By Musa Bakare.
In spite of the great and very commendable reform and rebuilding efforts of the present administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, there’s a new tribe in town, the angry activists of Nigeria. They live online, breathe lies outrage, incite and feed on chaos.
Every sunrise brings a new target: a minister’s shirt, a governor’s speech, or a policy they’ve never read. Their weapons of choice are rhetorics, half truths, and hysteria.
These are the self crowned saints of social media, moral landlords of a country they hardly understand. They scream accountability while spreading rumours, chant justice while insulting everyone in sight, and preach freedom while cancelling dissenting opinions.
Once upon a time, activism was noble. Think of Gani Fawehinmi, fearless, factual, focused. Dora Akunyili, bold, brilliant, purposeful. Today’s activists are Twitter thunderbolts, loud in grammar, empty in logic. They trade in anger, not analysis; rudeness, abusive and insulting.
Take #EndSARS, a movement supposedly born from genuine pain and legitimate grievance, misinformation spread faster than truth, and chaos replaced reason. By the time the smoke cleared, Lagos was on fire, literally, and the same people who screamed freedom disappeared when it was time for rebuilding.
Activism is a performance, suddenly you’re a social reformer. Many of these self-styled activits are simply digital dramatists, rehearsing rebellion for retweets. They are said to insult and abuse leaders by day and inbox them for favours by night.
Every issue in Nigeria now has a tribal flavouring. Electricity fails ? blame the North. Bad roads ? It’s the South’s fault. Fuel price ? it must be the West. Even hunger now has ethnicity. Our critics are no longer nationalists, they are sectional prophets preaching division with data free conviction.
When they’re not spewing bile, they’re declaring everyone corrupt, except themselves, of course. They drag, defame, and distort, mistaking noise for influence. Their favorite phrases are.. we the people and…. they have failed us. Yet ask what they have built, and silence becomes their loudest answer.
This is not activism it is attention addiction. It is activism with ring light, not research and reason. These are not Gani Fawehinmis; not Fela Anikulapos, they’re gladiators of gossip, rumors and lies, warriors without war plans.
True activism requires discipline, intelligence, and moral backbone. It demands patience to study, courage to speak truth and humility to listen. But today, our loudest critics are digital vigilantes, mistaking volume for value.
Nigeria needs sober voices, not social media volcanoes. We need patriots who will complement the efforts of President Tinubu and his administration in re building the broken and damaged bridges, not bonfires. We need reformers who confront power with facts, not fury.
Until then, the intemperate activists will remain what they are, noise in search of meaning, outrage without outcome, revolutionaries without results.
– Musa Asiru Bakare is a member of the APC and a political analyst. He writes from Lokoja, Kogi State.
