The God Complex: Why Nigeria’s Culture of Hero Worship Is Destroying the Nation It Claims to Honour By Kio Amachree There is a ritual that plays out in Nigeria with such regularity that most people have stopped seeing it for what it is — a civilisational wound dressed up as cultural pride. Men of accomplishment, men of talent, men of wealth, prostrate themselves flat on the ground before other men. They chant. They spray money. They compete to outdo one another in the performance of submission. They call it respect. I call it something closer to a social disease. I watched it again recently. Davido, accompanied by Cubana Chief Priest and other associates, made a high-profile visit to President Bola Tinubu at Aso Rock   — a man increasingly frail in body and, by many accounts, diminished in his capacity to govern. There they were, some of Nigeria’s most celebrated and commercially successful figures, performing the familiar theatre of prostration and deference before a man whose legitimacy to hold any office at all remains, to put it charitably, deeply contested. I watched with dismay. Not because of the individuals involved, but because of what the moment revealed about us as a people. Nigeria has produced, across its short history as a nation, figures of genuinely titanic stature. Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, served as the first and only Premier of Northern Nigeria from 1954 until his assassination in 1966, dominating national affairs for over a decade and uniting the vast, diverse peoples of the north through a combination of vision, religious authority, and unmistakable presence.  When the soldiers came to kill him on the night of January 15, 1966, even those dispatched to end his life were momentarily stopped in their tracks by the sheer weight of the man’s bearing — his wives forming a human shield, his senior guard standing with bow and arrow against men with machine guns.  That is what genuine authority looks like. It commands without demanding. It does not need a room full of kneeling celebrities to confirm itself. The Sardauna did not need prostrations. He had earned something rarer and more real — a moral gravity that made itself felt without ceremony. And yet it was precisely the culture that elevated him beyond accountability, that made men around him feel the only appropriate response to power was total surrender, that contributed to the conditions that ended the First Republic and brought the soldiers to his door in the first place. I saw the same pattern with MKO Abiola. I watched him at high society gatherings in Lagos, surrounded by adoring crowds who had run out of songs and superlatives. I said to myself then — with a certainty I wish had proved wrong — that these same people will one day destroy this man. The love was too loud. The praise was too absolute. It always is. In Nigeria, to be worshipped by the crowd is to have a target painted on your back. This is not an accident of temperament. It is structural. Nigeria is predominantly a polygamous society. Many children grow up competing for the attention of fathers who are divided, distracted, or absent. The hunger for affirmation, for being seen and celebrated, is not just personal — it is historical. And when those children grow into powerful men and women, some of them spend fortunes attempting to purchase the love they could not access as one of many. They build cults of personality. They reward sycophancy. They surround themselves with those who will never say no. And the country suffers. The same culture that produces this prostration also tolerates — even celebrates — a man who uses multiple names, holds passports that do not belong to him, claims to have graduated from institutions that records show were not yet operating in the manner he describes, and insists he is 74 despite a family arithmetic that tells a different story. A man with a documented drug-related legal history in the United States who now styles himself Jagaban, a self-appointed king of a country he appears to regard as his personal inheritance. The titles multiply. The sycophants amplify. The questions go unasked because asking them out loud, in a culture that genuflects before the big man, is itself considered a form of indecency. It is not indecent to ask hard questions. What is indecent is the spectacle of grown, accomplished people flattening themselves on the floor of a presidential residence as though the ground beneath a politician’s feet is sacred soil. What is indecent is spraying cash at public events while millions cannot afford a single meal. What is indecent is a political class that demands deference while delivering dysfunction. The prostration must end — not because tradition is without value, but because the form it has taken in modern Nigerian political culture is not about honouring elders. It is about power performing itself. It is about powerful men requiring visible submission as a condition of access. That is not tradition. That is coercion dressed in cultural clothing. Nigeria in 2026 does not need more gods. It needs citizens. I have never prostrated myself before any living man, and I never will. Not out of arrogance. Out of the conviction that a country cannot build itself on the premise that some human beings are divine. The man who demands that you prostrate before him will, eventually, fall. They always do. The question is how much of the country falls with him. Kio Amachree is President of Worldview International and a political commentator whose work has appeared in Vanguard, Sahara Reporters, and other publications. #Nigeria #NigerianPolitics #Tinubu #Jagaban #HeroWorship #Sycophancy #NigerianCulture #Accountability #AfricanGovernance #Diaspora #WorldviewInternational #KioAmachree #NigeriaDecides2027 #SardaunaOfSokoto #FirstRepublic #MKOAbiola #Davido #CivilSociety #PoliticalReform #AfricanLeadership

Solo hemos jugado el escenario pequeño del norte de Italia...pero este #FirstRepublic nos ha gustado....el sabor histórico que transmiten las cartas es fantástico..... por cierto, el pequeño Corso es una máquina!! @VaeVictis

Look what they did to #firstrepublic first republic bank. Before JPM took it over for pennies on the dollar. @DOGE @elonmusk @SECGov @SECPaulSAtkins

From 2013? One lender, became an enabler. Deutsche Bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, BankAmerica, Mellon Bank, FirstRepublic, etc.

Paul Mellon was a white supremacist. A member of WACL. He began a ”bank”? With proceeds of crime? Recall, T Barrack and FirstRepublic? T Barrack is now US ambassador to Turkey. Timmy can’t write this off?

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Same guy who had a bank to “wash….”. How did Colony Capital build an investment portfolio? Pension funds helped. FirstRepublic collapsed along with Signature and SVB. 2023 May? 2nd largest bank failure in the U.S. Off topic but you know……

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