Politics & Power Quote by Wole Soyinka

Security is usually sold as muscle: more police, more walls, more “stability” enforced from the top down. Soyinka flips that script with a dramatist’s sense of stagecraft and a dissident’s impatience. He argues that the safest arrangement is not the strongman’s grip but democracy that is democratic in practice: accountable institutions, participatory citizens, power that can be audited and replaced. The sting is in his diagnosis of half-learning. People are “beginning to recognize” the truth, but only “theoretically” - as if democracy were a textbook chapter rather than a habit of daily governance.

The subtext is aimed at elites and publics alike in postcolonial states that have cycled through coups, one-party rule, and “transitional” regimes that never quite transition. Soyinka has spent decades watching governments adopt the vocabulary of democracy while keeping its mechanisms on a short leash: elections without real competition, constitutions without enforcement, anti-corruption drives without consequences for the connected. “Secure” becomes a contested word: regimes claim they provide it, yet their security is often just regime survival.

His phrasing performs the dilemma it describes. “Gradually” and “beginning” suggest a slow awakening, while “sunk in” evokes something heavy that should drop from the head to the gut - from belief to behavior. It’s also a warning: until democracy moves from principle to practice, insecurity isn’t a glitch, it’s the system’s predictable output. Soyinka’s intent is to shame the comfortable and stiffen the wavering, insisting that participation isn’t idealism; it’s the only durable form of protection a society can give itself.