Across cultures, proverbs distill the wisdom of lived human experience into compressed language. In Igbo cosmology, proverbs, as cognitive map of socio-cultural realities, are not merely linguistic ornaments; they are the very “palm oil with which words are eaten.” Beyond serving the rhetorical strategy of decorative flourishes, proverbs are condensations of ancestral experience, crystallized into pithy wisdom. They distill centuries of observation into images so powerful that entire treatises of political philosophy can be folded into a single line. Among these, one particularly vivid saying speaks powerfully to the Nigerian condition today: mkpọkọrọ ikwe nẹ ẹkwụ reburu ọnụ – “pounding rotten palm nuts in a broken mortar.” Picture the imagery: a woman in an Igbo hamlet, seated before her mortar, pounding parboiled palm nuts to extract the oil that sustains her household. But the mortar is cracked, unable to contain the force of her pestle. Worse still, the palm nuts are rotten – useless, incapable of yielding oil. However much she labours, her sweat and toil are futile. She ends with exhaustion but no reward.
This image, rooted in the everyday struggle of agrarian life, is both literal and metaphorical. It describes futility, i.e., labouring where the conditions of success are structurally impossible. It is not laziness of the citizenry but the futility of the system. To unpack this, the broken mortar-rotten palm nut metaphor foregrounds and contextualizes Nigeria’s democratic failures within the long arc of political thought. It provides the premise for deploying modern tools of conceptual metaphor theory espoused by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson to account for how this proverbial image embodies the crisis. That is the tragedy of Nigeria’s democracy, 26 years of unbroken electoral rituals since 1999, yet the system is cracked like the broken mortar, and its political class rotten like the spoiled palm nuts. No matter how hard the people pound with their votes, their petitions, their protests, no oil of justice or governance flows. To understand this futility, it is important first to recall the philosophical evolution of democracy itself, what it promised, how it developed, and why its Nigerian variant appears trapped in perpetual frustration.
Democracy did not emerge fully formed; it evolved through centuries of thought. The story begins in Europe’s age of turbulence. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), writing in Leviathan (1651), was not himself a democrat but provided the starting point by grappling with the chaos of human selfishness. To Hobbes, the natural state of man was a “war of all against all,” where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The solution, he argued, was the “social contract;” it is the surrender of individual freedoms to a sovereign who guaranteed security. Though Hobbes justified monarchy, his contract idea laid the groundwork for democratic thinking. Legitimacy must come from the consent of the governed.
John Locke (1632–1704) radicalized this. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke argued that people possessed inalienable rights – life, liberty, and property – and government existed to protect them. Should rulers betray this trust, the people had the right to replace them. Here was the seed of modern liberal democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) further sharpened this with his idea of the general will. In The Social Contract (1762), he insisted that true sovereignty lay not in kings but in the people collectively. Liberty was obedience to a law one prescribed for oneself as part of the political community.
Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) provided the structural architecture. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), he advocated separation of powers among the executive, legislature, and judiciary to prevent tyranny. His doctrine shaped constitutions across the modern world. Taken together, these thinkers – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu – charted the promise of democracy, as a contract between rulers and ruled, a system where power flows from the people, institutions check arbitrariness, rights are preserved, and sovereignty remains collective. Democracy, as they envisioned, promised productivity, which guaranteed steady flow of oil from healthy palm nuts pounded in a sturdy mortar.
Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 with promises of liberty, progress, and justice. Two and a half decades later, the record is sobering. Seven general elections have cost nearly ₦1 trillion, the highest election bill globally, yet voter turnout has steadily declined, from 69% in 2003 to barely 27% in 2019 and about 29% in 2023. Transparency International consistently ranks Nigeria among the lowest scorers in its Corruption Perceptions Index. Afrobarometer surveys show citizens’ trust in democracy plummeting, with many Nigerians doubting whether elections express the will of the people. If democracy is meant to guarantee popular sovereignty, Nigeria’s version has yielded its opposite – elite capture, pervasive impunity, and broken institutions. It is here that proverbial metaphor as a conceptual frame from the insights of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson becomes illuminating.
In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue that metaphors are not just literary flourishes; they structure thought. Metaphor, they insist, is conceptual, shaping how people understand abstract domains through mappings from concrete experience. For example, we say “time is money”- mapping the concrete domain of finance onto the abstract domain of temporality. Applying this insight, the Igbo proverb becomes more than a local saying, it becomes a conceptual metaphor for Nigeria’s democratic crisis.
Here, the Source Domain (agrarian experience) is the oil processing activity of pounding palm nuts in a mortar. The Target Domain (democratic practice) denotes Nigerian elections and governance. The connection between the concrete and abstract domains is effected through mapping, whereby Mortar denotes the institutional framework (constitution, judiciary, electoral umpire); ‘palm nuts’ depicts political actors and leaders; ‘oil extraction’ denotes ‘the dividends of democracy’ such as justice, rule of law, even development, human rights; ‘rotten nuts’ denotes ‘corrupt ruling elite and ‘transactional political parties;’ ‘broken mortar’ depicts ‘compromised state institutions’ such as INEC, courts; ‘futility of pounding’ mirrors ‘citizens’ wasted votes, protests, and appeals’.
The entailment is devastating. Democracy in Nigeria is a cognitive frame of futility. Like the woman labouring over rotten nuts in a broken mortar, the Nigerian citizen labours in elections, petitions, and protests, but no oil flows. The metaphor structures not just critique but despair. It suggests irredeemability unless the very mortar and nuts are replaced. As long as the institutions remain broken and the elite rotten, democratic effort cannot yield oil. Citizens may pound harder; yet, futility is structurally guaranteed by the twin pillars of executive impunity (as cracked mortar) and judicial capture (as rotten palm nuts). Conceptual Metaphor Theory helps us see how sub-metaphors reinforce the central frame. These two pillars of ‘futility of pounding rotten palm nuts in a broken mortar’ constitute the two formidable dynamics, which canonize this ‘metaphor of brokenness’ as existential reality of Nigeria’s democratic experiment.
In a way, some democratically-elected Nigeria’s presidents have tended to wield their enormous presidential powers with a regimented mindset of garrison commanders, reminiscent of the Hobbesian Leviathan. Obasanjo’s imposition of state of emergency, first in Plateau State and later, Ekiti State in the 2000s set the stage. He followed these autocratic moves up with collateral leveling of Bayelsa community of Odi. Two decades later, President Tinubu’s state of emergency declaration in Rivers State echoed the same highhandedness. The extra-judicial rendition and continued incarceration of IPOB leader, Maazi Nnamdi Kanu; 6-month suspension of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, the federal government’s ironic reluctance to implement the Supreme Court’s ruling on local government autonomy, more than one year after obtaining a favourable judgment from a suit it filed before the apex court all illustrate the same drift, that is, executive impunity and power wielded without restraint. As former NBA President Olumide Akpata observed bluntly, “impunity has become the operating system of governance in Nigeria.”
The foregoing feeds into the judicial capture. Once considered the “last hope of the common man,” the judiciary is now widely perceived as compromised. Ironically, Obasanjo in his latest book, captured the awful transition from ‘court of justice’ to ‘court of corruption’. The Sultan of Sokoto, while addressing the 2025 NBA Conference in Enugu, decried the judicial rot when he lamented that justice has become a ‘purchasable commodity’ in Nigeria. The now-routine catchphrase “go to court” no longer inspires hope but ridicule. Together, executive impunity as cracked mortar and judicial capture as rotten nuts instantiate futility. And why does this cognitive frame of democratic futility matter? The broken mortar–rotten palm nut metaphor thus does three things – diagnoses futility; reframes discourse; and cautions irredeemability. Nigeria’s democracy is not failing because citizens are apathetic; it is failing because the structural conditions ensure futility. Instead of blaming voters, it shifts critique to institutions (the mortar) and elites (the nuts). Like rotten nuts, some ruling elite members are allergic to ‘reformation’. In this case, outright replacement, not pounding, remains the only enduring and sustainable panacea.
Together, these make the mortar mortally cracked and the nuts almost terminally rotten. The judicial mortar cannot contain the pounding; the executive palm nuts yield no oil. What remains is the futility of democratic rituals without substance. From Hobbes to Montesquieu, democracy promised a social contract in which citizens, through institutions, could check power and secure justice. From Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor teaches us that cultural imagery translates these abstractions into cognitive frames. From Igbo lore, the proverb of the broken mortar and rotten palm nuts captures futility in its purest form. Nigeria’s democracy, 26 years on, reflects all three. The institutions that should guarantee sovereignty are broken, the actors who should deliver governance are rotten, and the people’s energy is expended to no avail. The challenge of a sequel is to probe the empirical realities of this futility – elections, corruption, and prebendal politics – in order to measure the full weight of the metaphor.
From Hobbes through Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, democracy promised a contract guaranteeing rights, sovereignty, and institutional balance. From Lakoff and Johnson, we learn that proverbs embody cognitive frames shaping how people grasp abstract failures. From Igbo proverbial lore, mkpọkọrọ ikwe ne ẹkwụ reburu ọnụ distills Nigeria’s plight: no matter how hard the citizen pounds, the mortar is broken, the nuts rotten, and the oil never flows. This is the prefatory paradox of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic (1999–2025): 26 years of “unbroken democracy,” but what is unbroken is not productivity but futility. The imagery of futility is not a literary indulgence; it is a cognitive truth. Unless the mortar is rebuilt and the nuts replaced, the pounding will remain an endless ritual of despair.
I will end Part I of this series on a note of cautious optimism by staying the course of broken mortar-rotten palm nuts metaphor as a preliminary verdict. Placed side by side, judicial capture and executive impunity expose the hollowness of Nigeria’s democracy. Citizens may labour, casting ballots, staging protests, seeking justice; yet, their energy yields no democratic oil. What should be a harvest of legitimacy and accountability becomes only disappointment and bitterness. This is what the proverb teaches us. You cannot pound oil out of rotten palm nuts, and you cannot build justice out of a broken mortar. Nigeria’s democracy today is caught in that bind.
What is the way forward? The first step in this direction is to recognise that proverbs are not only warnings; they are also guides. The message is clear. Repair the mortar (if possible) or curate a brand new one; discard the rotten nuts and procure healthy fresh ones; and only then will oil flow. That means restoring judicial independence, upholding the rule of law, dispensing with executive impunity, rolling back the inglorious ‘technical glitches’ narrative, and demanding accountability from those who govern. It means building institutions strong enough to withstand the whims of individuals. Democracy may be bruised with shameless canonization of ‘technical glitches’ and ‘go to court’ mantra, but it is not beyond redemption. The people – the battered ‘orphans’ of the supposedly democratic Nigerian State – must insist on reforms that make their votes count, their voices matter, and their courts impartial. Anything less will keep us pounding ekwụ reburu ọnụ (rotten palm nuts) in mkpọrọ ikwe (broken mortar) – all in vain!
