Success Quote by Chinua Achebe

Achebe’s line lands with the calm bite of someone who has watched democracy treated less like a right than a muscle left to atrophy. He’s not romanticizing “the people” or sneering at them either; he’s diagnosing a pattern that postcolonial societies know too well: when elections are suspended, rigged, or reduced to ritual, the capacity to choose well doesn’t stay pristine in storage. It degrades.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s a sober critique of electoral outcomes. Underneath, Achebe is shifting blame away from the easy target (voters as inherently “unready”) and toward the political histories that produce bad choices: long stretches of military rule, one-party dominance, patronage systems, censorship, fear. If free election is a “facility,” it’s also infrastructure - and infrastructure can be dismantled. When you’re denied repeated practice in public accountability, you don’t just lose trust in institutions; you lose the learned behaviors of democracy: scrutinizing promises, organizing, accepting alternation of power, resisting ethnic or clientelist shortcuts.

The phrase “lose the habit” is doing the real work. It frames democracy as culture, not ceremony. Achebe the novelist understands how habits get replaced: by survival strategies, by cynicism, by the seductive clarity of strongmen when politics has been made incomprehensible. It’s a warning aimed at both citizens and elites: you can’t starve a society of genuine choice for decades, then act shocked when the first real elections don’t yield saints. Democracy is practice, and practice requires time, memory, and room to fail without collapsing.