I ran for things in school. Student union first, then actual party politics — the kind with structures and caucuses and people who knew how to count the votes before the votes were cast. What stayed with me from those years is not the campaigns. It is a gap I kept walking into: the distance between what a room full of people clearly wanted and what actually ended up happening.
It was rarely a shortage of good ideas. Somebody always had the plan, usually a better one than what eventually got done. The gap sat somewhere else — between the person holding a worked-out idea and the person holding the authority to approve it. And the second person often did not understand the first person's idea at all. He did not need to. He only needed to sign it or not sign it.
That is the thing I have carried since. If your idea always needs somebody else's signature, then the ceiling on what you can change is set by whoever holds the pen. Not by the quality of your thinking. Not by how badly your community needs it. By them.
I am not dismissing advocacy. NGOs, campaigns, community work — these move things, and I have watched them move things. But notice how they move them: by persuading whoever controls the state's resources to release some of them. That is real power and it is borrowed power. The ceiling does not move.
What convinced me this is not a modern complaint is how consistently Scripture handles it. Daniel and his friends were not drafted into Babylon's civil service because they were devout. They were selected against a written specification — young men without blemish, skilled in wisdom, quick to understand, competent to stand in the king's palace (Daniel 1:3-4) — and then trained for three years before anyone let them near a decision. Moses grew up inside Pharaoh's house (Exodus 2:10), which meant he understood the machinery of the very government he would later stand against. Esther went through months of preparation before the night she was finally presented (Esther 2:16-17), and everything she was able to do afterward rested on the fact that she was already in the room. Joshua did not inherit leadership because Moses ran out of time. He had spent years as the young aide who did not leave the tent (Exodus 33:11), close enough to watch how the decisions were actually made.
Preparation came first. Access came second. Influence came third. Never the other way round.
The families who already hold power understand this better than we do. They do not hope their children end up leading. They arrange it — the schools, the exposure, the introductions, the internship in the right office, the dinner-table conversation that makes governance sound ordinary instead of distant. By the time those children are old enough to want power, they have been rehearsing for it since primary school. That is not a conspiracy. It is seriousness, applied early and applied consistently.
Which brings me to the part I actually want to say, because it is the part we avoid. The church has been very good at forming character. Honesty, discipline, generosity, integrity, the fear of God — these are taught constantly and they are formed well, and they matter more than anything else here. But somewhere between the pulpit and the polling unit, we stopped translating that formation into anything structural. What gets taught consistently is what people become, and we have been teaching people to be good without preparing them to govern.
I understand the hesitation. Politics here has earned its reputation honestly, and there is a real fear of sending sincere young people into rooms that will bend them. That fear is not irrational and I am not going to pretend it is. But withdrawal has never kept a room clean. It only guarantees that nobody inside it is asking the questions we would have wanted asked.
Politics should not be feared, but should be participated in.
This is also not a call for everybody to run for office. Most people should not. But there is a difference between not holding office and not being anywhere near the conversation. Policy takes shape in committee rooms, professional bodies, civil service desks, advisory panels and party structures long before it ever reaches a ballot. There is a Yoruba adage that puts it better than I can:
Ẹni tó ní ọ̀rẹ́ ẹ̀ ò ní jọba, a ní pé l'ọ́rẹ́ ọba.
Someone who claims their friend will not become a king will not find themselves addressed as the friend of a king.
Proximity is the whole of it. If you are nowhere near the people who decide, and never were, there is no route from your idea to their decision, however good the idea is.
There is a sharper one for what happens afterwards: O ò sí níbẹ̀, o ní báwo ni wọ́n ṣe pín? — you were not there, and now you are asking how they shared it. It names two failures at once. The absence, during the planning and the arguing and the work. And the late arrival afterwards, to query the outcome or ask for a portion of it. Being absent is not neutrality. It is agreeing in advance to whatever the people who showed up decide.
So this is the question I would put to anyone still deciding what to do with their competence. Why spend an entire career carrying good ideas to people who cannot understand them? Somebody is going to hold the pen either way. It may as well be someone who was prepared — in character and in capacity — to understand what they are signing.