The Work Ahead: What the Intellectual Class Must Actually Do

A boy sleeps under the Oshodi flyover in Lagos, one of thousands. In most tellings of Nigeria's story, this is where his life ends; swallowed by a slum, forgotten by a state. But a few years ago, a young chess player named Tunde Onakoya walked back into that same slum with a chessboard, and today some of those children have scholarships, mentors, and a shot at a different life. No government program did that. No foreign donor engineered it. One trained, capable Nigerian decided to stop waiting and start moving. That story is not an inspirational footnote. It's the whole argument of this essay. In a previous piece, I made a case that will annoy almost everyone: Nigeria's failures are not really the fault of politicians alone. The political class is corrupt and short-sighted, yes, locked in a long-term zero-sum game that treats the country as spoils rather than a shared project. But that's the easy villain. The entrepreneurial elite have learned to thrive inside the dysfunction and have too much to lose to challenge it. The middle and working class are in survival mode, with no surplus of time, money, or connections to spare. The poor are, by definition, in no position to lead a national renewal. That leaves one group holding the actual tools for change and quietly declining to use them: the intellectual and professional class, at home and abroad. We have the education, the exposure, the networks, and this part matters, we still have something worth fighting for. We are not so comfortable that we've made peace with the rot, and not so desperate that we can't think past today. So why hasn't it happened yet? Because knowing you're capable and organizing that capability into something durable are two very different skills. This essay is about closing that gap and it turns out we don't have to guess at how. Nigerians have already done it. Not in theory. In practice, on the ground, in the last few years. We just haven't been paying attention to our own playbook. What You Do as an Individual Start with yourself, and don't feel guilty about it. The most useful thing you can do for Nigeria, before anything else, is become more capable; intellectually, physically, financially. A country isn't built by people running on empty. Onakoya didn't walk into Oshodi as a struggling amateur; he was already a serious chess player with real standing in the game before he turned that skill outward. Alex Onyia, the education entrepreneur behind the South East Mathematics Olympiad, didn't wake up one day with the ability to fly Nigerian students to Rome for an international competition. He built Educare, a real business, first. Capability came before contribution. It usually does. The next shift is harder, because it's psychological, not practical: you have to actually believe you're an agent in this story, not a spectator to it. Most of us treat national development as something that happens to us, decided by government, by history, by luck. It isn't. Every choice and every silence is already shaping the trajectory of the country. Onyia didn't need a ministry of education memo giving him permission to run a regional maths competition that eleven thousand students entered. He just started one. Once you accept that inaction is itself a choice with consequences, staying on the sidelines stops feeling neutral. From there, it's about deployment. You don't need to found the next Chess in Slums Africa. You need to find an organization already doing work you believe in, and give it what you actually have. That might be a recurring $10 a month, trivial for one person, but if 50,000 of us commit to it, that's $500,000 a month flowing into causes currently surviving on fumes. Or it might be your specific expertise: data analysis, communications, curriculum design, legal structuring, whatever you're actually good at. Onyia's Olympiad now runs on sponsorships from banks, families, and tech founders who each brought exactly one thing they had; money, a venue, a network and stacked it on top of what he'd already built. Pick your lane and stop spectating. Data and visualization. Comms strategy. Community building, online or offline. Civic education. Sustainability. It genuinely doesn't matter which one. What matters is that you choose, and then you show up, instead of having strong opinions about all of them from a safe distance. What You Do as a Group Here's where most well-meaning Nigerians get the strategy wrong from the very first move: they try to fix Nigeria. "Fixing Nigeria" isn't a plan. It's a wish dressed up as ambition. It's the equivalent of trying to build today's Google as your very first product, when Google actually started as two students and a simple search page in a garage. Power in Nigeria, in practice, is local. A group that puts its full weight behind one city, or one state, can produce something real within a year. A group chasing the whole country produces a slogan and a WhatsApp channel that goes quiet by March. Look at Kwara State. For decades, the Saraki family had the state locked down; a dynasty passed from father to son, treated by many as untouchable. Then, ahead of the 2019 election, a simple two-syllable phrase started showing up everywhere: Otoge. "Enough is enough." It wasn't a national campaign. It was hyper-local, carried heavily by radio stations that had spent years quietly building the case against the status quo, station by station, program by program, until the phrase was on every tongue in Ilorin. When the votes were counted, the Saraki dynasty's decades-long grip on Kwara politics ended. Not through a national uprising. Through one state, one message, one media channel, applied relentlessly. That's the model: build a movement that genuinely touches the grassroots, not just a following on Twitter. Carry a message of hope people can actually believe in, because cynicism is already the default setting and won't move anyone off their couch. Run programs that build real trust in health, education, skills, entrepreneurship, because trust is earned through delivery, never through rhetoric. This is exactly what Onyia's Olympiad does with every scholarship and every cash prize handed to a child who scored the best in Nigeria: it's not charity, it's proof. And it's what Chess in Slums Africa does every time a documentary crew or a <a class="tc-blue" href="https://chess.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">chess.com </a> partnership brings global attention back to Oshodi, using outside networks and influence to pull real resources into one specific place. Then comes the media strategy, and it needs to run on radio as much as social media. Otoge proved that old-fashioned local radio can still out-organize a national government. And once you have people, you have leverage. Influence with people leads to political influence. It is only once you've earned that trust and built that following that you can actually push government to move. Skip straight to "political influence" without the grassroots underneath it, and you'll find there's nothing to leverage. If you want to see what happens when this works at national speed instead of local scale, look at <a class="tc-blue" href="https://twocents.space/insights/tag/endsars">#EndSARS</a> in October 2020. There was no single founder, no headquarters, no five-year plan. A demand to disband a brutal police unit spread across Twitter in days, not months, pulled together mostly by young Nigerians with no formal organization behind them, and within weeks it had done something no single politician could: it forced the federal government to the negotiating table. It also showed the limits of a movement with no follow-through structure once the moment passed , which is exactly why the deliberate, city-by-city model matters. Speed without structure burns bright and fades. Structure without speed never ignites at all. You need both. What This Looks Like in Practice Strip away the theory and the sequence is this simple: 1. Join an organization whose mission you actually believe in.2. Contribute your real skills to it.3. Contribute financially, even in small, recurring amounts.4. Start genuine community engagement on the ground.5. Broadcast your message, your results, and your goals on social media and on radio.6. Build a real grassroots following.7. Earn the support of the masses in your city.8. Use that following as leverage to engage government.9. Push for the change you set out to make. None of this is easy, and none of it is free. It takes real skill and real resourcing to execute well. But it is pragmatic. It is executable. Onakoya proved it with a chessboard. Onyia proved it with a maths competition. Ilorin proved it with a radio slogan. Nigerian youth proved it, at devastating cost, with a hashtag. None of these people waited for permission, and none of them waited for the whole country to be ready. Within twelve months, a group that commits to this sequence can have a functioning movement, moving one city forward in ways people can see and feel. And if enough groups run this same playbook across enough Nigerian cities, the sum of those local movements stops being local. That's how national impact actually gets built. Not by one grand plan descending from the top, but by dozens of disciplined, local efforts converging into something the political class can no longer wave away. We've spent a long time waiting for the right leader, the right government, the right moment. The uncomfortable truth, and the hopeful one, is that we, the intellectual and professional class, have been the right people all along. The examples are already here. What's missing isn't capacity. It's organization, and the willingness to start small enough to actually start.

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