By Bruce Malogo
It is an old, unyielding truth of statecraft: whoever controls power controls the purse, and whoever controls both controls the people. That reality is as ominous as it is terrifying. But in Nigeria today, this truth is not a distant theory or a warning. It is our blueprint. We have locked political authority and financial power into a single, airtight loop, perfecting a grim art in the process. We have taken public wealth and forged it into a private weapon – a weapon that buys off the leaders and buys out the led, leaving an entire nation captive to its own resources.
At the apex of this predatory food chain sits a presidency whose shadow has lengthened aggressively across the federation. Nigeria’s constitutional design grants immense, almost imperial structural leverage to the center – a systemic flaw that has turned acutely oppressive under the administration of President Bola Tinubu. The federal government retains a tenacious custody over the nation’s primary revenue streams. Consequently, state governors, regardless of their superficial party affiliations, remain financially tethered, like desperate mendicants, to the monthly handouts distributed by the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC).
This financial stranglehold ensures that ideological conviction or party non-conformity is a luxury no Nigerian politician can afford. Nor do state governors have the gumption to assert their states’ constitutional autonomy. With the presidency dangling interventions, ecological funds and infrastructure approvals like treats to a domesticated pet, governors, including those in opposition, have quietly fallen into line. The result is an unsettling, transactional consensus where regional actors trade away their constitutional independence for immediate resource access. Today, they have effectively transformed themselves into compliance officers and advanced campaign managers for the president’s 2027 electoral calculations, abandoning the very electorates they swore to protect.
This sycophancy unmasks a deeper desperation. At the core is a raw, inordinate will for political survival. This, beyond anything else, drives governors across both ruling and opposition parties into such an unashamed display of fawning over the center. Having performed abysmally – leaving their states littered with unfulfilled promises, decayed infrastructure and unpaid obligations – most governors are looking down the road and seeing their political doom ahead, especially at the approach of the 2027 elections. While some are angling for a second term, others have their eyes on the Senate.
These flunking governors know that in a fair contest, they are most likely to lose. In that reality, a corrupt calculation emerges: by lining up submissively behind the president’s re-election ambition, they expect a transactional payback. The unspoken pact is simple: exchange regional loyalty today for the deployment of state security and electoral apparatuses tomorrow. In a country where institutional forces are routinely hijacked to distort the will of the voters, these governors view “federal might” as their ultimate safeguard, their insurance policy against the wrath of their own people.
This systemic hijack is possible because the institutions of the state are so easily compromised in Nigeria. Indeed, they have been effectively arrested, rendered virtually impotent, and turned into the big man’s lapdogs. Organs that traditionally should act as checks and balances on the executive have been neutralized. The Senate sees itself as an extension of the executive’s household; the judiciary is roundly perceived as a handmaiden of the presidency; and the media, the vaunted Fourth Estate of the Realm, are either conveniently slumbering or have fallen off the realm entirely. Public trust in INEC, the police and other security branches remains deeply suspect; and might-is-right has overwhelmed the rule of law. With these organs losing their bark and bite, even the most benevolent of leaders would become an unchecked autocrat; and an autocrat left unchecked, becomes a deity. We are verging on the last stretch.
To be true, Nigeria’s condition of institutional arrest is not a natural aging process; it is a deliberate and sustained act of state capture. Since the return to democracy in 1999, perhaps it was only President Goodluck Jonathan who did not fiddle with the institutions. His tenure remains a unique point of contrast. Here was a Nigerian “executive” president who superintended the very election that scuttled his own return for a second term. He left an indelible legacy with his historic declaration that his political “ambition is not worth the blood of any Nigerian.” Before and after him, Nigeria has rarely witnessed a leader of such grace, contemplation and humanism.
The consequences of this state capture are writ large; they scream loudly in the progressive erosion of our society. While data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) points to record-breaking levels of multidimensional poverty and soaring inflation, the political class operates in a parallel universe of unbridled indulgence. Public funds are treated as a bounty owned by no one in particular. And because they are perceived as ownerless, they are carved up for personal aggrandizement and old boys’ networks. We have repurposed governance and public service into mechanisms for personal enrichment rather than public welfare. Depending on one’s ambition, politics has become either a profession or an enterprise; and corruption morphed into an industry.
It is for that reason that the system deliberately invites an egregious breed of characters into governance – men and women of dangerous determination. Here are individuals without any history of honest labour who will wangle their way into public office solely because political power is the easiest, most lucrative heist in the country. People who have no business in leadership shove themselves into power on the dubious principle of “by any means possible,” and goaded by a duplicitous illogic that “all is fair in politics.” They do that, riding on the coattails of political oligarchs and head honchos. In the end, as is to be expected, they drive every developmental index backward while feasting on the carcass of the state.
The true tragedy, however, lies in the baffling complacency of the populace. Plunged into an artificial state of absolute survival, the people have been reduced to chasing short-term palliatives, conditioned to expect crumbs disguised as state benevolence. The greater tragedy is that this pseudo-benevolence functions merely as a maintenance cost to keep the population quiet and dependent. “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt,” Juvenal, the Roman poet and satirist wrote. Stripped of economic dignity, collective accountability completely collapses.
Broken along lines of ethnic solidarity, religious bigotry and regional bias, the victims end up actively defending their oppressors in what could easily pass as a political Stockholm syndrome – kissing and validating the very hands that ration their survival. When the state purse belongs entirely to those who hold the keys to power, the independence of the citizen dies. What remains is a captive nation, ruled by the purse and utterly broken by the powerful.
The advice is out there: when you find yourself in a hole, the wise thing to do is to stop digging. Nigeria is in a deep, dark hole, yet our political class keeps digging. Reversing this trajectory will not be an act of gentle graduation; it will require a brutal, uphill scramble. But we must dare to climb if we are to face the future with anything resembling hope. Breaking this vicious cycle demands far more than the routine ritual of swapping actors at the top every four years or polite checks on the character of officeholders. It requires an aggressive, structural dismantling of the imperial center – a fundamental rewiring of how public wealth is managed so that the sovereign purse genuinely belongs to the public.
Until that structural revolution occurs, Nigeria will remain a tragic monument to the law of the purse: a place where power dictates wealth, wealth dictates survival and the people remain perpetual spectators in the theatre of their own ruin. But those who hold the keys to the vault should know this: when a purse is completely empty, even the most captive audience stops watching the play.
Malogo is a director at Oscar and Halliday Media Company and a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE). bruce.malogo@gmail.com
