Power that has nowhere to go does not disappear, it just waits. Let me give you a few cases.
I recently met a senior Nigerian Finance ministry official at a workshop who told me about a delegation of American businessmen that wanted a meeting with him as they were undertaking a transaction that needed government approval. They wanted it immediately, as people do when they assume their time is worth more than yours. They were pushy. They were used to doors opening.
So he left them waiting. Days. No insult, no formal refusal, just a calendar that never quite had room. Eventually he gave them an appointment, but kept them in the waiting room for the whole morning. When I asked why, he gave the most honest answer in the history of public administration: “Because I could.”
It was not corruption, and it was not policy. It was a man who had endured a thousand small indignities, from visa queues to lectures on governance from folks whose countries were just as corrupt, finally holding the one lever in the room and pulling it gently, with a smile, for as long as he liked.
In 2024 Americans were told that a swamp would be drained, there would be no more forever wars and that life would become incredibly cheaper following poor leadership from the Democratic Party’s President Joe Biden.
Last Tuesday, that American voter removed his personal weapon of mass destruction and fired the single bullet in its chamber.
Having given Donald Trump a resounding victory in 2024, many of his voters have spent the last 22 months experiencing a painful dose of buyer’s remorse.
On November 3, 2026, Americans went to the polls armed with their domestic cost of living reality, using the only voice they were in full control of: their vote. Ninety seconds at the voting booth, and a resounding drubbing for the Republican Party across the country.
Earlier this year in April, Hungarians turned out in record numbers and ended strongman Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power. He controlled much of the media, redrew the electoral districts in his favour, and had friends abroad fly in to help including the American Vice President JD Vance. At the end, none of it mattered. A country quiet for a very long time stopped being quiet in one afternoon.
Then came Serbia. In November 2024, the concrete canopy of a newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. What followed was slower and harder to dismiss: students who kept protesting, week after week, for nearly two years, against a government that treated them as a nuisance to be outlasted.
Serbia votes for parties and coalitions, not individuals, and seats in its 250-member Parliament are shared out by the vote. The students’ answer was the “Student List,” a slate of doctors, professors, farmers and actors, with no career politicians and no famous leader, campaigning under the slogan “Serbia or Mafia?”
Aleksandar Vučić, whose party had held power for 14 years, thought he could pull a fast one. In September this year, he resigned the presidency to run for prime minister, hoping to move from one chair to another and keep the house. Serbs recognised that the chap was simply shifting deck chairs on the Titanic.
On October 25, 2026, they turned out in record numbers to vote. The student list took about 53 percent to his coalition’s 39, and Vučić conceded that night.
There is the shareholder whose questions were “noted.” The minority investor who stopped attending meetings, which the board took as contentment. The employee who quit filling in the engagement survey, which someone logged as a good sign. The customer who gets frustrated with every erroneous statement of account, eventually stops buying and just moves elsewhere.
In each case, the quiet is mistaken as consent, when it is not. A shock vote at the AGM, a signed letter to the regulator or the whistle finally blown by a frustrated employee are all examples of where passive demeanour translates into an aggressive response. That translation occurs at a tipping point. And that, my friends, is where leadership discernment is always required.
Watch what people do when they believe they have no say. They nod. They sigh. They say “it is what it is” and go home. Institutions mistake this for consent and start to enjoy the silence. But silence is not agreement. It is storage.
