Nigeria stands today as a paradox of abundance and absence. I mean a nation where billions are proclaimed in grants, interventions, and empowerment initiatives, yet the streets remain starved of measurable transformation. In fact, the poor are getting poorer. As a matter of facts, the country has mastered the rhetoric of upliftment without the architecture of impact. As Nelson Mandela once reminded the world, “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity; it is an act of justice.” Justice, however, is precisely what is missing from Nigeria’s empowerment ecosystem. The nation has become a vast field where promises fall like rain yet evaporate before touching the soil.
For more than two decades, the Federal government has launched empowerment schemes with exuberant fanfare. For instance, NAPEP, TraderMoni, YouWin, N-Power, YEIDEP, and countless other interventions whose names now float like forgotten ships on a silent sea. Communities repeatedly ripples the same lamentation: “We hear the money, but we never see the impact.” The crisis is not simply administrative; it is moral. Chinua Achebe diagnosed this ailment long ago when he declared, “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Leadership failure has turned empowerment into a mechanical ritual divorced from merit and integrity. Grants migrate secretly to the privileged like birds navigating familiar skies, never nesting among the poor.
As thousands of Nigerian youths queue to fill forms and if at all, trainings that end in certificates without capital, the illusion becomes clearer: the state has substituted symbolism for substance. Prof. Wole Soyinka’s caution reverberates across this landscape; “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” Today’s tyranny is bureaucratic, systemic, and subtle: the tyranny of exclusion disguised as empowerment. Nigeria’s programs are like seeds scattered on concrete, celebrated at the point of release, doomed at the point of landing. A generation is being conditioned to expect ceremonies instead of opportunities.
Corruption remains the invisible puppeteer manipulating this national tragedy. Funds dissolve in opaque corridors; beneficiary lists are doctored; empowerment centres become arena of patronage. Kofi Annan warned the world, “If corruption is a disease, transparency is an essential part of the cure.” Yet transparency is precisely what Nigeria refuses to institutionalize. Even T. B. Joshua, in his widely recorded 14 July 2013 sermon, cautioned the nation with searing clarity: “Carry your youths along; stop using them as thugs. I saw revolutions and bombs of all kinds.” His admonition carries civic urgency: a society that weaponizes its youths instead of empowering them courts eventual convulsion.
The cost of these failures is not merely economic but existential. Dreams are collapsing under the weight of systemic neglect. Young Nigerians migrate in desperation, professionals defect to foreign labour markets, and artisans abandon their crafts. The nation hemorrhages talent daily. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The injustice of selective empowerment, where the connected ascend and the deserving stagnate; threatens the nation’s cohesion and future. Nigeria is becoming a dramatic centre where potential dies quietly, long before its time.
Yet renewal remains possible if the nation chooses integrity over inertia. Empowerment must evolve from spectacle to strategy, from disbursement to durability, from political choreography to national conscience. John F. Kennedy’s timeless counsel provides the compass: “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.” Nigeria must seek the right answer; transparent registries, merit-based selection, public audits, independent oversight, and programmes measured by outcome rather than ceremony. Only then will empowerment cease to be a mirage. Only then will the rain of federal intervention finally reach the thirsty fields of the Nigerian people.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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