Chude Jideonwo on Depression, Nigeria's 2015 Election, and the Business of Building Media That Lasts

Description

Send money with Sendwave from the US, UK and Canada to Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Fast and easy. Use the code FoundersConnect when you make your first transfer from the US, UK, or Canada to Nigeria or Kenya — and you'll get $10 or £10 on that transfer when you send a minimum of $10 or £10: https://try.sendwave.com/kjap/nenwbcpd There is a version of Chude Jideonwo that the public knows — the media builder, the political strategist, the voice behind one of Nigeria's most consequential civic movements. And then there is the version that almost no one talks about: the man whose mind, in his own words, had a stroke. The man who woke up one day and could feel nothing. Not grief. Not joy. Nothing. This conversation goes to both places. Chude describes clinical depression not as sadness but as a total collapse of the operating system — a condition where the mind stops working in ways the person inside it cannot explain or control. He talks about anhedonia, the terrifying absence of pleasure in anything, and the internal claustrophobia of being trapped inside a dark maze with no visible exit. He could not imagine ever being okay again. What began his recovery was not a breakthrough or a revelation. It was surrender — a quiet, repeated prayer, and a decision to stop fighting what he could not defeat. He re-read the Bible with completely fresh eyes. His faith did not prevent the collapse. It was what he found in the wreckage. Before the collapse, there was the movement. Chude was one of the architects of the civic energy that drove the 2015 Nigerian general election — the first time in the country's history that a sitting government was voted out of power. He speaks about that moment with unmistakable pride. It was, for him, proof that citizens have a voice, that media and mobilisation can change the material conditions of millions of people. The scale of that outcome is what made political work feel unlike anything else he had done. But the administration disappointed him. And the Chibok kidnapping — the abduction of