When Citizens Curse Their Leaders

When Citizens Curse Their Leaders

By

Nze David N. Ugwu

When the People Who Should Be Praying for Their Leaders Begin to Curse Them, Something Has Gone Fundamentally Wrong

I watched a video clip on Facebook recently that left me both disturbed and reflective. A long convoy of glittering black sport utility vehicles, bearing the unmistakable trappings of power and privilege, sped along a public road. The dignitary being conveyed was not readily identifiable. The heavily tinted windows concealed the identities of the occupants, while the speed of the vehicles made it difficult for bystanders to determine who was inside. Yet, something remarkable was happening along the road. People who had gathered by the roadside were shouting curses at the unseen occupants of the vehicles. Their anger was unmistakable, even though the object of their indignation remained hidden behind tinted glass.

I do not know who the dignitary was, what office the person occupied, or what particular grievance, if any, the bystanders had against that individual. But the scene itself was profoundly symbolic. It captured, in a single disturbing moment, the widening gulf between Nigeria’s political elite and the citizens in whose name they exercise power. The people were not cheering. They were not waving flags or offering prayers for the safety and success of their leaders. They were cursing them.

This was the exact opposite of what the Holy Bible instructs Christians to do. In 1 Timothy 2:1–2, the Apostle Paul urges believers to offer prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving for all people, including kings and those in authority, so that they may lead peaceful and quiet lives. Romans 13:1–7 also addresses the place of governing authorities within the moral and political order. The biblical instruction to pray for leaders is not an endorsement of every decision they make, nor does it require citizens to applaud injustice or remain silent in the face of oppression. Rather, it recognizes that leadership carries enormous consequences for the welfare of society and that those entrusted with authority need wisdom, restraint and a sense of responsibility.

Why, then, would citizens who ought to be praying for their leaders instead resort to cursing them? What has happened to the relationship between the Nigerian people and those who govern them? At what point does the hope that accompanies political leadership deteriorate into resentment so deep that citizens can no longer bring themselves to wish their leaders well?

These are not merely religious questions. They are questions about governance, legitimacy, public trust and the moral foundations of the Nigerian state.

The sight of citizens cursing an unidentified dignitary in a convoy of luxury vehicles should not be dismissed as an isolated act of disrespect. Neither should it automatically be celebrated as evidence of popular resistance. It should instead be understood as a warning signal from a society in which many citizens increasingly feel abandoned by the political establishment. When the sight of a government convoy provokes resentment rather than admiration, the problem may be far greater than the behavior of a few angry bystanders. It may reflect a crisis of confidence in the very institutions that are supposed to serve the public.

The Moral Contradiction

There is something deeply troubling about a society in which the religious obligation to pray for those in authority collides so violently with the everyday experience of the governed.

Nigeria is a profoundly religious country. Churches and mosques are filled with worshippers who pray for divine intervention in their personal lives, their families, their communities and the nation. Religious leaders regularly offer prayers for the President, state governors, legislators and other public officials. National events are often accompanied by prayers for peace, prosperity and good governance. Yet, outside the places of worship, millions of citizens struggle with economic insecurity, inadequate public services, insecurity and the feeling that the political system is indifferent to their suffering.

The contradiction is striking. How can a country so committed to prayer become a place where citizens openly express such hostility towards those who govern them?

Perhaps the first mistake is to assume that the people in the video were necessarily rejecting the biblical instruction to pray for their leaders. We do not know their religious beliefs, their personal circumstances or the experiences that informed their reactions. Their curses may have been expressions of anger, frustration or political disapproval rather than a considered rejection of religious teaching.

Nevertheless, their behavior raises a legitimate moral question. What happens when the people are so disappointed in their leaders that the impulse to pray for them is overwhelmed by the desire to condemn them?

The answer cannot be found in the Bible alone. It must also be sought in the quality of leadership, the character of public institutions and the conditions under which Nigerians are compelled to live.

Prayer for leaders should not become a religious instrument for silencing legitimate criticism. Nor should the invocation of divine authority be used to shield public officials from accountability. A citizen can pray for a leader’s wisdom while condemning that leader’s policies. A Christian can obey the biblical injunction to pray for those in authority while demanding that they respect the Constitution, protect human rights and govern in the public interest.

Indeed, if prayer is to mean anything beyond ritual, it should inspire citizens to desire justice and leaders to pursue it.

When Power Becomes a Spectacle

The convoy in the video was not simply a collection of expensive vehicles. It represented a particular image of political power: distant, insulated, privileged and seemingly inaccessible.

In Nigeria, the public often encounters government through elaborate convoys, police escorts, security barricades, ceremonial receptions and other visible expressions of official status. Such arrangements may sometimes be justified by legitimate security requirements. Public officials, particularly those exposed to credible threats, cannot be expected to ignore their safety.

But there is a difference between reasonable security and the conspicuous performance of power.

When officials move through public spaces in long convoys of luxury vehicles while ordinary citizens struggle with the cost of transportation, food, housing and healthcare, the contrast can become politically explosive. The problem is not necessarily that an official occupies an expensive vehicle. The deeper question is whether the lifestyle and conduct of those in government reflect an appropriate understanding of the sacrifices being demanded of the people.

The tinted windows in the video were particularly symbolic. The citizens could see the vehicles but not the people inside them. They could identify the privilege but not the person exercising it. They could witness the machinery of power without encountering its human face.

This image captures one of the central problems of Nigerian governance: the growing perception that political leaders have become physically and psychologically separated from the citizens they represent.

Democracy is supposed to reverse that relationship. Public officials are not sovereigns dispensing favors to their subjects. They are temporary custodians of authority exercised on behalf of the people. Their offices are not private estates, and their privileges are not a permanent entitlement.

Yet, when public office becomes associated primarily with wealth, motorcades, security details and social exclusivity, citizens may begin to see government not as an instrument of collective progress but as a privileged club whose members enjoy the benefits of power while the public bears its costs.

That perception is dangerous. A government may possess constitutional authority, electoral recognition and the machinery of enforcement, but its long-term stability also depends on public confidence. Where confidence deteriorates, even ordinary symbols of authority can become objects of ridicule, resentment or hostility.

The convoy that should have inspired respect had become, for those bystanders, an object of contempt.

The Economy of Resentment

It would be intellectually dishonest to discuss the anger of Nigerian citizens without examining the economic conditions that have intensified public frustration.

For many households, the struggle to secure the necessities of life has become relentless. Food, transportation, electricity, accommodation, education and healthcare compete for incomes that often cannot keep pace with rising costs. Small businesses face mounting operational pressures. Workers find that their salaries buy less than they once did. Parents worry about their children’s education and future employment. Young people confront the possibility that hard work and qualifications may not guarantee economic security.

These difficulties have multiple causes, including structural weaknesses that predate the current administration, external economic pressures, longstanding failures of public institutions and policy choices made by successive governments. No serious analysis should pretend that every problem confronting Nigeria originated with one President or one administration.

Nevertheless, governments must be judged not only by the problems they inherit but also by how they respond to them.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration has pursued major economic reforms, including the removal of the petrol subsidy and changes to the foreign exchange system. These policies have been defended as necessary steps towards correcting fiscal distortions, improving economic efficiency and creating conditions for longer-term growth. Supporters argue that maintaining the previous arrangements indefinitely would have imposed substantial costs on the country.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the necessity, sequencing, implementation and long-term consequences of these reforms. It is possible to recognize the structural problems that made reform necessary while questioning whether the burden of adjustment has been distributed fairly or whether adequate protection has reached vulnerable households.

That distinction matters.

Economic reform is not merely an exercise in changing prices, exchange-rate arrangements or government expenditure. It is also a test of political judgment, social responsibility and public trust. The legitimacy of difficult reforms depends partly on whether citizens can see credible evidence that the sacrifices they are making will lead to a better future.

When people are asked to endure hardship in the name of national recovery, they reasonably expect public officials to demonstrate restraint, eliminate waste, improve public services, confront corruption and explain how the benefits of reform will reach ordinary households.

If citizens experience rising costs while government extravagance appears untouched, the message they receive is that sacrifice is a burden imposed on the powerless rather than a shared national responsibility.

This is where economic hardship becomes political resentment.

People can endure difficulties when they believe those difficulties are necessary, temporary, fairly distributed and honestly managed. What they find harder to accept is the suspicion that their suffering is being taken for granted by leaders who remain insulated from its consequences.

The anger directed at the convoy may therefore have represented something larger than hostility towards the individual inside it. It may have been an expression of accumulated frustration with a system perceived to distribute hardship downwards and privilege upwards.

That perception, whether or not it accurately describes every public official, is politically consequential. Governments ignore it at their peril.

The Crisis of Legitimacy

There is a difference between possessing power and commanding respect.

Power can be acquired through elections, constitutional succession or appointment to public office. Respect, however, must be earned through conduct. It grows when leaders demonstrate competence, integrity, empathy, fairness and a willingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.

A leader may enjoy the protection of security personnel, the authority of public office and the privileges attached to high position without enjoying the confidence of the people. A motorcade can clear a road, but it cannot clear the doubts in the minds of citizens. Tinted windows can prevent people from seeing the occupants of a vehicle, but they cannot conceal the public consequences of government policies.

This is the difference between the physical security of political leaders and the political security of their institutions.

The former can be provided by armed escorts, reinforced vehicles and intelligence services. The latter depends on public confidence, credible institutions and the belief that government is responsive to the needs of society.

When citizens begin to interpret the movement of official convoys as symbols of exclusion rather than service, political leaders should be concerned. When people who do not even know the identity of a dignitary feel compelled to curse the occupants of the vehicles, the anger may have become detached from individual personalities and attached to the institution of political privilege itself.

That is a more serious problem.

A government can replace one official with another, but changing faces will not necessarily restore public confidence if the underlying practices remain unchanged. Nor can public relations campaigns permanently repair a relationship damaged by persistent failures of accountability and service delivery.

The appropriate response is not to demand that citizens become more appreciative of their leaders. It is to ask why so many citizens appear to have lost the desire to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

Are Nigerians Right to Curse Their Leaders?

This question requires a distinction between understanding anger and endorsing every expression of it.

Citizens have the right to criticize public officials, oppose government policies, organize peaceful protests, demand explanations and vote leaders out of office. Such actions are not acts of disloyalty to the nation. They are essential components of democratic citizenship.

The freedom to express political dissatisfaction is particularly important in a society where many citizens believe that conventional channels of accountability have failed them. Public anger can expose problems that official statements conceal. It can remind political leaders that electoral victory does not confer unlimited moral authority.

But there is also a danger in allowing political frustration to degenerate into a culture of indiscriminate hostility.

Cursing every person in government, regardless of individual conduct or responsibility, may provide emotional relief without producing meaningful change. It can obscure distinctions between competent and incompetent officials, honest and corrupt public servants, and policies that deserve support and those that demand opposition.

It can also encourage a dangerous belief that national progress depends on the misfortune of those currently in power rather than on the construction of institutions capable of serving the country regardless of who occupies public office.

Nigeria does not need a politics of personal hatred. It needs a politics of accountability.

Citizens should be able to condemn policies without dehumanizing their authors. They should be able to reject a government without wishing suffering upon the nation. They should be able to hold leaders responsible for wrongdoing while recognizing that good governance requires more than the removal of unpopular individuals.

The people in the video may have had genuine reasons for their anger. Their reaction nevertheless presents an opportunity to ask whether Nigeria’s political culture is producing citizens who believe they can influence their future through organized democratic action or citizens who feel increasingly powerless, left with little more than curses directed at passing vehicles.

A curse cannot amend a budget, improve a hospital, repair a road, reduce the cost of living or compel an institution to investigate corruption. It can express indignation, but it cannot substitute for the sustained civic pressure required to change public policy.

The challenge is to convert anger into action.

The Responsibility of Religious Leaders

Nigeria’s religious institutions have an important role to play in rebuilding the moral relationship between citizens and their leaders.

Churches and mosques should continue to pray for those in authority. But those prayers should not be reduced to ceremonial invocations of divine protection for powerful individuals. They should be accompanied by moral scrutiny of how power is exercised and whose interests it serves.

To pray for a President is also to pray that the President will possess the wisdom to make sound decisions, the courage to correct mistakes, the humility to listen to criticism and the compassion to recognize the suffering of the vulnerable.

To pray for a governor is to pray that public resources will be used responsibly, that communities will receive essential services and that the rights of citizens will be protected.

To pray for legislators is to pray that they will enact laws in the public interest rather than treat legislative office as a route to personal enrichment.

Such prayers should be inseparable from the willingness to speak truth to power.

Religious leaders compromise their moral authority when they offer public officials uncritical praise while remaining silent about obvious injustices. Their responsibility is not to become instruments of political opposition, but neither is it to become chaplains to political privilege.

The biblical injunction to pray for leaders must be understood alongside the Bible’s repeated insistence on justice, compassion, honesty and concern for the poor. The prophets did not hesitate to condemn rulers who exploited the vulnerable or corrupted justice. Their message was not that authority should be insulted for its own sake, but that authority must answer to moral obligations.

There is therefore no contradiction between praying for leaders and demanding that they govern responsibly. In fact, the two obligations reinforce each other.

Prayer without accountability can become an excuse for passivity. Accountability without moral restraint can become an invitation to destructive hostility. A mature society needs both moral conviction and civic responsibility.

What Must Change?

The incident on the roadside should provoke reflection among political leaders, religious institutions and ordinary citizens alike.

For political leaders, the first responsibility is to recognize that public anger is not always the product of ignorance, misinformation or the activities of political opponents. Sometimes it is a response to genuine hardship, unmet expectations and the perception that government has become indifferent to the people.

The appropriate response is not to dismiss angry citizens as ungrateful or uncultured. It is to examine the policies, practices and public attitudes that have contributed to the loss of trust.

Government must communicate honestly about economic reforms, acknowledge their human costs and demonstrate measurable progress in reducing those costs. Social protection programs must reach their intended beneficiaries. Public expenditure must be defensible. Corruption allegations must be investigated fairly, and public institutions must be strengthened to ensure that accountability does not depend on the personal preferences of those in power.

Political leaders should also reconsider the symbolism of official privilege. Security arrangements may be necessary, but conspicuous displays of wealth and status should not become substitutes for public service. A leader who understands the economic anxieties of citizens should be sensitive to how official conduct is perceived in a country where millions struggle to meet basic needs.

For religious leaders, the challenge is to teach that praying for political authority does not mean surrendering one’s judgment. They must encourage citizens to pray for wisdom and justice while reminding public officials that leadership is a moral responsibility, not a divine license for impunity.

For citizens, the challenge is to move beyond spontaneous expressions of anger towards sustained democratic engagement. Voter participation, community organization, peaceful advocacy, investigative journalism, civic education and demands for transparent government are more effective instruments of change than resentment alone.

Citizens must also resist the temptation to judge public officials exclusively through the prism of political affiliation. The same standards of honesty, competence and accountability should apply regardless of party, ethnicity, religion or region. Nigeria’s problems cannot be solved if every criticism of one’s preferred political leader is treated as an attack on one’s identity, while the misconduct of political opponents is condemned without restraint.

The country needs citizens who are neither passive admirers of power nor indiscriminate enemies of those who exercise it. It needs citizens who can distinguish between legitimate authority and the abuse of authority, between necessary reform and poorly managed reform, and between political disagreement and the rejection of democratic values.

Above all, it needs a political culture in which public office is understood as a trust to be earned and renewed through responsible conduct.

From Curses to Consequences

Ultimately, the most important question raised by the video is not whether Nigerians should curse their leaders. It is why so many people may have reached a point where cursing them appears more natural than wishing them well.

A society in which citizens pray for their leaders is not necessarily a society in which leaders are doing a good job. People may pray for a government to acquire wisdom precisely because it is making serious mistakes. They may pray for peace because public policies have created tension. They may pray for a change of heart because those entrusted with authority have failed to demonstrate compassion.

Conversely, a society in which citizens curse their leaders is not necessarily a society whose citizens have abandoned morality. Their anger may be rooted in genuine experiences of injustice, deprivation or disappointment. Nevertheless, persistent hostility between the governed and those who govern is a symptom of a relationship that requires urgent attention.

It is also a warning that political authority cannot survive indefinitely on constitutional provisions, security arrangements and the rituals of official recognition alone. It must be sustained by public confidence that government exists to serve the common good.

The people in the video could not see the dignitary inside the convoy. They could not determine the person’s identity, character or personal contribution to their circumstances. Yet they directed their anger at the vehicles with unmistakable intensity.

That detail should trouble every responsible Nigerian leader. When citizens no longer need to know who is inside the convoy before expressing their resentment, the problem may have moved beyond individual performance to a general crisis of trust in political leadership.

The answer is not to make the convoys longer, the windows darker or the security cordons more intimidating. Neither is it to lecture the people endlessly about respect for authority while ignoring the conditions that have eroded their confidence.

The answer is to make government more deserving of respect.

A leader who reduces unnecessary hardship, protects public resources, improves security, strengthens institutions and treats citizens with dignity gives the people compelling reasons to wish that leader well. A government that listens to criticism and corrects its mistakes creates room for hope. An administration that demonstrates fairness in the distribution of national sacrifices is more likely to earn public patience, even when difficult decisions become unavoidable.

No government can satisfy every citizen. No political leader can escape criticism. But there is a profound difference between being criticized for making difficult decisions and being despised because the people believe their suffering does not matter.

That difference is determined, in large measure, by the character of leadership.

The biblical instruction to pray for those in authority remains relevant. But it should not be invoked to demand silence from suffering citizens. It should challenge leaders to become the kind of people for whom citizens can pray with sincerity rather than desperation. It should remind the governed that anger, however understandable, must be channeled into constructive action. And it should remind the governing that authority carries obligations that no convoy, security detail or tinted window can conceal.

Nigeria has reached a point where the distance between political power and public frustration demands more than another sermon on patience or another government promise of future prosperity. It demands a demonstrable change in the relationship between the state and its citizens.

The next time a convoy of glittering black SUVs speeds past a crowd of Nigerians, what should those citizens feel? They need not cheer. They need not wave flags. They need not pretend that their problems have disappeared.

But they should have reasons to believe that the people inside those vehicles understand their struggles and are working honestly to improve their lives.

And if that belief is restored, perhaps the curses will give way to something far more valuable than applause: the quiet confidence of citizens who know that their leaders, despite their imperfections, are genuinely committed to the public good.

Until then, the curses from the roadside will remain a disturbing reminder that the gravest danger to political leadership is not always the anger of the people. It is the loss of their hope.

Nze David N. Ugwu is the Managing Consultant of Knowledge Research Consult. He could be reached at [email protected] or +2348037269333.