Nigerians Top Chasing Snakes, Heal The Republic -By Prince Charles Dickson PhD

A monk once offered a piece of wisdom that may contain one of the most accurate diagnoses of Nigeria’s condition: “Imagine being bitten by a snake and, instead of focusing on healing from the poison, you chase the snake to understand why it bit you and to prove that you did not deserve it.”

At first glance, the lesson appears personal. On closer reflection, it is profoundly political.

For decades, Nigeria has behaved like a nation chasing snakes.

We chased history and chased ethnic grievances. We have chased political betrayals, and chased colonial ghosts. We chased corruption scandals, and chased explanations. We have chased the culprits.

Yet while we chase, the poison spreads.

The poison of distrust, poison of division, of selective morality, weak institutions, and the poison of collective irresponsibility.

Our public life increasingly resembles an emergency room where patients spend more time debating who caused the injury than treating the wound itself. We have become experts at assigning blame and amateurs at national healing.

A few weeks ago, after returning from a trip, I received a remarkable manuscript from Victor Prince Dickson. The work arrived in a sealed package carrying a curious instruction in red lettering: “Do Not Open.” Apparently warning the bearing not to touch. 

Naturally, I opened it. I was the recipient!

Inside was a 142-page intellectual intervention titled The Nigerian Emotional Map: A National Doctrine for Stability, Trust and Governance.

The work is difficult to categorise. It draws from emotional intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychometrics, indigenous human capital frameworks, and an innovative civic-learning tool developed by the author known as the National Cake Board Game. Yet beneath its academic sophistication lies a simple but transformative proposition.

My one-sentence summary of the entire work is this: Nigeria desperately needs a collective agreement about what is right and what is wrong.

The simplicity of that statement conceals its revolutionary implications. Because if we are honest, one of Nigeria’s deepest crises is not economic, constitutional, or even political.

It is moral.

Not morality in the narrow religious sense. But morality as a shared civic understanding of acceptable behaviour.

Today, we condemn corruption when our opponents steal and excuse it when our allies do. We denounce violence when our communities suffer and rationalise it when others become victims. We demand justice selectively. We defend principles conditionally. We often apply ethics tribally, religiously, regionally, and politically.

In such an environment, accountability becomes impossible because accountability requires a common moral language.

Where societies cannot agree on what is wrong, they cannot consistently punish wrongdoing. Where societies cannot agree on what is right, they cannot consistently reward virtue. The result is institutional confusion.

This insight resonated deeply with a keynote address I recently delivered at the 2nd International Conference on Followership Studies under the theme “The Demand Side of Accountability.” My presentation, titled “Followership as Power: The Untold Politics of Consent, Silence and Complicity in African Governance,” explored a question that African governance debates often avoid.

What if governance failures are not only leadership failures?

What if citizens, institutions, professionals, faith communities, media actors, and civil society organizations also shape the outcomes they routinely condemn?

I argued that no ruler governs alone. No corruption becomes systemic because a single politician decides to be corrupt. No injustice matures into culture without networks of permission, accommodation, rationalisation, reward, fear, and silence.

The tragedy of governance is therefore rarely the story of leaders alone. It is usually the story of an ecosystem. And ecosystems survive through participation.

This is where the monk’s lesson becomes especially relevant.

The snake matters.

The bite matters.

Understanding the snake matters.

But healing matters more.

Nigeria’s challenge is that we often confuse diagnosis with recovery. We assume that identifying the problem is the same as solving it. It is not!

A nation may understand every detail of its dysfunction and still remain dysfunctional. Knowledge alone does not produce transformation. Collective behaviour does.

At the conference, I introduced a distinction between what I called followers and followersheep.

Followers think, question, cooperate critically, strengthen institutions, and hold power accountable.

Followersheep surrender agency. They confuse loyalty with silence, confuse reverence with submission, and baptise power rather than scrutinise it.

The distinction may sound harsh, but it points to a larger truth. Societies rarely collapse because leaders fail alone. They weaken when citizenship becomes passive.

When silence becomes more comfortable than truth. When identity becomes more important than principle. When convenience triumphs over conscience. When citizens become spectators in the governance of their own nation.

This is why accountability cannot be understood merely as a demand placed upon leaders. Accountability is also a demand placed upon citizens. Democracy has a supply side and a demand side. We spend enormous energy discussing the supply side: presidents, governors, legislators, ministers, judges, and political parties.

Far less attention is paid to the demand side: the values, expectations, behaviours, and moral commitments of ordinary citizens. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that institutions are only as strong as the cultures that sustain them.

Constitutions matter. Laws matter and policies matter. But culture often matters more, because trust is cultural, legitimacy is cultural and responsibility is cultural.

Even democracy itself rests on emotional and moral foundations like empathy, reciprocity, fairness, restraint, duty and shared standards. Without these foundations, elections become transactions, public office becomes entitlement, citizenship becomes survival, and governance becomes performance.

Victor Dickson’s The Nigerian Emotional Map arrives at precisely this point. It suggests that Nigeria’s future may depend less on finding new political saviours and more on cultivating a shared emotional morality capable of transcending ethnicity, religion, geography, and political affiliation.

In other words, before we can reform institutions, we may need to reform the emotional architecture that sustains them. This is not a call for perfection. No society achieves perfect consensus. But every successful society establishes certain non-negotiable principles.

There are things that remain wrong regardless of who commits them. There are things that remain right regardless of who benefits. That consistency creates trust. Trust creates legitimacy. Legitimacy strengthens institutions. Strong institutions sustain nations. The absence of such consistency creates exactly the opposite outcome like distrust, cynicism, impunity, fragility, and eventually decline.

The monk’s wisdom and the argument of The Nigerian Emotional Map ultimately converge on the same conclusion. Healing requires responsibility. Not equal responsibility, but collective responsibility.

The greatest untold politics in Nigerian governance may not be the abuse of power by leaders. It may be the surrender of power by followers. For every authority depends upon legitimacy.

Every system survives because people participate in sustaining it. Every institution reflects the moral habits of the society beneath it.

This truth should not depress us. It should empower us. Because if citizens help sustain broken systems, citizens can also help transform them.

The snake has already struck. History has already recorded the bite. The more urgent question before us is no longer who bit us. It is whether we possess the courage to heal.

Whether we can build a shared civic morality that places principle above patronage, justice above identity, and accountability above convenience. Whether we can finally agree that some things are wrong regardless of tribe, religion, region, or political affiliation.

Because nations, like individuals, rarely perish from the bite alone. They perish when they mistake chasing the snake for the work of recovery. And perhaps Nigeria’s future depends on recognising the difference—May Nigeria win!