Over thirty years ago, Chinua Achebe summarised that our crisis of governance was ‘simply and squarely’ a failure of leadership.

Certainly, Achebe is right. But what we are rarely told, from primary school to adulthood, is that we also have a ‘success of followership’.

Most Nigerians of my generation and after have been taught to follow, to conform, and to revere the wisdom of existing political leadership. And now, there are people of my generation still out here proclaiming praise for the Tinubus, Atikus, El Rufais and Sarakis.

In this process, many have been moulded into groupthink identities – ethnic, religious, or political – that are convenient for the continuing rule of our political elite. The result of this political groupthink is what I call the success of followership.

While followership of humane norms has advantages, Nigeria’s norms are derived from a worldview that demands blind loyalty to hierarchical power structures.

Because of these norms, followers resist ideas for a better kind of governance as unrealistic, impractical, or radical.

Followership can be direct and sycophantic – the kind you see by Buharists here.

But, it can also be indirect and passive, a quiet resignation derived from the belief that rulers have the legitimacy to govern as they please - like you see in people who don't get why #EndSARS .

This second kind of followership is a more dangerous kind. People like these don't believe in or support Buhari, but they believe in the processes and institutions that sustain Buhari. They endure bad govt because they deeply believe in the system through which the govt emerged.

We may blame the failures of governance on the individual in power but, ultimately, the continuing power of that individual is still a product of the collective belief of the people.

To change a political system, you have to change what the people believe about it.

The colonisers understood this. They ruled Nigeria for a hundred years not just by force, but also by imposing their own ideas that asserted the supremacy of the white man as fact.

Colonial rule collapsed when enough people – locally and globally – stopped believing those ideas.

Similarly, it is the belief in the legitimacy of our ‘democracy’ that continues to power the dysfunction in Nigeria.

But what we have in Nigeria is not a democracy, what we have is merely a civilian autocracy; a resource generation system made for the benefit of a small elite.

To change our political system, we must change our belief in the legitimacy of the system. We will not have the kind of leadership we desire until we get rid of followership of, and belief in, the legitimacy of a system that continues to produce and sustain dysfunctional govts.

Nigeria cannot work until we build a true democracy under the guidance of a transformative constitution that has been negotiated by the people through their own neutrally selected representatives and then affirmed by a popular referendum.

#RewriteTheConstitution