There are moments in a nation’s existence when the silence of power speaks louder than the roar of war. In those hours, the absence of routine becomes the clearest signal of unsettling presence. The cancellation of the Independence Day parade in Nigeria on 1 October 2025 was not merely a logistical decision; it was a thunderous drumbeat of unease, echoing through the corridors of power. The official explanation, issued by the Defense Headquarters (DHQ), claimed the parade was called off so President Bola Tinubu could attend a bilateral meeting abroad and the armed forces could maintain focus on the battle against insurgency. Fine words, but they hang like thin drapes in a hall of mirrors when 16 military officers – including a Brigadier General, a Colonel and a Lieutenant Colonel – are detained under opaque circumstances and rumors of a coup swirl in the public square. 

To dismiss the suggestion of a coup as “entirely false and malicious” seems less an act of assurance and more one of panic-litigation. If democracy is “forever”, as the DHQ so grandly insists, then how do we interpret the skeletal transparency of arresting high-ranking officers without naming the crime? If loyalty to the Constitution is proclaimed, how do we interpret the cancellation of a national military parade – a cardinal display of civilian-military partnership – without credible explanation?

The spectacle of the Independence Day parade is one of the rare choreographies where state and citizen align in pageantry, reaffirming national belonging. Its absence this year is more than a cancelled event; it is a rupture in the chain of ritual that binds governed and government. The government offered an administrative pretext; the nation felt a void. DHQ claims the officers were arrested for “professional misconduct” and that the panel’s findings will be made public. Yet unnamed sources told a different story: an alleged October 1 plot, targeting the Presidential Villa and Abuja airport, justified arresting elite officers at the DIA underground facility. If a discipline process can require detention of top generals, secrecy and subversion have replaced standard accountability.

The DHQ’s phrase “Democracy is forever” rings like an empty slogan when the institution tasked with defending that democracy clamps down on its own ranks without transparent cause. This is not the mark of democratic strength – it is the echo of a military accustomed to protecting the state as much as it serves it. Citizens deserve more than denials and deferrals. They deserve: transparent charge-sheets for detained officers, so suspicion does not become sedition by default. Nigerians deserve a public explanation of the cancellation of a national parade beyond diplomatic errands. The people need a reaffirmation that the military’s role is firmly subordinate to civilian rule – not hostage to whispered power plays. Most importantly, Nigerians need a reaffirmation that discipline within the armed forces is not a cloak for mutiny.

This is not a quarrel with uniforms; neither is it a call to distrust the soldiers who confront Boko Haram or patrol forest zones. It is a warning to the civilian state that by treating internal dissent as sedition and ritual as expendable, it is denying the electorate the democratic character it claims to live by. If democracy is the trust between the citizen and the state, then suspending national ritual and shuttering transparency is a breach of that contract. Nigeria’s mood is not one of patriotic pause – it is one of anxious stillness.

Leadership cannot let discipline become disappearances, or protocol become paranoia. A sleeping democracy need not fray into dictatorship – not unless we allow the hand that holds the ballot to become the fist that falls silent. In a democracy, power rests not just in the hands of the people – it is of the people. And when silence becomes complicit, the people must speak.