Viewpoints Africa There is a particular danger when power stops pretending. No longer does it bother with caution, justification, or the rituals of accountability. It simply proceeds, confident that outrage will fade and attention will move on. This is where the Tinubu presidency increasingly finds itself, not merely governing amid controversy, but governing as though controversy no longer matters. The state no longer feels compelled to explain itself.
Democratic governance depends not only on elections, but on norms. On restraint. On the quiet agreements that say even power must pretend to be modest, lawful, and answerable. These conventions are what separate authority from arbitrariness and leadership from conquest. When they hold, democracy breathes. When they are discarded, what remains is only the mechanical shell of rule, stripped of conscience and legitimacy.
Consider the elevation of a former electoral commission chairman whose tenure presided over one of the most disputed elections in Nigeria’s democratic history. An election marred by failed technological assurances, mysteriously unavailable servers, and widespread loss of public confidence. Courts ruled. Politics moved on. But legitimacy, unlike legality, does not simply vanish on judgment day.
In serious democracies, this distinction is understood instinctively. In the United States or the United Kingdom, an official at the center of a credibility collapse would quietly recede from public life, not reemerge in high office. Not because of legal guilt, but because democratic systems understand symbolism. They understand that trust, once broken, must at least be respected in absence.
Nigeria chose the opposite path. The message was unmistakable. That failure, even of the most consequential kind, carries no reputational cost. That public memory is irrelevant. That institutions exist to serve power, not the other way around.
This pattern repeats itself in the long delayed ambassadorial list. After nearly two years of diplomatic drift, a basic failure of statecraft in itself, the eventual release of the list should have reassured Nigerians that seriousness had returned to governance. Instead, it deepened unease.
Diplomatic postings are among the most sensitive instruments of state power. Ambassadors are not rewards. They are emissaries of national character. Countries that value their standing in the world subject such appointments to intense scrutiny. Competence, temperament, background, and credibility matter because reputation compounds abroad just as quickly as it collapses.
Yet Nigerians are now left to ask uncomfortable questions. Who vets these nominees. By what standards. What institutional processes exist to protect the Republic from avoidable embarrassment. Silence has been the only response, and silence in governance is rarely accidental.
What makes this moment even darker is context. This administration is still emerging from the public backlash over controversial pardons that many Nigerians saw as a blunt insult to justice. Taken together, these decisions no longer look like isolated errors. They resemble a governing philosophy in which ethical boundaries are negotiable and public outrage is expected to burn out.
Every functioning democracy relies on internal friction. Advisors who warn. Institutions that slow leaders down. Protocols that force second thoughts. When these internal brakes disappear, power accelerates toward recklessness. Either the Tinubu administration lacks these safeguards, or it disregards them entirely. Both explanations point toward danger.
No government can survive indefinitely on contempt for perception. Legitimacy is not infinite. When citizens begin to see the state as unserious, unembarrassed, and untouched by consequence, disengagement follows. Cynicism hardens. Democracy becomes form without spirit.
Nigeria does not need flawless leaders. It needs serious ones. Leaders who understand that power exercised without restraint eventually consumes itself. That governance without embarrassment is governance without conscience.
A republic begins to fail not when it is challenged, but when those in power stop caring how their decisions look, feel, or mean to the people they govern. When power stops pretending, the endgame has already begun.
Abayomi Ojo is a Change Management Consultant. He can be reached at samyom5@yahoo.com
