The Theft of Agency. A Curated Weapon Against Thought.
One of the most curious habits in contemporary Nigerian political discourse is the casual accusation that anyone who disagrees with us must be “teleguided.” The word, inherited from military and intelligence vocabulary, implies that a person does not act from conviction or reason, but merely carries out instructions from some unseen hand. It is a convenient insult, and also a profoundly anti-democratic one.
To accuse a person of being teleguided is not merely to question his judgment; it is to deny his agency.
Agency is the capacity of human beings to think, choose, judge, and act according to their understanding and conscience. It is one of the fundamental assumptions of any democratic society. Citizens vote, protest, support and oppose government because they possess agency. Strip agency from the citizen, and democracy itself becomes meaningless.
Yet in Nigeria, political discourse increasingly treats disagreement as evidence of manipulation. Critics of government are said to be teleguided by opposition, while supporters are dismissed as paid agents. Labour unions are allegedly acting at the behest of enemies. Civil society organisations are accused of serving foreign interests. Even ordinary citizens expressing frustrations over inflation, insecurity, or corruption are often branded as pawns in some hidden conspiracy.
Such accusations are not only intellectually lazy but more dangerously, they are authoritarian in instinct.
Bertrand Russell observed that one of the marks of dogmatism is the inability to imagine that sincere and intelligent people may arrive at conclusions different from our own. The democratic spirit requires precisely that recognition. If a person criticises government policy, it does not follow that he is controlled by someone. If another praises the same government, it does not mean she has been bought. Human beings possess minds, they have experiences, values, hopes, fears, and interests. These are sufficient to explain most political positions.
The tendency to attribute every opinion to hidden masters reveals an impoverished understanding of citizenship. It assumes that Nigerians are incapable of independent thought, that they are forever clients, tribesmen, or hired voices. Such a view reduces citizens to marionettes and, politics to conspiracy.
Ironically, this language reproduces the paternalism that colonialism itself depended upon. Colonial administrators often viewed Africans as masses incapable of autonomous reasoning, susceptible only to manipulation by chiefs or agitators. Today, Nigerians sometimes inflict the same insult upon one another. Every protest must have a sponsor, every criticism must originate from an enemy and every opinion must have a godfather behind it.
This mentality is especially corrosive in the age of social media. Rather than engage with arguments, many prefer to attack presumed affiliations. “Who sent you?” becomes more important than “What are you saying?” Truth becomes secondary to tribe, party, or patronage. Arguments are not answered; motives are casually assigned.
Such discourse impoverishes public debate. A nation cannot solve its problems when every dissenting voice is treated as illegitimate. It becomes easier to dismiss concerns about insecurity, unemployment, poverty, corruption, or constitutional reform by alleging hidden sponsors than by confronting uncomfortable realities.
Certainly, people can be influenced, propaganda exists and political interests exist. Some actors are indeed paid or coordinated, but influence is not the same as control. Human beings are not robots. A person may agree with Peter Obi, Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, Rabiu Kwankwaso, or any other political figure without surrendering his autonomy. Agreement does not imply servitude nor does support negate agency.
The accusation of being teleguided often says less about the accused than about the accuser. It reveals an inability to accept plurality, the uncomfortable fact that other people may genuinely see the world differently. It substitutes suspicion for engagement and conspiracy for argument.
Democracy demands something nobler. It requires that we grant to others the dignity we claim for ourselves; the dignity of independent judgment.
For if I insist that my support for a candidate springs from principle while your support springs from manipulation, I have elevated myself into a free citizen and reduced you to an instrument, thus claiming humanity for myself while denying it to you.
And that is the ultimate theft.
The greatest injury in calling a person “teleguided” is not that it questions his loyalty, it is that it strips him of what makes him fully human; his agency, his reason, and his right to arrive at conclusions different from ours.
A republic worthy of the name cannot be built by citizens who refuse to acknowledge one another as thinking beings. Liberal democracy begins not with agreement, but with the recognition that those who disagree with us are nevertheless authors of their own convictions.
Dr. EK Gwuru writes from Nkolo Ikembe.
