Worldview Through Fiction #2: The Argument and the Machine

A lot of political discussion now happens online. We are able to make arguments about corruption, criticise a government, defend a candidate or explain a political issue to thousands of people in a few minutes. As a result of social media, political expression has become very cheap. What it has not made cheap however is political power.

I keep thinking about “A Man of the People” because Achebe understood this distinction long before any of us had social media. Odili can see what is wrong with Chief Nanga, but Odili himself is not clean. His politics is mixed up with humiliation, revenge, jealousy and ambition. Even when he joins Max in helping to form the Common People’s Convention, you as the reader are never completely sure where his political convictions end and his personal motives begin.

Nanga, meanwhile, has something different. He has money, patronage, political connections and access to the state. This gives him a robust political machine. That difference is what interests me, because I don’t think the problem with modern political discussion is that people are no longer political, if anything people are more exposed to politics now more than ever(particularly in a Nigerian context). Having something to say, getting people to act together and building something that can keep acting after the moment has passed, is unfortunately where our modern political discourse is lacking.

I don’t mean that online politics is fake. That is a simple and I would argue naive way of looking at things. Social media is a powerful tool and we have seen over the years that it can be used to expose things, spread information, connect people and mobilise them. EndSARS is an obvious example. Online networks helped to turn a political grievance into a real-world movement, and organisations such as the Feminist Coalition built systems for raising and distributing money, providing food, water, medical assistance and legal support. Research on online activism also does not support the simple idea that online participation just replaces offline participation. The two can reinforce each other.

The argument therefore is not that people post instead of doing. The more interesting question is what happens afterwards. You can speak, you can mobilise people around a moment. But can you build something that is still there afterwards?

For the sake of clarity. By mobilisation, I mean getting people to act together around a particular moment or objective. And, by durable organisation, I mean a structure with people, roles, rules and resources that can continue coordinating action after the people who started it have left. It could be in the form of a political party, a union, a civic group or something much smaller. What matters is that it can keep going and accumulate capacity.

Anton Jäger has a useful phrase for part of this problem: “re-politicization without re-institutionalization.” His argument is mainly about the political development of Western societies, so I am not trying to use him as though he has already explained Nigeria. I am borrowing the distinction because it gives me a useful way of thinking about the gap. The main gist of his book “hyperpolitics” is that you can have a lot of political activity without having the institutions to carry that activity forward. And there are really three different things people might want from politics, a concession, an office, or something that continues to represent them after the original issue has passed. Mobilisation can get you the first, but the other two are harder.

The Price of the Ballot

The internet has not removed the formal gate to electoral politics. Under the current constitutional system, candidates for the presidency, governorships and the relevant legislative offices have to be members of and sponsored by political parties. Independent candidacy has been proposed as part of the constitutional amendment process, but it is still not the law governing the 2027 election. So you can build an supportive audience without having a route onto the ballot. Then there is the real price of the ballot. For 2027, the APC announced a combined ₦100 million for its presidential expression-of-interest and nomination fees. Its House of Representatives fees total ₦10 million. For women, youths and persons with disabilities, the party announced a concession on nomination fees, but even with that reduction, a qualifying young House aspirant by my calculations would still be paying ₦5.5 million in expression-of-interest and nomination fees. And again, that is only the beginning.

Research on Nigerian party politics has documented the importance of money in party primaries, along with delegate influence, godfatherism, clientelism and weak internal party democracy, so there is a difference between the cost of entering the political conversation and the cost of entering politics itself. Visibility can be gained very cheaply, while becoming a viable candidate is another matter entirely.

And then there is the physical side of elections. INEC currently lists 176,846 polling units across Nigeria. Political parties can appoint agents to those polling units, and the election itself still depends on people being physically present at places where votes are cast, counted and recorded. A post can reach millions of people almost instantly, but It cannot stand in a polling unit. It sounds obvious, but I think it matters because we often talk about political reach as if reach and political capacity are the same thing. The fact of the matter is that they aren’t.

The Organisation Problem

EndSARS is where this argument gets more complicated. The protests are one of the clearest reasons I don’t want to say that people have become good at posting and bad at doing. People did things. The Feminist Coalition had been formed in July 2020, before the protests. So when EndSARS happened, the moment found an organisation that already had people, relationships and some capacity. By 15 October, the Coalition reported supporting 100 peaceful protests across 25 states, raising more than ₦62 million and spending on food, water, medical support and legal assistance.

The raising of funds and other important things that the coalition did in order to support the protests. Meant that the moment, being EndSARS did not have to start from zero. It found an already existing structure that could absorb it. And I think that is an important difference between mobilisation and organisation. Mobilisation can happen very quickly, organisation usually can’t. It needs money, it needs someone to handle the money, it needs people who know what they are doing, it needs records, logistics, relationships and some way of making decisions when people disagree. And once you have all of those things, you also become more exposed.

During EndSARS, accounts linked to people and groups associated with the protests were restricted. The Central Bank later obtained a court order covering 20 accounts. Its application described the accounts as being under investigation, while supporting documents referred to suspicions of terrorism financing. Those allegations were never tested in a final judgment, and the accounts were eventually unfrozen. Whatever conclusion someone reaches about the state’s justification, the larger point is simpler. Organisation creates things that other institutions can act on. A hashtag does not have a bank account,an organisation does. That is one of the less glamorous parts of politics. The more real your organisation becomes, the more real its vulnerabilities become too. And this creates another trade-off. Decentralisation can protect a movement from having one obvious leader who can be bought, arrested or pressured. But once the immediate moment passes, somebody still has to decide what happens next. Who controls the money? Who represents the group? Who negotiates? Who keeps the network together? The Avoidance of centralisation can make a movement harder to capture, but It equally makes succession and continuity much harder. And I don’t think there is a clear answer to this problem.

Constituencies Without Their Own Vehicle

Then there is another problem. What happens when a political constituency exists, but does not control the institution through which it has to compete? Peter Obi is a good example here, not because I want to make a judgement about him, but rather his political movements across parties make the institutional problem easier to see. In 2023, Obi received 6,101,533 votes under the Labour Party. That is a very large constituency, but it was not itself a political party. It operated through the Labour Party’s legal and organisational structure. Obi later joined the African Democratic Congress and left it several months later on the grounds that similar circumstances that gave rise to a toxic environment in the Labour Party were becoming apparent in the ADC. He was eventually adopted by the Nigeria Democratic Congress as its presidential candidate for 2027. Again, I’m not particularly interested here in whether those decisions were right or wrong. The point is that a following is not automatically an organisation. The people can be there. The support can be there. The attention can definitely be there (especially in Obi’s case). But the vehicle still matters. A party has officers, it has rules, it has legal status, it has money, it has internal disputes, it has people who can make decisions when the central political personality isn’t in the room. And the NDC is a good example of how much that infrastructure matters. Its legal recognition and political identity have themselves been caught up in litigation. So even the vehicle is not something you can just pick up and drive. And that brings me back to Odili,he has the argument. Nanga has the machinery. The internet has given a lot more people the ability to make the argument. It has not given everyone the machinery.

And then there is me

This is where the personal-branding question starts to bother me. When I post about corruption, I am making a point about corruption. I am also telling people who I am, that doesn’t make the point fake. Odili’s ambition doesn’t make his disgust with Nanga imaginary either. It just makes his politics harder to separate from himself. The same thing can happen online. Someone can genuinely believe something and still benefit from being known as the person who believes it. A political post can communicate an idea and build the reputation of the person making it at the same time. And I think that is where we have to be careful, because the internet gives us a very visible reward for being politically expressive. You can build a reputation and people can start to know what you care about. You can become the person who “talks about” a particular issue, and that can eventually become useful in very real ways. The question is whether the political identity is becoming more developed than the political capacity behind it. It is very easy to build the former. The latter takes a lot longer and a lot more work. And maybe this is why the question I keep coming back to is not: Was the post good? It is: What happens after the post? Does it connect somebody to an organisation? Does it create a relationship? Does it help raise money? Does it teach someone something they can actually use? Does it make people do something together? Or does it just become another piece of the identity I am building around myself as a final year political Science and International Relations Student?

In conclusion, I don’t think every post needs to produce an organisation. Sometimes a post is just a post. Writing matters and Public argument matter as well. Political movements equally need ways of communicating. But communication is not the same thing as organisation. And mobilisation is not the same thing as permanence. That is probably the part I think we need to be more honest about. The internet has made being heard incredibly easy. It has not made political organisation equally easy. And neither has it removed the cost of party membership, nomination, campaigning, logistics, fundraising or maintaining an organisation over time. It has not changed the fact that eventually somebody has to control the vehicle. Maybe this is why “A Man of the People” keeps coming back to me. Odili like many of us can see the problem, articulate it, and can even organise an opposition. But Nanga understands something that is much older than social media. Politics is not only about who has the better argument. It is also about who has the money, relationships, institutions and machinery to make that argument consequential. And maybe that is the real question we should be asking after we post something political. Not just who saw it. Not just who agreed.

But:

What is still there when the screen goes dark?

What did we build after?

Thanks for reading. Write back: we read every letter.