U
The Movement

Our Purpose

Founding Statement

The U is for unity. You have heard the word used loosely all your life, so here is what we mean by it, and what it would ask of you.

You already know what divides us

You have been told, all your life, what separates you from other Nigerians. The language your mother spoke. Where you worship, and on which day. What your father did for a living, and which way you mark a ballot. All of it is real. None of it is the most interesting thing about you.

Stand yourself in front of a flooded street beside a Nigerian from the far end of the country. The two of you will want the same thing, in the same order. Whatever fills your arguments has a way of going quiet the moment there is something in front of you to lift.

A public square in Nigeria
Public squares, markets and neighbourhood halls, where the movement does most of its work. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

You have spent a long time waiting

For a government. For an allocation. For a contractor, or the end of somebody's term. These things are owed to you, and the waiting is reasonable enough. What it has cost you is the one thing nobody can withhold: what you are able to do yourself, today, with the people on your street.

So that is where we start. Your chapter takes on work your own ward can carry without help. The rest still matters, and you ask for the rest from firmer ground once you have shown what you can do without it.

Nobody here will ask you

Not what language you think in. Not where you worship, what your surname says about your grandfather, what you earn, or how you vote. None of it changes what a Saturday morning's work requires.

A chapter is one of the few rooms in this country where those questions never come up. We built it that way on purpose, and you will feel the difference the first time you sit in one.

What we would ask of you

  • Come back. One appearance is a visit. The movement is made of people who return.
  • Bring the work, and leave the argument. Everything that divides us has other places to be settled.
  • Do what you said you would do, or say early that you cannot.
  • Treat every member as a Nigerian first. There is no second category.

No dues. No oath. No leadership to please. If that is a bargain you can keep, your ward is waiting on you.

"A country is only ever the sum of what its people are willing to do for one another. We intend to do ours."

The U Movement, Founding Statement

Read it, agree with it, and come.

Join the movement