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Mfonobong Inyang: Nuggets For Navigating The New Year
When it comes to bad governance, a lot of us are not victims, we’re accomplices. The lack of moral clarity on issues is something that made us seemingly divided and defeated because we routinely choose identity over our own interests.
One of the things that comes with getting older is a quiet but profound respect for people who have walked certain roads before you. 2025, like other years that preceded it, definitely tested our resolve individually and collectively. The usual temptation for most of us is to assume that a new year will automatically bring about a newer version of ourselves but that is rarely the case. Our thinking patterns are not subscriptions that automatically expire on the 31st of December every year and is renewed on the 1st of January of the next year. If you don’t learn to interrogate your life, purpose and experiences, you might not be as intentional about your growth as you may think. Here are some expanded thoughts from my personal journal.
It’s Not Always About You
In a world where everyone is looking out themselves (and rightly so), you must commit to a cause that is bigger than you. True greatness is best highlighted through service. If you cannot serve other people, then you cannot lead. You must learn to ask yourself existential questions such as: why on earth was I born? Why am I gifted in this area? What is my positive contribution to the wider society? These contemplations will shape your perspectives and approach to life. For example, at the earlier part of your life, you typically see your gifts or skills as blessings from God but a time would come when you realize that it is a responsibility to be properly stewarded. It was my training and practice as a cinematographer that helped me better understand this concept because it made me get used to working behind the scenes while making others look good. Till today, I struggle to take pictures of myself. For some people, becoming parents gives them this perspective – to live for someone else other than themselves.
A main character syndrome is responsible for many of the terrible things in this world: bad governance, lack of empathy, hubris, insensitivity, and so on. A corrupt leader that thinks about himself or herself alone will embezzle public funds meant to build hospitals, roads, schools and other critical infrastructure for the citizens. An influencer who thinks only about themself will sign up to a gig that requires them to sell out suffering citizens for the sake of a terrible product or policy. A lover who thinks selfishly will cheat on their significant other without recourse to the shame and hurt such actions will bring. A member of group can sabotage the team by their reckless actions. I remember Usain Bolt and his team mates being stripped of their gold medals and world record because one team member failed his drug test. Most of the innovations in this world came from a mindset of making life better for others, not from amassing wealth. Their income only became a natural consequence of their impact.
The Not-So-Subtle Art Of Audacity
You see this 2026, if you see anywhere audacity is being sold, sell whatever you have and buy it. I don’t know about you but I go cut my coat oversize this year. We are quick to call out people who set up ring light and spew rubbish online (and rightly so) but have we also paused to take note of their audacity? Two truths can co-exist; we can condemn vendors who offer terrible services but have we paused to ask ourselves why such people invest in their ads and marketing more than the vendors who claim to offer better services? This life has a way of making space for audacious people. Fortune favours the bold; if you don’t own your narrative, the world will shape it for you. Audacity isn’t reckless enterprise or blind optimism, it’s the art of taking calculated risks and making educated or informed decisions despite the possibility of failure. To achieve a certain level of success in life, you need to have a heart like that of the lion.
The older sibling of audacity is authority. Typically audacity involves talking a big game but authority is when you can back up your words with power. Let me use a story from the bible to annotate this point. Imagine you are Micaiah, then one day God shares intelligence with you about the imminent fall of the incumbent king. Let me give some context on how much of a daunting task this was for Micaiah. Ahab wasn’t just the worst king his country had, his marriage to Jezebel made matters even more precarious. Jezebel headed the deep state and she was also a terrorist, making her the last person anyone would want to offend. It was Jezebel that turned the same Elijah who called down fire into a fugitive, depressed and suicidal prophet by just a single threat. Micaiah was not intimidated by the manufactured consent of other prophets, the risk of being cancelled or even having his head chopped off. He stood on business, looked Ahab in the eyes and didn’t stutter when delivering his message. Authority only comes when you’re walking in faith because you get backing.
Staying In Your Niche Requires Discipline
Many people talk about how your riches are in niches but speak little about the commitment to stay your field of expertise. If I’m being completely honest, doing the same thing repeatedly and for a lengthy amount of time can be very boring – yet that is the very path to exponential results. In an age where the internet has the ability to make some people overnight celebrities, you might be tempted to leave your career path for something that offers instant gratification. The real perk that comes from staying in your lane isn’t what you get, it’s who you become. Let me explain. Per verified media reports, Cristiano Ronaldo’s new compensation package at his current football club is worth almost half a billion Pounds Sterling – a staggering amount of money for a 40-year old guy! Here is the thing: from humble beginnings, Ronaldo was playing football in Lisbon even when he couldn’t afford lunch and had to wait for leftovers from goodhearted people like Edna. More than three decades later, the same Ronaldo is still playing football. What then has changed? The major key is that the value of the Ronaldo brand has so grown that people are willing to pay an arm and a leg to be associated with him. He’s being paid for brand association, not so much for football – sport is just a touchpoint to access him.
Let me bring this home. Nigerian filmmaker and superstar actress, Funke Akindele, is the queen of box office. Three of her movies, A Tribe Called Judah, Behind The Scenes, and Everybody Loves Jenifa, have all smashed records by grossing over one billion naira. The causality for such outcome has gone beyond screenplays, casting, production quality or marketing, it is brand association. There are many movies showing in the cinemas but more people were willing to pay just to be associated with her brand. The same Funke Akindele that starred in the popular television series, I Need To Know, is the same Funke Akindele that is bossing the movie market almost three decades later. She is still doing same thing but on a higher level, and it takes discipline to pull that off.
Patriots FC
As usual, I will end by sharing some thoughts on Nigeria. I run a lot of diagnostics on the country from time to time and one thing I discovered is that despite our seemingly complex challenges, certain maladies can be identified using different metrics and paradigms. One of such frameworks is that which segments our challenges into leadership, institutions and citizens. These segments clearly overlap but for purposes of simplicity, let’s assume they don’t. Our failures in leadership and institutions are well-documented so I will just focus on citizens. One harsh but poignant conclusion I have reached about the Nigerian citizenry is that we’re not as naïve or innocent we would love to think. Please understand I speak to the collective, not individual. It is said that we are individually brilliant but collectively mediocre, a school of thought I don’t disagree with. Why? For something to be considered normal, it has achieved a level of consensus. For example, if corruption has become cultural in Nigeria, the logical implication is that despite the faux religiosity, a large swath of Nigerians don’t see anything wrong with it.
When it comes to bad governance, a lot of us are not victims, we’re accomplices. The lack of moral clarity on issues is something that made us seemingly divided and defeated because we routinely choose identity over our own interests. Do you know that survival instincts is something built in every animal? Instinctively, most animals know what to do to survive winter – whether it’s to migrate, burrow or store food that would sustain it for such harsh weather. You would think that people who have suffered greatly under the weight of abysmal governance would educate themselves on their political choices going forward but as we have seen, that’s not always the case. Let me share some practical examples to show that some people who claim to be emergency lovers of Nigeria are just fork-tongued political operatives.
The same people who shut down the country because they claimed subsidy should never be removed and even threatened to start a “civil war” were the same people who cheered its abrupt removal without socio-economic cushions. The same people who successfully harassed a sitting president for not tackling insecurity are now on the timeline brazenly sympathizing with terrorism. The same people who claimed that “no government can become rich by taxing poverty” are the same people waxing lyrical about how squeezing more money from citizens in the now poverty capital of the world is the best thing since slice bread while conveniently ignoring the fact our fiscal challenge is not primarily a revenue problem but a spending problem. The same people that organized the biggest protests when they wanted power are now quick to designate such a constitutional right as a national security threat. Quite the irony.
This is why I take the opinions of these faux intellectuals with a pinch of salt because they have no convictions, they just spew politically-convenient narratives. If you take seriously the thoughts of people who insisted a decade ago that someone with almost zero academic qualification could run a $600 billion economy then the joke is on you. By the way, if you are a Nigerian who has attained voting age and you are among those waiting for some influencer or celebrity to tell you who to vote for, you’re part of the problem, there’s no other way to say it. When you’re hungry, nobody tells you to get food. Whether as an employee or a business person, you have an idea how to pursue your economic interests. Even a child learns early not to put his hand in fire, so why do we have to cajole adults to vote wisely? Doesn’t that speak of intellectual dishonesty?
Yes, we have leadership and system issues but as citizens, we have to own our culpability in this dysfunction. Whilst everyone has a right to make their individual choices, they cannot claim to be blissfully unaware of the consequences of those choices. We cannot keep praying for a better country then when it comes to leadership recruitment exercise, we fall over ourselves to elect the worst people to represent us. God is not mocked. Hypocrisy is a bigger challenge than corruption in my humble opinion; which I why I usually say that I have great respect for people who support bad governance with their full chest than those who say they are sitting on the fence. Personally, you will hardly see me nudging anyone to make the right political choices going forward. In the final analysis, we all know what we are doing.
