Post by Ceejay Oji (@CeejayOji22)

THE WORK OF CONSTRUCTION

Chapter One
THE CITIZENS WE MUST BECOME.

By Ceejay Oji
• Deputy Publicity Secretary African Democratic Congress (ADC), Abia State.

There comes a point in the life of a people when the greatest danger is no longer the failure of those who govern. The greater danger is the quiet adaptation of those who are governed. It is the moment when deprivation ceases to outrage and begins to instruct. When the abnormal is rehearsed so often that it acquires the dignity of the ordinary. When citizens no longer measure the present against what is possible and begin measuring it only against what they have already endured.

This is not a dramatic collapse. It is a slow education in diminished ambition.

We have become skilled at this education. We have learned to receive the restoration of broken things as if it were invention. We have learned to greet the delayed performance of elementary duties with the language of gratitude. We have learned to treat the absence of yesterday’s humiliation as sufficient evidence of progress. In the process we have allowed the memory of pain to become a permanent ceiling on our demands.

A people who have suffered long enough can be persuaded that survival itself is an achievement. That persuasion is the most effective form of political control because it requires no force. It only requires time and repetition.

History has seen this pattern before. The late Roman Republic did not fall solely because ambitious men seized power. It fell also because large numbers of citizens had grown accustomed to trading their civic vigilance for bread and spectacle. The institutions remained standing long after the habits that once animated them had withered. What died first was not the constitution. What died first was the expectation that the constitution should still mean something.

Closer to our own intellectual tradition, the novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe understood that the deepest injury a society can suffer is not the theft of its resources but the theft of its capacity to be shocked. Once a people lose the ability to be properly scandalised by mediocrity, mediocrity acquires the right to rule without interruption.

We are closer to that condition than many of us are prepared to admit.

Consider the private calculations we make. How often do we lower the bar in conversation so that the conversation remains pleasant? How often do we accept the story that any movement is better than stillness, even when the movement is circular? How often do we congratulate ourselves for enduring systems that should never have been endured in the first place? These small concessions accumulate. They form a culture. And culture, once formed, is harder to dismantle than any single administration.

The work of construction therefore cannot begin with the search for better leaders. It must begin with the recovery of a more exacting citizenry.
- A citizenry that still knows the difference between relief and transformation.
- A citizenry that refuses to convert public obligation into private favour.
- A citizenry that has not yet forgotten what functional institutions feel like and is therefore still capable of recognising their absence.

This recovery will feel ungrateful to those who have grown comfortable with praise. It will feel unreasonable to those who have adjusted their hopes downward. It will feel uncomfortable to those who prefer the safety of low expectations.
That discomfort is the first sign that something honest is taking place.

We must become difficult again. Not difficult for the sake of noise, but difficult for the sake of memory. Difficult enough to remember that public office is not a philanthropic enterprise. Difficult enough to insist that the standard of governance is not the depth of previous failure but the height of present responsibility. Difficult enough to look at our own lowered voices and ask whether we have been defending principles or merely protecting our peace.

The citizens required for the work ahead are not saints!
They are simply people who have decided that adaptation has gone far enough. They are people who still possess the capacity to be disappointed, and who treat that capacity as a form of civic health rather than a personal failing.

Until we recover that capacity, every conversation about better leadership will remain incomplete.
For leaders, however capable, eventually become reflections of the expectations they are allowed to meet.

In Chapter Two, we will examine the standards such recovered citizens must learn to enforce. Because once a people stop adjusting downward, they become far more precise about the kind of authority they are prepared to accept.

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