Osita Chidoka, OFR, NPoM, Chancellor of the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership and a former Minister of Aviation, has called for a new Nigerian national consensus founded on equal citizenship, answerable public power and a common duty to defend the rights of every Nigerian.
Chidoka made the call while delivering the keynote address at the 28th Wole Soyinka Lecture in Port Harcourt, which this year also marked the inauguration of the National Association of Seadogs’ Martyrs’ Day. Professor Wole Soyinka, now ninety-two, was present throughout the lecture.
The Wole Soyinka Lecture Series was established in 1994 by the National Association of Seadogs, Pyrates Confraternity, to mark Professor Soyinka’s sixtieth birthday, and has since become an annual platform for national and global discourse on good governance, social justice and democratic ideals.
NAS itself was founded in 1952 at University College, Ibadan, by seven undergraduates, including Soyinka, and was formally registered in 1980.
This year’s Martyrs’ Day, inaugurated alongside the lecture, honours thirty-three NAS members detained for seventy-two days in Port Harcourt in 1997, an episode Chidoka examined at length in his address.
In the address, titled “Reclaiming the Nigerian State Through Accountability, Justice and Civic Courage,” Chidoka argued that Nigeria’s difficulty runs deeper than the structure of the federation. What the country lacks, he said, is “a sufficiently shared organising ideal”: an agreement on “what Nigerian power is for, what citizenship must guarantee and what Nigerians owe one another.”
He acknowledged that Nigeria’s federal arrangements need repair, particularly on devolution, policing and fiscal responsibility, but warned that structural reform without moral purpose can simply redistribute injustice. “A federation can be decentralised and still be unjust,” he said. “A regional government can oppress a local minority. A state police service can protect a Governor rather than the citizen.”
Tracing the country’s founding aspirations through the 1957 Willink Commission, the independence anthem and the 1999 Constitution, Chidoka said Nigeria was established on a promise to protect minorities, uphold justice and build a nation in which no citizen would be oppressed. He commended President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for restoring “Nigeria, We Hail Thee” in 2024, arguing that the anthem “does more than ask us to love Nigeria: it tells us what kind of Nigeria deserves our loyalty.”
Chidoka proposed three commitments as the foundation of a renewed national consensus: equal citizenship without need of an ethnic sponsor or political godfather; public power treated as a trust that leaves a trail and submits to correction; and a shared duty to defend the dignity of Nigerians outside one’s own party, faith or community.
On accountability, which he defined as “answerability joined to consequence,” Chidoka, drawing on his years as Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps, said explanations, audit reports and court judgments mean little on their own. “Explanation without correction is not accountability,” he said, proposing a three-part discipline for public power: trace, test, correct.
Drawing a direct line between the 1997 detention of NAS members in Port Harcourt and the 2005 Apo Six killings in Abuja, Chidoka argued that Nigeria has changed the uniform of its rulers without sufficiently changing the reflexes of power. He called on NAS to extend the meaning of Martyrs’ Day beyond its own members, insisting that “the best way to honour the F18 survivors is to defend citizens who do not belong to this Association.”
He closed with a direct appeal: “Let us construct a new national consensus around equal citizenship, answerable power and common brotherhood. Let us give young Nigerians a banner worth carrying. Let us build a Nigeria where courage can live and no citizen needs a martyr’s bravery merely to enjoy a citizen’s rights.”
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