By Innocent Ezeugonwa

Sir: There is a widening gulf between the triumphal language of government and the daily reality confronting millions of Nigerians. The ruling All Progressives Congress continues to present the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, the Sokoto–Badagry Superhighway, and regional rail expansion projects as proof of transformational governance under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. These projects are advertised as symbols of modernity, economic integration, and national rebirth.

Yet beyond the glossy animations, drone footage, groundbreaking ceremonies, and ribbon-cutting spectacles lies a more uncomfortable truth: many Nigerians are not demanding futuristic grandeur. They are asking for survival.

For ordinary citizens, the most urgent national questions are painfully basic. Can people travel safely without fear of abduction? Can farmers return to their farms without terrorists invading rural communities? Can families sleep through the night without kidnappers breaking into their homes? Can workers afford food, transportation, electricity, and medicine? Can children go to school without becoming targets for bandits?

These are not extravagant expectations. They are the minimum obligations of any functioning state. The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway and Sokoto–Badagry corridor may eventually become economically strategic projects. No serious observer disputes the importance of infrastructure in national development. Roads, railways, ports, and transport corridors are essential to economic growth. But infrastructure loses moral and political meaning when citizens increasingly feel unsafe, hungry, and abandoned.

Nigeria today is battling an epidemic of insecurity that has transformed large sections of the country into killing fields. Terrorist attacks, banditry, communal violence, kidnappings for ransom, and organised criminality continue to spread across rural and urban communities alike. From the North-East to the North-West and increasingly into parts of the Middle Belt and southern regions, countless citizens live under constant anxiety.

The tragic irony is impossible to ignore: it is only those who remain alive that can someday enjoy mega-projects. A government cannot successfully market “legacy infrastructure” to grieving families burying victims of terrorism and abduction. It cannot convincingly celebrate trillion-naira highways while citizens crowd social media daily with desperate fundraising appeals for kidnap ransom payments.

The emotional disconnect is simply too wide.

This is where Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs becomes politically relevant. Maslow argued that human beings first seek physiological survival and security before aspiring toward higher levels of fulfillment and prestige.

Nigeria’s current governance dilemma is that many citizens believe the political elite are attempting to leap toward prestige projects while foundational human needs remain dangerously unmet. Food inflation continues to erode incomes. Youth unemployment remains severe. Public hospitals struggle. Electricity remains unstable. Insecurity continues to spread. For millions, survival itself has become a daily negotiation.

Against this backdrop, the aggressive celebration of partially completed mega-projects increasingly appears detached from social realities. To many Nigerians, it feels like watching an expensive science-fiction production while the roof of the house is on fire.

Even the frequently cited Nigeria–Niger railway project illustrates the contradictions within the ruling party’s narrative. The Kano–Maradi rail line was conceived and initiated during the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, not under the current government. The project generated controversy because many Nigerians questioned the wisdom of prioritising cross-border rail expansion while domestic infrastructure and security challenges remained overwhelming. Critics argued that governance should first stabilise the internal condition of the nation before pursuing symbolic regional ambitions.

That criticism has not disappeared. It has deepened. Citizens are increasingly asking whether governance has become more performative than responsive; measured through media optics rather than through the reduction of suffering. The issue is not whether highways should be built. They should. The issue is whether political leadership understands the hierarchy of national urgency.

A hungry citizen does not experience governance through drone shots of coastal highways. A kidnapped family does not measure progress through animated project designs. A farmer fleeing armed violence cannot celebrate projected trade corridors. For many Nigerians, governance is judged not by the scale of announcements but by the restoration of safety, dignity, stability, and hope.

And so, the nation watches political leaders gather around gigantic projects with applause, speeches, cameras, and ceremonial fanfare, while millions of citizens remain trapped between hunger and fear. The highways may stretch across maps, the rail lines may decorate policy documents, and the promises may dominate headlines, but to many ordinary Nigerians, the essentials of life still remain painfully absent.

In the end, what Nigerians seek is not the glamour of elephant projects but the reassurance of human security and economic survival. Until governance begins to answer those fundamental needs, the loud celebrations around these grand ambitions will continue to resemble what many citizens now bitterly describe as the celebration of a calabash of emptiness; beautifully lifted high for public admiration, yet hollow at its centre.

Innocent Ezeugonwa, a Mass Communication scholar, political and current affairs analyst, can be reached via [email protected]