A movement of young Nigerians has taken to the streets under Martins Vincent Otse, known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), whose Ratel Movement rests on a following of over 2.7 million on Instagram and 2.5 million on TikTok. It has moved from monthly community clean-ups into open confrontation with the state, leading midnight protests in Abuja over the abduction of more than 40 schoolchildren in Oyo, marching on the Air Force Base, and facing down thugs in Ibadan.
In a country where the NLC calls strikes and suspends them after a phone call from Aso Rock, where the official opposition negotiates only its own cut of the same arrangement, and where the unions have let workers’ wages be devoured by government price hikes without a fight, a movement that actually shows up demands to be taken seriously. Taking it seriously means telling the truth about it, and that begins with a basic question: what kind of movement is this, and where can it go?
To answer that question, we need to analyse the contradiction within VDM and his movement.
In a video circulated last month, VDM told his audience that Nigerians are not worth fighting for, arguing that if they truly wanted change they would step forward themselves instead of leaving one man to carry the risk.
This is the leader of a movement built on the energy of ordinary Nigerians, telling those same Nigerians that they do not deserve the fight.
Once a person decides the masses cannot save themselves, they are forced to find some other force to save the country, and VDM finds it in the ballot and in the mercy of the ruling class.
This is why his politics keep folding back into appeals to the very ruling class he marches against. Having spent months calling the Tinubu government incompetent and telling Nigerians to vote out the APC in 2027, he then urged them to “urge the political class to fix the North,” asking the same class he says must go to repair the country it has ruined.
His own followers on X caught it, reminding him that he had already called it a political move and was now pleading with the political class to solve it. A man with no faith in the masses has no one left to petition but their rulers, and so he petitions them.
The contradiction runs into how he treats other struggles too. Although he mounts mass action himself, when Sowore’s supporters gathered at court, VDM rebuked them for disorder and told them to stay coordinated so as not to give the authorities an excuse, worrying aloud about whether the government would take them seriously. He chants “Tinubu must go” one week and polices other people’s protests for the government’s comfort the next, wanting the pressure of a crowd while distrusting the crowd itself.
VDM is not blind to the class division, however. Through his agitation he reads it more sharply than men who only study class theory in lecture halls, and he knows who the looters are and who is looted.
That makes his conclusion worse, not better.
Someone who sees the class divide clearly and then tells the looted they are not worth fighting for has taken a side, and it is clearly not theirs. His perception is real, but the use he puts it to is reactionary. Class instinct can tell you who the enemy is while leaving you helpless to say how he is to be beaten, and that is the wall the Ratel Movement runs into.
That wall exists because of the dearth of a mass organised left force in Nigeria. There is no revolutionary party waiting to receive the anger of the youth, no mass workers’ organisation with the theory and discipline to turn that instinct into strategy. The unions have made their peace with the government, and the Labour Party is a vehicle for career politicians rather than a weapon of the working class.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and into this emptiness VDM has moved, his ideas unequal to the task but standing where nothing better yet does. His limits are the limits of a movement built on one man’s platform and one man’s judgment, with no programme beyond the next election and no faith in the people it mobilises.
The same limit shows in his dealings with the state. VDM met the Chief of Defence Staff privately in December 2025, met him again in May this year, and shared intelligence with the same military whose budget he questioned and whose killing of civilians in Benue he condemned.
He has no theory of the state, and so no ground on which to refuse being drawn into it.
The ruling class saw the opening, and the Defence Minister moved to embed VDM and other influencers in military operations. This is how the state handles a nuisance. It courts him, flatters him, and folds him in, so that each time a scandal builds, the noise drifts back to VDM’s personality and his troubles while the real question is buried.
Now, moving beyond the personality, the Ratel Movement calls itself non-political, cleaning the drains the government abandoned and then asking that same government to do better. There is nothing wrong with workers helping one another, but charity is not the cure, it only directs the energy of thousands into patching the wounds the Nigerian state constantly inflicts, without confronting the state that inflicts them!
Every failure of the Nigerian government should cost it, to drive ordinary people to ask why they have been abandoned and to turn against the state itself. To be non-political in a periphery capitalist state is to smother that anger before it can gather, which works on behalf of the state!
So the Ratel Movement can go one of two ways.
It can be drawn into the service of the state, the youth’s anger courted and managed by the same apparatus that has already reached for VDM, spent on the government’s own ends until the next atrocious scandal. Or the young people who built it can learn from its limits, see that cleaning drains and shaming officials has not stopped the machine, and conclude that protest without organisation changes nothing.
Gani Fawehinmi and Femi Falana fought the state for decades, with real courage, and yet it still grinds the workers, the youth, and the peasants without pause. You cannot NGO your way out of this crisis, and you cannot go viral your way out of it either. The lone agitator has courage without an army, the crowd has numbers without direction, and both break against a state built to absorb exactly that kind of pressure.
What is missing is the one thing neither VDM nor the movement can supply: an organised revolutionary party of the working class, rooted in its workplaces and communities, grounded in theory, committed to a programme that goes all the way to the expropriation of the capitalist class and the construction of workers’ power in Nigeria.
The Naija Marxists understand this, and are building that force now, patiently and deliberately, in the workplaces, the campuses, and on the streets. Spontaneous anger can shake a government, but it cannot replace one class with another. That work falls to the organised working class and youth, and the party they build.
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