No Messiahs, No Saviours, No Saints

Andrew Kintum

Although I am young, my memory fails me sometimes, but I can never forget the 2015 election campaign. I remember playing with friends on an open field and hearing a humming noise above me. I look up to see an aeroplane trailing a banner: “Vote Buhari/Osinbajo.” Children and adults alike were shouting as they ran alongside the plane. Excitement. That was the prevailing atmosphere.

It was not just the aeroplane that got people excited, the candidate Buhari did. Unfathomable now, but he did. People from every stratum of society were in awe: from the elite writing columns about why they were supporting the retired General despite his past “sins,” to my jovial security guard bellowing Sai Baba. There were posts upon posts about how Nigeria was going to turn a corner. The excitement was so massive it could have been mistaken for hysteria.
There is a term that best encapsulates the excitement of that season: FeBuhari, a portmanteau of February, the month of love & the month of the election (initially), and Buhari. To vote for Buhari was to believe in Nigeria again. And people believed, completely, passionately, with their whole hearts.

Which is why I find it maddening when people attempt to revise that history. Some have argued that Buhari’s victory was predicated solely on the failure of President Jonathan, that they did not vote Buhari in, but voted Jonathan out. But I was there. I saw the posts, I saw the campaign, I heard the chants. There was complete, wholehearted belief in Change. Every banner, every bumper sticker, every conversation, “Vote for Change”. It was THE slogan of the election. It cut across tribe, class, and religion.

For Change, Nigerians went to the polling booths to vote for Buhari with genuine, fervent hope. The incorruptible General. The messiah who was going to purge corruption from Nigeria. No heed was paid to concerns about his earlier stint as military ruler. None of it mattered. That is what messiah politics does to a people. It blinds them.

Jump eight years forward. It is 2023. Buhari is concluding a thoroughly lacklustre administration. The economy is in tatters, and the promises of Change lie in ruins. I do not think I have enough words to express how underwhelming, lackadaisical, and ultimately damaging the entire administration was, and yet, somehow, impossibly, Nigerians found another messiah.
The Obidient Movement was born. The movement was massive, perhaps even more participatory than 2015. People did not just vote; they bought campaign merchandise, set up donation pools, volunteered, canvassed, and organised. A term was coined for the supporters, “Obidients”, a name so thoroughly embedded that even now it feels wrong to spell the word obedient correctly.

The energy of the youths, still raw from the EndSARS protests of 2020, was unmistakable. And it is worth noting the irony: my generation that had called itself the leaderless Sọ̀rọ̀ sókè generation, the same us who said we needed no single figurehead, ended up placing all our eggs squarely in one man’s basket.

What did those two men have in common? One from the North, one from the South. One, a former military ruler who had contested the presidency three times; the other, a two-term governor and former vice-presidential candidate. On the surface, they are different figures. But strip it back, and the architecture of their appeal is almost identical.
And let us not forget Jonathan. Run, Jonathan, run. The boy with no shoes who became president. His own mythologising was nearly as potent. Three messiahs. Three moments of collective ecstasy. Three profound disappointments, or, in Obi’s case, a dream that many still refuse to let go of.

At the core of the appeal of all three men was the same thing: their perceived stance on corruption. Nigeria’s relationship with corruption is long, bitter, and deeply personal. According to the Corruption Perception Index, Nigeria consistently ranks among the most corrupt in the world. Nigerians know this. We feel it every day. And so, when a candidate comes along who seems to embody the possibility of a corruption-free Nigeria, the reaction is not mere political enthusiasm. It is something closer to a religious revival. Politicians understand this, presenting themselves as the anointed one, only to exploit the people further.

Our search for salvation has not been limited to politicians. I remember, during EndSARS, the desperate push for UN intervention, the petitions and the social media campaigns directed at international bodies. After the massacre and the cover-up that followed, we should have learned what we should perhaps have already known: we are on our own.
2023 brought a different kind of saviour-seeking. Inundated with false stories about Ibrahim Traoré, the young military ruler of Burkina Faso, a section of Nigerians began clamouring for military intervention, a strongman to sweep away the corrupt politicians and restore order. I, too, want order, but I ask that we really think through what the propagandists are selling: that our military, afflicted by the same widespread corruption and indiscipline, will somehow produce a high-ranking officer of integrity. An officer who can stage a coup, consolidate power, and still choose to do right by us? That is not hope. That is fantasy. Military rule has been tried in Nigeria. Repeatedly. Each time, it left corruption more entrenched and living standards worse. Why would it be different now?

Then there is the call for revolution. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Burn it down, start fresh, purge the system and let something new grow. I understand the anger behind it. I share some of it. But the truth is that beneath the surface, the argument falls apart. Its core premise is that the rot is confined to the ruling class, that ordinary Nigerians are fundamentally different and being held hostage by a small cabal of monsters at the top. That is not true. I once joked with my uncle that if we were to select Nigerians randomly to make up a new National Assembly, we would not see a significant drop in corruption. Corruption in Nigeria is a societal condition that has seeped into everything: our institutions, universities, hospitals, the private sector, and civil service. The notion that we can depose our political class and watch corruption disappear with them is a misdiagnosis. A revolution comes with enormous risks, and even if successful, it only treats the fever and ignores the infection.

And look at the countries that have attempted violent revolution. Egypt. Libya. The instability unleashed continues to shape and distort their political economies years later. A revolution, in the best case, removes one set of leaders. It does not remove the conditions that produced them. And in the worst case, it becomes an opportunity for the most ruthless and opportunistic actors to seize power under the banner of liberation; the ultimate messiah complex playing out in real time.

Let’s talk about my favourite “solution”, Japa. For a while, migration has felt like a reasonable answer. Get out while you can. Build a life where the system works. While I cannot condemn anyone for wanting a better life, the global sentiment on immigration has shifted. We are seeing country after country tighten its borders, and the trend does not look to be slowing down. Very soon, many of us will have to come to a realisation: Nigeria is not just where we are from. It is all we have. Running away was never a permanent solution.

So no, we cannot pin our hopes on a single political actor. We can’t pin them on Japa. We cannot pin them on a revolution or on a coup d’état. We cannot pin them on Trump’s tweets or UN interventions. There are no Messiahs, no Saviours, no Saints.

There is a version of this story where Nigerians are written off as completely apathetic, a people who have checked out, who cannot be bothered, who will not show up. I do not buy it. The FeBuhari phenomenon, the Obidient movement, the EndSARS protests; these are not the expressions of an apathetic people. When Nigerians believe in something, they are ferocious. They debate, they volunteer, they donate, they organise, they march. The passion is there.
The problem is the system. It is not a small ask to tell Nigerians to show up faithfully and enthusiastically after recurring disappointments. The apathy that sets in is not laziness; it is the exhaustion from helplessness. It is what happens when people learn, again and again, that the rules of the game are rigged, that their votes may not count, that the man they die for today will betray them tomorrow.

But here is where I have to be candid with you, and push back a little.
That the system is broken is not a reason to sit out. It is all the more reason to show up. The system will not fix itself.
So what do we do?

We must first abandon the messiah framework entirely. Not reluctantly, not as a tactical concession, but as a matter of principle. The search for a messiah is antithetical to democracy. Democracy does not ask you to find a perfect leader and hand them your fate. It asks you to elect representatives, hold them accountable, remove them when they fail, and participate constantly in governance. The idea of a passive citizenry waiting for an anointed one is not just ineffective; it is a fundamental misreading of what democracy is.

There is a concept I think about often: political innocence. It describes a citizenry that sees itself as innocent of the political challenges of its state, mainly because they are genuinely ignorant of their role as the vanguard of democracy. Politicians love this innocence. It keeps the people passive. It keeps the status quo intact. The price of liberty, as the saying goes, is eternal vigilance, and vigilance is not a four-year sprint to the ballot box. It is a permanent state of engagement.
We need to wake up! We are the vanguards of our democracy, and we are not doing a great job. We need to be honest with ourselves. Yes, the candidates we have are flawed, the system we are working within is broken, and the progress on offer is slow and unspectacular. None of that changes what must be done. There is work, and we need to do it.

Part of that honesty is confronting how narrowly we have defined the problem. We have pinned Nigeria’s salvation to a single office, a single face, a single election. Every four years, the entire weight of a nation of 200 million people gets loaded onto one man’s shoulders, and we hold our breath. We treat the presidency as though it were a miracle that, if only the right person occupied it, it would cascade down, and the road, and the schools, and the health centres would be fixed. It will not. It can not. The obsession with Aso Rock is itself part of the problem. It is messiah thinking in a different costume.
The energy we reserve for presidential elections needs to come down the chain, all the way down. Down to the senator, the House rep, the State HoA, the LGA chairman, and even the ward councillor. Accountability cannot be a once-in-four-years event directed at one office. It has to be permanent and distributed.

And while we are being honest, let us say the difficult truth: God will not send us a leader. I believe in the power of prayer, but a people that outsources its political responsibility to divine intervention will wait forever. The work of governance is human work. It is unglamorous, incremental, and deeply imperfect, but it belongs to us. It has always belonged to us.
The egg must come first. We cannot wait for the perfect conditions to participate. We must build participation itself, from the ground up. We must build in the absence of ideal conditions, precisely because the conditions will only improve through participation. Grassroots politics. Local government engagement. Government accountability. These are not glamorous acts, and they do not produce the rush of an aeroplane trailing a banner across the sky. But they are what actually move the needle.

Progress will not arrive with a snap of the fingers. It will require people who are in it for the long haul; people who have deprogrammed themselves from the need for a dramatic rescue and accepted the harder, quieter work of democratic citizenship.

We do not need a messiah. We need millions of Nigerians who understand their power, who refuse to surrender it, to show up, again and again and again. That is the only valid salvation on offer. And honestly? It is enough.

Andrew Kintum, based in Lagos, Nigeria, is the Executive Director of PoliZ NG, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering youths to actively participate in governance