Tunjiogunrinu.com

In Nigeria’s volatile political ecosystem, corrupt leaders have long been vilified as the primary architects of national failure. Yet a more insidious force often escapes scrutiny: the dogmatic political follower.

These individuals, bound by blind ethnic, religious, or partisan loyalty, defend their leaders with unyielding zeal, irrespective of evidence of graft, policy failure, or outright incompetence. This fanaticism is not mere support; it is the structural reinforcement that allows corruption to thrive unchecked.

Paradoxically, dogmatic followers are more dangerous than the corrupt leaders they worship because they create the enabling environment for perpetual underperformance. They do not merely tolerate bad governance; they normalize, defend, and immortalize it, thereby crumbling the foundations of accountability that any democracy requires.

Why Followers Are More Dangerous Than LeadersCorrupt leaders are transactional actors. They loot, mismanage, and underdeliver because they calculate that the cost of doing so is lower than the reward.

But without a critical mass of dogmatic followers, their power evaporates. A leader’s corruption can be exposed, challenged in court, or punished at the ballot box only if the electorate demands it. Dogmatic followers remove that demand entirely. They transform politics from a performance-based contract into a cult of personality.

This danger manifests in four lethal ways:

1. Electoral Impunity: Followers vote along primordial lines (“our son/daughter”, “our party”, “our faith”) rather than on deliverables. Once a leader secures this bloc, performance becomes optional. The leader knows re-election is guaranteed, not earned.

2. Suppression of Accountability: Any criticism—whether from opposition, civil society, or even objective data—is branded as “hate speech”, “tribalism”, or “sponsored attack”. Social media armies, sponsored influencers, and street thugs mobilized by followers silence dissent more effectively than any secret police.

3. Institutional Capture: When followers defend every scandal, institutions (EFCC, judiciary, legislature) lose the political will to act. Why investigate when the leader’s base will riot or vote against any probe?

4. Cycle of Mediocrity: Followers reward loyalty over competence. This signals to aspiring politicians that the path to power is sycophancy and ethnic mobilization, not vision or integrity. The talent pool shrinks; the rot deepens.In short, corrupt leaders are symptoms. Dogmatic followers are the disease. Remove the followers’ fanaticism, and even the most venal leader is forced to reform or fall. Protect the followers’ dogma, and no amount of leadership change alters the outcome.

How This Has Crumbled Nigeria’s Political SystemNigeria’s Fourth Republic was built on the promise of democratic accountability. Instead, it has devolved into a patronage democracy sustained by dogmatic blocs. From the return to civilian rule in 1999, politics has been dominated by “godfatherism”, zoning formulas, and ethnic solidarity rather than ideological or performance-driven competition.

The result is a hollowed-out system:- Eroded Opposition: The opposition rarely functions as a check; it merely waits its turn to inherit the same loyal, uncritical base. Both major parties (APC and PDP) have perfected the art of weaponizing followers’ emotions.

Policy Paralysis: Reforms that hurt in the short term (subsidy removal, forex unification, security operations) are either abandoned midway or defended irrationally by the incumbent’s base, while the opposition’s base rejects them purely on partisan grounds.

Evidence-based governance dies.

Public Cynicism: Citizens who once demanded better now shrug and say “na dem turn”. Voter apathy rises, turnout falls, and the democratic mandate weakens.

Economic and Social Decay: Decades of this dynamic have produced Africa’s largest population living in multidimensional poverty, persistent insecurity, and a brain drain of epic proportions. The political system no longer selects for solutions; it selects for survival of the most tribal.

How Dogmatism Encourages the Present Federal Government to Underperform:

The current federal administration (as of 2026) operates in an environment where its core supporters have largely suspended critical judgment. Economic reforms—however necessary—have come with severe short-term pain: inflation, currency volatility, and rising cost of living.

A healthy democracy would see the ruling party’s base demanding faster results, better targeting of palliatives, and accountability for implementation failures. Instead, dogmatic followers frame every hardship as “sabotage by enemies” or “the price of inherited mess”, shielding the government from the pressure that should force course correction.

This creates a perverse incentive structure:- The administration faces minimal internal pushback from its own supporters.- Opposition criticism is dismissed as “political”, not substantive.

Media and analysts who highlight underperformance (rising debt servicing, persistent fuel queues in some areas, security gaps, or implementation gaps in key initiatives) are attacked not on facts but on loyalty grounds.Consequently, the government operates with reduced urgency. When followers treat every policy as an article of faith rather than a testable intervention, the incentive to deliver measurable outcomes evaporates. Underperformance is not punished; it is rationalized.

The system rewards narrative management over results. The Way Forward Breaking this cycle requires a cultural shift among the electorate: from tribal loyalty to performance citizenship. Citizens must demand that leaders earn support daily, not inherit it by identity. Until dogmatic followers become critical stakeholders rather than cheerleaders, Nigeria’s political system will remain a revolving door of elite capture, and every federal government—present or future—will find underperformance politically sustainable.

This analysis is credited to; Tolulope Ogunbiyi.