Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
•Onuma, a contributing analyst to USAfrica, is a Nigerian writer, essayist, and public intellectual whose work sits at the intersection of politics, culture, history, and lived experience.
Today is a public holiday across Nigeria. Here in Lagos it’s all wet and raining. I doubt many people would venture out. And staying home wouldn’t be fun either. Because there no light and this comes with many accompanying side effects. The rain here in Lekki-Epe express axis, is not the theatrical kind that crashes in with thunder [though where I am the thunderstorm is unrelenting] and leaves just as quickly; it is the slow, stubborn sort that has lingered for days, seeping into walls, into clothes, into thought. As Democracy Day ceremonies spill from radios and televisions, that stillness thickens, almost tactile. Flags hang limp, their colours dulled by the wet breeze. And the city — vast, restless, impossible to quiet — feels less like a nation taking a breath and more like one holding it, waiting for a promise made thirty‑three years ago to finally arrive in full.
June 12 has always lived in the Nigerian imagination as both a wound and a window. Every year, the date returns like a question mark, asking not only what happened, but what has happened since. And in 2026, with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Democracy Day address echoing across the nation, the question becomes even sharper: What’s really democratic about June 12?
Tinubu celebrated 27 years of uninterrupted Nigerian civilian rule. He honoured the martyrs — Abiola, Kudirat, Fawehinmi, Rewane — by name. Then came the pivot that every Nigerian has come to expect: “every generation has a defining responsibility. The generation of June 12 secured democracy. Our generation must secure prosperity.” Yet even this framing contains a subtle elision. The president counts civilian rule from May 29, 1999 — the Fourth Republic’s inauguration — not from June 12, 1993, the election that gave Democracy Day its name. That slippage — from the crime to the consequence — reveals how the Nigerian state has absorbed June 12: as origin story, not as unresolved indictment.
Because the very same day, a grand coalition led by Femi Falana and musician-activist Falz declared June 12, 2026 a day of nationwide protest over worsening insecurity, economic hardship, and deteriorating living conditions. They were not protesting against Democracy Day. They were protesting in its name. Which raises the most interesting question: who owns June 12? The state that has adopted it as holiday, or the people who made it a struggle?
On June 12, 1993, Nigeria did something terrifyingly beautiful. Millions of citizens marched to the polls under the Option A4 voting system — a method so transparent it forced voters to declare their preference openly, standing in line behind their chosen candidate’s image. They came out weary of military dictatorship, and they did not vote along the rigid, weaponised fault lines of ethnicity and religion. The overarching intention, felt in the queues and expressed in the results, was the pursuit of an egalitarian society, the banishment of poverty, a collective yearning for a functioning nation. Abiola ran on a Muslim-Muslim ticket and won anyway, including Northern states such as Kano, once thought impossible for a southern Muslim candidate. This was the democratic miracle of June 12: a demonstration that Nigeria could transcend itself.
Then it was stolen. Babangida annulled the election. What followed was a full assault on the democratic will of a people — the formation of NADECO, the murders of Kudirat Abiola and Alfred Rewane, the arrest and eventual death of Abiola himself in custody in 1998, the imprisonment of journalists and activists, years of Abacha’s vicious dictatorship. Democracy eventually arrived in 1999, but through the same back door it had been denied through the front — a transition managed by the very military establishment that had suppressed June 12, restocked with recycled power elite: coup-plotters turned elder statesmen.
The lived experience of the ordinary Nigerian on this Democracy Day is a devastating rebuttal to the speeches from Abuja. According to the World Bank, more than 60 percent of Nigerians were living below the national poverty line in 2026, with an additional seven million falling into poverty that year alone — despite economic reforms and moderating inflation. Kidnapping and banditry have metastasised into a parallel ransom economy worth trillions of naira, in which schoolchildren are abducted while the state issues hollow ultimatums. The Inter-Party Advisory Council noted on this same Democracy Day that insecurity, poverty and corruption had worsened compared with what was witnessed during past military regimes. The African Democratic Congress asked the question nobody in power wants to answer, titling its open letter simply: “When Is Democracy?”
The electricity grid has been segmented into tariff bands, grading citizens’ access to power by their ability to pay — access to a basic condition of modern life made contingent on income rather than citizenship. The Falana-Falz coalition was demanding the release of thirty-nine schoolchildren and seven teachers abducted from primary schools in Oriire, Oyo State, one teacher beheaded; and forty-two pupils abducted from a school in Askira-Uba, Borno State, by suspected Boko Haram militants. Children abducted from schools on Democracy Day. That is not incidental detail. It is the sharpest possible rebuttal to the claim that the democratic question has been settled.
The irony is almost too dense to navigate. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a bystander to the June 12 struggle. He was a participant in it — a politician who cut his teeth in the trenches of that resistance, who fled into exile to fight the annulment. The same man who once ran from Abacha’s security apparatus now commands Nigeria’s security apparatus. The question June 12 insists on is whether honouring the martyrs means anything if the conditions that made their sacrifice necessary are quietly being recreated in civilian form. Even Babangida — in his memoir launched in Abuja — finally admitted that Abiola won the June 12 election, calling the annulment “an accident of history”. Regret without reckoning. Admission without consequence. Memory without justice.
The vibrant primaries that once allowed citizens to choose their leaders have been surgically replaced by the autocratic mechanism of “consensus” — decisions made in the living rooms of billionaires and then ratified by gatherings dressed as democracy. The citizen’s vote at the general election becomes a rubber stamp for a choice already made elsewhere. And when citizens object — to the cost of living, to insecurity, to elections whose integrity is contested — they are told to be grateful. Grateful for the longest stretch of civilian rule in Nigerian history. Grateful the man governing is wearing an Agbada rather than a uniform. But June 12 does not ask Nigerians to be grateful for civilian rule. It asks them to demand that civilian rule be worthy of them.
What’s really democratic about June 12, therefore, cannot be found in the official events of 2026. The date has been progressively hollowed out, its radical spirit extracted, leaving behind a ceremonial carcass the government parades to validate its own existence. The political elite have learned to weaponise the memory of the martyrs — to use the blood of activists and journalists who defied Abacha as a human shield against accountability. A government that genuinely honoured the spirit of June 12 would not merely name airports after its heroes. It would make the airports work. It would not merely reference the ballot as sacred. It would make the ballot count.
In the vast, trembling landscape of the Nigerian experience, where history often feels like a long conversation between memory and forgetting, there is perhaps no sensation more sharply felt — and more stubbornly remembered — than injustice. Achebe once suggested that the story of a people begins with the moment they refuse to be silent about the wrongs done to them. It stirred the women of Abeokuta to challenge colonial taxation with nothing but their bodies and their refusal. It moved the coal miners of Enugu to strike. It compelled the students of 1978 to march. It animated the millions who in 1993 stood in the Option A4 queues, insisting in the language of lived courage that injustice is not immutable. They were not chasing perfection — but they were reaching for the removal of clear, remediable wrongs.
June 12 belongs to that tradition. Not the tradition of institutional democracy, with its constitutions and its electoral commissions. But the deeper, older tradition of popular refusal — the tradition in which ordinary people, confronted with power that has forgotten its purpose, say: enough. The women of Abeokuta said it. The miners of Enugu said it. The millions under Option A4 said it. The young people at Lekki Toll Gate said it at the cost of their blood. And the coalition who chose Democracy Day 2026 to declare a nationwide protest said it again — not because they have given up on Nigeria, but precisely because they have not. Because you do not march in the name of a country you have abandoned. You march in the name of a country you still believe can be held to its own promise.
June 12 endures because Nigerians, like the protagonists of their own literature — Okonkwo’s sons who survived the fall, Ben Okri’s spirit children who kept returning despite the pain of arrival — have always known how to name injustice when they see it and how to resist it when they must. The sentence that began in 1993 was not ended by the annulment. It was interrupted. The sentence continues. Nigeria continues. And it is this same ancient, literary, civic, democratic refusal to be still that compels us — standing in the Lagos rain on another Democracy Day that does not yet deserve its name, the water falling steadily as it has fallen for days, washing the streets clean of nothing that matters — to ask again: What’s really democratic about June 12?
That refusal to stop asking is itself the most democratic thing about Nigeria. And June 12 is its anniversary.
