"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever… And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon" — George Orwell

Every sunrise is a reminder, deep down in the guts of Nigerians, of how trapped we are. A realisation that we have surrendered our rights to people who keep passing the same rotten box down to their loyal successors.

You scroll through social media and find angry youths dissecting the absurdities built into the system — the ones our politicians are confident we will overlook.

And always, the verdict lands the same way: Nigerians are not angry enough.

But are we not? Is any Nigerian comfortable buying petrol at triple its price from 4 years ago? Are we comfortable having epileptic power supply? Do we smile when we see another headline of a snake swallowing an amount enough to bring more than a million families out of abject poverty?

No. Nigerians are angry. But anger, if it never risks anything, is little more than noise.

And that is why I hold an unpopular opinion: if you are not willing to risk your life for your country, you have no standing to tell us that Nigerians are not angry enough.

We Have Already Paid in Blood

We have seen what risking it looks like.

We watched it in October 2020, when young Nigerians poured into the streets for #EndSARS not because someone organised a concert, but because something in them broke and they decided the breaking was worth something.

They brought food, first aid and legal support. They built something rare in this country: spontaneous, leaderless solidarity. And for twelve days, it looked like anger had finally grown a spine.

Then came Lekki.

The lights went out. The cameras kept rolling. And soldiers, in a country whose government has never officially admitted what happened, opened fire on unarmed protesters waving the Nigerian flag.

People died. People disappeared. People were arrested and tried for treasonable felony for having the audacity to say SARS should not be able to kill them in the street.

And what changed? SARS was dissolved and replaced with units that inherited its appetite.

The protesters who survived went back to their apartments. The ones who didn't were mourned in tweets.

The government set up a judicial panel and till today, we are yet to see the results of the report submitted by the panel.

This is the part that the "Nigerians are not angry enough" crowd never wants to sit with.

It is not that Nigerians have not sacrificed. It is that sacrifice, in this country, has a terrible return on investment.

We have watched people give everything — their safety, their freedom, in some cases their lives — and seen the system absorb it without flinching.

The machine does not care about your pain. It has been engineered not to.

Put Your Name On It or Stay Quiet

So when someone, often from the comfort of a foreign country, or from behind the safety of a verified Twitter account, declares that Nigerians are simply too docile, too compliant, too unwilling to fight — I want to ask them one question: what exactly are you asking people to do, and are you prepared to do it yourself?

Because if the answer is another protest that ends in rubber bullets and teargassed crowds and a government that will wait it out, then we have already run that experiment.

If the answer is something more, something that puts bodies and futures and names on the line in ways that cannot be ignored, then that is a different conversation, one that requires honesty about the cost, not just the righteousness of the cause.

Anger is easy. Anger is the thing you feel at 2am reading another headline, another figure, another name.

Anger costs nothing. It asks nothing of you. It lets you feel moral and outraged and correct, and then it lets you go to sleep.

Sacrificeis the thing anger becomes when it stops performing.

And in Nigeria, sacrifice has a face; it is the face of everyone who showed up in October 2020, everyone who was shot at, arrested, silenced and forgotten.

It is the face Orwell described, pressed into the ground, permanently, by a boot that knows it will never be held accountable.

So no, do not tell us we are not angry enough unless you are prepared to be next. Unless you have looked at what this country does to the people who love it loudly and decided to love it loudly anyway.

Until then, your verdict is just noise. And we already have enough of that.