In his classic 1965 satirical novel, A Man of the People, Chinua Achebe gave us Chief Nanga, a charming, corrupt politician who turned governance into a private buffet while the electorate clapped for crumbs. Achebe warned us that when politics becomes a marketplace, the citizens are eventually priced out of their own lives.
Decades later, on the pages of the Daily Independent, Dr. Dakuku Peterside issues a sobering, contemporary sequel to Achebe’s warning. He diagnoses a quiet, malignant pathology eating away at the heart of Nigerian democracy, that is, the weaponisation of the “consensus candidacy.” What Peterside terms a “civilian coup” is not just a local crisis; it is a masterclass in what postcolonial scholars call elite capture, the ritualistic preservation of democratic forms to empty them of democratic substance.
This crisis of political authorship is precisely what Peterside has spent years analyzing. In his seminal work, “Leading in the Storm,” he diagnosed the institutional turbulence that paralyses African governance, offering frameworks for navigating systemic crises. In his provocative book “Beneath the Surface,” he peeled back the layers of public rhetoric to expose the raw, transactional mechanics of power that dictate Nigerian public life.
When we read his latest newspiece through the lens of his broader scholarship, the picture is harrowing. The “storm” is no longer an external threat to Nigerian democracy; the storm has been institutionalised inside the party secretariats, the closed-door hotel rooms and the late-night Abuja deals. By examining what lies beneath the surface of the benign phrase “consensus candidacy,” Peterside reveals that what party barons call “harmony” is actually the enforced silence of the graveyard.
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