful drafting of documents. But it is the only thing that has ever built lasting institutions anywhere in the world, from ancient times to the present day, and it is the only thing that can move Ndigbo from searching for heroes to producing them at scale, from episodic spectacle to steady civic capacity that can be relied upon in good times and bad.
This brings me to consider another dimension of our collective predicament, one that recent memory supplies with painful clarity and fresh disappointment. In the not too distant past, a public figure of considerable stature, Bianca Ojukwu, announced that she had reached an understanding with the Tinubu administration that Nnamdi Kanu would be released soon. The promise – framed as a near-term certainty, delivered with the authority of someone who is not only a diplomat and a lawyer but also the widow of the man many Igbo consider their greatest modern hero, Dim Chukwuemeka Ojukwu – landed like a bright flare across social media feeds and comment threads, illuminating everything with sudden hope.
For many, it read as a political olive branch finally extended, a sign that the logjam might finally break after years of frustration. For others, it felt like a bargaining chip in a larger game, a move whose rules were not visible to ordinary people watching from the sidelines. What matters for our present argument is less the factual follow-through, which has not materialized despite the passage of considerable time, than the pattern the episode exemplifies so clearly: a short-fuse approach in which high-profile assurances are offered to open doors, create soft landings, or secure political capital, and then the public is left waiting as the promised soon stretches into an indeterminate future, becoming first a week, then a month, then a year, and finally a bitter memory of hope deferred that sours in the mouth.
That short-fuse approach is not an isolated incident but a recurring feature of how some leaders engage with issues that are existentially important to millions of Ndi Igbo, issues that affect their daily lives and their sense of belonging in Nigeria. It is a symptom of a deeper moral deficiency that has crept into our public life over time, a corrosion of the fundamental understanding that leadership is a sacred trust rather than a personal opportunity for advancement. When leaders use communal pain as an instrument for personal positioning, they convert the suffering and hopes of their people into transactional currency to be spent for their own benefit.
The promise of a release, framed as a concession they have personally secured or a quid pro quo they are negotiating behind the scenes, becomes a tool to be deployed for immediate optics rather than a commitment to sustained advocacy that outlasts news cycles and survives political realignments. The promise is made not because the leader has done the hard work of building a legal strategy, assembling a coalition of supporters, and creating a realistic plan with timelines and benchmarks that can be tracked, but because saying something dramatic in the moment yields immediate returns in attention, gratitude, and political capital that can be spent elsewhere. The leader gains a surge of goodwill, a spike in social media mentions, a round of applause at events, an invitation to more meetings, and the community is left holding an empty promise that gradually deflates as the days pass without action, leaving only the memory of hope.
The moral cost of such transactions is twofold and devastating in its cumulative effect on the community. First, it cheapens the suffering and hopes of those who have invested emotionally in the outcome, who have allowed themselves to believe that change might finally come. Think of the mothers who have not seen their sons in years, who wonder if they will ever hold them again. Think of the wives raising children alone, trying to explain to young ones why their father is not there. Think of the young people who have come to see Kanu’s prolonged detention as a symbol of everything that is wrong with their place in Nigeria, of the marginalization and exclusion that they feel in their bones. For them, a promise of release is not a political maneuver to be analyzed and debated; it is a lifeline thrown to someone drowning, a possibility that the long nightmare might finally end and life might return to something approaching normal. When that promise is made casually, without the infrastructure to deliver it, and then allowed to dissolve into the air like morning mist, the disappointment is not merely intellectual or political but visceral and physical, a wound inflicted on top of existing wounds.
The emotional whiplash from hope to despair is itself a form of violence, and it accumulates over time, making people cynical not just about particular leaders but about the very possibility of change, about whether anything will ever be different. The second moral cost is that it corrodes trust in the very leaders who claim to speak for the people, who present themselves as champions of the cause. Trust is the currency of collective action, the essential substrate without which people cannot pool resources, coordinate efforts, or sustain the long campaigns that actually produce results in the real world. Each broken promise, each soon that never comes, each assurance that evaporates into nothing, erodes that trust a little more, making the next effort harder and the next leader’s task more difficult. And when trust is gone completely, what remains is a public that is simultaneously desperate for heroes and deeply skeptical of anyone who steps forward to fill that role, a paradox that leaves the community paralyzed and unable to act even when genuine opportunities arise.
That emptiness is not merely private sorrow, though it is certainly that – countless individuals nursing private griefs over hopes raised and then dashed, over promises made and then broken, over leaders who came and went without changing anything. It is also a public deficit that fuels the hunger for heroes in ways that are ultimately self-defeating, creating a cycle that is hard to break. When institutions and durable organizations fail to deliver results, people naturally look for persons who can embody the promise of redress, who can stand in the gap and do what the organizations cannot. And when those persons then fail them, as they often do when the weight of expectation exceeds their capacity, the hunger only deepens, becoming more desperate and less discriminating with each disappointment.
Viral applause and trending messages are the social media equivalent of a standing ovation in an empty theater: loud, immediate, and ultimately unsatisfying if there is no encore, no second act, no resolution to the drama that has been set in motion and then abandoned. The applause becomes a substitute for structural change because it momentarily fills the void, giving people the illusion of progress while the underlying mechanisms of power remain unchanged and completely unresponsive to popular will. We clap because we want to believe, because believing is better than despair, and for a moment the clapping itself feels like movement, like we are doing something, like we are part of a wave that cannot be stopped. But when the clapping stops and nothing has actually changed in the world, the silence that follows is louder than the applause that preceded it, and the disappointment is sharper for having been preceded by hope.
The short-fuse tactic also distorts civic priorities in ways that are difficult to reverse once they become entrenched. It privileges moments that can be packaged and sold to the public – soundbites that fit in a tweet, photo-ops that generate shareable images, promises that make for good headlines – over the slow, unglamorous work of building legal cases, lobbying quietly over months and years, funding litigation that may take a decade to reach its conclusion, and sustaining coalitions through the inevitable disappointments and setbacks that accompany any serious political struggle in a complex society. A leader who secures a headline by saying soon may gain temporary favor, may be invited to more events where cameras are present, may see their social media following increase significantly, but the community loses out when that headline is not followed by a realistic plan, when the promised soon becomes a running joke among the cynical, when the issue that was supposed to be resolved remains exactly where it was before the promise was made. Over time, repeated reliance on such tactics trains the public to value spectacle over substance, and that training is corrosive in ways that extend far beyond any particular issue or leader. It conditions people to expect emotional highs rather than institutional outcomes, to measure progress by the intensity of their feelings rather than by measurable changes in the world around them. It creates a public that is easily excited and easily pacified, that can be mobilized for a protest or a trending hashtag but cannot sustain the kind of disciplined pressure that actually moves institutions and changes policies. And that kind of public is not a political community capable of self-determination and collective action but a crowd to be managed, an audience to be entertained, a resource to be exploited by those who understand how to manipulate its emotions for their own purposes.
Psychologically, the pattern reveals a collective coping mechanism that has developed over time in response to sustained frustration and marginalization that seem to have no end. Facing repeated disappointments that stretch over decades, communities develop rituals of hope – public pledges, elder entreaties, celebrity endorsements, viral campaigns – that function as emotional scaffolding, holding up the spirit even when the material conditions of life remain stubbornly unchanged. These rituals are not inherently bad or misguided; they can mobilize attention, create solidarity among otherwise divided people, and generate the kind of collective energy that occasionally breaks through into genuine movement and lasting change.
The danger arises when they are used as ends in themselves, when the ritual becomes a substitute for the reality it is supposed to foreshadow and eventually produce. The moral deficiency lies precisely in that substitution: using communal grief as a ladder for personal advancement or as a short-term bargaining chip in political games rather than as the starting point for a disciplined, accountable, and sustainable campaign that respects the pain it claims to address. When a leader makes a promise they cannot keep, or makes a promise they have no real intention of keeping, they are not just failing in their duty to those who trusted them; they are actively depleting the emotional resources of the community, using up hope that cannot be easily replenished, making it harder for the next leader with genuine intentions to gain a hearing.
The applause and viral messages that follow such promises are therefore double-edged, carrying both possibility and peril in their wake. On one hand, they signal solidarity and keep the issue alive in public consciousness, preventing it from being forgotten or buried under the endless flow of new information. On the other hand, they can lull communities into a dangerous passivity, creating the illusion that something is being done when in fact nothing is changing in the real world. Social media metrics – likes, shares, comments, trending tags – become a form of emotional currency that leaders can spend without ever being held to account, a way of demonstrating influence without demonstrating any actual results.
The danger is that attention becomes the metric of success rather than measurable progress in the world: a trending hashtag is celebrated as if it were a policy win, a viral video is treated as equivalent to a court judgment, and the real work of legal strategy, coalition building, and institutional reform is deferred indefinitely because the emotional needs of the moment have been met by the spectacle. This is not to say that social media advocacy has no value; it clearly does, and the ability to focus national attention on an issue is an important part of any political strategy in the modern world. But when that attention becomes an end in itself, when the goal shifts from changing the situation to generating content about the situation, then the medium has consumed the message and the community has been led into a dead end from which there is no easy exit.
What Ndi Igbo need in this context are what might be called artesian wells of civic capacity, not shallow applause that dries up as soon as the moment passes. An artesian well, in this metaphorical sense, is a durable source of civic capacity that flows continuously rather than in sporadic bursts, that can be drawn upon whenever needed without having to be reinvented each time a crisis emerges. Such a well consists of organizations with deep legal expertise that can litigate cases through every level of the judiciary, not just file suits that gather dust in court registries while years pass. It includes funding streams for sustained advocacy that are not dependent on the whims of donors or the fluctuating popularity of particular causes, that can support research, documentation, and public education over years and decades regardless of the news cycle. It requires leadership pipelines that combine moral authority with technical competence, that produce people who understand both the symbolism that moves hearts and the mechanics that move institutions. And it depends on media practices that keep attention focused on long-term campaigns rather than just on viral moments, that educate the public about the slow work of change rather than just feeding the endless appetite for instant gratification.
Building such wells requires patience of a kind that is scarce in our moment, resources that are always claimed by more immediate needs and pressing crises, and a willingness to trade immediate visibility for long-term effectiveness that runs counter to everything the attention economy rewards and encourages. It requires accepting that the work may not bear fruit in time for the next election, the next news cycle, or even the next generation, but that it must be done nonetheless because the alternative is an eternal recurrence of the same disappointments, the same soon that never comes, the same cycle of hope and despair that leaves the community exhausted and cynical. It requires a cultural shift that values the steady, often invisible labor of organizers, lawyers, policy advocates, and institutional builders as much as – indeed, more than – the dramatic gestures of public figures who dominate headlines for a day and then fade into irrelevance. This is not easy work, and it is not glamorous work, but it is the only work that has ever built lasting capacity anywhere in the world, from ancient democracies to modern social movements.
The remedy for the short-fuse approach is both practical and moral, and the two dimensions cannot be separated without losing the force of either. Practically, it means investing in institutions that can translate promises into enforceable outcomes – legal teams that are not just names on letterheads but functioning entities with track records and sustainable funding, civic groups capable of sustained lobbying that tracks legislation and engages with policymakers at every level of government, independent media that follow through on promises and hold leaders accountable by documenting what was said and what was actually done. It means creating mechanisms that allow the community to distinguish between genuine commitment and performative rhetoric, to reward the former and penalize the latter through informed public opinion. Morally, it means insisting that leaders treat communal pain as a sacred trust, not a bargaining chip to be spent for personal advantage. Promises must be accompanied by timelines that can be tracked and verified, accountability mechanisms that can be activated when things go wrong, and transparent plans that show how the promise will be fulfilled step by step. When a leader says soon, the community must be able to ask hard questions: soon by what measure? soon through what specific means? soon with what consequences if the promise fails to materialize? These are not unreasonable questions from a skeptical public; they are the basic demands of a people who have been disappointed too many times to accept mere words as currency.
Only by converting episodic heroics into institutional practice can Ndi Igbo move from the brittle exhilaration of viral moments to the steady, nourishing flow of real progress that improves people’s lives. The difference between shallow applause and an artesian well is the difference between a crowd that gathers for a spectacle and then disperses, and a community that builds together over generations. The difference between a promise that evaporates and a commitment that endures is the difference between treating people as an audience to be entertained and treating them as partners in a common project with shared stakes. The difference between the short-fuse approach and sustainable advocacy is the difference between a fire that flares brightly and then dies, leaving only cold ash behind, and a hearth that is tended carefully and provides steady warmth for everyone who gathers around it day after day. Which kind of future we build depends entirely on choices we are making now, in how we respond to the next viral promise, in what we demand from those who claim to lead us, in whether we are satisfied with applause or insist on results that can be seen and measured in the world.
6.
This brings me to a question that has nagged at me throughout these reflections, a question that cuts to the heart of why our public life takes the shape it does and why we seem trapped in patterns we cannot break: why do we elevate individual actions so readily, so quickly, with such intensity? Why does a single speech by a traditional ruler, a governor’s trip to a distant city, or an elder’s dying wish generate such intense and widespread celebration, while the patient work of building institutions, sustaining organizations, and pursuing long-term strategies attracts so little attention and even less applause? The question is not merely academic or theoretical; answering it honestly is essential if we are to understand the forces that shape our collective behavior and, perhaps, to find ways of redirecting those forces toward more productive ends that actually serve the community.
The short answer, rooted in what psychologists have learned about how human minds actually work, is that we are wired to seek anchors in moments of uncertainty and distress, and individuals – especially those who carry symbolic weight, who embody in their persons the history and hopes of a people – serve as the most efficient anchors available to us. When the world feels unstable, when institutions are weak or distant or unresponsive, when the future is opaque and the present painful, the mind reaches for something solid to hold onto, something that can make sense of chaos and provide a point of orientation in the confusion. A single face, a single voice, a single act compresses the overwhelming complexity of social and political life into a story we can hold in our minds, narrate to others, and pass down to our children as part of their inheritance. This is not mere sentimentality, though sentiment certainly plays a role in the process; it is a form of cognitive economy, a mental shortcut that allows us to navigate a world that would otherwise be too complicated to comprehend fully. A person is easier to remember than a process, easier to talk about than a bureaucracy, easier to rally around than an abstract set of principles and policies. When we elevate an individual, we are not just expressing admiration for their qualities; we are creating a mental map that helps us find our way through difficult terrain, a guide to action when we are unsure what to do.
Psychologists who study heroism systematically have identified a set of predictable functions that heroes perform in human societies, functions that explain why the impulse to create and celebrate heroes is so universal and so persistent across cultures and historical periods. Heroes instill hope in times of despair, showing us that change is possible and that courage can prevail even against overwhelming odds that seem insurmountable. They model moral behavior, providing concrete examples of what integrity, sacrifice, and dignity look like in practice, examples that can guide our own choices and actions when we face difficult decisions.
They offer a sense of protection, both real and symbolic, standing as bulwarks against the forces that threaten us and our communities. And they provide meaning in times of threat, framing our struggles within narratives that make suffering comprehensible and purposeful, that give us a reason to keep going when giving up seems easier. When we look at the figures who have been elevated in Igbo public life over the years – the elders who speak truth to power, the monarchs who stand before presidents and demand justice for their people, the self-made achievers who return home to build schools and hospitals – we can see these functions at work in real time. They are not just individuals going about their business; they are repositories of collective hope, moral exemplars for the young, symbolic protectors of the community, and sources of meaning in a world that often seems to make no sense at all.
Culture amplifies this cognitive tendency, shaping it into specific forms that reflect particular histories and deeply held values. In Igbo social imagination, moral authority has long been concentrated in certain archetypal figures who appear again and again in stories and proverbs: the elders who carry the memory of the community and whose words are weighed by the accumulated wisdom of generations; the self-made achievers who have demonstrated the capacity to succeed through their own efforts and who are therefore seen as capable of helping others succeed as well; the community custodians who hold titles and offices that bind them to the welfare of the people and make them accountable.
These archetypes are not accidental or arbitrary; they evolved over centuries in a social environment where personal reputation and communal reciprocity were the primary mechanisms for organizing collective life and maintaining social order. In the absence of strong centralized states or formal bureaucratic institutions that we take for granted today, Igbo societies developed sophisticated systems of checks and balances in which individual character and public accountability were intimately linked in complex ways. A man’s word was his bond because without that bond, trust would collapse and the community would fragment into warring factions. An elder’s counsel carried weight because it was backed by years of demonstrated wisdom and by the knowledge that the elder would have to live with the consequences of bad advice in the community. These cultural patterns persist in the present, shaping how we respond to public figures and what we expect from them, even when the context has changed dramatically.
When a respected elder speaks, their words carry not only their own personal authority but the weight of memory and precedent accumulated over a lifetime; they are read as condensed histories and moral verdicts, as statements that sum up the experience of generations and point toward the path that wisdom recommends for the future. When a traditional ruler stands before a president and demands justice for his people, the act resonates not just because of what is said but because of who is saying it – a figure who embodies the continuity of the community, who sits on a stool that has been occupied for centuries, who speaks with the voice of ancestors as well as his own. When a self-made achiever returns home to build a school or a hospital, the gesture is read as the fulfillment of a moral obligation, as evidence that success does not have to mean abandonment of one’s roots, as proof that the old values of reciprocity and responsibility can survive even in the harsh environment of modern global capitalism. This cultural grammar makes individual acts especially potent and meaningful: they are not only statements about particular issues but also rituals that reaffirm identity and continuity, that remind us of who we are and what we owe to each other across generations. They are performances of belonging, and that is why they move us so deeply.
But the cultural predisposition to elevate individuals would not have the power it does if it were not operating in a context of profound institutional scarcity and weakness. Where umbrella bodies once coordinated schools, scholarships, and development projects across vast regions of Igboland, where the Igbo State Union and its affiliated organizations once provided a durable architecture for collective action that could translate individual initiative into sustained communal benefit, the post-war and post-military eras left gaps that have not been fully closed despite decades of effort. The colonial and early post-colonial networks had the advantage of concentrated leadership, clearer institutional aims, and a political environment in which ethnic unions could operate as mass organizations without the constant suspicion that later became normal.
The bans that came later, first from colonial authorities nervous about nationalist mobilization and then from post-independence governments determined to suppress ethnic organizing that might challenge their power, disrupted their operations and scattered their leadership across the country and beyond. The trauma of war completed the demolition, destroying records, dispersing members, and making any form of organized collective activity deeply suspect in the eyes of a federal government determined to prevent any future challenge to its authority. In that institutional vacuum, individual gestures – an elder’s dying wish, a monarch’s public plea, a politician’s promise, a celebrity’s endorsement – become the most visible levers for change, the only tools that seem capable of moving the immovable structures of power that surround us. They are amplified because there is no standing machinery to translate communal grievance into policy or legal action; the person becomes the proxy for the missing institution, carrying on their shoulders the weight that should be distributed across organizations and processes that outlast individuals.
7.
Emotion plays a decisive role in this dynamic, and understanding that role fully is essential if we are to grasp why the elevation of individuals persists even when it so often leads to disappointment and cynicism. Heroes and heroic acts meet deep affective needs that are not being met by other means: they soothe anxiety by providing reassurance that someone is watching, someone cares, someone will act on our behalf in the face of overwhelming power. They restore dignity by showing that we are not forgotten, that our suffering is seen and acknowledged by those who have the power to do something about it. They offer narratives of moral clarity in a world that is often morally confusing, drawing clear lines between right and wrong, justice and injustice, courage and cowardice. Research in psychology shows that thinking about heroes can actually reduce psychological threat, buffering the mind against the stress of uncertainty and powerlessness that otherwise weighs heavily. Communities that feel marginalized and vulnerable therefore naturally gravitate toward figures who can supply those emotional goods, who can make them feel, even if only for a moment, that they are not alone in their struggles and that change is possible.
In practical terms, a viral clip of a monarch speaking truth to power functions as an emotional salve, a balm applied to a wound that has not healed and continues to cause pain. It momentarily repairs the communal injury and gives people something to rally around, a focal point for feelings that might otherwise remain diffuse and unexpressed, turning inward as depression or outward as random anger. The same is true of an elder’s last plea, a governor’s dramatic visit to a distant city, a celebrity’s public statement of support. These moments do not change the material conditions of people’s lives, but they change how people feel about those conditions, and that emotional shift has real psychological value that should not be dismissed. It sustains hope, maintains solidarity across divisions, and prevents despair from taking hold completely. That emotional utility explains why applause and trending tags proliferate even when the substantive follow-through is uncertain, even when the promised soon never arrives, even when the viral moment fades and leaves everything exactly as it was before. The applause is not just for the act itself but for the feeling the act produces, the temporary relief from the chronic pain of marginalization that is otherwise constant.
But this emotional utility comes with a significant cost, and that cost is compounded by the political incentives and short-termism that characterize our public life at every level. When the system rewards visibility – likes, shares, headlines, invitations to events, access to power – actors have a powerful incentive to produce moments rather than movements, to prioritize the spectacular over the substantial, to focus on what can be achieved in a news cycle rather than what might take years of patient work. A promise framed as soon or an understanding can be politically expedient in ways that a sober assessment of the challenges cannot: it opens doors, creates soft landings, buys time with constituents, and generates goodwill among constituencies that might otherwise be critical of the leader’s performance. The leader who makes such a promise gains immediate benefits in attention and gratitude, while the costs – the erosion of trust when the promise inevitably fails, the deepening of cynicism when the soon stretches into infinity, the damage to the community’s capacity for collective action – are deferred and diffused across the community, borne by everyone rather than the person who made the promise.
This pattern creates a vicious cycle that is difficult to break once it becomes established. Spectacle begets applause, and applause, when it is not accompanied by accountability mechanisms that track results, becomes a substitute for the real thing. Leaders learn that they can secure emotional buy-in without delivering material results, and the public, starved for any sign that someone is fighting for them, continues to applaud because the alternative is the unbearable recognition that no one is fighting for them, that they are truly alone in their struggles. The applause substitutes for accountability, and the absence of accountability increases the appetite for the next spectacle, the next promise, the next soon that will surely be different. This dynamic is not unique to any one community or culture; it is a structural feature of media-accelerated politics in an age of institutional decline, and it operates wherever the gap between what people need and what institutions deliver grows wide enough to create a market for emotional substitutes that provide temporary relief without lasting change.
There is also a social-psychological function in heroism that is often overlooked in discussions of this kind, and that is the function of modeling for the young. Heroes do more than comfort and inspire; they teach by example. When a respected figure takes a visible stand, they provide a template for behavior – what courage looks like in practice, what dignity requires in moments of pressure, what sacrifice means when the stakes are genuinely high. That modeling is valuable, especially for young people who are forming their own ideas about how to live and what to value in life. A child who sees an elder speak truth to power learns that truth-telling is possible, that power can be confronted, that dignity does not have to be surrendered even in difficult circumstances. A young activist who watches a leader pursue a cause with integrity learns that the struggle is worth it, that the compromises that tempt along the way are not necessary, that it is possible to fight without becoming what you fight against.
But this modeling is incomplete and ultimately insufficient if it is not accompanied by scaffolding that teaches others how to act similarly, that provides the training and support and resources necessary to translate inspiration into practice. Without mentorship programs that pair experienced leaders with emerging ones, without institutional pathways that allow people to learn the skills of advocacy and organizing and governance, without funding mechanisms that support the long, slow work of building capacity, the hero remains an isolated exemplar rather than a replicable practice that can be passed on. The hero stands alone, and when they are gone, there is no one to take their place. The community applauds, but the applause does not create more heroes; it only marks the passing of the ones who existed and reminds us of what we have lost. This is the tragedy of leadership that is not institutionalized: it produces moments of greatness that cannot be sustained, individuals of courage who cannot be multiplied, examples of integrity that cannot be reproduced across the community.
So what follows from these observations about why we elevate individuals so readily? What lessons can we draw that might help us break the cycle of spectacle and disappointment, of promise and deferral, of hope and despair that characterizes so much of our public life? The first and most important implication is that we must stop treating the elevation of individuals as merely a cultural quirk, a colorful feature of Igbo public life that is amusing or charming or perhaps a bit excessive but ultimately harmless. The elevation of individuals is a signal, and like all signals, it points to something beneath the surface that requires attention and action. When a people repeatedly turn to single figures to carry communal burdens that should be distributed across institutions, they are telling us that the mechanisms for collective problem-solving are inadequate, that the organizations that should be translating grievance into action are not functioning properly, that the pipelines that should be producing leaders at all levels are not flowing. The signal is a symptom, and the symptom points to a disease that must be treated if the patient is to survive and thrive.
That diagnosis points to a remedy that is both practical and moral, and the two dimensions cannot be separated without losing the force of either. The practical remedy is to rebuild the institutions that can translate moral capital into legal, political, and developmental outcomes that improve people’s lives. This means umbrella organizations with transparent governance structures that can be held accountable by their members and the public. It means legal teams that are not just names on letterheads but functioning entities with track records, sustainable funding, and the capacity to litigate cases through every level of the judiciary without running out of resources. It means funding mechanisms for sustained advocacy that are not dependent on the whims of donors or the fluctuating popularity of particular causes, that can support research, documentation, and public education over years and decades regardless of the news cycle. It means leadership pipelines that pair elders’ moral authority with younger technocrats’ skills, that identify people with potential and train them not just in rhetoric but in governance, negotiation, and the patient art of building consensus across differences. These are not optional luxuries that can be deferred until a more convenient time; they are the essential infrastructure that converts applause into achievement, that turns the emotional energy of viral moments into the steady pressure of organized campaigns that cannot be ignored.
The second implication is that we must change the reward structure of public attention, and this is perhaps the most difficult task because it requires shifts in behavior that cannot be mandated or legislated from above. Media and civic culture should learn to celebrate sustained wins – court victories that are won after years of patient litigation, policy reforms that improve people’s lives in measurable ways, schools that are built and staffed and maintained over decades – with the same fervor that is currently reserved for viral moments that last a day. This requires editorial discipline from media organizations, which must resist the constant temptation to chase clicks at the expense of substance, and civic literacy from audiences, who must learn to ask the hard questions when leaders make promises. What is the timeline for this promise? What is the specific plan to achieve it? What are the benchmarks for success along the way? What happens if the promise is not kept and who will be held accountable? Turning applause into accountability is the civic equivalent of turning a spark into a steady flame; it requires patience, metrics, and the political will to follow through even when the initial excitement has faded and the next spectacle is demanding our attention.
The third implication is that leadership must be plural and cultivated, that we must move decisively beyond the search for a single savior who will solve all our problems and instead build a polity that produces many capable actors working in concert across different domains. The search for a single savior is a brittle strategy that inevitably fails; it places all our hopes in one basket, and when that basket breaks, as it almost inevitably will given human frailty, we are left with nothing and have to start the search all over again. A resilient polity, by contrast, cultivates many baskets, many leaders, many centers of initiative that can respond to challenges from different angles and with different tools suited to different situations. Mentorship programs that pair elder statesmen with legal experts and community organizers, civic education that trains citizens in advocacy and litigation and governance, funding for community institutions that support local leadership development – these are the building blocks of a distributed leadership ecosystem that can survive the loss of any single individual. That ecosystem will make heroism less necessary as a stopgap because moral authority will be embedded in institutions that can act reliably, that can respond to crises without waiting for a single figure to emerge, that can coordinate efforts across regions and sectors without depending on the charisma of any individual.
Finally, answering the question of why we elevate individuals so readily points to a conclusion that is, in its own way, hopeful rather than despairing. The impulse to seek heroes is not irrational; it is not a sign of backwardness or cultural deficiency that we should be ashamed of. It is adaptive, a survival mechanism that helps people navigate uncertainty and maintain hope in the face of overwhelming odds that might otherwise crush the spirit. In the absence of functioning institutions, people do what they must to survive emotionally and politically, and creating heroes is one of the ways they do that.
The task now is to convert that adaptive impulse into constructive architecture, to harness the energy that goes into celebrating individual acts and channel it into building the institutions that can make such acts more than momentary distractions. If the applause that follows a monarch’s plea or an elder’s dying wish can be harnessed into sustained campaigns, legal strategies, and institution-building efforts, then the very human tendency to seek heroes can become the seedbed for producing many more of them – leaders who are not merely viral moments but durable agents of change, who are not just applauded for what they say but supported in what they do over the long term, who are not isolated exemplars but nodes in a network of collective capacity that amplifies their efforts. That is the work that lies before us, and it is work that cannot be done by heroes alone. It requires all of us, organized and committed, patient and persistent, building together what none of us can build alone.
8.
When I think about the gap between what the Igbo Union achieved with limited resources and what we fail to achieve today with infinitely more educated citizens and far greater material wealth spread across the globe, I am struck by how much we have lost that cannot be measured in bank accounts or GDP figures. We have lost the habit of organized collective action, the muscle memory of working together across clan and town and class for common purposes that benefit everyone. We have lost the institutional knowledge of how to sustain campaigns over years and decades, how to raise funds transparently and deploy them accountably, how to hold leaders responsible without destroying them, how to disagree internally without fracturing the community beyond repair.
We have lost the sense that our individual successes are intimately connected to the welfare of the whole, that a doctor in America or a trader in Lagos still has a profound stake in what happens in a village school in Anambra or a market in Aba. And until we rebuild those habits, that knowledge, that sense of deep connection across distance and difference, we will continue to wake up to trending news about men who simply said what needed to be said, projecting onto them our deepest yearnings for salvation, only for the frenzy to die down and leave us once again feeling exposed and naked, still in desperate search of a hero to clothe our collective spirit.
Look at the trajectory of our recent trends and you will see the pattern repeating itself endlessly. Before Otti, before Agubuzu, there was the frenzy around the Igbo presidency that consumed our attention for years. Any politician of Igbo extraction who so much as coughed in the direction of Aso Rock was instantly anointed a savior who would deliver us from marginalization. Their posters, their movements, their every mundane activity was dissected with the fervour of messianic prophecy, as if each small gesture carried cosmic significance. We built them up with our hopes, projected onto them the collective weight of our perceived marginalization, and then watched, heartbroken, as they crumbled under the weight of reality or, worse, revealed themselves to be mere politicians playing a familiar game of self-advancement. We were not searching for a competent leader with a realistic plan; we were searching for a hero to slay the dragon of our political impotence, and we were disappointed every time.
This desperate search manifests in other, more subtle ways that pervade our daily lives. Consider the phenomenon of the Odogwu culture, particularly in the diaspora and among the youth who consume social media. On the surface, it is a celebration of affluence, a reclamation of a traditional title signifying greatness, wealth, and power in the community. But scratch that surface, and you often find a hollowness beneath the glitter. The title is self-applied, validated by likes and shares from strangers, not by communal consensus or demonstrable impact on the community’s welfare.
The Odogwu is the one who flaunts the latest car, the expensive watch, the bundles of cash spread out for the camera. In a society starved of tangible, structural heroes who actually change things, the icon of individual wealth becomes a convenient, if ultimately unsatisfying, substitute for genuine achievement. The applause is for the symbol of success, not for the substance of a life that has advanced the collective good. We also see it in our relationship with our diaspora brothers and sisters. When a successful Igbo professor in the US or a tech entrepreneur in the UK visits home, they are often treated with a reverence that borders on the messianic, as if their presence alone will solve our problems. Their opinions on local affairs, however detached from the on-the-ground realities that have changed since they left, are given undue weight and attention. They become a conduit for our hopes of a better connection to the outside world, a world we simultaneously envy and feel excluded from, and we project onto them powers they do not possess.
Into this void steps the trending figure of the moment, whoever it happens to be. Igwe Agubuzu’s CV is genuinely impressive, but it is a CV of the system, a testament to navigating existing structures successfully. He is a retired civil servant, a man who climbed the ladder of the Nigerian state through decades of service. His biography is a testament to individual success within the machinery that we simultaneously feel has marginalized us as a people. So when he speaks, we see a man who has mastered the system, who holds a title from it, who has access to its corridors of power, and we hope that perhaps, just perhaps, he can use that mastery to bend the system to our collective will. His heroism in our eyes is not in his vision for the future, but in his proximity to the levers of power we feel disconnected from. Similarly, the frenzy around Alex Otti’s visit to Sokoto was less about the substantive content of the visit itself and more about the powerful symbolism of an Igbo governor, a man from the business class, traversing the geographical and political landscape of the north and engaging with northern leaders. It was seen as an act of diplomatic courage, a reassertion of an Igbo presence in a space we have largely ceded over the decades. We celebrated the audacity of the journey more than the substance of any dialogue that might have occurred.
What we are witnessing across all these examples is the tragic consequence of a leadership deficit that has accumulated over generations. We have not lacked for spokespeople who can articulate our grievances eloquently, but we have lacked for statesmen who can actually deliver solutions. We have had many voices raised in complaint, but few that speak with the unified authority of a people organized for action. We have become experts at amplifying the mundane because the truly extraordinary has become so rare that we no longer recognize it when it appears. We celebrate the man who asks for the release of Nnamdi Kanu, forgetting that the true hero would be the one who builds the political, legal, and diplomatic architecture that makes such a request unnecessary – the one who restructures the Nigerian state so that the conditions that led to Kanu’s detention in the first place are addressed at their root, ensuring justice and belonging for all regardless of ethnicity. The reality is that no single biography, no matter how intimidating, and no single plea, no matter how passionate, will serve as the silver bullet that solves all our problems. The hero we are searching for isn’t a person at all; it is a philosophy of collective action. It is the return to a form of leadership that values strategic silence over viral speeches when silence serves the cause, and collective bargaining over individual grandstanding when bargaining is needed.
To understand why heroism feels so scarce in our time, we must unpack the structures that produce leaders today and see where they fall short. First, fragmented authority: traditional institutions coexist uneasily with modern political offices, often with unclear boundaries between them. Monarchs, elected officials, and civil society leaders often operate in parallel, sometimes in direct competition for the right to represent the community. This fragmentation dilutes the capacity for unified, long-term leadership and makes every bold utterance a potential rallying point simply because unified action is so rare. Second, media acceleration: social platforms reward immediacy and emotion over everything else. A short, forceful statement travels faster and further than a months-long negotiation conducted quietly behind the scenes. The reward structure of attention encourages gestures over governance, spectacle over substance. Third, economic precarity: when livelihoods are insecure and people struggle to meet basic needs, the community’s tolerance for slow institutional work shrinks dramatically. People look for quick wins and visible champions who promise immediate relief.
Fourth, generational divides: younger Igbo, connected to global ideas and impatient for change that matches their aspirations, often demand different forms of leadership than elders who value protocol, precedent, and continuity. Youth activism prizes disruption and novelty; elder leadership prizes stability and gradual change. This tension produces both creative energy and confusion about who should lead and how. Fifth, moral expectations: there is a historically high moral bar for leaders in Igbo culture – integrity, courage, generosity, and the demonstrated ability to secure communal welfare are all required. When leaders inevitably fall short of these high standards, the disappointment is deep and public, and that disappointment fuels the hunger for new heroes and the tendency to elevate symbolic acts into moral tests that few can pass.
The psychology behind the power of an elder’s plea is straightforward once you understand these dynamics. When an elder who has been a freedom fighter, a minister of state, and a public moralist for decades frames a political demand as a dying wish, the act functions as a powerful ritual. It compresses decades of grievance, memory, and moral claim into a single, shareable narrative that can be transmitted instantly. The ritual does two things at once with great efficiency: it humanizes the demand – an old man’s final plea touches the heart in ways that political arguments cannot – and it sacralizes it – a last wish carries moral weight that must be honored by the living. That double move explains why Mbazulike Amaechi’s story spread beyond political circles into markets, churches, schools, and family conversations across Igboland.
In a society that prizes age, memory, and moral standing above many other qualities, an elder’s public entreaty functions as a moral ledger: it calls on the living to settle accounts with the past before it is too late. When institutions are weak or slow to respond, these ledger entries become public currency that everyone can use. People share, amplify, and debate them because they are short, emotionally charged, and promise a moral resolution that formal political processes often fail to deliver. But ritual power has definite limits that cannot be ignored. Despite the immense emotional force of a dying wish, formal institutions – courts, executive offices, security agencies – operate by different logics that are not easily moved by sentiment alone. The public ritual can shame or persuade individual actors, but it cannot by itself change legal outcomes or move bureaucratic mountains.
This pattern is deeply revealing because it shows how symbolic authority is repeatedly used to compensate for institutional weakness in our public life. Viral moments become pressure valves that release communal anxiety briefly but do not necessarily produce structural change that lasts. Place Mbazulike’s dying wish beside the Agubuzu clip and other recent episodes and the pattern emerges with painful clarity. Both the elder statesman and the traditional ruler used ceremonial or moral authority to press a political demand in a national setting that commanded attention. Both acts went viral because they offered a simple, compelling narrative: an elder or a monarch speaks truth to power on behalf of a wounded community that cannot speak for itself. The difference lies in the kinds of legitimacy they mobilized – historical and national in Mbazulike’s case, ceremonial and regional in Agubuzu’s – but the public psychology they tapped is exactly the same: a deep hunger for figures who can restore dignity and force attention to long-ignored grievances.
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The Igbo mind today is a mind in a state of perpetual motion, always searching, always hoping, but rarely pausing to build anything that will last beyond the current crisis. We are like the palm tree, tall and resilient, able to bend in the wind without breaking, but our roots, while deep, are individual rather than collective. What we need is to intertwine those roots, to form a forest that can withstand any storm because the trees support each other. The search for heroes is ultimately a search for fathers and mothers, for elders whose words carry weight, not because of a government gazette or official position, but because of the moral and communal authority they command through a lifetime of service. We are looking for the modern-day equivalent of the man or woman who could sit under the village tree and, with a few well-chosen words, guide the community away from the precipice and toward safety. The challenge for Ndi Igbo is to convert the moral capital of elders and traditional rulers into sustained civic capacity rather than episodic spectacle that fades as quickly as it flares. If the problem is not only the scarcity of heroic acts but the absence of structures that make heroism durable across time, then the remedy must be both cultural and institutional, addressing the deep roots as well as the surface symptoms.
We must build institutions that can translate voice into change effectively. Heroic speeches matter and should be appreciated, but they must be coupled with mechanisms – legal, civic, and political – that can carry demands forward through the system. Strengthening local governance, supporting credible civic organizations with sustainable funding, and investing in independent media that can follow through on stories are all practical steps we can take. When an elder makes a public appeal, civic organizations should be ready with legal briefs, petitions, and follow-through strategies that convert attention into action rather than letting it dissipate. We must cultivate leadership pipelines that pair the moral clarity of elders with the technical competence of policy experts, lawyers, and community organizers.
Mentorship programs and civic training can help younger leaders inherit moral authority while gaining the skills to navigate courts, legislatures, and media ecosystems effectively. Heroism should not be accidental or dependent on individual whim. We must learn to reward patient work as well as spectacle, to value the slow accumulation of capacity as much as the dramatic gesture. Communities and media can shift incentives by valuing sustained problem-solving – legal wins achieved after years of work, institutional reforms that improve governance, economic projects that create jobs and opportunities – alongside dramatic gestures that generate attention. Changing incentive structures will reduce the temptation to treat spectacle as a substitute for governance. We must bridge generational divides by creating forums where elders and youth can co-design strategies together as equals. When younger activists see elders as partners rather than obstacles to be overcome, the pool of credible leaders expands exponentially. And we must protect moral authority by guarding the integrity of traditional and civic leaders, for when leaders are seen as transactional or corrupt, public trust evaporates and the hunger for dramatic substitutes intensifies dangerously.
These are long-term investments that require patience. They require time, resources, and a willingness to trade immediate visibility for durable capacity that will serve future generations. But they are the only way to convert episodic heroism into a civic culture that produces leaders who can be more than viral moments. Until we, as a people, stop looking for messiahs and start building the structures and institutions that produce collective leadership at all levels, we will continue this endless cycle. We will continue to wake up to trending news about men who simply said what needed to be said, projecting onto them our deepest yearnings for salvation, only for the frenzy to die down and leave us once again feeling exposed and naked, still in desperate search of a hero to clothe our collective spirit. The true hero for Ndigbo will not be the one who merely speaks, however eloquently, but the one who can organize our many voices into a single, powerful, and undeniable chorus that cannot be ignored. The challenge is to turn attention into architecture, to make heroism possible for many rather than a select few, and to build a public life where the next viral plea is the beginning of a process, not the end of a conversation. When we have done that, we will have found not just heroes, but ourselves as a people capable of shaping our own destiny.
What we have traced through these many pages are symptoms that reveal themselves in the everyday rhythms of our public life: viral clips that light up timelines with the intensity of a bushfire, spreading rapidly and then dying just as quickly, leaving behind only ash and the lingering smell of smoke. Elder pleas that move hearts to their deepest chambers, that bring tears to eyes and words of praise to lips, but that seem to dissipate into the air like harmattan mist when the sun rises and the day begins. Political promises framed as soon that fizzle into silence, that stretch from weeks into months into years, that become running jokes among the cynical and fresh wounds for the hopeful who allowed themselves to believe. These symptoms point to something beneath the surface, something that cannot be captured in a trending hashtag or a viral video, something that requires us to look beyond the immediate spectacle and ask the uncomfortable questions that spectacle is designed to obscure.
The condition those symptoms reveal is both structural and moral, and the two dimensions are so deeply intertwined that they cannot be treated separately without losing the essence of both. Structurally, we are a people with a strong memory of collective achievement and moral authority, but with weakened institutions to convert that moral authority into durable outcomes that improve lives. Our grandparents built schools with their own hands, pooling resources from meager earnings to ensure that the next generation would have opportunities they never had. Our parents organized across towns and clans, creating networks of mutual support that could respond to crises and seize opportunities for advancement. But the structures they built have been steadily eroded by war, by decades of military rule, by the centrifugal forces of modern politics, by the seductions of individual success that make collective work seem unnecessary and even burdensome. What remains are fragments, memories, and occasional flashes of the old capacity, enough to remind us of what we once had but not enough to build what we now need for survival.
Morally, we face a crisis of trust that is the direct result of too many promises made and broken, too many soon that never arrived, too many leaders who used communal pain as a ladder for personal advancement and then abandoned the community when the ladder had been climbed. Trust is the currency of collective action, the essential substrate on which all institutions are built, and when it is depleted, everything becomes harder and more costly. Every new promise is met with skepticism rooted in experience, every fresh hope is shadowed by the memory of old disappointments, every potential leader must overcome the accumulated weight of previous failures before gaining a hearing. This moral depletion is not something that can be fixed by a single speech or a single gesture, no matter how powerful; it requires sustained demonstration over time that things can be different, that words can be trusted, that commitments will be kept. And that demonstration can only be provided by institutions that outlast individuals, by processes that are transparent and accountable, by a civic culture that rewards integrity and penalizes betrayal consistently.
The search for heroes is therefore both an emotional reflex and a civic admission, and understanding this duality is essential. It is an emotional reflex because when people feel vulnerable, when they face threats they cannot control and uncertainties they cannot resolve, they reach instinctively for figures who can embody protection and hope. This is not a peculiarity of Igbo psychology but a universal human response, one that psychologists have documented across cultures and throughout human history. In moments of crisis, we look for someone to follow, someone who seems to know the way, someone whose courage and clarity can compensate for our own confusion and fear. The reflex is natural, and in itself it is neither good nor bad; it becomes problematic only when it is the only response available, when the search for heroes substitutes for the work of building institutions that would make heroism less necessary over time.
But the search is also a civic admission, a confession that the machinery of representation and redress has faltered and no longer functions as it should. When people look to a single figure to solve problems that should be addressed by courts and legislatures and bureaucracies, they are acknowledging that those institutions are not functioning as they were designed to function. When a dying wish becomes a political strategy, it is because the normal channels of political advocacy have failed and no alternatives remain. When a monarch’s public plea goes viral, it is because the mechanisms for translating communal grievance into policy response are broken and cannot be fixed quickly. The search for heroes is thus a measure of institutional failure, a diagnostic tool that reveals where the gaps are and how wide they have become over time. It tells us that we cannot rely on our organizations to deliver what we need, and so we must rely on exceptional persons who, by force of character or fortunate circumstance, can do what organizations cannot.
One lingering question that has run through these reflections from beginning to end is simple and urgent, and it deserves an answer that draws on everything we have considered: why do we elevate individuals so readily, with such intensity, despite so many disappointments? The answer lies partly in culture and partly in scarcity, and both parts are essential to understanding the full picture. Culturally, Igbo society has long honored certain archetypes that persist in the collective imagination – the elder whose words carry the weight of generations, the self-made achiever whose success demonstrates what is possible, the community custodian whose office binds them to the welfare of the people. These archetypes are not arbitrary or accidental; they emerged from a social environment where personal reputation and communal reciprocity were the primary mechanisms for organizing collective life and maintaining order. In the absence of strong centralized institutions, people had to rely on the character and demonstrated capacity of individuals, and they developed sophisticated ways of evaluating and honoring those who demonstrated the qualities necessary for leadership in difficult times.
But culture alone does not explain the feverishness of our present moment, the desperate intensity with which we seize on every public act as potential salvation, the urgency that fuels our applause and our sharing and our hoping across platforms. That fever is amplified by scarcity – scarcity of credible institutions that can act reliably over time, scarcity of coordinated civic capacity that can translate outrage into strategy, scarcity of leaders who combine moral standing with technical competence, who can not only inspire but also organize, not only speak but also deliver results. When these scarcities converge, when every pathway to change seems blocked and every organization seems captured or compromised, the community’s appetite for a single visible champion grows until it becomes a hunger that consumes everything in its path. Every public figure is scrutinized for signs of heroism, every gesture is read for its potential to save, every promise is clutched as if it were a lifeline in a stormy sea where drowning seems the only alternative.
Another question that has threaded through these pages is whether the search for heroes is ultimately harmful or helpful to the community, and the truth, as with most important questions about human affairs, is deeply ambivalent. Heroes can catalyze attention in ways that nothing else can, focusing the diffuse energies of a people into a beam that can illuminate even the darkest corners of power where decisions are made. They can shame recalcitrant power by exposing its failures to a watching world, using the spotlight of public attention to make injustice visible and unsustainable over time. They can crystallize narratives that mobilize people for action, turning inchoate grievances into coherent stories that can be told and retold, passed from person to person until they become the common property of an entire community. Mbazulike Amaechi’s public entreaties did exactly this, gathering up decades of history and hope into a single dying wish that moved millions across ethnic and regional lines. Igwe Agubuzu’s bold address did this, compressing the frustration of a people into a moment of truth-telling that lit up every screen in Igboland and beyond. The promises made by public figures do this, offering a glimpse of possibility that keeps hope alive even in the darkest times when change seems impossible.
Yet heroism without follow-through risks becoming something much less than it promises, a ritual of consolation rather than a mechanism of genuine change. When the applause dies down and the trending tags fade, when the next crisis arrives and the next hero emerges to capture attention, the underlying structures that produced the crisis remain untouched and unchanged. The schools are not built, the courts are not reformed, the legal teams are not funded, the coalitions are not sustained across time. Applause and trending tags can soothe collective anxiety temporarily, providing an emotional release that makes the pain more bearable for a moment. But they do not change the material conditions of people’s lives, and when the soothing wears off, as it always does, the pain returns, now compounded by the fresh disappointment of hopes raised and dashed yet again. The danger is that spectacle substitutes for strategy, that emotional catharsis replaces sustained civic work, that we come to believe that celebrating a hero is the same as solving a problem. It is not, and the confusion between the two is one of the most costly mistakes a people can make over time.
So what does a responsible response look like in practical terms? What would it mean to take the enormous energy that goes into our search for heroes and channel it into something more durable, more sustainable, more capable of producing real change over the long term? The answer is complex in its details, but it can be stated simply as a guiding principle: we must build the institutions that can do what heroes cannot do alone. This is the first and most fundamental requirement, the foundation on which everything else must rest if we are to break the cycle.
Institution-building means creating and sustaining the scaffolding that once allowed Igbo unions and post-war organizations to coordinate education, development, and advocacy across vast regions and diverse communities with remarkable effectiveness. It does not mean recreating the past wholesale, as if we could simply reach back and retrieve what has been lost. The world has changed fundamentally, and any institutions we build must be suited to the conditions of the present, not the nostalgia of the past. But we can learn from the past, drawing lessons from what worked and what did not, adapting the principles that made earlier organizations effective to the challenges of our own time. This means creating umbrella bodies with transparent governance structures that can be held accountable by their members and the public. It means establishing funding streams that are sustainable and accountable, that do not depend on the whims of donors or the fluctuating popularity of particular causes. It means developing legal and policy wings that can translate moral claims into enforceable action, that can take an elder’s plea and convert it into court filings, legislative proposals, diplomatic outreach, and sustained media campaigns that outlast any single news cycle.
When an elder makes a plea, there should be a standing apparatus ready to receive that plea and act on it systematically. Not just a press release expressing support, not just a meeting to discuss the matter, but a coordinated response that mobilizes every available tool – legal, political, diplomatic, communicative – in service of the outcome the plea demands. That apparatus should have been built long before the plea was made, should have been funded and staffed and trained and ready, so that when the moment comes, the community does not have to scramble and improvise but can move with the kind of coordinated power that only institutions can provide. This is what it means to take heroism seriously: not just to celebrate the hero, but to build the infrastructure that makes heroism effective in the real world.
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Second, leadership must be plural and pipeline-driven, distributed across many people rather than concentrated in a few exceptional individuals. Heroism concentrated in a few personalities is inherently brittle, vulnerable to the accidents of mortality and the vagaries of human frailty that affect everyone. When a single figure carries the hopes of millions, what happens when that figure falls ill, or makes a mistake, or is revealed to have feet of clay like everyone else? The hopes collapse, the people are left stranded once again, and the search begins anew for the next savior who will surely be different, surely be better, surely be the one who finally delivers. This cycle is exhausting and ultimately fruitless, and the only way to break it is to build a different kind of leadership culture entirely.
A healthier model is a distributed leadership ecosystem where elders, technocrats, youth activists, legal experts, and community organizers work in tandem, each contributing their particular gifts to a common project. In such an ecosystem, no single figure carries the whole weight; the weight is distributed across many shoulders, and if one falters, others can step forward to take their place without missing a beat. This requires intentional cultivation over time: mentorship programs that pair the moral authority of elders with the technical skills of younger professionals, creating leaders who are both inspiring and effective. It requires civic education that trains people not just in rhetoric but in governance, negotiation, and the patient art of building consensus across differences. It requires funding for community institutions that support local leadership development, that identify people with potential and give them the resources and training they need to develop that potential fully. This is how moral theatre becomes policy muscle over time: not by replacing spectacle, but by embedding it in a broader strategy that values patient work as much as dramatic moments, that recognizes that the slow, invisible labor of organizing is just as important as the visible flash of heroism.
Third, media and civic culture must change their reward systems fundamentally, must learn to value different things than they currently value. Social platforms are currently designed to reward immediacy and emotion, to privilege the spectacular over the substantial, to amplify whatever can grab attention in the shortest possible time. This is not a conspiracy against good governance; it is simply the logic of the attention economy, and it operates wherever attention is the currency that matters most. But communities are not powerless in the face of this logic. We can choose what we celebrate, what we amplify, what we treat as worthy of our attention and our praise. We can learn to reward persistence and measurable outcomes over time, to celebrate legal victories that are won after years of patient litigation, institutional reforms that improve people’s lives in measurable ways, development projects that are built and staffed and maintained over decades. We can give these achievements the same fervor we currently reserve for viral clips, can make them the subject of our conversations and the object of our admiration and emulation.
This also means holding public figures accountable in ways that go beyond the immediate reaction to their words. When a promise is made, we must demand a timeline, a specific plan, and periodic updates on progress. We must track what was said against what was actually done, and we must make our findings public for all to see. We must create mechanisms that allow the community to distinguish between genuine commitment and performative rhetoric, to reward the former and penalize the latter through informed public opinion. Turning applause into accountability is the civic equivalent of turning a spark into a steady flame; it requires patience, metrics, and the political will to follow through even when the initial excitement has faded and the next spectacle is demanding our attention.
Fourth, we must confront the moral deficiency that corrodes trust, that makes every new promise suspect and every fresh hope shadowed by old disappointments. Using communal pain as a bargaining chip, as a short-term political asset to be deployed for personal advancement, is corrosive in ways that cannot be easily repaired. Leaders who traffic in soon without a realistic plan, who offer assurances they have no intention of fulfilling, who treat the suffering of their people as raw material for their own ambition, are not just failing in their duty; they are actively depleting the moral capital that the community needs to mobilize effectively. Each broken promise, each soon that never arrives, each assurance that evaporates into nothing, erodes the trust that is essential for any collective action. And when trust is gone completely, even genuine leaders with real plans will struggle to gain a hearing, because the community has learned through bitter experience that words are cheap and promises are worthless.
Rebuilding trust requires transparency, humility, and a willingness to subordinate personal ambition to communal outcomes over the long term. It means being honest about what is possible and what is not, about what can be delivered and what cannot, about the timelines that are realistic and the obstacles that must be overcome. It means admitting mistakes when they are made, and learning from them rather than covering them up or blaming others. It means treating public grief and hope as a sacred trust to be stewarded, not a currency to be spent for personal advantage. This is not easy, and it requires a kind of moral discipline that is rare in any political culture. But it is absolutely essential, because without trust, no institution can function and no collective project can succeed.
Fifth, generational tensions must be bridged rather than amplified, must be transformed from sources of division into sources of collective strength. The energy of youth – their urgency, their creativity, their mastery of new tools and platforms, their willingness to question old assumptions – is essential for any movement that hopes to succeed in the modern world. But that energy needs direction, needs the kind of wisdom that only experience can provide. Elders bring memory, legitimacy, and moral clarity; they have lived through struggles that young people can only read about in books, and they carry the lessons of those struggles in their bones. Both are necessary, and the challenge is to create forums where these constituencies can meet as equals and co-design strategies together. When the energy of youth is channeled into legal campaigns and policy advocacy, and the wisdom of elders informs long-term planning and institutional design, the combination is unstoppable.
This requires intentional bridge-building over time, creating spaces where different generations can meet as equals, can share their perspectives and learn from each other. It requires humility on both sides: young people must recognize that they do not have all the answers, that the elders they sometimes dismiss have knowledge that cannot be found in books or on screens; elders must recognize that the world has changed fundamentally, that the strategies that worked in the past may not work in the present, that young people have insights that are essential for navigating the complexities of modern politics. When these bridges are built and maintained, the pool of credible leaders expands exponentially, and the temptation to look for single-figure salvation diminishes. Leadership becomes not a matter of waiting for a messiah to appear but of cultivating a garden in which many flowers can bloom at once.
Sixth, we must accept that the work is long and often unglamorous, that building the institutions and capacities we need will take time and patience and persistent effort. The artesian wells of civic capacity – sustainable funding streams that last for decades, legal expertise that accumulates over generations, policy research that informs advocacy, community institutions that outlast any individual leader – cannot be built overnight. They require the kind of sustained investment that does not produce immediate returns, that may not bear fruit for years or even generations. This is difficult to accept in a culture that values immediacy above all, that measures success by what can be achieved in a single news cycle or a single political term. But the alternative is perpetual crisis management, an endless cycle of viral moments followed by disappointment, each one deepening the emotional emptiness that this essay has described. If we want something different, we must be willing to do the slow, patient, often invisible work that genuine change requires.
This means prioritizing durable gains over immediate visibility, making choices that may not generate applause but that build the infrastructure for future success. It means funding organizations rather than just individuals, supporting institutions rather than just campaigns, investing in processes rather than just outcomes. It means teaching our children not just to admire heroes from a distance but to become the kind of people who can build the organizations that make heroism effective. It means accepting that we may not see the fruits of our labor in our own lifetimes, but that the labor is nonetheless worthwhile because it creates conditions for those who come after us to succeed where we have failed.
Seventh and finally, the search for heroes can be reframed as a project of production rather than discovery, as a matter of cultivation rather than passive waiting. Instead of scanning the horizon endlessly for a single savior who will appear from nowhere and solve all our problems, we can intentionally cultivate the conditions that produce many capable leaders, many centers of initiative, many sources of moral authority and technical competence. This means investing in education that forms not just skilled workers but civic leaders, people who understand the responsibilities of citizenship and have the tools to fulfill them. It means supporting civic training programs that teach advocacy, organizing, and governance, that give people the practical skills they need to be effective. It means funding legal clinics that train the next generation of lawyers in public interest advocacy, that create a pipeline of legal expertise that can be drawn upon when cases arise. It means developing community development projects that create a track record of competence and integrity, that demonstrate what is possible when people work together for common purposes.
This is the work of institutionalizing moral capital over time, of taking the authority that elders possess and embedding it in organizations that can act even when those elders are gone. It means creating mechanisms that convert the emotional power of a dying wish into the sustained pressure of a legal campaign, that transform the moral clarity of a monarch’s plea into the technical precision of a policy proposal. It means building a civic culture where heroism is not an exception but a norm, where many people are capable of courageous action because they have been trained and supported and empowered to act.
To square everything up with the title that has framed these reflections from the beginning, we must understand that NDIGBO IN SEARCH OF HEROES is both a lament and a call to action, both a diagnosis of our condition and a prescription for our future. The lament recognizes a real hunger that has deep roots in our history and our culture, a hunger born of genuine suffering and legitimate aspiration that deserves respect. When a people have been through what we have been through – the trauma of war, the marginalization of peace, the accumulated disappointments of decades – they naturally look for figures who can restore what has been lost, who can secure what has been denied, who can embody the dignity and power that seem always just out of reach. This hunger is not a sign of weakness or backwardness; it is a sign of life, of a people who refuse to accept that their situation is hopeless, who continue to hope and strive even when hope seems foolish and striving futile.
But the call to action insists that this hunger must be answered not by more spectacle, not by an endless succession of viral moments and broken promises, but by architecture – by the patient, unglamorous, essential work of building institutions that can deliver what heroes can only promise. Institutions are not exciting; they do not generate trending hashtags or viral videos. They are slow, bureaucratic, frustrating, and often disappointing in their pace. But they are also the only thing that has ever worked at scale in human history, the only mechanism that can translate individual courage into collective power, the only way to ensure that the work outlasts the workers and the hope outlasts the moment.
If we can convert our enormous appetite for heroes into the labor of producing them – through mentorship programs that develop new leaders systematically, through legal capacity that turns moral claims into enforceable rights, through organizational renewal that rebuilds the civic infrastructure we have lost – then the search will end not with a single triumphant figure but with a people capable of sustaining their own dignity and destiny. The hero we have been looking for will turn out to be not a person at all but a people, organized and committed, patient and persistent, building together what none of us can build alone. And in that discovery, the search will finally find its fulfillment, not in the applause that greets a single speech but in the steady, nourishing flow of a civic culture that produces leaders at every level and in every generation. That is the architecture we must build, the future we must create, the inheritance we must leave for those who will come after us. It is the only answer worthy of the hunger that drives us, and the only response that can finally bring the search to an end.
Yet there is something else that has not been spoken directly in these reflections, something that hovers at the edges of every conversation about Igbo public life but rarely receives the attention it deserves. It is the question of what happens in the spaces between the viral moments, in the long stretches of silence when no elder is making a dying wish and no monarch is speaking truth to power and no promise is lighting up the timelines. What do we do with ourselves in those ordinary times, when the cameras are not rolling and the crowds are not gathered and the work of daily life continues with its mundane rhythms?
The answer, too often, is that we do nothing collectively. We retreat into our individual pursuits, our businesses and professions and family obligations, and we wait for the next crisis to summon us back into the public square. This is the rhythm of a people who have not learned to sustain collective attention beyond the emergency, who have not built the habits and institutions that make civic engagement a continuous practice rather than an intermittent response to disaster. The hero, in this reading, becomes not just a leader but an alarm clock, someone whose appearance wakes us from our civic slumber long enough to register our grievances before we drift back into the comfortable oblivion of private life. And as long as this pattern persists, as long as we only gather when tragedy strikes or when a heroic figure emerges to speak for us, we will remain reactive rather than proactive, responding to events rather than shaping them, always one step behind the forces that determine our fate.
There is also the matter of what might be called the spiritual dimension of this search, the way that the hunger for heroes often expresses itself in language and imagery that borders on the religious. We speak of saviors and deliverers, of messiahs who will come to set us free from bondage. We invest our hopes in figures with an intensity that seems to exceed what any mere human could reasonably bear, projecting onto them qualities that belong properly to the divine. This is not accidental. When material conditions become unbearable and political solutions seem impossible, the human psyche naturally reaches for transcendent answers, for salvation that comes from outside the normal order of things. The hero becomes a secular messiah, someone whose appearance promises a rupture in the fabric of reality, a sudden transformation that will make all things new. But this expectation is a setup for inevitable disappointment, because heroes are human beings with human limitations, subject to the same constraints of mortality and fallibility as the rest of us.
They cannot perform miracles, cannot overturn the laws of politics and power with a wave of the hand. To expect them to do so is to set them up for failure and ourselves for despair. The spiritual hunger is real and deserves to be honored, but it must find its satisfaction in something other than the flawed and finite creatures who share our human condition. Perhaps that something is the community itself, the ongoing project of collective self-determination that has always been the deepest source of meaning in Igbo life, the understanding that we are saved not by heroes descending from on high but by the slow, patient work of building together what none of us can build alone.
Another dimension that has remained largely unspoken in these pages is the question of joy, of celebration, of the legitimate pleasure that comes from witnessing acts of courage and integrity in a world that often seems bereft of both. It would be a mistake to write too sternly about the viral moments and trending tags, to dismiss them as mere spectacle or empty consolation, because they do provide something real and valuable that should not be denied. When a monarch stands before power and speaks truth, when an elder uses their last breaths to plead for justice, when a leader makes a promise that aligns with our deepest hopes, it is right to celebrate. It is right to share the clip, to add our voice to the chorus of approval, to feel that surge of collective emotion that reminds us we are not alone in our longings. These moments are gifts, and to receive them gratefully is not a sign of weakness or naivety but a mark of our shared humanity that connects us across differences.
The problem arises only when the celebration becomes a substitute for the struggle, when the applause replaces the work, when we mistake the moment of inspiration for the lifetime of perspiration that genuine change requires. Joy and celebration are not the enemies of serious politics; they are its necessary companions, the fuel that keeps us going through the long nights of disappointment and setback. The task is not to suppress them but to integrate them into a larger framework that also includes the patient, unglamorous labor that the moments of joy cannot replace. We must learn to celebrate without ceasing to work, to applaud without ceasing to organize, to feel the surge of collective emotion without allowing it to become an end in itself.
Finally, there is the question of what all of this means for the young, for those who are coming of age in a time when the gap between what is promised and what is delivered has never been wider, when the cycle of viral hope and systemic disappointment is the only politics they have ever known. What does it do to a generation to grow up watching elders make pleas that go unheeded, promises that evaporate, heroes who rise and fall with the speed of a trending hashtag?
The answer is not simple, but it is urgent and demands our attention. For some, it breeds cynicism, a conviction that nothing ever changes and that the only sensible response is to look out for oneself, to pursue individual success and let the collective fend for itself. For others, it breeds a kind of desperate activism, a determination to break the cycle by any means necessary, a willingness to embrace radical solutions that sometimes do more harm than good in their urgency. For many, it breeds confusion, a sense of being adrift in a world where the old maps no longer work and new ones have not yet been drawn.
What these young people need is not more heroes to disappoint them, not more promises to break their hearts, but a different kind of education entirely – an education that teaches them not just to admire those who speak truth to power but to build the institutions that make truth-telling effective, not just to hope for deliverance from outside but to organize for it from within, not just to wait for saviors to appear but to become, together, the agents of their own liberation. This is the deepest work that lies before us, the work of forming a generation that can break the cycle because they understand it, that can build what we have failed to build because they have learned from our failures, that can finally end the search for heroes by becoming, collectively, the hero that our story has always needed.
