Across Africa, the winds of change are beginning to stir. In Madagascar, disillusioned youths have taken to the streets in defiance of a corrupt and unresponsive government, demanding reform, accountability, and a future worth living for. The protests, sparked by crippling water and electricity shortages, quickly transformed into a broader movement against systemic corruption and authoritarianism. Twenty people have already lost their lives, but the fire of resistance burns on. Madagascar’s story fits the pattern of a new age, one where young, urban, and digitally connected populations are refusing to be silenced.
Yet, in Nigeria, Africa’s so-called giant, the silence is deafening. Despite deeper poverty, worse corruption, and even more blatant misrule, the Nigerian people, particularly its vast youth population, remain largely subdued. The question is not whether Nigerians suffer; it is why they have not risen.
Nigeria is, by every measure, more primed for a revolutionary awakening than Madagascar. It has over 220 million people, with more than 60 percent under the age of 30. Its cities are bursting with unemployed graduates, informal workers, and digitally literate youths who see, on their phones every day, the vast gulf between their reality and that of their corrupt elite. The economy is collapsing under inflation, insecurity festers across all regions, and basic infrastructure has failed. Electricity is a privilege, fuel prices are crippling, and the naira’s value evaporates daily. Yet, instead of revolt, what prevails is resignation.
Why can’t Nigeria rise up?
The first reason is fear. Decades of military dictatorship and state violence have hardwired a survivalist mentality into the psyche of the average Nigerian. The 2020 #EndSARS movement, one of the few recent attempts at mass youth mobilization, ended in blood, bullets, and betrayal. The Lekki Toll Gate massacre sent a chilling message: the Nigerian state will kill its own children to maintain power. Since then, the youth have been psychologically caged. Every protester remembers how the government turned truth into propaganda, labeling peaceful demonstrators as violent insurgents. The lesson was clear, in Nigeria, justice is fatal.
The second reason is fatigue. Nigerians have been protesting for decades, against fuel subsidy removal, police brutality, rigged elections, and corruption. Each time, the government absorbs the noise, outwaits the anger, and returns to business as usual. This cycle of protest and disappointment has drained the people’s willpower. Hope has been replaced by cynicism; activism by apathy. The average Nigerian no longer believes change is possible, not because they don’t want it, but because the system has made it impossible.
The third reason is fragmentation. Unlike Madagascar, where citizens are united by common grievances, Nigeria is deeply divided along ethnic, religious, and regional lines. The ruling class has mastered the art of weaponizing identity to destroy solidarity. The north is told the south wants domination; the south is told the north wants Islamization. Christians and Muslims are pitted against each other, while both remain victims of the same corrupt elite. Whenever Nigerians begin to unite, the old fault lines are reignited. The oppressed remain divided, while their oppressors remain united.
Moreover, Nigeria’s political class has built an intricate web of economic dependency and fear that sustains their grip on power. Patronage systems ensure that millions rely on government stipends, contracts, or political connections to survive. For many, speaking out means losing access to livelihood. For others, the hope of “their turn” to share in the national loot keeps them complicit. Poverty has become not just an economic condition but a political weapon, one that guarantees obedience.
Compounding this paralysis is the collapse of institutions of moral and civic resistance. The Church and the Mosque, once moral beacons, are now extensions of the establishment. Many clerics have traded the pulpit for political patronage, preaching submission instead of justice. The universities, once hotbeds of radical thought, have been neutered by underfunding and infiltration. Even the media, once seen as the voice of the people, now echoes the voice of power, silenced by brown envelopes and fear of reprisal.
Madagascar’s uprising reveals what happens when frustration meets courage. Nigeria’s stagnation, on the other hand, reveals what happens when frustration meets fear. The Nigerian youth are no less angry than their Malagasy counterparts, they are simply more exhausted and more aware of how ruthless their government can be. They have seen how dissent ends, in detention, exile, or death.
President Rajoelina of Madagascar, faced with an urban uprising, at least feigns dialogue. In Nigeria, dialogue is a trap, a façade for further repression. Those who dare to speak are branded enemies of the state or agents of foreign destabilization. From the judiciary to the electoral system, every channel for peaceful change has been compromised. When a people cannot protest, cannot vote, and cannot speak without fear, they are not citizens; they are hostages.
Nigeria cannot rise because it has been systematically broken, morally, institutionally, and psychologically. Its youth, though brilliant and globally aware, are trapped in a rigged system that punishes honesty and rewards submission. Corruption has become not an aberration but a way of life. In such a system, even rebellion is commercialized, and every movement has its price.
The tragedy is that Nigeria’s decline is not inevitable, it is sustained by a carefully constructed architecture of fear and falsehood. But history teaches that even the most subdued nations eventually find their breaking point. Madagascar’s story is a warning and a mirror. A time will come when Nigeria’s suffering will outweigh its fear, when the hunger in the belly will become stronger than the terror in the heart.
For now, Nigeria remains silent. But beneath that silence lies pressure, the kind that, one day, explodes. When it does, it won’t be the hashtags or politicians who ignite it. It will be the people, hungry, desperate, and no longer afraid. Until then, Nigeria will continue to drift, a giant shackled not by foreign powers, but by its own chains of fear, division, and fatigue.
By Duruebube Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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