The Myth Of Holding Government Accountable

If elections are contested, protests are risky, and complaints are ignored… what exactly is ‘accountability’ supposed to be?

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around so easily it almost sounds comforting: hold the government accountable.

It rolls off the tongue like a solution. While it might sound democratic, the more you sit with it, the more it starts to feel like one of those ideas everyone repeats without really asking what it means in practice.

Because… accountable to whom, exactly? And enforced how?

That’s where things start to get uncomfortable.

How do we hold government accountable?

Take the United States. You don’t even have to look far back.

A segment of Donald Trump’s support base has openly criticised him for military escalation and foreign entanglements, despite his earlier positioning as an anti-war candidate. That contradiction is real, and people notice it. They talk about it. They argue about it on TV, on social media, in living rooms.

But does that translate into accountability in any strict sense?

Yes, there’s frustration and public disagreement, but the machinery of state policy keeps moving. Supporters can disagree loudly and still find themselves carried along by decisions they never endorsed.

So, what does “holding accountable” mean there? Voting again in a few years? Writing op-eds? Protesting? Lobbying? At what point does criticism become control?

It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the whole issue.

Complaint as background noise in Nigeria

Here, the phrase “hold government accountable” is almost part of daily speech. People say it in arguments, in WhatsApp messages, on radio shows, in tweets that disappear into the noise by the next hour.

Complaints are constant - that part is not in doubt. However, the complaints rarely change the behaviour of the institutions being criticised.

Police brutality has scourged Nigeria for decades but was brought to the public eye years ago. The protests were massive, especially the youth-led demonstrations against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. For a moment, it looked like something might shift.

Then things escalated.

There were widely circulated reports and video evidence alleging violence against protesters, including claims that armed forces were deployed during demonstrations. Different investigations and accounts continue to disagree on details, but what remains widely discussed is the sense that state response moved from containment to force.

Even now, interpretations differ, but the perception many people carry is simple: protest did not translate into accountability.

When people returned to quieter channels – complaints, petitions, media pressure – it didn’t feel like those mechanisms made a difference.

Are elections the answer?

Then there’s the electoral route.

In 2023, Nigeria’s election cycle was widely framed as a test of public dissatisfaction with the ruling party. Opposition supporters and many ordinary voters expressed deep frustration with governance, corruption allegations, and economic hardship.

The expectation – at least in theory – was that voting would function as accountability in action.

The aftermath of the election was greatly disputed. Allegations of irregularities and concerns about the electoral process were widely raised, particularly around transparency and result collation. Supporters of different sides still argue over what happened – even though everyone really knows what happened.

So again, you end up in the same place: competing narratives, competing claims, and no universally accepted mechanism that resolves the disagreement in a way everyone agrees is legitimate.

Which leads to a blunt question people don’t like to ask out loud: If elections are contested, protests are risky, and complaints are ignored… what exactly is “accountability” supposed to be?

Theory vs reality

In theory, accountability sounds like it works like a chain:

people → institutions → consequences → correction

But in practice, the chain often is:

people → complaints → media cycle → institutional continuity

And the missing link is consequence.

Without consequence, accountability becomes empty words; an expectation without enforcement.

That doesn’t mean governments are identical everywhere or that pressure never works. It does work sometimes – slowly, unevenly, and usually after long periods of struggle, but the romantic idea that citizens can simply “hold government accountable” whenever they want starts to look fragile when tested against real power structures.

This is because governments don’t exist as neutral platforms waiting to be corrected. They are systems with their own incentives, security apparatus, political interests, and control over enforcement tools.

That asymmetry matters.

What’s really going on?

At this point, it almost feels like there are two different meanings of the phrase floating around.

One is aspirational: citizens participate, speak, vote, protest, and gradually steer outcomes.

The other is literal: someone can be compelled to change behaviour because consequences are imposed on them.

Only one of those resembles strict accountability.

Here’s the tension nobody resolves cleanly: modern states tend to monopolise the very mechanisms that would enforce accountability against themselves.

Courts, policing, regulation, electoral administration – these are all state-adjacent structures. Even when independent, they operate inside the broader system they are supposed to constrain.

So, when people ask, “Why don’t we just hold them accountable?” it sometimes misses the deeper issue: through what mechanism, exactly, is that supposed to happen when the system itself controls most of the levers?

What happens when peaceful channels fail?

This is where discussions usually get awkward, because if voting is disputed, protests are suppressed or ignored, and institutional complaints don’t produce change, then people are left with a gap between expectation and reality that is hard to ignore.

Historically, that gap has sometimes led to instability or outright rupture, but that is not something most societies want to contemplate, let alone normalise.

Still, avoiding the question doesn’t make it disappear. It just sits there, unresolved. Maybe because the alternative is harder to articulate or harder to face.

Econ Bro (@EconBreau and @EconBreau2 on Twitter/X) is a Nigerian Austrolibertarian economist and an apprentice at the Mises Institute. Under the organisation name “The Freedom Institute” he teaches individual liberty, personal responsibility, private property rights, free markets, and sound money to mostly young people across Nigeria. Econ Bro is an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.