By Prof Jacob Jacob
Good afternoon. I was 11 years old when I learned what a letter bomb can do to a human body. My father had come home from work in Calabar in South-eastern Nigeria where I grew up and left a magazine on our living room table. And I was the kind of 11- year-old kid who was drawn to news.
So, I picked it up. On the cover of the magazine was a photograph of a dead man with a horrible gash on his face. The headline read: ‘‘Who killed Dele Giwa? I took that magazine to the corner of the room I shared with my siblings and read how Dele Giwa, the Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch, Nigeria’s most fearless news magazine at the time, had opened a parcel bomb that was delivered at his home address that morning.
He told someone that was with him – this must be from the President, referring to the then military dictator of Nigeria, General Ibrahim Babangida. The bomb exploded and killed him instantly. For many nights afterward, I imagined bombs everywhere.
I would hesitate before even opening the toilet seat, imagining there could be a bomb hidden underneath. And this is what fear does to a child. This is what the death of trust looks like.
But here is what I didn’t understand then, which took me years to grasp. The real story wasn’t just about military brutality. The real story was about how Nigeria got there.
When the military first seized power and overthrew a democratically elected government in 1983, people celebrated on the streets. People danced. They thought, including my parents, that the military had saved them from a government that had completely lost their trust.
And the celebration was genuine. The relief was real. And this is the problem with the story that we tell ourselves about democracy.
That it simply dies by a coup, by force, by evil men with guns. The truth is more unsettling. Democracy dies when people lose faith.
It dies when trust collapses so completely that citizens even welcome the executioners. I grew up through almost two decades of military dictatorship. There were lots of disappearances of people.
Journalists imprisoned and killed- assassinations – including extrajudicial ones. One that I remember vividly was that of the environmental activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by a firing squad after a kangaroo trial in a military tribunal.
And I learned something I wish I didn’t know. What the opposite of democracy actually looks like. What it feels like.
Today, Nigeria is a vibrant democracy- imperfect as it is. But I carry those years with me. They taught me that the most imperfect democracy is better than the most perfect authoritarian rule, if there’s anything like that.
And they taught me to recognize the signs of a dying democracy. So, when I see the numbers from Pew Research, close to 80% of Americans, for example, trust the military. And less than 30% trust the elected officials.
I recognise something. When I see that across Europe, citizens trust those who carry guns more than they trust people that carry bullets. I recognize something.
When I hear the same cynicism about politicians, the same weariness with democratic institutions, the same desperate longing for someone strong, someone powerful that will come and fix everything, I recognize something. When I see the military- people in combat uniform on the streets, enforcing public order.
Ladies and gentlemen, I recognise something. I recognise the story I already know- the story of trust collapsing. The story that precedes the story of the death of democracy. But here is what else I recognize – crisis has a strange power.
It has the power to force us to imagine differently. And my work in democratic support and countering disinformation and my vocation as well as a Benedictine spiritual director led me to realization that may make some people a bit uncomfortable. The crisis of democracy cannot be solved by technical fixes alone.
When citizens say they don’t trust their government, when they say they don’t trust the people in government, they’re saying essentially they really don’t trust the people in government. When they say ‘they don’t trust institutions,’ what they’re saying essentially is that they don’t trust the people that run those institutions. When they distrust democracy, it’s because they don’t believe that their political leaders will act all the time in their best interest.
So, I began asking a different kind of question. What if we address not just the systems of democracy, but the souls of the people who lead those systems? This question felt radical. It even felt spiritual.
It felt uncomfortable, particularly among my colleagues and in policy circles. But I couldn’t escape it. Let me tell you what trust looks like. The kind of trust that builds democracies. Trust is what happens when leaders’ deepest values and their actions are consistent; when citizens witness genuine care, not performance.
When moral integrity is embodied, not acted- trust is not a product that can be manufactured. It cannot be packaged, advertised, and sold. It cannot be focused, grouped. It cannot be branded. Trust is fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon.
It emerges from the recognition of our shared humanity, from the experience of being truly seen and heard. And right now, we’re facing something that really threatens the very foundation of trust. AI-enhanced disinformation that doesn’t just spread lies, but fragments our shared reality itself.
And democratic consent is manipulable at scale. And our capacity for collective truth-seeking is eroding. And traditional tools such as fact-checking, counter-narratives, they’re necessary, but they’re insufficient.
Because we’re not just fighting false information, we’re really fighting for the possibility of truth itself. And this is why we established the Global Center for Rehumanizing Democracy. Let me be specific about what we do.
First, we offer contemplative leadership formation. We create training retreats where leaders do the inner work that must accompany how to change. Not meditation as stress, relief, but contemplative practice as a foundation for moral integrity.
Because what I’ve learned is that you cannot give what you don’t have. And a leader who has not done that inner work does not have the capacity to create conditions for trust. Second, we engage in system renewal and strategic mediation.
We help structures, we help build structures that can help enhance trust within institutions and trust building within such institutions. And thirdly, we’re creating a trust intelligence tool, an AI-powered democratic discourse index that analyzes social media in real time to measure the quality of national democratic discourse. And you can think of it as an early warning system for when democratic trust is fracturing.
This is our bet, that what is coming, the AI-revolution, the information chaos, the fragmentation of reality, requires us to move beyond technical fixes to address the human heart and spirit. I want to return to where I began, that 11-year-old boy reading about delirious assassination, imagining bombs everywhere. He learned to live in fear; he also learned about hope.
He experienced what the alternative to democracy looks like, and I can tell you that it is an experience I would never wish on anyone. The story I’m telling you today, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the crisis of democracy, and the crisis of democracy is fundamentally the crisis of trust. We need a global movement for trust-based democratic renewal.
Not just better policies, not just stronger institutions, of course we do need those, but we need leaders who have done the inner work to lead with moral integrity. What the Organisation of Education Cooperation needs to re-humanise democracy by addressing what we’ve neglected, the moral foundation, the spiritual dimension, the human heart, and I’m inviting you to this work. Thank you.
Prof Jacob, who is the Under-Secretary for Research, Evaluation and Foresight (REEF) Organisation of Educational Cooperation- OEC, presented this speech at Athens
