The Broken Promise: How a Youth Leader Sold Out His Generation

I remember the first day I saw Tunde speak.

We were gathered in the dusty courtyard of the community hall, restless and worn out from years of silence. We had all suffered — no jobs, no hope, no voice. Our leaders treated us like numbers. But when Tunde stood on that makeshift stage with nothing but a microphone and fire in his eyes, something shifted. Something awakened.

He wasn’t just a speaker; he was a storm.

“Enough is enough!” he roared. “They have used us as ladders and broken our backs to climb. But we will rise, and this time, we won’t carry anyone—we’ll carry ourselves.”

The crowd went wild. Young people cried. Some even knelt and raised their hands. In that moment, we believed in him. I believed in him.

Tunde was one of us—born and raised in the slums of Ajegunle. His mother sold akara by the roadside, and his father died in a bus accident when he was nine. He didn’t speak perfect English, but every word he spoke came from pain, and we understood pain better than any language.

When he founded the movement Youth Arise, we followed him like he was Moses parting the Red Sea. We held rallies. We cleaned gutters as a symbol of cleaning our society. We even donated our meager savings to rent a small office for the movement.

Tunde didn’t wear suits or drive fancy cars. He wore plain clothes and rode okada like the rest of us. He said, “I want to change the system, not become the system.” That line alone made him a legend in our eyes.

When the elections came, the politicians took notice. Suddenly, the same leaders who once ignored us were now inviting Tunde for meetings. He resisted at first. He told us, “They want to buy our silence, but we are not for sale.” We cheered. We trusted him.

But everything changed after that night.

It was a rainy Thursday, and we were supposed to have a press conference about our next protest. Tunde didn’t show up. He didn’t pick calls. We thought he had been arrested.

The next morning, he was on national TV—smiling, shaking hands with the same governor he once called “a thief in a tie.”

He didn’t speak to us. Not even a phone call. We were just... abandoned.

At first, we defended him. “Maybe he’s playing smart,” we told ourselves. “Maybe he’s infiltrating the system to fix it from within.” But weeks passed. Months. No protest. No outreach. Youth Arise became a Twitter account run by interns. The fire was gone.

Then came the worst betrayal.

Tunde was appointed as Special Youth Adviser to the Governor.

We were shocked. Not because he took a government job—but because he had become everything he promised never to be.

He stopped speaking truth. He started defending policies that hurt us. Fuel price hikes. Unpaid salaries. He called our suffering “necessary sacrifice.” When people complained online, his team called them “ungrateful.” The same Tunde who once held a placard now dismissed protests as “unproductive noise.”

The pain was deep, but for me, it was personal.

I had been with him since day one. I was the one who designed the Youth Arise logo. I had slept in the office on cold cement floors, working on flyers, sending emails, organizing events. I had sacrificed my final year in school just to support the movement full time. My parents thought I was crazy. Maybe I was.

When I finally got a meeting with him—after three months of begging—it lasted five minutes. He sat in a cool, air-conditioned office with leather chairs and a new iPhone.

“Tunde,” I said, trying not to cry. “People are suffering. They need you. We need you.”

He leaned back, sighing like I was a burden.

“Emeka,” he said, “you don’t understand how this game works. You can’t fight the system from outside. You have to get in to make change.”

“But what change have you made?” I asked, voice cracking. “People can’t eat. They’re being evicted. The governor you once hated is now your boss. You’re defending him while we’re dying out there.”

He looked away.

“Do you think I haven’t tried? Do you think this is easy?”

I stood up. “You’re not trying. You’ve stopped. You gave up. You’re not one of us anymore.”

He didn’t reply. Just looked at his phone.

I left his office that day and never looked back.

The betrayal burned like acid. I went into depression. Everything I believed in had collapsed. People I recruited mocked me. My parents barely spoke to me. I had nothing left—no degree, no money, no movement.

But pain has a strange way of waking you up.

Slowly, we began to rebuild. Quietly. Without Tunde.

We started holding street classes to teach young people how to create small businesses. We set up free skill centers with used laptops. We volunteered in hospitals. We didn’t shout as much, but we worked harder. We had no leader, no funding, no TV coverage. But we had each other. And the people noticed.

Years passed.

Tunde became a full politician. Rumors of scandals followed him. Contracts inflated. Funds mismanaged. He denied everything. He always had a smart response.

But the truth? The truth was loud in the eyes of those who once believed.

One day, I was walking through Mushin when I saw him.

Tunde.

He was being rushed into a car by security men. His face was older. Tired. But our eyes met for one second—and I saw it. That old fire was gone. All that remained was a man who had traded his soul for a seat.

He looked at me, and for a flicker of a moment, his lips moved—almost like he wanted to say something.

I just nodded and kept walking.

Because sometimes, the saddest stories are not the ones where the hero dies...

It’s the ones where the hero becomes the villain.