Last week, a video emerged online. It showed the Governor of Edo State, Monday Okpebholo, walking out of what appeared to be the Government House of Ekiti State, accompanied by Governor Biodun Oyebanji and the Senate Majority Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele. Waiting outside was an itinerant hype man serenading the Edo Governor with praise chants. The scene drew laughter, awkward laughter, it must be stressed, from onlookers. The clip went viral. Nigerians watched, replayed, and commented. The discussion was not about policy or partnership between the two states. 

It was about performance, about a governor treated like a pop star, and an exalted public office turned into a spectacle. This is not a minor matter. Governance is a serious business. It requires focus, discipline, and strategy. It demands courage and clarity. It is not a stage for personal amusement. It is not a theatre for applause. And yet, what the video communicates is exactly the opposite. It communicates a culture of performance over purpose. A culture in which politics becomes alawada kerikeri, the clowning that entertains but achieves nothing.

The roots of this theatrical culture run deep. Nigerians first saw it institutionalised under Nyesom Wike, the former Governor of Rivers State, who surrounded himself with praise-singing bands and public entertainers. It became his signature. Every commissioning of a project, every political gathering, turned into a carnival of sound, music, and ego. What should have been moments of accountability were converted into festivals of self-adulation. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher of literature, referred to this as the carnivalesque: the inversion of order, where fools become kings and kings become fools. In medieval Europe, carnival was a brief season of laughter that mocked the solemnity of power before life returned to normal. But when carnival becomes permanent and when the laughter of fools takes over the palace, governance collapses into farce. 

That is what Nigerian politics has become: a carnival that never seems to end.

Bakhtin found his model in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, a world of giants and gluttons where absurdity exposed the vanity of rulers. The same grotesque spirit runs through our politics today. Governors parade sycophants as choristers of praise; public ceremonies are choreographed like concerts; and power, stripped of restraint, becomes comedy. What should elevate the state now ridicules it. Governor Okpebholo may think his moment of amusement harmless. It is not. Edo State faces crises that laughter cannot cure. Insecurity stalks the highways. Kidnappers terrorise communities. Farmers abandon fields for fear of bandits. Schools close early. Families live in anxiety. These are not passing inconveniences; they are threats to life and livelihood. In such an environment, a governor should be seen at strategy sessions, not surrounded by hype men. 

Leadership is the art of statecraft, not stagecraft. Statecraft demands foresight, planning, and a willingness to confront painful truths. It requires meetings with security chiefs, investment in intelligence, and rebuilding of public confidence. Stagecraft, on the other hand, is theatre. It belongs to carnivals, to the market square, and to the endless appetite for spectacle.

When a governor chooses performance over policy, the boundary between governance and clowning dissolves. The tragedy of the carnivalesque in Nigeria is that it no longer liberates the people, as Bakhtin once observed of medieval laughter. It humiliates them. The people no longer laugh with their leaders; they laugh at them. Every viral clip becomes an emblem of decay. Every dance, every boast, every song of self-praise reminds citizens of the emptiness that has replaced governance. The laughter that once mocked power now marks its bankruptcy.

But, Mikhail Bakhtin was not alone in illuminating the idea of the carnivalesque. He found kindred insight in Robert Antoni, who, in his novel Carnival, populated his fictional world with foolish characters to reveal how societies lose their sense of seriousness when spectacle becomes their governing creed. Nigeria today mirrors that fiction. The state has become a continuous performance in which every act of governance is staged for applause. The governor’s hype man is not merely a man with a microphone; he is the symbol of a political culture that prizes noise over nuance, image over substance. The harm is cumulative. When leaders trivialise their offices, institutions lose authority and prestige. When governance becomes comedy, citizens stop expecting seriousness. The result is cynicism. People withdraw their belief in the state’s capacity to protect or deliver. They see power not as stewardship but as a circus.

Governor Okpebholo should know that the optics of his office matter. Leadership is moral theatre, yes, but of a different kind: the theatre of responsibility, not of farce. The governor’s conduct sets the tone for public service. When he behaves as entertainer-in-chief, his subordinates learn that performance, not performance of duty, is what earns approval. Edo State’s insecurity demands the governor’s full attention. He must summon his men and women, invest in surveillance technology, rebuild community policing, and communicate regularly with his people. They must see him as a leader who listens, not one who seeks serenades. He must prove that the business of governance is work, not show.

Humility is essential. Every leader must remember that the office is greater than the individual who occupies it. Power is temporary; public trust is fragile. A governor’s legacy will not be written in the applause of a hype man but in the safety of farmers on their farms, the confidence of traders in their markets, the calm of children in their classrooms. The spectacle we witnessed in Ekiti is not an isolated episode. It is part of a broader decline, the collapse of statecraft into entertainment, and the substitution of competence with comedy.

Across Nigeria, from campaign grounds to state functions, we see governors performing for cameras rather than governing for citizens. Each performance erodes what little dignity remains in public office. Governance must return to seriousness. The world is watching a country that jokes while its citizens bleed. The viral clips are consumed abroad as proof of unseriousness, of a nation unable to distinguish leadership from lunacy. No society advances on the back of laughter at its rulers.

Bakhtin warned that when carnival becomes permanent, society loses its soul of renewal. Nigeria has lived too long in that permanent carnival. We need an intermission. We need to end the show. Governors must step off the stage and take their seats at the desk of duty. Governor Okpebholo’s choice is clear. He can be remembered as a performer or as a reformer. He can continue to dance to the tunes of hype men while insecurity ravages Edo State, or he can silence the drums and face the hard work of leadership. Governance is not a circus. It is a covenant of responsibility between the leader and the led. 

The people of Edo State deserve a governor, not a showman. They deserve safety, not spectacle. They deserve policy, not praise songs. Nigeria’s tragedy is that we have turned governance into a continuous carnival of stupidity. To reclaim seriousness, our leaders must shut down the stage, dismiss the jesters, and remember why they were elected. Power is not for performance. It is for service. Governor Okpebholo should leave the highways of hype to the marketplace performers who earn their bread with laughter. The state needs a man of courage and concentration, not a stage star. He must choose between statecraft or stagecraft, leadership or laughter.

The people are watching. History too is watching.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette