By Bruce Malogo
We are not poor. We are plundered. We didn’t fall. We were pushed. There is a difference. One is an accident. The other is a job. For decades, those doing the job have perfected the art of making their victims apologize for bleeding. They call it decorum. They call it patience. They call it patriotism. It is none of those. It is maintenance. A population locked in the daily panic of survival – of whether the fuel in your car can get you to your destination, whether school fees can be stretched, whether the hospital will demand a deposit before touching your dying child. Such a population does not have the luxury to audit a budget. Despair is a superb instrument of control.
This is the central obscenity: Nigerians have no business suffering this much. There is no material or intellectual justification for it. We are a country taunted by our own abundance. A nation blessed with a healthy and bountiful wealth, both natural and human, that should make penury impossible. We have crude oil and gas, bitumen and lithium, cocoa and sesame, and 70 million hectares of arable land. More importantly, we have people who are inventive, relentless and demographically young.
We were not always a beggar at the gates. There was a time when Nigeria was the envy of the Third World. In the 1970s, our voice in international and diplomatic circles was not a whimper; it was a roar. We bankrolled liberation movements from Angola to South Africa, we sent teachers to the Caribbean and doctors across West Africa, we nationalized British Petroleum to make a point. We spoke and the world leaned in to listen. That influence was not an accident of oil. It was the dividend of seriousness.
Not anymore. That project has been abandoned, and the bill is paid by the ordinary Nigerian who is now clearly living a beggarly life. And what does that beggarly life look like in the 21st century? It looks like a first-class graduate in engineering who drives a “keke” or trades “crypto” because the factory that should have hired him was never built. Our unemployment is not just a number; it is a daily humiliation of talent.
It looks like a mother in Igbuzo who haggles with a “chemist” for paracetamol – a basic drug that has become a luxury. This is inevitable when 80% of Nigeria’s 34,000 primary health centres are non-functional: no drugs, no staff, no light, no water. More than 130 million people live without real access to basic care, where a caesarean section bankrupts a family and malaria still kills children by the thousands.
It looks like darkness. After 66 years of independence and over $25 billion poured into power, the average Nigerian still receives less than six hours of reliable electricity a day. We run a 21st-century economy on generators – the most expensive, inefficient and environmentally destructive way to power a nation. Small businesses spend 40% of their overhead on diesel.
It looks like “japa” – the frantic exodus of our best nurses, our best engineers, our best doctors, queuing at embassies not out of adventure, but out of surrender. We train them here and lose them there, and the government calls it “brain export.” The ultimate insult is that this was not inevitable. Our peers at independence have outrun us while we were busy running in circles, playing the ethnic, religious and class cards. While we schemed how to rig the next election, argued over which part of the country must produce the president and who gets what position, and sparred over which regime raided the treasury more.
Make no mistake about it, Nigeria has had the misfortune of being run by men and women of predatory instinct, and they have always put the instinct to use, set after set. It is exactly as America’s Abraham Lincoln put it: “Men of ambition and talent will continue to spring up amongst us, and when they do, they will seek gratification of their ruling passion, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.” Nigeria’s ruling class often chooses the latter – a vicious, relentless violation of the many by the few.
Consider Indonesia – our usual mirror. In 1970, we were equals: same GDP per capita, same dependence on oil, same military rule, same fractious diversity. Today, the mirror breaks. Indonesia’s economy is three times ours. It has built 2,000 km of industrial rail and a manufacturing base for 18 million people. Its poverty rate has fallen from 60% to under 10%. Ours has risen. We now lead the world in extreme poverty, even of the multidimensional kind.
Take Malaysia, as we always tried to remind ourselves. In the 1960s, it came to the Nigerian Institute for Oil Palm Research (NIFOR) in Benin City to collect palm seedlings. It took our fruit and built a $20 billion global empire. We, the original owners, now import palm oil.
Consider the United Arab Emirates. Dubai had nothing in 1971 but sand and a creek. Its elders came to study the Lagos port system. It had no oil to speak of. Today, Lagos goes to Dubai to learn how to run a port, an airline and a city. The UAE turned its desert into a hub; we turned our hub into a desert.
Even Botswana – a landlocked, arid country that at independence had only 12 kilometres of paved road and 22 university graduates – has managed its diamonds with a sovereign fund that pays for free education and healthcare. We managed our oil boom into debt.
These countries are not more blessed than Nigeria. They are simply better governed. They made a pact that public wealth must create public value. Here, the opposite pact holds. The authorities keep churning out statistics that do not reflect the objective realities of the people. Inflation is down, they say. Growth is up. Reforms are working. How disingenuous to redefine poverty out of existence! If the law is an ass, so is statistics – you put it to whatever use you desire. After all, who doesn’t know how to lie with statistics?
Figures have become our national anaesthetic. They are deployed to contradict what every citizen knows from his own stomach, his own rent, his own light switch. A GDP figure that does not reflect the reality of the market woman in Oyingbo or Ogbete whose purchasing power has halved in 18 months, or the farmer in Birnin Gwari who cannot reach his farm because of bandits, is not data; it is propaganda.
They ask us to be patient with a system that has never been patient with us. To be civil to a state that is structurally uncivil to its citizens. To lower our voices while our lives are lowered. To make our language antiseptic in the face of severe pain. The mass of Nigerians is now wired to assimilate too much suffering. Even as they look at their abject condition, they find ways to regard it as normal. And the more they feel this condition, the more they become inured to – not informed by – what they are feeling. “When the heart suffers so much, it develops a taste for misfortune,” writes Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. But there should come a time in the life of a people when they have to say to themselves: enough is enough.
This is not a call for chaos. It is a demand for dignity. Nigerians do not seek charity from the state; they seek a return to the basic moral contract of governance – that a people so endowed should live a life of worth, that public office should be stewardship and not brigandage. They cannot continue to be a wealthy country that manufactures poor people. The oil is still there. The land is still there. The people – battered but brilliant – are still there. What is missing is a leadership that sees citizens as more than a statistic to be massaged. Nigerians deserve more than survival. They deserve a life. They do not deserve bullets, they deserve bread.
Malogo is a director at Oscar and Halliday Media Company and a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) bruce.malogo@gmail.com
