By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
Where I grew up, the masquerade came out at the big festivals, and the whole community rearranged itself around it. Children scattered and peeped from behind their mothers’ wrappers. Grown men stepped off the path. The music changed when it changed, and people danced or ran according to its moods. Every one of us knew there was a man inside that costume. Some of us could have told you whose legs those were from the way he walked. But nobody said it aloud. To unmask the mmanwu in public was an abomination, and the people who would have punished you first were not the masquerade society. They were your own neighbours, the same crowd that had been running from the whip a moment before.
I have thought about that crowd a great deal in recent days, after watching a television interview with a man who spent his working life inside Nigeria’s intelligence services. He spoke slowly, like someone who had made his peace with what he knew and had decided, late in life, to let some of it out. His claim was simple enough to fit on a placard. Nigeria, he said, is not ruled by the people it elects. It is ruled by a small, patient, largely unseen group that does not govern but decides who will govern. He called them the Deep State.
I waited for the country to stop. It did not. The clip went round for a day or two, people nodded or laughed, someone made a joke of it, and by the end of the week we were quarrelling about something else. That, more than anything he said, is what has stayed with me. A people who can hear a claim like that, from a man in that position, and simply move on, have either stopped believing that truth matters or stopped believing they can do anything with it. I am not sure which is worse.
We are not short of words for hidden power in this country. We have said “cabal” so often that it has lost its edge. We talk about godfathers, about the kitchen cabinet, about “the Abuja people,” about “those who own Nigeria.” The man in that interview was impatient with all of it. A cabal, he said in effect, is a clique around a ruler; it rises with him and falls with him. A godfather finances a candidate and collects his dues. What he was describing is older than any of them, and more patient. It outlived the soldiers and has outlived every civilian president since. It does not need office, because office needs it. Its people are not appointed; they appoint.
And their hold, he insisted, is not only money, though there is stupendous money involved. It reaches into who gets a platform and who does not, which grievance is fanned and which is allowed to die, which crisis burns and which is quietly put out. It reaches into the social, the political and, most painfully for some of us, the religious. The men and women they place in office understand the terms without being told. You do not question how the visible machinery of government is bent to suit the people who put you there. That silence is not an accident. It is the price of the seat.
I have spent a long career around institutions, close enough to see how appointments are actually made and how often the person who signs the letter is not the person who made the decision. So I did not hear any of this as revelation. What unsettled me was hearing it said so calmly by someone who would know.
To support his claim, he went back to something many of us remember. In January 2012, at the interdenominational service for Armed Forces Remembrance Day in Abuja, President Goodluck Jonathan told the congregation, and through them the country, that Boko Haram sympathisers and members had found their way into the executive and legislative arms of government, into the judiciary, into the armed forces, the police and the other security agencies. He said the situation was in some ways worse than the civil war, because in that war at least you knew where the enemy stood.
I remember where I was when I heard it. I remember the strange flatness of it, the way a man with more formal power than anyone else in the land described the rot around him the way you might describe the weather. No purge followed that the public could see. No names were laid before the nation. Whatever one thinks of that government, and people will argue about it for a long time, the confession told us something about the office itself. The presidency could see the infiltration and still could not cut it out. If the person at the top cannot remove those sitting next to him, then the person at the top is not where the power lives.
None of what the veteran described requires hooded meetings or secret oaths. That is what makes it so effective. It runs on things we see every day and have stopped noticing. Money arrives before the election, long before. It pays for the nomination forms, the posters, the vehicles, the “mobilisation” of delegates, the hall rental, the security. Loyalty follows the money, and it follows it for years. By the time a budget line, a contract, a bill or a posting comes up for decision, the outcome was settled by an obligation incurred long ago, often in a currency that never passed through a bank. A legislator does not need to be told how to vote. He only needs to remember who paid for his campaign, and who could pay for his opponent next time.
Faith and ethnicity are the most useful tools of all, precisely because they are what ordinary Nigerians trust most. I have sat in churches where a politician was given the front pew and the microphone on thanksgiving Sunday, and watched a congregation that was struggling to pay school fees applaud a donation they would never trace back to its source. I know Muslim friends who have watched the same thing happen in their own places of worship. Package a grievance as a threat to the faith, an insult to the region, a slight against the tribe, and millions of decent people will defend, with real passion, an arrangement that keeps them poor. The faithful supply the energy. Others collect the dividend.
The line from that interview that I cannot shake is this one. All the noise made by more than two hundred million of us, the permutations about zoning and rotation, the confident forecasts about who will emerge, the arguments in danfo buses and barbing salons, after Mass and after Jumat, in a thousand WhatsApp groups about where this country is going and who is driving it, is mostly that: noise. Beneath it the real arrangements are being quietly and ruthlessly reshuffled, and the outcome is known only to the few who are doing the reshuffling.
If that is even half true, then much of what we have called civic life has been a kind of spectator sport in which the crowd believes it is on the pitch. We register, we queue in the sun, we vote, we protest, we fast and pray, we argue until friendships break, and then we are surprised by what we get. I have come to think that the surprise itself is the clearest evidence. A people who are surprised by their own government again and again are a people who do not know whom their government answers to.
Concentrated private power over public life is not a Nigerian invention, and I do not want to pretend that it is. Americans of the late nineteenth century lived under men like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt. At its height Standard Oil controlled close to nine-tenths of the refining in the United States. The railroad barons could make or ruin a farming district by setting freight rates. State legislatures, which in those days chose the country’s senators, were widely understood to be bought and paid for.
What separated that America from our Nigeria was not that its rich men were more virtuous. It was that their interests were legible. Everyone knew what Rockefeller wanted: oil, markets, monopoly. Everyone knew what the railroads wanted: rates, land, freedom from regulation. Their geoeconomics and their geopolitics sat in plain view, and what sits in plain view can be contested.
A journalist named Ida Tarbell spent years documenting exactly how Standard Oil crushed its rivals, and published it. Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. In 1911 the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil broken up. Within two years the country had a federal income tax and the direct election of senators. None of it abolished wealth or influence. It dragged both into the open and forced them onto terms.
That is the lesson I take from them. Power you can see is power you can bargain with. Power that hides cannot be negotiated with. It can only be obeyed, or resisted blindly, and blind resistance is usually crushed or bought.
Many of us are old enough to have watched several of our national promises arrive and leave. Independence was going to bring dignity. The soldiers were going to bring discipline. Oil was going to bring prosperity. Democracy was going to bring accountability. One crusade after another was going to clean house. Each time, ordinary people invested what they had: their hope, their votes, their prayers, and too often their blood. Each time the dividends drifted upward and the costs settled at the bottom, where they always settle.
We have tended to read this history as a run of bad leaders, one disappointment after another. The interview pushed me toward harder reading. Perhaps we have been watching a long series of performances by the same producer. If the hand that chooses the actors never changes, then changing the actors will never change the play.
That reading does not let the rest of us off. Our religious mobilisation, our ethnic solidarity, our election-season fervour and our online fury have rarely been organised around a clear demand on the people who actually hold power. They have been organised around proxies. We fight each other with astonishing energy over which mask should lead the dance, and we never ask who is wearing them.
I owe the reader some honesty here, because an essay like this can easily become its own kind of noise. A single interview, however senior the voice, is testimony and not proof. The Jonathan remark is on the record, but it shows infiltration and paralysis; it does not by itself prove a single hand directing everything. Many serious students of Nigeria would describe not one hidden group but a shifting bargain among competing regional, military, business and religious networks, who cooperate to share the national cake and fight viciously over the size of their slices. That difference matters. A cartel and a crowd of rival oligarchs call for different remedies.
There is also a trap in believing too completely in an all-seeing hand. If everything is already decided, nothing is worth doing, and that kind of fatalism serves the powerful as well as any rigged election. I have seen elections go against the establishment’s wishes. I have seen courts rule against the mighty, and journalists and ordinary citizens force a government to reverse itself. Any honest account of hidden power has to leave room for those moments. They are where the cracks are.
None of this weakens the warning. It sharpens it. Our task is not to swap one myth for another but to replace whispers with evidence, and resignation with organised pressure.
If this hand cannot easily be exposed, it can at least be made visible in its effects, and visibility is where every negotiation begins. We are not without tools. The Freedom of Information Act has been law since 2011 and is used far less than it should be. The Electoral Act sets limits on campaign spending that almost nobody tracks. The Companies and Allied Matters Act of 2020 created a register of the people who ultimately own and control companies. If civil society, the professional bodies, the press and the universities insisted that these instruments be enforced and their data published, we would begin to see who funds whom and who owns what.
Public officers already declare their assets to the Code of Conduct Bureau, but citizens cannot routinely read those declarations. A country that wants to know whom its officials owe should be able to see what they owned on the day they entered office and what they owned on the day they left.
Our congregations, unions, professional institutes, market associations and town unions command a loyalty no politician can match. For too long we have lent that loyalty freely to whoever speaks the language of our faith or our people. It should be lent only on terms: written demands, measurable commitments, a public scorecard at the end of each tenure.
And we should learn to name interests, not only individuals. Chasing personalities invites libel suits and endless distraction. Mapping interests, in oil and gas, land, ports, import licences, contracts and security votes, lets ordinary people see which policies feed which pockets, even when the pockets have no names stitched on them.
I do not read the veteran’s warning as a claim that Nigerians are powerless. I read it as a charge that we have been spending our power in the wrong place. We have danced in the market square for sixty-six years, cheering the masquerade or cursing it, interpreting its moods, running when the whip came out, and we have never collectively asked who stands beneath the costume and what he wants.
Taboos survive only as long as the crowd agrees to keep them. The way out of these hollowed years is not, in the first instance, revolution, and it is certainly not resignation. It begins with a shared refusal to go on pretending that we do not know someone is inside the mask. Once enough of us refuse, the conversation changes. It stops being about who should lead the dance and becomes a question of what the dancers owe the village. That is a negotiation. And a people who negotiate, with open eyes and organised strength, are no longer spectators of their own history.
Charles is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
