ALL manner of “activists” crawl out of the woodworks to make vague, empty statements (and this isn’t to say they don’t have a right to criticize government’s performance) but one wonders where many of these new voices were when things truly started to fall apart. It’s easy for the middle-class to join the bandwagon and cry out in alarm over the insecurity and violence in Nigeria, the state of the economy, etc. But the reality is today’s armchair activists either did not have the intellectual depth to realise (and therefore oppose) Nigeria’s gradual shift from production to consumption, or they benefitted in no small measure from a said move which also came with state-sponsored benefits and patronage for a small elite.