Actor and social commentator Adebowale Adedayo, known as Mr Macaroni, has explained why he stepped back from constant public attacks on government. He pointed to exhaustion, public backlash and threats he said followed his activism after Wazobia FM recirculated an old interview in which he spoke about danger around the #EndSARS protests.
He was quick to date the clip. The radio conversation, he said on X, is more than two years old. The argument inside it, he insisted, has not expired.
“Forget about the threats. My issue with us as Nigerians is how we move on quickly. We complain and move on. There is nothing I will say now that I haven’t already said hundred times over. Until we as a people are ready to fight for what is ours, saying the same thing over and over again is just TIRING.”
He tied the break to a March 2026 post in which he branded President Bola Tinubu’s administration “the Most Useless Government in the history of Useless Governments.” That day, he said, was when he decided to pause. A handful of politicians, he added, still “ruin the lives of over 200 million Nigerians so brazenly without any resistance.” Until citizens drop what he called a “survival mentality,” “then we are truly not ready.”
Fans had read his quieter timeline as fear. He rejected that reading.
“I have been persecuted and vilified since I started speaking up against Government. Threats are a usual occurrence. Please don’t mix things up. I am only tired of saying the same thing over and over again. When Nigerians are finally ready, I will be ready too! But till then, please let me continue enjoying my break by redefining myself and Art, which I love as dearly as I love Nigeria.”
The Wazobia FM tape shows why the fatigue runs deep. He said speaking up turned him into the villain in the eyes of the same public he thought he was defending.
“Nigeria is a very funny country. Nigerians are also very funny. And I say this with all seriousness, because I’m not so happy about how things have been. And you keep talking, and it seems like you are the troublesome person. The same Nigerians that you speak for turn against you. They start to fight you.”
He said he has no interest in joining politics and that the system even spoiled people he once admired from school, men whose reputations, in his telling, collapsed once they entered the game.
Then came the conversation about #EndSARS. He described threats to his life and a family that feared for his life.
“So, you know, End SARS came at risk to my life, threats here and there, serious threats. My family, no time, they were every time calling me, crying, ‘Debo, please. Debo, please.’ Every—every blessed time, my mother. Every blessed time. It was so bad they wanted to fly me out of the country. I said, ‘For what? I’m not running anywhere.’”
He said he still did not go quiet after the protests. During the 2023 election he posted videos and tweets telling people to vote wisely and named the candidate he personally preferred, without ordering anyone else to follow him. The reply, he said, was abuse.
“See curses and insults they were raining on me. ‘You are a bastard, you are this one, you are that one.’”
After a president emerged, the same crowd started tagging him again. His question now is blunt.
“Now, everything is the way that it is and it is affecting me too. But what should I come and say again now?”