In an era where vanity is crowned and arrogance is marketed as leadership, the virtues of loyalty and humility are often dismissed as relics for the naïve. The world now claps for the loud, rewards the ruthless, and rolls its eyes at the steady servant whose back bends under the weight of faithfulness. Yet, as the Ivorian philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne once warned, “A society that forgets its humble builders will one day live in houses without foundations.” This is the paradox—humility is ridiculed until the absence of it brings the walls crashing down.
From Accra to Abidjan, from Lagos to Kigali, the African intellectual tradition has wrestled with this tension between quiet virtue and visible gain. Ghana’s Kofi Awoonor, in his reflections on communal life, wrote, “The tree that bends survives the storm, but the one that refuses to bow will be broken by the wind.” Here lies the ancient counsel: humility is not servility, it is survival; loyalty is not slavery, it is seed-keeping. But in our present culture, where the market of recognition trades in noise and spectacle, these truths are buried beneath the applause for the brash.
To say “loyalty doesn’t pay” is to measure worth only in coins and contracts, not in the currency of trust, honour, and memory. The Senegalese thinker Cheikh Anta Diop urged Africans to reclaim “the ethics that build a people before the politics that break them.” It is this ethic—rooted in humility and loyalty—that stitches the fragile fabric of our communities. Without it, ambition becomes predatory, leadership becomes self-feeding, and success becomes a funeral procession in disguise.
The tragedy is that too many measure the value of these virtues by immediate return. But as the Akan proverb from Ghana says, “The hen knows it will die, yet it still scratches the ground for its chicks.” Loyalty often operates beyond the witness of the moment; humility plants forests in the dark, long before the next generation strolls in their shade. Even in the competitive heat of politics, those who mocked humility often return years later to seek its shelter.
In Côte d’Ivoire, the late President Félix Houphouët-Boigny reminded a restless postcolonial generation, “You cannot lead a people you do not first serve.” This is the unmarketable truth—real service begins low, not loud. And those who despise such beginnings may find themselves celebrated for a moment, but forgotten for a lifetime.
History keeps receipts. Those who rise on the scaffolding of arrogance collapse with it. But those who climb slowly on the ladders of loyalty leave something enduring. In a continent still nursing the wounds of leaders who loved power more than people, humility is not a weakness—it is a form of resistance against the tyranny of self.
If the world today is too impatient to see the profit of loyalty and humility, Africa must remember her own wisdom: the baobab does not grow overnight, but it outlives the grass. And in the end, the mockers of loyalty will find that their harvest came too quickly—and their barns, too empty.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
08152094428 (SMS Only)
