There is a peculiar species of confidence, one that borders dangerously on delusion, that permits a man to burn down a house and then position himself as the foremost authority on fire safety. In Nigeria, this confidence does not merely exist; it has been institutionalised, rewarded, and handed a microphone. Every television screen, every newspaper column, every political rally stage in this country has become a recurring theatre of the absurd, where the very architects of Nigeria’s decay arrive well-dressed, well-fed, and extraordinarily well-spoken, to diagnose a disease they themselves have been spreading for decades.
Nigerians may be patient. But patience is not the same thing as ignorance. And we are watching.
The Physician Who Manufactured the Plague
Let us be honest about who these people are. The dominant voices in Nigeria’s political conversation today are not fresh minds unburdened by the failures of the past. They are, with striking consistency, the same cast of characters who have rotated through the corridors of power since the return of democracy in 1999, and in several cases, long before it. Governors who became senators. Senators who became ministers. Ministers who became presidential advisers. Presidential advisers who became governors again. The carousel never stops. Only the titles change.
These are men and women who have had their hands on the levers of this country for over a quarter of a century. Twenty-six years. In twenty-six years, a child is born, grows up, completes a university education, if ASUU quarrels with the government permit, and enters a job market deliberately kept dysfunctional to maintain a cheap, desperate, and compliant labour pool. In twenty-six years, a nation with Nigeria’s oil wealth, agricultural potential, human capital, and geographic advantage should, by any reasonable standard, have transformed itself into a continental powerhouse. Instead, we have managed to perfect the art of squandering everything.
The Audacity of the Defeated
There is no moment quite as revealing of this class’s breathtaking impunity as the post-election press conference. Watch carefully what happens when a Nigerian politician loses power. The man who could not fix a single road in eight years suddenly discovers an urgent passion for infrastructure. The governor under whose watch schools crumbled now delivers impassioned lectures on education reform. The former minister who looted a ministry to its foundations becomes, overnight, a fierce anti-corruption crusader. Defeat, it seems, is the great awakening, the moment these physicians suddenly remember they studied medicine.
The commentary flows freely. The interviews multiply. The op-eds appear. The think-tank affiliations emerge from nowhere. And the Nigerian public is expected, is, in fact, demanded, to sit attentively and receive this wisdom without raising the uncomfortable question that hangs over every sentence like a persistent harmattan haze: Where were you when you had the power to do something?
The answer, invariably, is the same place the money went. Somewhere unreachable, unaccountable, and thoroughly unexplained.
When the Physician Refuses the Medicine
What makes this class particularly insufferable is not merely their diagnosis of problems they created. It is their visible, almost contemptuous refusal to submit themselves to the very prescriptions they offer others. They speak of sacrifice while collecting jumbo salaries that mock the GDP per capita of the citizens they govern. They preach fiscal discipline while maintaining a federal legislature that is, by several global comparisons, one of the most expensive and least productive on earth. They lecture on patriotism while their children are schooled in the United Kingdom, receive medical treatment in India and Germany, and hold foreign passports that provide a convenient exit strategy from the country they claim to love.
They call for unity but build their entire political careers on ethnic arithmetic and religious mobilisation. They demand that citizens obey the rule of law while their legal teams work around the clock to ensure that the rule of law ends precisely at the doors of their own mansions. They ask the poor to endure subsidy removal, currency devaluation, and the withdrawal of social support, austerity measures administered to the patient in the ward, while the physician’s own lifestyle remains untouched, unexamined, and in many cases, growing more lavish by the quarter.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Ordinary hypocrisy carries at least a shadow of shame. What the Nigerian political class has achieved is a bolder mutation: shameless, structural, and entirely self-aware hypocrisy. They know what they are doing. They have simply calculated, not incorrectly, it must be said — that there will be no meaningful consequence.
The Conspiracy of Permanent Relevance
Perhaps the most sophisticated trick this class has perfected is the conspiracy of permanent relevance. No Nigerian politician truly leaves the stage. They metamorphose. The former head of state becomes a statesman whose opinion must be sought. The convicted or strongly alleged looter rehabilitates through a new party affiliation and re-emerges as a reformer. The failed governor returns as a senator. Power is never relinquished; it is merely reorganised. New faces are occasionally admitted into the circle, but they are carefully vetted, not for competence or integrity, but for their willingness to honour the unwritten code: protect the class, sustain the system, and never, under any circumstances, permit genuine accountability to take root.
This is why the same names appear across administrations of different parties, different geopolitical zones, different so-called ideological persuasions. Because the parties are not ideological formations. They are vehicles. Alliances of convenience assembled and disassembled with the efficiency of a roadside mechanic, depending entirely on which direction the wind of patronage is blowing. The Nigerian voter is presented with the illusion of choice while the options on the ballot are, in substance, drawn from the same diminishing pool of recycled ambition.
To the Physician: We See You
So let this serve as a direct communication, not a petition, not a plea, but a statement of clarity, to this political class that has mistaken Nigerian endurance for Nigerian endorsement.We see the houses in Maitama and Banana Island built on salaries that could not have afforded them. We see the convoys and the foreign hospitals and the children in universities abroad whose fees exceed what most Nigerian families earn in a lifetime. We see the stomach infrastructure deployed at election time, the rice bags and the cash, as the cynical transaction it is: a rental of our votes, not a recognition of our humanity. We see the sponsored thuggery. We see the judiciary that bends. We see the anti-corruption agencies that somehow always seem to find corruption exclusively in the ranks of political opponents.
We have watched your television appearances, read your carefully worded statements, and endured your national day speeches about the Nigeria of our dreams, delivered from podiums while the dreamers outside struggle with darkness, hunger, insecurity, and a future that recedes faster than it can be chased.
You have diagnosed us long enough. The question that Nigeria is now beginning, slowly but unmistakably, to ask aloud is the oldest question in the consulting room. The one that strips the white coat away and demands something the Nigerian political class has never voluntarily offered.
Physician, when last did you examine yourself?
A Final Word to the Nigerian People
And to us, the supposedly docile millions, let this also be said plainly: docility is only a virtue until it becomes complicity. The Nigerian people are not fools. We are a people who have been systematically exhausted, divided, economically neutered, and spiritually worn down by a class that profits from our fragmentation. But exhaustion is not consent. Survival is not surrender.
The physician’s greatest fear is a patient who reads. A patient who remembers. A patient who compares the prescription written on paper with the life being lived by the one who wrote it.
Nigeria, we are that patient. And our memory is longer than their confidence.
The diagnosis is no longer in dispute. The question is only whether those responsible will be held to the same bitter medicine they have so generously prescribed for the rest of us — or whether we will continue to allow them to write cheques of wisdom that their own conduct has never been willing to cash.
