Opinion
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma
LET me tell you about the Bolekaja. For those who never had the pleasure—or the trauma—of riding one, the Bolekaja was the mythical contraption that ferried Nigerians from the villages to the cities, from poverty to the promise of something better.
It was a rickety lorry, painted in colours that announced its audacity from a kilometre away, overloaded with passengers, their goats, their chickens, their entire lives stuffed into a space designed for half the number. The driver—a man of infinite self-confidence and zero mechanical training—would stuff the vehicle until human beings were hanging off the sides, clinging to the roof, their knuckles white with terror and something that passed for hope.
The Bolekaja had no suspension worth speaking of. It had no seatbelts, no airbags, no pretence of engineering. What it had was momentum and a driver who had decided, against all evidence, that the vehicle would reach its destination. The wheels fell off with metronomic regularity. The engine overheated. The tyres burst on roads that were themselves an argument for turning back. The driver pulled over, the passengers got out, and together—because what choice did they have?—they pushed. They fixed what they could with string, prayer, and the particular Nigerian genius for improvisation. And then they climbed back on. Because the Bolekaja, for all its murderous inadequacy, was going somewhere. It was the only ride in town.
Before I go further, I owe the word itself its due, because the word is doing more work in this essay than mere decoration, and a reader who does not know its blood and bones will miss half of what I am trying to say.
Bolekaja is Yoruba. It is not one word but a compressed sentence—bọ́ lé kájà—which translates, roughly and vividly, as “come down, let us fight.” It was not the lorry’s official name. No manufacturer stamped it on a chassis plate. It was a nickname, earned the hard way, on the roads of Lagos and the western towns from the 1950s through the early 1980s, before the molue and the danfo took over the trade.
The Bolekaja—also known along the West African coast as the “Mammy Wagon”—was a wooden-bodied lorry, its cargo bed converted into a passenger carriage with two facing rows of benches running the length of the vehicle and sometimes a third row down the middle, so that passengers travelled staring into each other’s faces for the length of the journey. A conductor rode at the rear, working a bell-string that signalled the driver to stop or go, and it was the conductor’s unhappy job to collect fares in a vehicle so tightly packed—licensed for roughly thirty-nine souls but routinely made to carry forty-five, fifty, sometimes more—that every collection was a small war. Elbows were thrown. Tempers, already worn thin by heat and closeness and the indignity of the fare itself, snapped. And when they snapped, someone would shout the challenge that gave the vehicle its name: get down from the lorry, and let us settle this with our fists, because there is no room to settle it any other way while we are still on board.
That, right there, is the first gift the word gives us. The Bolekaja was named not for its route, not for its driver, not for its destination, but for its fights. It was, from birth, a vehicle whose defining feature was the violence that erupted inside it when too many people were made to occupy too little space under the authority of someone collecting money from them.
Nigerians of a certain age remember the wooden proverbs painted along the lorry’s flanks—”Man Proposes, God Disposes,” “No Telephone To Heaven,” “No Money, No Friend,” “Simplicity Is A Talent”—aphorisms of resignation and hard-won wisdom, hand-lettered by drivers who understood, better than any political scientist, that they were operating a vehicle of managed chaos and needed philosophy on the outside to survive the war on the inside. When I call Nigerian democracy a Bolekaja, I am not merely reaching for a picturesque image of rickety transport. I am naming a system in which citizens are packed in far past capacity, in which the person collecting the fare answers to no one, and in which the built-in mechanism for resolving grievance is not the ballot, not the court, not the ombudsman—it is the shout to come down and fight, because there was never enough room inside the vehicle to resolve anything peaceably. Every Bolekaja carried, welded into its own name, an admission that violence was its native language of dispute resolution. Ask yourself, honestly, whether that is not also a fair description of how disagreement gets settled in Nigerian public life today—in the streets, in the party primaries, in the “final solution” language of political thuggery, in the EFCC’s midnight visits. We have not left the Bolekaja. We have simply upholstered it and given it an Instagram account.
The second gift the word gives us is generational memory. The Bolekaja was banned from Lagos roads in the early 1980s, replaced first by the molue—the yellow-and-black Mercedes 911 flatbed with a bus body welded on, itself no stranger to shouting matches—and eventually by the danfo minibus that still rattles through Lagos traffic today. But banning the vehicle did not retire the word. “Bolekaja” survived in the language as shorthand for any institution, any relationship, any negotiation defined by overcrowding, hostility, and the absence of a civil channel for complaint.
Nigerians still invoke it—in newspaper columns about a national carrier’s shouting match with a passenger, in church sermons about forgiveness lest one’s “Bolekaja” never reach its destination, in ordinary conversation about any workplace or marketplace where people are packed in too tight and treated too roughly. The word outlived the wooden lorry once the molue took over the trade because the condition it described—too many people, too little dignity, too little room to disagree without combat—outlived it too. That is precisely the inheritance I am invoking when I hang the word over Bola Tinubu’s Nigeria. The specific lorry is gone. The specific condition is not. It has simply been re-registered under new plates: Renewed Hope.
Now look at us. I am not speaking rhetorically. Look. At. Us. We have taken democracy—the most beautiful and expensive idea in the history of human governance, an idea paid for in the blood of martyrs across the world and specifically in this country with the blood of June 12, with the exile of NADECO patriots, with the prison years of every man and woman who said no to the generals—and we have turned it into a Bolekaja. We have constructed a ramshackle vehicle held together by duct tape, denial, and the desperate hope that we will reach our destination before the whole thing collapses into the Nigerian dust. We climb onto this democracy every four years, PVCs clutched like lifelines, chanting “change” and “renewed hope” and “next level” as if the incantations will keep the wheels on. And when the vehicle breaks down—when the elections are rigged, when the judiciary delivers judgements in defiance of its own superior courts, when the economy detonates the savings of a generation, when the bandits take over the highways, when the hunger becomes a physical presence that sits at your table uninvited—we get out, we push, we fix what we can with protest and prayer, and we climb back on. Because this Bolekaja democracy, for all its criminal inadequacy, is the only ride in town. It is going somewhere. At least, that is what the driver tells us. And he tells us this from the front seat, through a window he has tinted to avoid seeing the passengers in the back.
The driver is the key to understanding the Bolekaja democracy. In the old days, the Bolekaja driver was a man of the people. He had ridden the vehicle himself, had hung off the sides, had pushed it when it broke down in the rain. He understood the journey because he had lived it. But something happens to men when they take the wheel. Something about the steering column, the gear shift, the engine note—something about the particular physics of control—changes a man. The Bolekaja driver discovers that the vehicle can be turned into a business. He discovers that he can charge more, carry fewer passengers, and pocket the difference. He discovers that he can take the long route, the route that passes through his village, his uncle’s farm, his brother’s shop. He discovers that the vehicle, which he was entrusted to drive for the passengers, can be redirected for his own purposes. And once he makes that discovery, the Bolekaja ceases to be a vehicle of hope. It becomes a vehicle of extraction. It ceases to exist to carry the passengers to their destination. It exists to enrich the driver. This is what has happened to Nigerian democracy. We have elected a driver who has forgotten that he was once a passenger.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu has become the Bolekaja driver of our democratic nightmare. He once rode the vehicle. He once marched. He was jailed and exiled and persecuted by the generals he opposed with the NADECO courage that a whole generation rightly honoured. He was, by his own subsequent account, a man of the people’s struggle. And then he got the wheel. And then he discovered “Emi Lokan”—it is my turn. Not the nation’s turn. Not the people’s turn. His turn. His turn to drive. His turn to decide the route. His turn to determine who gets on and who gets thrown off. His turn to break down the vehicle strategically and charge the passengers for the privilege of pushing it. The Bolekaja democracy, in the Tinubu era, has been converted from a public transport system into a private toll road. The passengers have become cargo. The destination—a Nigeria where justice is accessible, liberty is secure, and opportunity is abundant—has become a campaign slogan, a Democracy Day speech, a promise that dissolves, like the Bolekaja’s exhaust fumes, in the heat of the Nigerian morning.
There is a particular figure every Bolekaja passenger remembers, and I want to resurrect him here because Nigeria in 2026 has elevated him to statecraft: the agbero. The park tout. The man who does not own the vehicle, does not drive it, and performs no labour that any economist would recognise as productive—yet who cannot be bypassed, because he controls who boards and who is made to wait until the next lorry, or the one after that, or never. The agbero collects his “owo view,” his “settlement,” his tribute, at the park gate, before the journey even begins, and everyone pays because the alternative is standing at the roadside until dusk. Nigeria’s Bolekaja democracy has agberos in agbada now. They sit on boards. They chair committees. They wear the title “Distinguished” or “Right Honourable” in front of names that ordinary citizens once knew as area boys with better tailors. Every contract that must be “settled” before it is awarded, every appointment that must be “cleared” through a godfather who holds no office but holds every key, every governorship ticket that changes hands not on the strength of votes but on the strength of who paid the park fee at the party secretariat—these are agbero transactions conducted in Aso Rock’s vocabulary. The passenger does not choose the lorry. The agbero chooses the passenger. And the fare has nothing to do with the distance travelled and everything to do with how badly you need to reach the other side.
Speaking of Democracy Day speeches: on 12 June 2026, President Tinubu delivered an address to mark Nigeria’s “27 unbroken years of democratic governance.” He called upon Nigerians to “build a Nigeria united by a common purpose, strengthened by diversity, where justice is accessible, liberty is secure, and opportunity is abundant.” He spoke of democracy as the nation’s inheritance and its promise. The speech was beautifully crafted and morally fraudulent in equal measure. It was delivered by a president whose administration had, in the preceding months, used a Federal High Court to attempt the deregistration of opposition parties in defiance of a superior court’s stay order; had denied the ADC access to a public event centre in Abuja; had deployed the EFCC against opposition figures on allegations carefully timed to the election season; had signed an Electoral Act within 24 hours of its controversial passage—so fast that civil society groups who had spent months demanding amendments did not have time to formally respond. The speech about liberty and justice was delivered by a man whose government FCT Minister Nyesom Wike was using to shut the doors of public facilities against the political opposition. If irony were a crime in Nigeria, the 12 June 2026 address would carry a sentence of life imprisonment.
Let us examine that Electoral Act, because it is in the Electoral Act that the Bolekaja democracy reveals its most sophisticated mechanics. On 18 February 2026, Tinubu signed into law the Electoral Act 2026, within 24 hours of its controversial passage by both chambers of the National Assembly—a passage so rushed and contentious that it provoked protests in Abuja and a dramatic floor row in the Senate where Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe demanded a division on Clause 60. Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele described the Act as “a collective work that involves nearly all critical stakeholders” and “a consolidation and refinement of the country’s electoral governance framework.” On paper, the Act contains genuine reforms. It abolishes the notorious indirect primaries system that had turned party conventions into dollar auction houses where delegates were purchased wholesale. It mandates digital membership registers. It creates a dedicated fund for INEC to guarantee financial autonomy. It raises penalties for vote-buying and result manipulation to up to two years’ imprisonment. These are real reforms—the kind that, in a functioning democracy governed by people who meant them, would represent progress.
But the Bolekaja democracy, being what it is, has a twist in every reform. The Act’s most controversial provision—Clause 60—mandates electronic transmission of election results and prescribes a N500,000 fine or six months’ imprisonment for any presiding officer who wilfully frustrates the process. That sentence sounds strong. Here is the catch: Clause 60(3) allows the paper form (Form EC8A) to be relied upon where electronic transmission “fails.” In a country where electricity collapses with the regularity that Nigeria’s has demonstrated—where the national grid has failed dozens of times under this administration—the question of when electronic transmission “fails” is not a technical question. It is a political one. A presiding officer, a colluding state actor, a determined rigger, need only ensure that the system “fails” and the paper form takes over. Yiaga Africa, the Centre for Media and Society, the Kukah Centre, ElectHER, the Nigerian Women Trust Fund, and TAF Africa all demanded that electronic transmission be made mandatory, without exception—that the opt-out clause be removed. Their warnings were not incorporated. The Act was signed as it was. And the ADC has alleged that Sections 77 and 84 of the Act were specifically designed to weaken parties like theirs. The reform that looks like progress in the headline conceals the loophole that enables the old game in the footnote. This is the Bolekaja democracy: gleaming new paintwork on a chassis that the driver knows exactly how to break down when necessary.
I keep returning to those hand-painted Bolekaja proverbs—”Man Proposes, God Disposes”—because I think the Electoral Act 2026 deserves its own coat of that particular paint. Imagine it stencilled along the flank of the Nigerian state: “Reform Proposes, Clause 60(3) Disposes.” Every Bolekaja driver knew that a slogan painted boldly enough on the outside of a vehicle could distract a boarding passenger from the state of the engine underneath. INEC’s promise of electronic transmission is precisely such a slogan—bright, reassuring, photographed at every press briefing—bolted onto a chassis that still runs, when the moment calls for it, on the same paper-form engine that has carried every disputed Nigerian election since the Second Republic. The passenger reads the slogan and boards with confidence. Only somewhere past the halfway point of the journey does the passenger discover that the slogan was never a specification. It was decoration.
Now consider what former Secretary to the Government of the Federation Babachir Lawal said on Channels Television on 2 June 2026, shortly after resigning from the ADC. Asked whether President Tinubu was already positioned to win in 2027, Lawal’s answer was eight words that should haunt every Nigerian who cares about electoral democracy: “Landslide. He’ll rig everybody.” He elaborated: “If the parameter for winning the election in Nigeria is rigging, nobody can face Bola Tinubu in this country. If Atiku’s strength is in manipulating results, I wish him luck; he will meet the master rigger in front.” Babachir Lawal. Former SGF. A man who was inside the system, who has seen the architecture of Nigerian electoral power from the inside. He was not making an allegation. He was offering an assessment. He was telling us how the game works. He was describing the vehicle. And the vehicle he described is not the democracy that the martyrs of June 12 died for. It is the Bolekaja democracy—a democracy in which the driver knows exactly how to fix the route before the passengers board. The question I want to ask, and I want Nigerians to sit with, is this: if a man who served in the executive and has spent decades inside Nigeria’s political machinery says openly on a national television programme that the president is the “master rigger,” what does that tell us about an Electoral Act signed with such urgency that the ink was barely dry before the National Assembly dispersed? What does it tell us about an administration that speaks of electoral integrity in every speech while its own former allies describe it as a rigging machine?
What does it tell us? It tells us everything. It tells us that the Bolekaja democracy is not accidental. It is designed. The route is chosen. The mechanical failures are planned. The passengers who get thrown off are selected. And the driver, behind his tinted window, smiles at the passengers still clinging to the sides and says: “Renewed Hope.” The original Bolekaja at least had the decency to occasionally break down honestly. This version breaks down by design.
Let me descend from metaphor to Mama Kemi. She is a trader in Surulere, Lagos—a woman I shall call Kemi though you will recognise her immediately, because she is every market woman in every Nigerian city. She sells fabric. Or she did, until the naira’s collapse made importing cloth from China cost three times what it did in 2023. Her husband drives a tricycle—a keke—and he used to clear N8,000 on a good day after fuel. Now, with petrol at prices that have risen more than 488 per cent since May 2023, his daily fuel spend consumes most of his earnings. On the worst days, he makes nothing. On the best days, he makes enough for one meal. Kemi pulled her eight-year-old daughter from the private school the child had attended since nursery—not because the child was failing, but because school fees doubled while the family’s income halved. She has stopped eating breakfast so that her children can eat lunch. She is not an extreme case. She is the median case. She is what 140 million Nigerians below the poverty line looks like when the World Bank statistic comes to life and sits across from you at a rickety market stall. She does not need an analyst to tell her about the cost-of-living crisis. She lives it in her body, in the ache of hunger that she has learned to ignore, in the prayers she says at dawn before the day’s disappointments begin.
Mama Kemi is, in the truest sense, riding the Bolekaja without ever having boarded a lorry in her life. She is squeezed on a bench built for far fewer passengers than the economy has forced onto it—competing for market space with a hundred other traders whose customers have also stopped eating breakfast, breathing the exhaust of a fuel subsidy removed overnight, absorbing every pothole of naira devaluation without the luxury of a driver’s seat to cushion the impact. And here is the cruelty the Bolekaja metaphor makes visible that a spreadsheet cannot: on the old wooden lorry, at least the driver breathed the same dust, ate at the same roadside buka, risked the same burst tyre as everyone in the back. Today’s driver has solarised his own compartment. He does not feel the road Mama Kemi feels. He has been insulated, quite literally, from the journey he is in charge of.
And what does the Bolekaja democracy offer Mama Kemi? Let us count. The World Bank’s April 2026 report noted with clinical precision that even as inflation declined from 34.80 per cent in December 2024 to 15.15 per cent in December 2025, “household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset still-elevated inflation, and poverty has yet to begin declining.” Let that sentence be read slowly. Inflation has come down—the government has been celebrating this, and the celebration is not entirely dishonest. Prices are rising less fast. But poverty is still rising. Because the damage of previous years is structural. Because the savings that were wiped out cannot be restored by lower inflation. Because the businesses that closed cannot reopen by decree. Because the N35,000 bag of rice that became N77,000 does not return to N35,000 when inflation eases—it merely stops rising as fast. PwC’s projections suggest that 141 million Nigerians will be poor in 2026—a number that is more than two-thirds of the country, more than the combined populations of Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. And in the face of this arithmetic, the Bolekaja government’s prescription, issued from the Presidential Villa through the First Lady’s lips, is: sell akara. “To start akara business doesn’t take a lot of money,” the First Lady advised. “To start roasting corn and kuli-kuli doesn’t take much.” Nigeria, meet Marie Antoinette. She is wearing aso-ebi and she is advising you to eat bean cakes.
Every Bolekaja conductor knew a trick that the First Lady’s akara advice has revived for the modern age: when a passenger complains that the fare is too high, distract them with a plan for how they might one day afford it. Do not lower the fare. Suggest a side hustle. Point out the roadside vendor who seems to be managing. Never, under any circumstance, examine why the fare itself has tripled since the last journey. The genius of this manoeuvre is that it sounds like empowerment. It is, in fact, abdication dressed as encouragement—the state’s failure to keep bread affordable repackaged as the citizen’s failure of entrepreneurial imagination. Mama Kemi does not lack imagination. She has, in fact, already run the numbers on akara: the cost of beans, the cost of the palm oil to fry it in, the cost of the gas or firewood to heat that oil, all of it inflated by the same forces that emptied her fabric stall—and she has concluded, correctly, that a nation of akara sellers selling akara to one another is not an economy. It is a queue for the same shrinking pot, rearranged and given a hopeful name.
The State House, from which this advice was issued, has a 2026 budget allocation that makes up its own formal accusation. The Guardian’s review of the 2026 Appropriation Bill found that the State House Headquarters budgeted N11.25 billion for vehicle procurement alone—a 135 per cent increase from the previous year. It budgeted N7 billion for the solarisation of the Presidential Villa—so that Aso Rock can disconnect from the national grid that Nigerians depend on and that the government cannot keep running. And it budgeted N2.42 billion for wildlife conservation in the State House. Wildlife conservation. In a country where PwC estimates 141 million people will be poor this year, the Presidential Villa has ring-fenced N2.42 billion to conserve its animals. The animals in the Villa will be better conserved than the citizens outside its gates. This is not a coincidence. This is not a clerical error. This is the Bolekaja democracy made concrete in a budget line: the driver’s world, inside the tinted windows, is a world of wildlife parks and solar mini-grids and N11.25 billion worth of new vehicles. The passengers’ world, outside, is empty pots and N70,000 minimum wages that cannot buy a bag of rice. The ADC has said it with a simplicity that deserves to echo: “Nigerians cannot eat roads.” Let me add to that: Nigerians cannot feed their children with presidential wildlife conservation budgets.
Consider the zoo animal and the market woman as the true twin portraits of this administration’s priorities. One is fed on schedule, sheltered from the sun, monitored by veterinarians, and budgeted for in nine figures because its wellbeing has been formally recognised as a state responsibility. The other rises before dawn, walks to a market stall that may or may not attract enough customers to justify the transport fare she paid to reach it, and has no line item anywhere in the Appropriation Bill acknowledging that her survival is the government’s business at all. I do not begrudge the Villa’s antelope its feed. I begrudge a state that can find the conscience, and the currency, to guarantee three meals to a captive gazelle while telling a free citizen to fry the solution to her hunger out of a frying pan she can no longer afford to fill with oil.
How does the government respond to criticism of this expenditure? The way the Bolekaja driver always responds to the passenger who complains: by going faster and pretending the noise is enthusiasm. The President’s spokespeople insist that the reforms are working. The Senate Leader insists the Electoral Act is a “collective masterpiece.” The State House insists the wildlife budget serves a legitimate function. And when none of that works, there is always the EFCC. The EFCC is the Bolekaja driver’s preferred instrument for managing restless passengers—a mechanism for ensuring that anyone who raises their voice too loudly discovers, with a certain administrative efficiency, that they have outstanding financial obligations to the Nigerian state dating from some period in the past.
Former Senate President Bukola Saraki has provided the most candid insider account of how this mechanism works. Speaking with remarkable frankness about his own experience, Saraki alleged that the EFCC cases brought against him were acts of political persecution directly connected to his Senate’s refusal to confirm an acting EFCC Chairman whose qualifications the Senate found insufficient. “We had the acting chairman of EFCC come before us. After reviewing his qualifications and security report, we said no. But he stayed in office. Defiant. Totally disregarded our rejection. And some of us paid a personal cost for that. We were hunted, just because of that,” Saraki said. Governor Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State, who has direct current experience of the mechanisms in question, stated it without equivocation: “The APC-led federal government thinks they can use the courts and institutions of government, like the EFCC, to persecute and prosecute Nigerians who are not within their own party,” he said. The pattern has now extended beyond politicians. The EFCC moved to investigate human rights activist Deji Adeyanju and social media commentator VeryDarkMan over alleged terror financing and illegal funding channels, following a petition by a lawyer who questioned how the two raise funds for their public advocacy. Deji Adeyanju, who has spent years documenting abuses by the same government, now faces a financial crimes investigation. VeryDarkMan, who built a following by speaking truth with uncommon directness, is now a subject of EFCC inquiry. This is the Bolekaja democracy’s version of passenger management: if they speak too loudly, investigate their transport fares.
There was always one passenger on the old Bolekaja whom the conductor watched most closely: the one who had noticed the odometer did not match the fare chart, or who kept asking, politely but persistently, where exactly the extra ten naira went. That passenger was never physically removed at the park—that would draw a crowd, and crowds ask questions. Instead, the conductor waited for a quieter stretch of road, a bend with no witnesses, and there the “misunderstanding” was resolved. Nigeria’s institutions of accountability have learned the same choreography. The EFCC rarely announces, “we are investigating this critic because they are a critic.” It waits, instead, for the quieter bend in the road—a “petition,” a “tip-off,” a resurrected file from years past—and there the misunderstanding is resolved, always with paperwork, always with a case number, always with the appearance of due process wrapped around the unmistakable shape of a settling of scores.
The FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, has provided his own contribution to this project of passenger management. When the ADC sought access to a public event centre in Abuja for their activities, access was denied—while, as Atiku noted, a sponsored faction of the same ADC held a public event in the same FCT without any difficulty. The message requires no interpretation: in Tinubu’s Bolekaja democracy, the public spaces of the Federal Capital Territory are available to those who support the driver and closed to those who do not. The FCT is not Nigeria’s capital city. It is, under Wike’s management, a private annex of the ruling party. Every Nigerian who has ever been refused a market stall, a shop permit, or a business licence because they belonged to the wrong side of a political equation knows exactly what this feels like—except that this time it is happening at the national scale, to the main opposition presidential candidate, in the capital of Africa’s largest democracy. This is the Bolekaja democracy: the route is toll-free for the connected and prohibitively expensive for everyone else.
Children have never been safe cargo on the Bolekaja, but what has happened to children under this administration requires its own paragraph, its own reckoning, its own accounting. The security threat to Nigerian schools has industrialised to the point where the Department of State Services—the state’s own security agency—issued a formal advisory in June 2026 warning of a planned mass abduction of schoolchildren in Edo State. The DSS advisory included a chilling revelation about how the market for child abduction now works: bandits had concluded, based on accumulated experience of government responses, that “abducting school children would attract greater government attention and potentially increase the likelihood of huge ransom payments and concessions.” Read that sentence again. Slowly. The Nigerian state’s own security agency is telling us that the government’s previous conduct—its pattern of negotiating ransom payments, its policy of engaging kidnappers at the table—has created a business model for child abduction. The government has, through its own responses, incentivised the kidnapping of children. The state that was created to protect its citizens has instead created the price structure that makes abducting them profitable. The Nigeria Union of Teachers, watching all of this, declared: “As much as we have casualties among learners in terms of abduction, we have higher casualties among teachers.” Two teachers killed. Children traumatised. Parents choosing between sending their children to school and keeping them home in poverty-level idleness. This is the Bolekaja democracy in its most devastating expression: the journey itself has become the danger.
I think often of the smallest passengers the old Bolekaja carried—the children strapped to their mothers’ backs with wrappers, or wedged onto a father’s lap for lack of a spare bench—who never chose to board, who had no fare to pay because their fare was paid for them by adults who had promised, by the simple act of bringing them along, to get them there safely. A nation’s children are always that category of passenger: non-consenting, non-paying, entirely dependent on the driver’s competence and the state’s good faith. When a school becomes a target rather than a sanctuary, when the going rate for a child’s freedom becomes a line item that bandits calculate the way a lorry driver calculates fuel cost against fare revenue, the Bolekaja has stopped being merely reckless. It has become predatory upon the one class of passenger who never agreed to ride it at all.
The Bolekaja democracy is also, at its core, a cultural crisis. It is a crisis about what we have normalised. It is a crisis about the threshold of our national outrage—or more precisely, about the systematic erosion of that threshold. Consider what we have come to accept as routine. A former SGF goes on national television and says, without apparent embarrassment, that the President of the Federal Republic is a “master rigger” who will “rig everybody” in 2027—and the response from the Presidency is silence. A Federal High Court judge delivers a judgment explicitly defying a Court of Appeal stay order—and faces no disciplinary consequences. A presidential campaign anthem replaces the National Anthem at the nation’s most senior judicial gathering—and the NJI explains it away as a military band’s ceremonial protocol. A First Lady tells citizens struggling with industrial-scale poverty to start selling bean cakes—and the controversy lasts two news cycles before we move on. When a country has been so saturated with absurdity that the absurd no longer shocks, that is not resilience. That is the Bolekaja passenger who has been rattled so many times that they have stopped feeling the potholes. That is the numbness of a nation that has been gaslit into accepting the unacceptable as the merely regrettable.
There is a particular sound every Bolekaja veteran remembers: the creak of wooden slats settling under a weight they were never built to carry, a sound so constant on a long journey that passengers eventually stopped hearing it at all. It became part of the silence. That creak is, I submit, the precise acoustic signature of Nigerian civic life in 2026. The wood is still groaning under a weight it was never built to carry—EFCC files that arrive suspiciously on schedule, court orders that vanish into judicial fog, budget lines that feed antelope more generously than orphans—but we have ridden this particular lorry long enough that the groaning has become ambient. We notice it only when a passenger new to the route, a foreign journalist, a returning member of the diaspora, flinches at a sound the rest of us stopped hearing years ago. Their flinch is a mirror. It shows us what we have stopped being able to see about ourselves.
I want to raise a question that I believe Nigerians must answer honestly before 2027: what, precisely, is the democracy we are celebrating? We chant “June 12” with the fervour of the converted. We invoke the memory of MKO Abiola with the reverence due to martyrs. We celebrate 27 unbroken years of civilian rule. And these celebrations are not without basis—the fact of civilian governance is better than the alternative we have lived through. But civilian rule is not democracy. Civilian rule is what happens when soldiers stop shooting their way to power.
Democracy is what happens when civilians compete fairly, when institutions are genuinely independent, when the ballot box is inviolable, when the losers accept the verdict, when the state’s power is exercised for citizens rather than against them. By that measure—the measure that the NADECO struggle was actually about—we are not celebrating 27 years of democracy. We are celebrating 27 years of not being under military boots, which is a different and considerably more modest achievement. The Bolekaja has been running for 27 years. That does not mean it has been going in the right direction.
The answer to the question must begin with an honest assessment of where this vehicle is and who is driving it. The vehicle is Nigeria. It is overloaded, precarious, and held together by the determination of its passengers—ordinary Nigerians who wake up every morning, go to their markets, their farms, their hospitals, their schools, and insist on living despite everything the state has failed to do for them. The passengers are Nigeria’s greatest asset, and they are being treated as an inconvenience by the man holding the steering wheel. The driver—Tinubu and the political class that sustains him—has convinced himself that the vehicle belongs to him, that the route is his to choose, that the destination is optional if it conflicts with his interests. He has, with meticulous thoroughness, attempted to ensure that no alternative driver can present themselves: opposition parties are targeted for deregistration, opposition leaders face timed criminal allegations, public venues are closed to opposition events, and a former SGF freely acknowledges that the president is the national master of electoral manipulation.
And yet. And yet. The Bolekaja has never been defeated by the road. It has been defeated, when it has been defeated, by the passengers. The passengers who finally got off the vehicle and refused to push. The passengers who blocked the road and demanded a different driver. The passengers who, having been broken down one too many times on one too many roads by one too many engine failures that seemed suspiciously deliberate, decided that they were done with this particular vehicle and this particular driver. The Nigerian people—who have born 140 million-strong testimonies to what this administration has cost them, who have pushed this Bolekaja through fuel subsidy shocks and naira collapses and interest rate hikes and inflation peaks and security crises without end—are not without power. They are, in fact, the only power that matters. Not the EFCC. Not the FCT Minister. Not the Guards Brigade Band. Not the judges who rise to their feet for a campaign anthem. The passengers. The 200 million who were promised a destination and have been given only the journey, in perpetuity, as the driver circles the block.
Remember what the shout “Bolekaja” actually demanded: come down. Not stay seated and complain to the person beside you. Not write a strongly worded letter to the conductor. Come down. Plant your feet on solid ground, outside the vehicle, where the driver’s authority over you ends the moment you are no longer his cargo. That is the etymology’s final gift to this essay, and perhaps its most important one. The word does not describe passive suffering. It describes a demand for confrontation on equal footing—off the lorry, away from the conductor’s bell, in the one place where the man collecting your fare cannot out-rank you. Nigerians have spent 27 years learning to endure the Bolekaja from inside it, absorbing every pothole as though endurance itself were a civic virtue. The word suggests a different discipline entirely: that there comes a point on every bad journey when the correct response is not to hold on tighter, but to get down, stand your ground, and insist that whatever is wrong between passenger and driver be settled where both stand as equals. In Yoruba, on the old wooden lorry, that settlement was a fistfight. In a republic, it has a gentler name. It is called an election that is actually free. It is called a court order that is actually obeyed. It is called a public square that is actually open to whoever wishes to stand in it. Nigerians do not need to relearn how to fight. NADECO already proved they know how. What the Bolekaja democracy is daring them to forget is that they are still, formally, allowed to come down at all.
The Bolekaja democracy will end. Not because the driver will choose to stop. Not because the institutions will spontaneously recover their independence. Not because the reforming Electoral Act will be implemented by the same hands that designed its loopholes. It will end because the Bolekaja always ends. The engine overheats. The tyres burst. The passengers, who have absorbed every jolt and every breakdown and every detour and every kilometre driven in the wrong direction, reach the limit of human endurance. And then they do not push the vehicle. They demand a different one. The 2027 election is not a foregone conclusion—Babachir Lawal’s “master rigger” assessment notwithstanding. It is not a foregone conclusion because the Nigerian people know what they have endured. They know the price of garri and eggs and school fees and transport fares. They know what their savings bought in 2023 and what they buy now. They know the teacher who was beheaded on camera in Oyo State in May. They know the general who died in bandits’ captivity. They know the activists and opposition politicians who have been summoned by the EFCC in carefully choreographed political sequences. They know all of it. And the function of elections, however imperfect, is to give that knowledge a formal address. The 2027 ballot box is where 200 million people can send the same message in a language that even a president who cannot see or hear ordinary Nigerians cannot ignore. The Bolekaja democracy has a destination. The passengers know what it is. The question is whether the driver will allow them to reach it.
The Bolekaja democracy has come down. It has descended from the NADECO vision—from that time when men and women were willing to go to prison for the idea that Nigeria could be governed by consent rather than coercion—to a system where the governing party’s former allies describe its leader as the national master rigger on prime-time television, where wildlife in the Presidential Villa is budgeted for more generously than the education of rural children, where the First Lady tells the hungry to fry bean cakes while the president allocates N6.14 billion to international travel for himself. But the Bolekaja can also go back up. The road it has come down is the same road it can ascend. Democracy is not a destination that is reached once and held forever. It is a vehicle—perpetually requiring maintenance, demanding passengers who refuse to be mere cargo, needing drivers who remember that the journey is for everyone on board, not just for the man behind the wheel.
The Bolekaja democracy is a choice. It always was. And the choice, now as before, belongs to Nigerians—not to the driver who has forgotten where he came from, not to the conductor who is collecting the fares, not to the mechanics who are making sure certain wheels do not fall off before certain journeys. The choice belongs to the passengers. It always did. And in 2027, the passengers will speak. Let the driver prepare to listen.
***Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO) writes from
Lagos
A.I
July 23, 2026
Tags: Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma