The Sound of Our Own Silence

There is a particular kind of grief that does not announce itself with tears. It sits quietly in the chest of a nation, disguised as patience, as endurance, as the famous Nigerian resilience we have learned to wear like a badge of honour. But sometimes resilience is not strength. Sometimes it is simply the exhaustion of a people who have stopped expecting anything to change, and so have stopped reacting when it doesn’t.

This is the grief I want to write about today. Not the grief of a bad economy, or a fallen currency, or another kidnapped schoolchild whose name will trend for two days and then vanish. I want to write about the grief of watching, in real time, the quiet dismantling of the very idea of checks and balances in Nigeria, and realising that most of us are simply sitting back, arms folded, watching it happen.

Look at what is unfolding before us. On the floor of the House of Representatives on July 9, 2026, a lawmaker rose to move a motion asking the President to answer questions on insecurity and the national budget. He was shouted down. Not by the executive he sought to question, but by his own colleagues, elected representatives of the people, who screamed “sit down” and “shut up” at a man doing the one thing the constitution asks of a legislature: to hold power accountable. It should have been a national scandal. Instead, it was a viral clip, a few days of outrage online, and then silence. On your mandate, indeed, they shall stand. But whose mandate is it serving anymore?

The judiciary tells a similar story, and I do not say this recklessly. It is opposition figures, civil society voices, and even senior lawyers who have been saying it publicly, in the press, on record, for months now: that the courts have become one more arena where political battles are pre-decided; that opposition parties have found themselves tangled in litigation and deregistration battles that critics describe as convenient and well-timed; that a presidential aide could reportedly warn an opposition figure to go to court and be “scattered,” and the judiciary’s silence in the face of such a statement was itself an answer. Whether one calls this capture or coincidence, the pattern has repeated often enough that ordinary Nigerians no longer walk into a courtroom expecting impartial justice. They walk in calculating whose side the bench is on. When a people stop believing the law will protect them, they do not become lawless. They become docile. They simply stop trying.

And what of civil society, that supposed conscience of the nation? The President himself, in his most recent Democracy Day address, called the National Assembly, the judiciary, the press, and civil society “the guardrails of our republic” and urged Nigerians to keep criticising him. It was a generous line, and perhaps a sincere one. But guardrails only matter if they can hold weight. When advocacy becomes proximity, when convenings become co-optation, when the loudest voices that once spoke truth to power now speak softly, carefully, gratefully, from inside the room, the guardrail has not disappeared. It has simply been repainted to match the walls it was meant to protect us from.

Meanwhile, security agencies that belong constitutionally to the Nigerian people are, by the account of lawyers and opposition figures alike, experienced by ordinary citizens as instruments of a person rather than protectors of a nation. And the opposition, battered by defections, court rulings, and internal collapse, watches its leaders threatened, its parties deregistered, its coalitions strangled in courtrooms, while the ruling party consolidates what analysts now openly describe as a near one-party dominance ahead of 2027.

I want to be honest about something else: some of the opposition’s wounds are self-inflicted. Poor judgment, internal rivalries, and strategic errors have made the ruling party’s task easier. Accountability, real accountability, has to hold every actor to the fire, not only the ones in power. But an opposition’s mistakes do not excuse the slow suffocation of the institutions meant to check that power in the first place. Both things are true at once, and a mature nation must be able to hold both truths without using one to erase the other.

So I return to where I began: the docility. Because none of this, not the shouting down of a lawmaker, not the whispered discomfort about captured courts, not the quiet fear that keeps ordinary Nigerians from speaking too loudly about power, none of it happens in a country that is truly watching. It happens in a country that has been trained, generation after generation, coup after coup, “settlement” after “settlement,” to expect that this is simply how power behaves here. We have inherited docility as an unspoken survival strategy, and it has kept many of us alive. But it is also, slowly, killing the republic.

I do not write this as despair. I write it as an act of refusal, refusal to let the docility become permanent, refusal to let silence be mistaken for consent. Accountability was never meant to be the sole burden of the National Assembly or the courts. It belongs, first, to citizens who refuse to look away. CSR REPORTERS exists because we believe institutions, corporate and public alike, should be tested against what they do, not what they say. Nigeria’s democracy is being tested right now, in full view, and the most urgent question is not whether power will overreach. Power almost always will. The question is whether we, the people it governs, will keep choosing to watch.

If your organisation wants to move from random CSR activities to structured, measurable impact, CSR REPORTERS helps organisations:

•  Conduct community needs assessments

•  Track and measure CSR impact

•  Document and report social investments

•  Communicate CSR efforts transparently and independently

Responsible business should not begin when companies become big. It should begin the day the business starts.