‘Yes, Our Leaders’ – Abdul Mahmud Writes on Moral Collapse of Yesterday’s Radicals

By Abdul Mahmud

They were heroes once upon a time. They were the firebrands, the stone-throwers at picket lines, the shouters of slogans under the gaze of riot police, and the ones who made the streets and the solidarity grounds of universities tremble with chants for freedom. They were the guardians of democracy before democracy even arrived. They dared to risk imprisonment, rustication, and exile for ideals that were larger than themselves.

They were activists, pro-democracy crusaders, student leaders with banners held high, a generation carrying the winds of change, who spoke truth to power.

Then democracy arrived. The soldiers retired to the barracks, the loudspeakers of oppression fell silent, and the people, exhausted and hopeful, clapped. The activists were no longer rebels, they were tribunes of change, arbiters of the new era. Many believed they would transplant the fervour of their struggle into the arteries of governance. They were expected to be the conscience of the nation. The dream was simple: those who fought for liberty would embody liberty in office, in party, in lawmaking, in leadership. Instead, they became something else. Worse than the soldiers they fought. They imbibed the language of power with gusto and reverence. They turned the principles they once held sacred into excrement they now publicly deplore. Those who demanded accountability began to peddle excuses.

Labour leaders who fought for equality now became defenders of inequality. Activists who once faced tear gas began to luxuriate in air-conditioned rooms. Student leaders who once slept on mats on protest streets were now sleeping in five-star hotels paid for by those they once held to account. Forget those who cavort with ladies sky-high on private jets. They became “leaders” in the peculiar sense our corrupt political order reserves for those who ascend to its highest rungs only to master the art of gaming the country. Yes, our leaders, as eager hangers-on loudly celebrate them. Men who once wielded righteousness like a sword now brandish patronage like a ceremonial sceptre, mistaking privilege for purpose and power for principle.

Yesterday’s activists are everywhere. In party political hierarchies, where slogans of reforms have been replaced with whispered deals. In legislative chambers, the rhetoric of justice is now delivered in a tonal monotone. In government offices, where principles now bow to protocols. On television, where their voices, once the heralds of change, now amplify the very mediocrity they once condemned. They are megaphones of mediocrity, spokespersons for convenience, and custodians of the status quo.

Change they say is constant. God forbid that anyone or anything created by God should become frozen in an unchanging state, petrified in form and spirit. But change is not an alibi for self-betrayal. Change that turns a person into a grotesque caricature of their former self is hardly within the purpose of creation. Growth refines; it does not destroy. It deepens conviction; it does not erode meaning. Change that empties life of its animating values is not evolution but erosion.
What, then, explains activists who walk away from the labour of enlarging humanity to champion a narrow ethnic enterprise, especially one nourished by resentment and the demonisation of the other? How does the language of justice fit into the grammar of exclusion?

Often, it is not ideology that changes first, but appetite. The long discipline of principles gives way to the seductions of belonging, access, and closeness to power. Principles are abandoned for parochial rewards. The struggle for dignity is reduced to a scramble for advantage, and solidarity is reimagined as kinship. In that descent, activists do not merely change sides; they change the moral scale by which sides are judged. More tragic is the fact that they become the simulacrum of the very oppressive system they once opposed, and brownnosers for the capricious order they spent a lifetime fighting.

Power has a way of recruiting its critics when vigilance falters. It flatters them with relevance, baptises compromise as pragmatism, and calls surrender “realism”. Over time, the language of resistance is retained, but only as a costume; the substance has migrated. What remains is a hollow exhibition of dissent that now functions to stabilise the status quo it once sought to unsettle.

True change demands continuity of moral purpose, even as methods, contexts, and roles evolve. To grow is not to forget where one stood when standing carried a cost. It is to carry that memory forward as a weapon against the corruption of the self. Anything less is not the inevitability of change but its abuse.

And we are told not to be shocked. Change is constant, they say. God forbid that anyone or anything created by God should remain unchanging, rigid, frozen in form or spirit. We are told that change is inevitable, that evolution demands compromise. But growth does not annihilate conviction. Refinement does not hollow out the heart. Change that turns a moral soldier into a clown of convenience is not evolution. It is erosion.

Consider those activists who once championed the rights of the oppressed, who marched with placards screaming equality, who stood at barricades when no one else dared. Today, they champion the interests of a narrow ethnic group, a parochial elite, classes of the powerful who laugh at the very ideals they once defended. Their language still brims with the lexicon of justice, but the grammar has changed. Justice is no longer universal. It is transactional. Solidarity has been traded for kinship. Ideals have been exchanged for influence.

Principles are footnotes to privilege. Appetite comes first, and ideological commitment vanishes entirely. The transformation is tragic, yes, but also comic, in a way only history can fully appreciate. They parade the language of resistance as a costume. Their speeches are performances. The fire in their eyes has been replaced by the sheen of self-preservation. Power has recruited them. It flatters them and baptises compromise as pragmatism.

We laugh, sometimes nervously, at the irony. Student leaders who once kept vigil under the stars after drafting press statements now sleep in state guesthouses while drafting memos of patronage. Human rights crusaders who once chained themselves to gates to stop tyrants now chain themselves to the rhetoric of convenience to secure ministerial appointments. Pro-democracy campaigners who once marched on empty stomachs now march to the bugle of protocols, ensuring the machinery of governance runs for those in power, not for ordinary citizens. Yes, our leaders, those who once claimed moral high ground, now crouch in the corridors of expediency.

The change is constant, we are told, but it is not a free license for self-betrayal. True transformation requires that the memory of struggle serve as a beacon, not as relics for display. Growth refines. Change deepens meaning. What we are witnessing is neither growth nor evolution. It is performance. It is mimicry. It is erosion.

And yet, the world continues. Citizens who once cheered now sigh. Society, ever hopeful, still expects something from those who fought for its liberation. They remind themselves that the world is not static, that yesterday’s radicals can, in theory, evolve into today’s guardians. But patience has limits. Tolerance has boundaries. One can only marvel at the spectacle of former revolutionaries embracing the very vices they once fought against before the theatre becomes unbearable. In that theatre, satire writes itself. The activist turned politician now debates on primetime television, defending policies he would have burnt effigies over thirty years ago.

The student leader turned legislator now introduces bills that preserve the inequalities he once decried. The pro-democracy campaigner turned bureaucrat now ensures that the machinery of repression is lubricated for those who wield money and influence. And citizens, the audience, clap. Sometimes out of politeness, sometimes out of despair, and sometimes simply because they recognise that the world is often stranger than fiction.

There is a lesson here. Vigilance is personal as well as public. The struggle for humanity is not a season but a lifetime. Principles are not souvenirs to be displayed when convenient. Ideals are not theatrical props. Change must be measured against memory, and growth weighed against conscience. Those who lose that measure become grotesque, comic, and tragic all at once. Yes, our leaders, the ones who once led marches, issued ultimatums, and endured imprisonment, now sit comfortably in the halls of privilege. They smile, they gesture, and they quote old speeches. But the substance has long departed.

Time spies at their costumes. History notes the irony. And the citizenry? The citizens wait for someone, anyone, to remember that growth without conscience is hollow, that power without principles is tyranny in disguise.