By Godwin Anaughe
On Saturday, Festus Keyamo went on X and gave the National Leader of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, NDC, Senator Seriake Dickson 48 hours to state the NDC’s position on the old national anthem. This followed a town hall meeting in Oregun, Lagos, on Thursday, where supporters of Peter Obi sang “Arise, O Compatriots.”
Forty-eight hours, for a song.
Funny how there is no deadline for the insecurity ravaging Nigeria. None for the hunger. None for the kidnappers who now collect “taxes” in our villages. None for a naira that has lost 66 percent of its value since May 29, 2023.
So let me say this plainly, so nobody twists it. Those at the Oregun Town Hall have not adopted any other anthem. Nigeria has one official anthem, “Nigeria, We Hail Thee,” and it was sung at that same event. What happened in Oregun is that people who grew up singing “Arise, O Compatriots” for 46 years, from 1978 to 2024, sang it again. From memory. From the heart. You cannot wipe out that kind of memory with a bill pushed through in days, without ever asking Nigerians what they wanted.
That is the first thing to understand. It was not planned. It was not a policy. It was memory. For almost five decades, “Arise, O Compatriots” was what children sang at assembly, what Nigerians sang at Independence Day. A law can change the official words overnight. It cannot change what people carry in their hearts overnight.
Keyamo knows this. He admitted in his post on X that no law punishes anyone for singing the old anthem. So what is this ultimatum? Theatre. And if singing it really were secession, then half the country would be guilty: schoolchildren, church members, grandparents who still know every word. A Senior Advocate can see how ridiculous that is.
But Keyamo went further. He said singing a different anthem is “preparing grounds to break away.” He turned a song into secession.
Listen to the line itself: “Arise, O compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey.” That is not a secessionist cry. It is a call to duty, to serve the fatherland with love, strength and faith. The people at that town hall were asking patriots to rise up against insecurity, hunger, corruption and election rigging. They were not asking Nigeria to break. They were asking Nigeria to wake up.
So who is actually threatening Nigeria? Citizens singing a song that served this country for 46 years? Or a government under which terrorists kill with impunity, farmers cannot get to their farms, parents cannot pay school fees, and officials still flaunt their wealth as if nothing is wrong?
Let us be honest about what poses an existential threat to this country. It is not a song. It is misgovernance. It is injustice. It is the arrogance of power. When a government cannot protect lives, cannot create jobs, cannot unite its people, and then turns around to criminalise a song, that government is the threat.
We have seen this play before. When you cannot defend your record, you invent a scandal and call your opponents unpatriotic. It is much easier to police an anthem than to fight insecurity. It is easier, too, than fixing aviation and curbing the astronomical cost of flying in Nigeria today.
That is why this ultimatum matters beyond Oregun. It tells us how this government wants to fight 2027. Not with ideas. Not with performance. But with intimidation, with labels, with manufactured outrage. If they can brand NDC as secessionist over a song, what will they brand Nigerians for complaining about hunger?
The NDC will not be intimidated or blackmailed into silence. We will sing the official anthem, and we will also defend the right of Nigerians to remember their history and to ask for a better country. Patriotism is loving your country enough to tell the truth about it.
Nigeria’s problem was never the anthem. It is a government that changed the anthem in days but has not changed its people’s suffering in years.
Senator Dickson owes nobody a clarification. Nigeria is the one owed an answer: where is the governance?
And let history record this clearly. It was not those who sang “Arise, O Compatriots” who threatened Nigeria. It was the government Keyamo serves, a government that has made patriots cry out for their country to arise again.
Godwin Anaughe writes from Delta State.