Nigeria is a country where “the struggle”, the altruistic, strategic, and organised agitation for an egalitarian society has no retirement age. Those who laboured to awaken our collective conscience should, by now, have withdrawn with the dignity of fulfilled duty. In a just society, they would have retired not into silence, but into peace because the battles they fought would already have been won.

But Nigeria is not that society.

Figures like Kongi have given their quota. Their sacrifices are not in doubt. If such men chose silence, they could not be begrudged. Indeed, it would then fall to those of us with more time, more to gain, and more to lose to continue the agitation for a better nation. Elders should not be crushed for choosing rest.

However, when an elder chooses not to retire, when he continues to speak, then conscience demands continuity. Moral authority is not static; it must remain aligned with the values that earned it.

This is where the unease begins.

Kongi’s categorical declaration that the 2023 election was free and fair, anchored on claims that his organisation supervised and validated the process created a rupture. Not because elders cannot err, but because that pronouncement appeared to side with power against lived experience. For many Nigerians, it felt less like oversight and more like abdication. It did not erase his legacy, but it blurred the moral clarity that once defined it.

It is against this background that his recent intervention must be read.

When Kongi drew attention to the battalion of security reportedly surrounding the President’s son, at a time the President claimed to have banned VIP security, and suggested that the President should send his son to quell insurrection rather than deploy the military, reactions were mixed. Some saw it as Kongi finding his way back to the heart of the people. Others saw it as remission. Either way, it became another mirror held up to what Nigeria has become.

We now live in a country where power reproduces itself through unofficial offices: the office of the First Lady, the office of the First Son, the office of the First Daughter, and, if we are not careful, soon the office of the First Pet.

The family’s growing prominence increasingly evokes a familiar historical template—Ceaușescu’s Romania, though that is a symposium discussion for another day. Ceaușescu, at least, did not pretend: he conferred power openly, Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, his wife and children embedded in the state, each bearing official emblems of authority. Our own version appears more cautious: testing the waters, normalising the project without naming it, turning family dynasty into state culture before turning it into law.

It was a First Daughter who recently stormed a state rich in tradition and custom to “anoint” a market head, with scant regard for local norms. It was a First Lady who recently threatened a governor with public humiliation. And the President himself once publicly derided an entire state before one of its kings, boasting of wealth superior to the state’s commonwealth. He is also the President who once dismissed a sitting governor of a prominent state as “eleyi”, “this inconsequential one” in his unforgettable “emi lo kan” jab.

The pattern is unmistakable.

Let us be fair: the President understands power. He understands heirship. He knows that his son and daughter are heirs to the throne of the state and political influence, just as he still holds uncanny sway in Lagos and has, since 1999, mastered the architecture of succession. It is precisely because of this understanding that he will never take Kongi’s advice to send his son into any theatre of insurrection.

You do not send the Crown Prince to war. He is the light of the nation, the starlight of Nigeria, to be preserved by all means necessary, because, in this logic, to preserve the President’s son is to preserve Nigeria itself. That, perhaps, explains the battalion of armoured men and women that trail him everywhere. My Lord, Kongi sir, when last did you see such security around a refuse dump? The higher the glory, the higher the security. And I am not sure, sir, that you are a descendant of the wise men from the East who discerned, from afar, the coruscating star of Jesus in the full weight of His majestic glory.

I repeat with fear and trembling you do not send the Crown Prince to war. Not even a Nobel laureate of Kongi’s calibre will lure me into uttering such sacrilegious blasphemy against His Majesty, the Crown Prince, odindi, the President’s son. And Kongi must not forget the old wisdom: “omo olomo la n ran ni se dé tórú tórú.” Nature, too, abhors double entry: why send the Crown Prince to quell insurrection when Nigerians have already sent their children? Hundreds were taken. Some were negotiated back. Many remain missing weeks later. Those children are not princes or princesses; they are commoners. And commoners, in this system, are forgettable.

That is why children write examinations by candle and torchlight after papers meant for the afternoon arrive late into the night, in classrooms without electricity. That is why hospitals overflow with children without care. That is why nearly 20 million children are out of school, and those who remain are barely learning. These are the children we call the hope of tomorrow, even as we treat them like disposable footnotes today.

Nigerians have already sent their children. They were forced to. They are the grass in the proverb, trampled while elephants debate posture. Their destinies are quietly rerouted into oblivion.

So when we ask, who shall we send? the honest answer is this: the children have already gone.

Who will follow?
Who will stop the bleeding?

On that question, I defer to Kongi, the man of letters, the literary giant, the Nobel laureate to give us the words.

Do have an INSPIRED week with your families.