Nigeria today is a nation not in the conventional sense; it is a soup pot sizzling with the very oil wrung off a disoriented people! A metaphor that is never mere exaggeration captures the harshness of a country shackled by debt, gouged by corruption, and strangled by legislative, executive and judicial excesses. Federal and state governments borrow endlessly, ballooning the country’s debt profile into a grotesque figure – a mountain of obligations both domestic and foreign. But what do these borrowings yield? Not infrastructure, not schools, not hospitals, not steady electricity, not motorable roads, not safety of life and property.
Instead, the borrowings dissolve into the abyss of politicians’ bloated bonuses, perverse perquisites, padded budgets, and phantom projects. The highways remain death traps, the power grid flickers like a candle in the wind – consequence of its routine collapse (?), and water taps across communities sad reminders of the Saharan reality. Borrowings that should have been lifelines are instead nooses, tightening around the neck of the ordinary citizen with every executive move! Corruption in Nigeria is not fleeting disease to be cured; it is the bloodstream of governance. Everyone knows it, everyone laments it; but no one corrects it, as the very custodians of correction powers are lead perpetrators! Politicians are not embarrassed by corruption: they flaunt it; they wear it like beatified regalia, strutting in convoys of latest SUVs, their pockets bulge with public funds. Anti-corruption agencies bark and bite often only in retrospect, their teeth largely dulled by political interference, and recovered loot, re-looted!
The people, weary of hope, have resigned to the fact that corruption is no more an aberration; it is the system itself! Nigeria’s insecurity is not a puzzle without a solution. Banditry, insurgency, and kidnapping are not unsolvable riddles. The solutions exist, the strategies are known, the resources are available. Yet the crises persist, metastasising like cancer. Why? Because politicians are not merely indifferent; they are sponsors and beneficiaries. Bandits are armed proxies, insurgents are political pawns, kidnappers are revenue streams. The blood of citizens is the lubricant of political machinery. Every abduction, every massacre, every burnt village is a dividend cashed in by overseers who thrive on chaos. The other day bandit-robbers visited few banks in Offa, Kwara State, silencing nearly 40 in an early afternoon death campaign. The news started streaming, much soon they were all rounded up – five/six in number! But upon mentioning the name of a politician, the stream dried!
The executive pads the budget, the legislature approves it, and the people pay the price. It is a grotesque circus of theft, a performance where entire arms of government have ossified into a gluttonous beast! Oversight is a myth, accountability a joke. The budget is not a plan for development; it is a shopping list for politicians. Constituency projects are ghostly apparitions, existing only on paper. The common man is shortchanged, robbed in broad daylight, while the political class clinks glasses in celebration of their loot – in my country, funds awarded for repair of 20-kilometre road stretch will conveniently offset the bill for 100 kilometre, even more!
Across the world, lawmaking is a part-time fixture. Legislators convene, deliberate, and return to their professions to earn from legit toils. In Nigeria, lawmaking is full-time occupation, not because of legislative workload, but as it offers excuses to pillage billions, even trillions. Lawmakers are not public servants; they are professional parasites. Their salaries and allowances are obscene packages in a country where university teachers and other categories of public servants remain perpetually rubbished by shaming wages; see medical doctors fleeing abroad, seeking dignifying living! The legislature is not a house of peoples’ representatives; it is one of predatory mis-representatives.
Some argue restructuring Nigeria into geopolitical zones will solve whole legion malaise. True? No! Restructuring will not cleanse their soup pot; it will merely reorganise it into smaller pots, each seized by the same band of politicians, now redistributed based on ancestral leanings, and the zones, far from being sanctuaries of justice, will promptly deliquesce into fiefdoms of exploitation. Witness children of today’s politicians already positioned to inherit the reins of control, groomed to sustain the cycle of plunder. Restructuring will not liberate Nigerians; it will only elongate the dynasty of thieves.
Given perennial abdication of duties and extreme scarcity of ethical governance, Nigerians cannot genuinely enthuse “God bless my country,” much same way as Americans would! The solemn invocation presupposes a moral covenant between citizen and state, a pact in which governance embodies probity, justice, and responsibility, while the people reciprocate with loyalty and sacrifice.
In Nigeria, this covenant has been chronically fractured. The perennial abdication of duties by successive governments – manifest in infrastructural collapse, endemic corruption, commonising of killings and violent criminality, and the grotesque trivialisation of public trust – renders patriotic benediction hollow. To bless a polity is to affirm its legitimacy. But Nigeria’s political architecture, long corroded by venality and dysfunction, scarcely merits such affirmation.
Dearth of ethical governance is not episodic but visceral. Institutions designed to safeguard equity have been transmuted for prebendal purposes. Citizens, daily confronted with insecurity, unemployment, and egregiously horrifying social services, cannot in good conscience sanctify a state that persistently betrays them. Factually, military takeover threatened unsuccessfully by a band weeks earlier, remains an unending wish often whispered among the populace yearning for radical overhaul of a system that sustains corruption in cyclical perpetuity.
Contrast Nigerians with the American reality. Despite imperfections, the United States has cultivated a mythology of liberty, opportunity, and united purpose, and so Americans can, with logical ease, invoke divine benediction upon their republic, for they perceive a tangible reciprocity: a government that, however flawed, strives to protect rights, uphold institutions, and inspire sacrifice. The spectre of brain drain – talented citizens fleeing in search of dignity and opportunity, running away from their roots that refused them blessings for earned toils – underscores the impossibility of authentic patriotic blessing.
Governance would have to transcend kleptocracy, embrace ethical administration, for Nigerians to genuinely and willfully pronounce “God bless my country.” To do so in its current impugned shape would be to consecrate dysfunction, sanctify betrayal, and dignify a state that has perfected every modality to un-dignify its own people. Indeed, tormented by the scourges of banditry, insurgency, and kidnapping, scarified by insecurity, with meager earnings worsted by inflation, while infrastructural decrepitude is perennial torment, amidst routine news serves of humongous robberies across the seats of power/influence, how will Nigerians not hanker after coups or the anachronistic intrusion of foreign bayonets?
Truly, the choking harvests of military usurpation – authoritarianism, repression, and economic regression – might be atavistic, it nevertheless attracts some sympathy, arising from sheer neo-colonial subjugation of citizens by fellow citizens who have doctored electoral victories for narrow interests of self, family and cronies. Truly, to invite the United States or any foreign power into helping to fight insurgency might be to barter sovereignty for servitude as an eventuality, and exchange indigenous hardship for alien domination. But Nigerians seem to have outgrown sentiments of affection for a nation-state that has perfected the tradition of removing their clothes at the market square, and returning same to them in the corner of their living rooms.
In a grand theatre of exploitation that is Nigeria, the people are everlasting victims. They are triply taxed and borrowed against, deceived, and abandoned. Their voices are drowned in the din of political propaganda.
Their votes on election days bought with crumbs – futures mortgaged for pennies. Nigeria is the soup pot. The politicians are the c(r)ooks and diners. The broth, brewed in part from borrowed funds, but mainly through ceaseless streams of petro-cash, is spiced with corruption, thickened with insecurity, and garnished with padded budgets. The aroma indeed tantalises the palate of the political class, but poisonous upon people’s lives. Every spoonful taken by the politicians is a life diminished, a dream extinguished, a hope betrayed.
Nigeria stands today as a nation devoured by its own leaders. Debt has become the anthem, corruption the creed, insecurity side hustle, budgeting carnival, and lawmaking feast. Who will commandeer the lawmakers to admit that lawmaking is part-time, and stop appropriating padded full-time benefits? While the people starve and pine interminably, the Nigeria soup pot simmers endlessly, feeding the politicians and a handful of elite bureaucrats. Unless the pot is shattered, unless the c(r)ooks are expelled, Nigeria will remain a banquet of betrayal, a republic of ruin-country where the only thriving industry is the politics of plunder!
Salawudeen, essayist and polemicist, can be reached via [email protected]
