There is a particular kind of insult that governments reserve for the poor, and it is not hunger. It is being told to bear hunger patiently by people who are visibly not bearing anything at all. Since May 2023, Nigerians have been asked, repeatedly and in solemn language, to endure a difficult transition for the sake of a better future. They have endured. What has been much harder to endure is watching the cost of running the government rise in the same years that the cost of feeding a family became unbearable — and being told, in effect, that sacrifice is a duty owed downward and never upward.
The Bill Arrived Before the Benefit
The case for removing the fuel subsidy and floating the naira was always that the pain would be front-loaded and the reward would follow. Nigerians accepted the first half of that bargain without being asked. Transport fares multiplied. A bag of rice moved beyond the reach of households that had comfortably afforded one. School fees, rent, medicine and diesel for the generator that substitutes for the national grid all climbed together. Whatever one believes about the economics, the political contract was clear: if you ask a nation to tighten its belt, you must be seen tightening yours first. That is the part this administration never even attempted.
A Cabinet Built for Patronage, Not Performance
Consider the first signal sent. A president who had just told the country there was no money assembled one of the largest cabinets in Nigeria’s democratic history, complete with ministries subdivided so that more people could hold titles. Each of those offices carries a salary, a fleet, a residence, aides, travel votes and a bureaucracy behind it. Nobody in government has ever explained what specific national problem required that many ministers, because there is no such explanation. The cabinet was sized for the coalition that produced the election result, not for the country that has to pay for it. That is the definition of governance as reward rather than as service.
Jets, Yachts and Convoys in a Year of Hunger
Then came the procurement stories, and they arrived in the worst possible year. Budget lines for presidential aircraft. A line item for a yacht that the government spent days trying to reclassify rather than cancel. Fleets of luxury vehicles for the presidency and the National Assembly, defended on the grounds of comfort and security while Nigerians queued for subsidised rice. Each item was individually defended with the same weary formula — it was budgeted, it was approved, it is standard practice. That is precisely the problem. In a country where hunger became a live political emergency, standard practice was the thing that needed to change, and it was the only thing that did not.
The Renovation Votes Nobody Can Justify
Nigeria’s budgets have long carried an embarrassing seam of spending on the physical comfort of officialdom: residences renovated, offices refurbished, guest houses upgraded, official quarters rebuilt at costs that would fund a rural hospital several times over. Under this presidency that seam has not been trimmed; it has been defended. Meanwhile primary health centres operate without electricity, teachers in several states go months without salaries, and universities negotiate over allowances year after year. A government’s true priorities are not in its speeches. They are in the columns of the appropriation act, and those columns have been telling Nigerians the truth for three years.
A Legislature Paid Not to Ask
None of this could survive a functioning National Assembly, which is why the National Assembly had to stop functioning as a check. Nigeria’s legislators remain among the most expensive in the world relative to what their country earns, and the details of their own remuneration remain among the most closely guarded secrets in public life. A chamber that is comfortable does not interrogate the executive that keeps it comfortable. Budgets pass with minimal friction. Uncomfortable inquiries fade. The cost of that arrangement is not merely the money spent on the legislature; it is the money spent everywhere else that nobody was willing to question.
Leadership Is Modelled, Not Announced
What makes this a failure of leadership rather than merely of accounting is that the alternative was available and free. A president determined to hold a suffering country together could have cut the presidential fleet and said so on national television. He could have halved the cabinet, frozen official travel, ended the renovation votes for a year, and published every naira saved. It would not have solved the fiscal crisis, and it was never going to. But it would have bought something this government has almost entirely lost: the moral standing to ask for patience. Nigerians are not unwilling to sacrifice. They are unwilling to be the only ones doing it.
The Question Waiting in 2027
By 2027, voters will not be asked to grade an economic theory. They will be asked a far simpler question, and they will answer it from memory: in the hardest years most of us can remember, who was asked to give something up, and who was not? The answer has been written down, budget cycle by budget cycle, in documents anyone can read. A government that could not bring itself to sacrifice anything at all, while insisting that everyone else must, has already told Nigerians who it was working for. There is no second term that can be built on that record.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
