Nigeria is living through a brutal season of political laceration: a rip of roses where hope is not fading naturally but being wrenched apart by reckless hands. What were once cultivated symbols of renewal now lie shredded, their moral fragrance replaced by the stench of public disillusionment. This is not a failure of capacity or imagination; it is a catastrophic failure of guardianship. The state has become adept at harvesting loyalty while neglecting the discipline of care.
At the core of this rupture is systemic duplicity. Commitments are announced with theatrical certainty and abandoned with administrative silence. Reform is marketed as inevitability but practiced as improvisation. Citizens are repeatedly conscripted into sacrifice while the dividends of endurance are indefinitely deferred. Each cycle of broken assurance shears another layer of trust, normalizing deceit as governance strategy and patience as civic obligation.
This rip of roses is acutely generational. A demographically dominant youth population, schooled in meritocratic rhetoric, now collides with an economy of exclusion and a politics of closed circuits. Credentials depreciate, labor is devalued, and aspiration is punished by structural indifference. When a society repeatedly mutilates the future it advertises, it incubates alienation, radical skepticism, and a corrosive withdrawal from collective responsibility.
The present moment is neither accidental nor abstract. It is the cumulative product of elite impunity, institutional hollowing, and the routinization of ethical compromise. Systems engineered to protect public interest have been retooled to shield privilege. Accountability has become episodic, justice transactional. In such an environment, ideals do not merely erode; they are actively dismantled, torn apart to clear space for unrestrained accumulation.
Yet even this diagnosis resists finality. The metaphor of the rose is instructive precisely because it implies regeneration. But regeneration demands rupture with the habits that caused the tearing. It requires leadership that treats truth as infrastructure, policy as moral architecture, and power as trusteeship rather than entitlement. Nigeria’s immediate task is stark: arrest the violence against hope, reconstruct the stem of trust, and choose preservation over predation before nothing remains left to bloom.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
08152094428 (SMS Only)
