I started writing what became Citizen in the months leading up to Nigeria’s 2023 general elections. I want to be clear about what prompted it, because the reason is not what people might expect. It was not the electoral violence or the logistics chaos or the results controversy, though all of those happened. It was the conversation around all of it. Specifically, it was the quality of thinking behind the loudest voices in that conversation.
My entry point into this subject has always been jurisprudence. People tend to hear that word and file it under legal academia, which is a mistake. Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law. It is the discipline that asks the prior questions: what is law for, what does an ordered society actually require, and why does the thinking behind civic rules matter as much as the rules themselves. It has always interested me for exactly that reason. You cannot argue intelligently about whether something is just without a prior framework for what justice is trying to do. And you cannot argue about rights and duties without knowing what those categories were designed to protect in the first place.
What I observed in the lead-up to 2023 was a lot of civic noise from people who had skipped those prior questions entirely. People who were passionate and articulate and completely unequipped. The vocabulary was wrong. The categories were collapsed. People were using “right” and “duty” and “responsibility” as though they described the same thing with different emotional intensities. They do not. They describe fundamentally different relationships between a citizen and the state, and the difference matters enormously for how you reason about any civic situation you find yourself in.
The deeper conviction behind this book is one I have held for a while. The attitude of Nigerians reflects the leadership of Nigeria, and leadership reflects the society that produced it. We talk endlessly about the quality of our leaders. We spend considerably less time asking what kind of citizenry we have produced, and whether that citizenry has the civic foundation to demand and sustain anything different. A polity that has not worked out what citizenship actually requires — what the state owes its people, what the people owe the state, and what belongs to neither by legal obligation — will reproduce its own confusion at every level, including the top.
Citizen is my attempt to address that at the level where I think it starts: language and understanding. The book covers four concepts that every Nigerian encounters daily but rarely examines: rights, duties, responsibilities, and privileges. It defines each one precisely, looks at how they operate across the civic relationships we navigate — with each other, with government, with institutions, with public resources — and works through what happens when each one is violated or weaponised. The final section applies the whole framework to situations that are not hypothetical: a police checkpoint, an election, a tax dispute, a conversation with a public institution that is behaving badly.
It is not a long book. The argument does not require length. It requires clarity, and I have tried to give it that.
We are moving toward 2027. The noise is already building. I am more interested in whether more Nigerians enter that cycle knowing what their rights actually are, what can legitimately be demanded of them, and what is merely being pressured on them under the cover of civic language. That distinction changes everything about how you show up.
Citizen is available in my shop. You can download it for free for a limited time. If you read it, I would like to know what you think.
