Statistics hardly lie, especially those not crooked off the Nigerian laboratories! On the continental level, the country ranked 33 out of 54 African nations on the 2024 Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) platform, a score which has been declining since 2014, indicating concerning trend in the country’s overall governance quality.
Globally, the country consistently ranks in the lower tiers. In 2024, it was 140th out of 180 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index, signifying severe corruption problem. The 2024 Global Hunger Index tiered Nigeria 110th out of 127 countries, with hunger levels classified as “serious”. Similarly, the 2023 Global Peace Index positioned Nigeria as the 144th most peaceful country out of 163. The UN’s Human Development Index (2023) ranked Nigeria 163rd, indicating critically low levels of health, education, and standard of living.
The 2024 Democracy Index categorised Nigeria as a “hybrid regime,” ranking it 106th globally. The Fragile States Index (2024) also places Nigeria among the more vulnerable nations, clinching 8th in Africa, below such countries as Ghana, South Africa, Senegal and Namibia. The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators underscore these challenges, with Nigeria performing below average in areas like government effectiveness and rule of law. The country’s performance on the Human Misery Index and various good governance indices reveals significant challenges too, positionings that validate systemic issues with transparency, accountability, and security.
Yet, this is resource-affluent Nigeria! While calculating the exact total earnings by the country from petroleum products alone since discovery may be an incredibly complex exercise, it is acknowledged the country has made well over a trillion U.S. dollars from crude exports since the 1970s, with some estimates reaching significantly higher, considering all forms of petroleum-related income over the decades. Indeed, oil has been the dominant force in Nigeria’s economy, consistently accounting for over 90 per cent of export earnings and a substantial portion (often over 60 per cent) of government revenue.
While this immense wealth has funded significant infrastructure projects, urban development, and social programs, it has also instantiated a “resource curse” phenomenon, as quite significant fraction of accruals from it since discovery – far exceeding half a trillion dollars – has been systemically plundered off! Has the country not been reaping consequences in scandalously transformed national infrastructure, education, energy, and healthcare systems?
In fact, Nigeria has even remained hugely indebted to the Bretton woods and the Asian Tigers, as federal government has never stopped borrowing, despite and amidst gargantuan earnings from crude. As at January 2025, the country’s total debt stock stands at N122 trillion, and borrowings have continued! Governance remains blatant travesty, and year-in, year-out, indices that evidence reverses, like those initially reeled out, slide worse on critical fronts! Lately, kidnapping, ritual killings and other varieties of armed banditry have joined legion other ills in consequence of the absentee governance syndrome.
If the preceding expose on sheer enormity of robberies across Nigeria’s seats of power did not symptomise chronic mental challenge on part of occupiers of the seats, one should wonder what would! Indeed, some controversial theories had predicted human intellectual and moral retrogressions – as being currently harvested, particularly among political barons of our day – as the world wore on!
Francis Galton, linked to eugenics, prognosticated “dysgenics,” contending modern society’s reduced natural selection would allow less intelligent individuals to out-reproduce, thereby lowering human intelligence across generations. Factually, some thinkers had warned of cognitive stagnation or atrophy of the intellect. Oswald Spengler, in “The Decline of the West,” surmised that civilisations had entered a phase where true creativity and intellectual vitality would diminish, replaced by machinist thinking.
Nigerian government’s un-loosening of so-called market forces upon the populace, juxtaposed with its stubborn refusal to ensure a living wage for its workers must have given positive nod to such wondrous theory. The twin failure has created deeply inequitable system, where the burden of latter-day “reforms” disproportionately crushes the ordinary citizen, even as state-funded welfare projects remain a distant dream.
It is quite baffling why government even talks of market forces when its policies have plainly de-marketed the very masses! Why do they pretend blindness when their gaze ocularly captures grisly eviscerations of sheer blatancies of poverty contents of those far removed from entire forms of state-propped clemencies?
Should anyone again wonder at governments’ routine preference for dressing roads and highways, and other forms of inanimates, while being entirely unconcerned in making genuine efforts at even marginal enhancement of the human condition? While salaries and perks of political office holders are on constant rise – recall a new regime is recently unleashed(!), wages of civil/public servants have remained meaningfully unchanged, amidst uncontrolled, petro-propelled inflation!
Is this not the machinist manifestation of Oswald’s prognosis – a kind favouring its kind, in a way? It’s a predatory governance system that milks the populace to placate the elitist affluent sections via ceaseless mix of resource miss-location and budget padding. Cost of living has skyrocketed at least six folds in consequence of caricatured subsidy removal and currency devaluation in the last two years, eroding purchasing power and plunging millions worse into penury.
The situation evinces fundamental breakdown of the social contract, where the state prioritises elite interests and abstract economic metrics over genuine well-being of its citizens. In such a Nigeria facing atrocious fusion of executive, legislative and judicial psychosis, columnists and writers have mortified into unconscionable, even sophisticated, apologists, often justifying the transgressions – from human rights abuses to corruption – as ‘strategic necessities’ or unavoidable challenge of ‘teething’ democracy! Their sophistries are a coating upon government’s illegitimate practices, effectively partnering state sanctioned decadence!
One never suspected governance could worsen into such unmitigated charade! Machines garbed in human forms in full force everywhere – humanoids dispensing directions, heaping petro-induced inflation upon starvation wages! They heap policies that barely address human needs, and pile up even more as people cry! They dress roads and structures, and undress humans who use them!
They blame those who bolt away with railway bolts to sell as scraps and still search for reasons! Like veteran theatre practitioners, Nigeria’s executive council and assembly members, from central to the states, fill the news with performances having interesting, but quite absurdist, contents on daily frequency! It’s as though they were recruited to do anything but that which concerns those who voted them! Just consider the subject(s) that are of interest to them and one would be left in no doubt as to the value(s) that govern their lives! How come, and by what perfected stratagem, Nigerians harvested such catastrophes as superintendents? From Olusegun Obasanjo’s OFN (Operation Feed the Nation) which he applied to feed himself in specific and recorded ways, through MAMSA, SAP, and all, it has been a rain of pain amidst plenteousness!
While many would not take to criminality under whatever situation, quite legion others would welcome perverseness, when entire means to legit, decent living has been blocked by unceasing heaping of insufferable policies. In their specious harangues, they tutor us to see development where retrogression has domiciled, and plenteousness in a penumbrae of poverty. In an environment of sheer executive folly and wanton wickedness, it remains to be seen what the common man may decide in the months and years ahead.
Definitely, it could not have been humans that would peg wages at shameful levels, and instigate rising prices in unprecedented fashions! Let a malaise that has lived decades witness a revolutionary turnaround, for once! This pilfering in public offices across the layers of governance is too humongous not to stifle breathing passage for the mass of long neglected Nigerians! For a while, just a while, let public officials stop subordinating the welfare of humans to that of non-humans.
It is possible to construct East-West roads and North-South Super highways, even while maintaining human-centered vigilance upon the lives of the abusively neglected. To stop killing wages, reconstruct invalided humans across habitations, and offer genuine revolutionary lease to the generality, government only has to tame its policies! Humanising power in Nigeria truly confronts Nigerian leaders as centennial desideratum!
Quite sadly and apparently, whichever way it is gleaned – from micro-level social relations, to national and global conducts, the modern man has proven a moral/psychological wreck, though obviously intellectually more elevated! Indeed, one looks upon the streets and no one is doing any running! Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimar Putin, Narendra Modi, and back to most of our African homesteads, the headships emit signals humanity is headed in wrong directions.
World leadership has been a felon, relishing Islamophobic killings everywhere – Asia, America, Canada! The vast slaughter-slab Israel has made of Palestine for almost two years, crushing Palestinians in their hundreds every day, has been significantly generally tolerated, even as some elitist bigots routinely wax casuistries to validate/justify what has been fairly simply captured as genocide! Myanmar military in 2017 unleashed death campaign upon Rohingya Muslims which claimed at least 25,000 lives and Aung San Suu kyi, State Counsellor now deservedly deposed and imprisoned, simply looked on! One surely does not have to be Muslim to condemn such killings anywhere – whether in Palestine or elsewhere, one only has to be human!
Intra-America, Trump’s presidency has continuously featured “anti-masses” policies, characterised by significant tax cuts that basically favour corporations and the wealthy, alongside his push to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and environmental protections that ultimately slant favourably towards affluent segments. Putin’s Russia unleashed full-scale, though well-provoked, military onslaught upon Ukraine. A move which violated international law and national sovereignty has truly occasioned immense human suffering, widespread destruction to life and property, and stark challenge to world stability.
Leaderships everywhere are setting the world on fire, and the peoples seem too trapped and helpless to run! Americans now lament polarising, we-against-them, policies; North Koreans cry of open-air imprisonment; it is rising ghetto criminality in India; Europe boasts racism; China has continued its underhand re-education programme for Muslims, discounting media outrage! The human condition for billions is defined by general inequities and profound struggle for basic dignity. From Sahel to flood-soaked deltas of Southeast Asia, and across resource-rich but poverty-laden Africa and Latin America, millions grapple daily with realities far opposed to statehouse declarations.
Average lives globally are meshed and messed up in scarcities across water, healthcare, education, and energy, and economies exploited for elitist ends rather than developed for benefits of common humanity. Climate change continues to torment most communities, amidst a global arms trade superintended by the very powers that purports to maintain peace. Amidst these anomalies, world leaders remain fixated on so-called strategic alliances and resource extraction from unprivileged and impoverished provinces, with collective and individual decisions that tirelessly promote nationalistic interests and corporate gain, discounting universal human dignity, equitable development, and basic welfare.
Salawudeen, writer/freelance journalist, wrote via: via [email protected]
