Babayola M. Toungo
They call them “stakeholders,” with the solemnity of a boardroom oath and the smug assurance of men who have never had to itemize survival. It is a word that arrives polished – corporate, neutral, faintly benevolent. In its imported form, it suggests a table where all are seated, a process where all are heard, a system where all have a stake. But here, under the harsh fluorescence of Nigerian political reality, the word sheds its borrowed civility and reveals its native anatomy: stake-holder – not metaphor, but method.
Look closely and the choreography begins to make sense. The political hacks – those tireless custodians of access, allegiance, and applause – are the first to assemble. They do not come empty-handed; they come bearing the stake. They hold it upright with ceremonial seriousness, debating among themselves who grips it best, whose loyalty has earned a firmer grasp, whose proximity to power entitles them to steady it at the center of the stage. Their language is thick with inclusion, their gestures rehearsed for optics, but their true function is simple: to ensure the stake never wobbles, never falls, never leaves their hands.
Next come the poor – the endlessly invoked, seldom encountered “grassroots stakeholders.” They do not arrive so much as they are delivered, ushered into position by necessity, history, and the quiet coercion of circumstance. They are tied, not always with rope, but with something more enduring: unemployment that does not relent, healthcare that does not heal, education that does not educate, and security that does not secure. Their binding is administrative, their restraint bureaucratic. They are labeled beneficiaries in speeches, statistics in reports, faces in campaign montages. Yet in the lived grammar of the moment, they are not stakeholders; they are what is staked.
Then, almost as an afterthought but in truth the main act, the ruling class takes its place. They do not rush. Power never does. Draped in the confidence of insulation – economic, social, and often geographic – they raise their instruments. Not crude weapons, of course, but policies, directives, adjustments – each one calibrated, each one justified. When they fire, they do so with language. A subsidy is removed and called reform. A currency collapses and is christened liberalization. A budget is signed and announced as hope. Each discharge is followed by explanation, each consequence by clarification, each wound by a statement assuring the public that the pain is both necessary and temporary.
The political hacks tighten their grip on the stake. They nod vigorously, echo the language, defend the trajectory. They appear on panels, issue rejoinders, circulate talking points that convert suffering into statistics and endurance into patriotism. Their reward is proximity – a seat near the stake, a share of its symbolism, sometimes even a splinter of its benefits.
And the poor? They remain, bound to the logic of a system that insists on naming them as participants even as it renders them perpetual subjects. They are told they are being carried along, even as their feet drag on the gravel of policy. They are assured of inclusion, even as every meaningful decision is made at a height they cannot reach. Their voices are sampled, not heard; their consent is assumed, not sought. And yet, in the official record, they are everywhere – consulted, engaged, empowered – ghost authors of a story they do not control.
The word “stakeholder” continues its tireless journey through documents and declarations, acquiring prestige with every repetition. It appears in white papers and communiqués, in donor briefings and policy frameworks, in speeches that promise transformation and panels that simulate participation. It has become a ritual incantation, a linguistic talisman against accountability. Say it often enough, and the illusion of inclusion hardens into accepted truth.
But language, no matter how carefully managed, cannot forever conceal structure. And the structure here is stubbornly visible. The stake is not shared; it is controlled. The people are not holding; they are held. The outcomes are not collectively owned; they are selectively distributed. What is presented as a circle is, in practice, a line – drawn sharply between those who decide and those who endure.
There is, of course, a tragic elegance to it all. A system so adept at renaming its own contradictions that exclusion becomes participation, and suffering becomes policy. A theatre where the script is written in advance, the roles assigned at birth, and the applause cued regardless of the performance. And at the center of it, steady and unquestioned, the stake – gripped by the loyal, justified by the powerful, and borne, always, by those who were told they owned it.
So when next the word is spoken – stakeholder – listen carefully. Not to what it promises, but to what it permits. Not to the table it imagines, but to the stake it sustains. For in this context, to be named a stakeholder is not to share in the power of the system, but to be secured within it – visible, necessary, and perpetually at its mercy.