-By Abdul Mahmud
The Nigerian virtual space was recently been filled with striking images. Young persons and the old, teenagers in-between. Men and women who turned up with brooms, buckets, hoes, machetes, brushes, paint, and resolve in pursuit of social good. Streets were swept. Drainages cleared. Dilapidated school walls were repainted. Public spaces long abandoned to neglect were touched again by human care. The question many asked was simple. Who are these people?
They are the Ratels.
They are followers of the social media activist and celebrity, Martins Vincent Otse, widely known as Very Dark Man. But to describe them merely as followers would be to miss the point. What we are witnessing is not fandom. It is civic action. It is collective labour. It is shared responsibility returning to the public square. The Ratels have offered Nigerians something rare in these times. An example. Not a sermon. Not a press statement. Not a state policy paper. An example in motion. Their work speaks in the language of action. Clean streets. Schools reclaimed from neglect. Reclaimed public spaces. This is the grammar of democratic citizenship made visible.
Otse and the Ratels deserve to be praised for this intervention. Not because they discovered something new, but because they reminded us of something old and hallowed that we allowed to fade into oblivion. The ethics of communal labour of love. The spirit of mutual aid. The understanding that a country is sustained not only by those who govern it but by the citizens. Long before the modern Nigerian-state came into existence, empires, kingdoms and chiefdoms organised life around collective responsibility. Communities built together. They farmed together. They repaired roads together. They cleaned the shared villages’ squares together. This was not charity. It was belonging. To live in a community was to owe it labour, time, tenderness, love and care.
These practices were known by many names across the continent. They varied by language and culture, but they shared a single moral core. In the Etsako provenance of this writer, it was called and it is still called Mha’kugbe. Let’s join up together, literally. No one was left alone with a burden that belonged to all. When a roof collapsed, neighbours gathered. When a path was overgrown, the village cleared it. When shrines decayed, hands appeared without invitation. This was democracy before the ballot box arrived. Not democracy as an abstract ideal, but democracy as participation. Citizenship was not a document. It was conduct. It was performance.
The Ratels have unconsciously returned us to this past. Not as nostalgia, but as practice. They have shown that modern citizenship does not require waiting for government permission. It requires initiatives. It requires a sense of ownership over shared spaces. It requires the courage to act without applause.
Their actions also echo another powerful historical tradition. Mutual aid societies.
Across Africa, the Caribbean, and working class communities worldwide, mutual aid societies sustained life long before welfare states emerged. They organised burial funds. They supported widows. They helped the sick. They pooled resources to solve common problems. They did this quietly, efficiently, and with dignity. These societies were not built on ideology. They were built on need and solidarity. They understood something essential. Survival is collective. Dignity is shared. The Ratels stand firmly in this historical lineage. Their work is unpaid. Their labour is voluntary. Their reward is not money, but meaning. In a society where public discourse often celebrates what many now rightly describes as “wealth without work” and influence without service, this matters deeply. What they have done is to reframe activism. Too often activism is reduced to outrage alone. Outrage has its place. Anger can expose injustice. But outrage without repair leaves spaces broken. The Ratels have chosen repair. They have chosen to clean, paint, and rebuild.
This choice carries democratic significance. Democracy is not sustained by elections alone. It is sustained by habits. Habits of care. Habits of responsibility. Habits of showing up. When citizens clean streets together, they learn cooperation. When they repair schools together, they affirm the value of education. When they reclaim public spaces, they reject abandonment as a destiny. These are civic lessons no classroom can teach as effectively. There is a moral clarity in sweeping the streets. Humility in painting a classroom wall. These acts restore dignity not only to spaces but to those who perform them. The public space matters because people matter. The Ratels have also challenged the culture of spectatorship. Social media often turns citizens into observers of decay. We film potholes. We record collapsing buildings. We circulate evidence of failure. The Ratels have moved from documentation to intervention. They have crossed the Rubicon between seeing and doing, into quarters mobilised by verbs and new shifts. These shifts matter. No country can be rebuilt by commentary alone. It requires hands. It requires sweat. It requires citizens willing to act without waiting for the perfect conditions. There is also something quietly radical about their inclusiveness. The images show no hierarchy. Old and young work side by side. Men and women share tasks. There is no division of labour based on status. Everyone contributes what they can. This is equality practiced, not proclaimed.
The Ratels offer hope without slogans in the time of cynicism. In the time of fragmentation, they remind us that democracy is a lived experience. It lives in how we treat shared spaces. It lives in whether we see public schools as ours or as nobody’s. It lives in whether we act when we see decay or merely complain. In the time of noise, they stand at the intersection of communal tradition and modern civic activism. They show that the past is not dead. It waits to be reactivated. They show that citizenship can be joyful. That service can be communal. That democracy can be practiced with brooms and paint, not only with speeches. They have work quietly. They practice unity of purpose publicly. This is why they deserve praise. Not excessive praise. Not romanticisation. But recognition.
In praising Otse and the Ratels, one must be clear. This is not about personality worship. It is about civic inspiration. Leadership in this sense is not command. It is example. Otse has provided the spark. The Ratels have become the fire. Their work should challenge governments, but it should also challenge other citizens. The state must provide infrastructure and services. That obligation does not disappear. But citizenship does not end where government responsibility begins. Both can coexist. Both must. Salute to the Ratels. Salute to shared action in pursuit of the common social good. Salute to the Very Dark Man whose surname, Otse, carries the meaning of beauty. May that meaning find full expression in his life and labour; and may the grace of his works endure in its purest form, untouched by distortion, undimmed by time, and revealed in its natural brilliance.
In the hands of the Ratels, the past has returned, not as memory, but as a living practice.
