Follow Us on Google
Two metaphors frame this reflection.
The little pot and the fluttering flag.
The little pot comes from Igbo proverbial lore: E lelia nwa ite, ọ gbanyụọ ọkụ – despise the small cooking pot and it may extinguish the fire. The proverb warns against arrogance of scale. What appears small may hold the power to unsettle what appears mighty. The fluttering flag is different. It signals movement in the air before the storm arrives. A flag does not create the wind; it merely reveals it. Together, the two metaphors offer a grammar for reading political moments. The little pot represents underestimated actors. The fluttering flag signals deeper forces gathering beneath the visible surface.
A small scene in Owerri recently brought both metaphors into sharp relief. Village boys. City boys. An empowerment stage.
A sudden scramble. Brief disorder. Passing spectacle.
However, symbolism often hides inside small disturbances. The village boys disrupted what had been choreographed as a “city boys empowerment.” In literal terms, it was an interruption. In metaphorical terms, it resembled a little pot shifting beside a fire.
Nigeria’s democracy today already sits uneasily beside many such pots. The system itself resembles what I had earlier described as mkpọkọrọ ikwe nẹ ẹkwụ reburu ọnụ (broken mortar and rotten palm nuts).
Owerri, therefore reads less like an incident and more like a signal. A little pot shifting beside the flame. A fluttering flag revealing uneasy winds in Nigeria’s fumbling democracy.
History offers a quiet philosophical lesson. Political earthquakes rarely begin with thunder. First comes a murmur. Then a symbol. Then a crowd discovering its arithmetic.
A crowd begins to discover that it is not a crowd but a force. Numbers rearrange the architecture of power. What once looked immovable begins to tremble.
Regimes that seemed permanent suddenly reveal their fragility.
History turns quietly, almost politely, before the sound becomes unmistakable.
And somewhere beside the fire, the little pot waits.
This is the deeper lesson carried by the small scene in Owerri. A brief collision between village boys and city boys may look like a passing disorder. However, in a democracy already weakened by defections – from governance, from morality, from constitutional discipline, from accountability – it reads like a signal.
It is a reminder that political authority is always borrowed from the people, who appear to stand outside it.
Classical thinkers of the social contract – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – each framed this principle in their own language.
Hobbes warned that authority is granted to prevent chaos; without the consent of the governed, even the most powerful sovereign collapses under the weight of disorder.
Locke emphasized that government exists to protect life, liberty, and property; when rulers betray this trust, the people are not merely observers; they have the right to reclaim power.
Rousseau went further, declaring that sovereignty ultimately resides in the general will: rulers are delegates, temporary custodians, and any breach of the social compact awakens the latent authority of the citizenry.
The Owerri episode, and its echoes across Africa and the world, illustrates this timeless lesson: political power is not inherent in office or title; it is a conditional trust, always contingent upon the consent, participation, and vigilance of the people. Ignore them, belittle them, or exclude them, and even a small group – the proverbial little pot – can disrupt the fire and remind the powerful of where true sovereignty lies. It reminds the ruling elite that democracy, like fire, depends on balance. It warms the community only when the village gathers around it. But when those who tend the fire forget the village, the village remembers the pot.
Most importantly, history teaches us something else.
The pot does not shout. It waits. Patiently. Quietly.Beside the flame. It observes the heat. It senses the balance. It notes which sparks fly and which flames flicker in vain.
The pot knows that power misreads patience for weakness. It knows that arrogance sees silence as consent.
It knows that authority, no matter how fortified, is always borrowed.
The little pot has seen the fire consume the careless and the inattentive.
It has seen empires crumble under the weight of ignored murmurs.
It has seen regimes, swollen with confidence, falter at the first tremor the crowd dared to make.
And so it waits.
It waits while the powerful posture and the courts deliberate.
It waits while budgets are borrowed and taxes piled.
It waits while the lights fail and promises gather dust.
But the pot is not idle.
Its waiting is a kind of awareness.
A vigilance.
A memory of all those who thought small things could be dismissed.
When the pot moves, it moves decisively.
No trumpet calls its action.
No herald announces its power.
And yet, when it moves, the fire it confronts is never the same again.
In the quiet of Owerri, in the murmurs of Ouagadougou, in the streets of Nairobi, the lesson is the same: the people’s power rests in patient calculation.
The flame belongs to those who tend it wisely.
But the sovereignty of the pot belongs to those who never forget their place beside it.
When it decides to move, the world watches, not the pot; it is too late to remind the fire who wields it. The flame, once tended and coaxed, now dances with recklessness, licking corridors of power that have long forgotten their duty. The air thickens with smoke of ignored murmurs, and the walls of palaces, heavy with arrogance and bloated ego, begin to sweat under the weight of a patient fury long underestimated.
Hubris swells like a storm-cloud, and those intoxicated by the cheap wine of authority stumble blindly, their crowns loose upon their heads. They see only themselves reflected in the mirrors of their ambition, deaf to whispers, blind to the tremors. Yet, the little pot, humble in size but vast in consequence, moves silently beneath, a shadow preparing to tilt the scales. Its motion is not violent at first, but inexorable, like roots splitting stone, or a tide rising behind the horizon, quiet, persistent, unstoppable.
And should the final trumpet go unheeded, the apocalypse waits – unannounced but certain. Streets will echo with the calculus of awakened people. Thrones will shatter in silence. The wind will carry away the smoke of neglect. Flames that once promised warmth will consume neglect, leaving only the stark reminder that power borrowed from the people, mismanaged and defied, is always reclaimed in due time.
And so the cycle comes full circle. The little pot, once overlooked, has moved; the fluttering flag, once subtle, now billows in the storm of consequence. What began as a whisper in Owerri, a tremor in the wind, now embodies the very grammar these metaphors promised: underestimated actors rising, unseen forces gathering, and a democracy reminded that power is neither infinite nor immune to the calculations, aggregation, and emergent power of numbers. Then, comes the combinatorics of the people, each small act multiplying, arranging, calculating, and converging into a presence too large to ignore. Indeed, arrives finally, the calculus of the crowd, as individual murmurs accumulate, coalesce, intersect, and swell into a force that tilts the balance of power.
