A nation lives on vision, industry, and accountability, argues TONY EDEMENAHA
Vladimir Lenin is often credited with the phrase “useful idiots.” Historians will argue the exact origin, but the meaning has survived every regime. It describes intelligent, passionate people who defend the hand that picks their pocket. In 2026, Nigeria has perfected the art. We have turned it into a national sport.
The tragic reality of our situation is this: many citizens have become, in that old and bitter phrase, “useful idiots.” Not because they lack sense or passion. But because they are intelligent, data-wielding defenders of a system that impoverishes them daily. They are not scarce. They are loud.
Look at the market square of our democracy. Fuel prices climb like palm wine in dry season. Insecurity keeps the farmer from his farm and the trader from her road. Jobs have become rumours. Yet on X, on Facebook, in family WhatsApp groups, our brightest sons and daughters are breaking friendships over politicians they have never met.
They argue online as if their data subscription is a national budget. They insult strangers as if abuse is a policy paper. They are not holding leaders accountable. They are holding umbrellas for the rain that is drowning them.
The elders have a saying: When the masquerade enters the village, children forget their mothers and follow the beads. Our politics has shifted from policy to identity. Once thinking stops, manipulation becomes easy. The system does not need to silence you. It only needs to redirect you.
Give the youth a tribe to defend, a pastor to trend, a party logo to wear like war paint. Give the market woman a rumour about the other tribe’s candidate stealing her pepper. Give the graduate a hashtag and tell him his poverty is because “the other side” won. And just like that, the motorcade moves, while the oppressed wave flags they bought with their last 500 naira.
This is where the matter becomes satire, except that satire has left the stage and taken a seat in Aso Villa. A few weeks ago, the First Lady of Africa’s most populous country, where 60% of the population is under 30, advised citizens to embrace frying akara and selling kulikuli. The nation erupted.
Not because akara is evil. Akara is sacred. It has fed generations. My mother’s hands still smelled of beans and hot oil on Saturdays. Kulikuli has sent children to school. But the conversation was never about business acumen.
As James Ogunjimi rightly amplified for the Good Governance Group, nobody is debating whether one can sell N200,000 worth of akara daily. The question is: What does it mean when the First Lady’s vision for 60% youth in 2026 is oil, beans, and groundnut?
Because how a country’s leaders perceive you is the blueprint for the policies they will make about your life. A government that tells graduates to measure ambition in basins of akara will not write policies for AI labs, semiconductor design, or biotech research.
It will not create the runway for Moniepoint, Flutterwave, or the next Nigerian unicorn to find talent here. It will instead distribute roadside tables and N10,000 “starter packs” and call it empowerment.
The elders say: If you tell a child with a laptop that his destiny is a frying pan, do not be surprised when he sells the laptop for charcoal. And here enter the useful idiots. The moment the advice dropped, a battalion rose.
“I can sell two billion akara a day,” one posted. “Street-sweeping makes N500,000 daily,” another argued. They positioned themselves as business gurus and best sellers of common sense. They missed the point deliberately, because outrage does not trend as well as performance.
They did not ask why a nation of 200 million, with universities, coders, engineers, and artists, is being told in 2026 that its economic horizon is kulikuli. They did not ask why young people in China are building drones, in India are exporting software, in the US are becoming VPs at 24, while ours are told to fry faster.
Instead, they shouted down the questioners. They validated the policy. They gave the government screenshots for the cabinet: “See? The people accept it.” The elders say: When the goat claps for the butcher, the knife is already hot.
This is the mechanics of “useful idiocy.” Leaders no longer need to gag citizens. They need only to point. “Look, your enemy is the man from the other tribe.” “Look, your enemy is the woman who doubts akara economics.” “Look, your enemy is the one who says we should build, not fry.”
Immediately, citizens who share the same suffering become each other’s enemies. The system survives not only because of bad leadership. It survives because enough people emotionally justify and protect it.
To admit the policy is small is to admit you have been shouting for a small thing. And pride, my people, is more expensive than petrol. So the motorcade moves. The flag-wavers sweat.
The price of garri rises. The university goes on strike again. The hospital has no drugs. But on timeline, there is war. Not against poverty. Against each other.
I remember my village during election season. Two brothers, sons of the same mother, would not speak for four years because one wore red cap and the other wore green. The man they fought for won, moved to Abuja, built a mansion, and hired both brothers’ cousins as gatemen.
When they met at the village square years later, they had nothing to show but broken brotherhood and faded caps. The elders laughed and said: The rat and the lizard fought over who owned the trap. The farmer took both and went home.
Nigeria is not poor because God misplaced our map. We are poor because we keep renting our brains to tenants who sell the house. The post about the VP at 24 in another country is instructive.
A Nigerian child sees it and feels insulted, because his own reality is being asked to embrace kulikuli as a career ceiling. That is not self-hate. That is cognitive dissonance. It is the sound of a mind that knows it was built for more than a roadside table.
You cannot tell a generation that grew up on smartphones that their future is only in frying. You cannot tell coders, designers, scientists, and creators that the national vision is beans. If you do, they will either leave, or they will fry.
And the nation will wonder why it has no export but regret. The government floats ideas deliberately, like fishermen testing water. If the outrage is unanimous, they say, “That is not what we meant.”
If the useful idiots clap, they say, “The people have accepted it.” And the policy becomes law. Tomorrow it will be “toilet washers make N500,000 daily.” The day after, “Street-sweeping is the new tech.” And the gurus will write threads to explain it.
So what do we do? Do we hate akara? No. Do we hate kulikuli? No. We eat them. We celebrate them. But we refuse to be confined by them. The elders say: The child who knows how to farm should also know how to read.
Nigeria needs both the frying pan and the fibre optic. We need the market woman and the machine-learning engineer. We need dignity in every honest work, and ambition in every policy room.
To break the cycle, Nigerians must move from blind loyalty to independent, questioning citizenship. Question regardless of party. Question regardless of tribe. Question regardless of religion.
If your party is in power and the price of rice rises, say so. If your brother is the governor and the hospital has no light, say so. If your pastor is dining with the man who looted the school budget, say so.
Because the system’s survival strategy is your silence. And your silence is rented with identity.
Let me end with a story. In my grandfather’s compound, there was a stubborn goat that would not leave the chief’s veranda. Every time the chief came out, the goat would stand, bleat, and block the way.
The children would laugh and feed it. One day the chief’s son sold the goat at market and used the money to buy a motorcycle. The children cried. The elders said: The goat thought it was a pet. The chief knew it was meat.
Many Nigerians are that goat on the veranda of power. We bleat, we defend, we trend. We think we are pets. The system knows we are meat.
Lenin’s “useful idiots” are not a foreign import. They are a local crop, watered by frustration and harvested by manipulation. But Nigeria is older than any phrase. We are the people who turned palm wine into philosophy, suffering into proverbs, protest into poetry.
The akara is sweet. The kulikuli is crunchy. But a nation cannot live on snacks alone. A nation lives on vision, on industry, on accountability.
So the notice is served: Put down the flag of the motorcade. Pick up the pen of the citizen. Stop fighting your neighbour for a politician who does not know your name. Start demanding results from every leader, at every level, all the time.
Until we do, the cycle continues. The tree will fall, and we will be under it, still arguing about who sharpened the cutlass better.
My people, the elders are watching. The children are waiting. The house is ours.
Edemenaha, poet and social commentator, writes from Asaba