Nigeria’s gravest tragedy is not hidden in classified documents; it is imprinted on the gaunt faces of its citizens; etched by hunger, sculpted by despair, and darkened by an exhaustion that no nation with oil wealth should ever witness. As the ruling class slices the national cake with the precision of seasoned predators, the masses are left scavenging for crumbs so stale they have lost all nutritional and moral meaning. The country’s wealth circulates in elite bloodstreams, while poverty circulates through the veins of everyone else. The richer the nation pretends to become, the poorer its people are forced to be.
This poverty is not accidental; it is curated. It is the deliberate architecture of a political elite that discovered long ago that destitution is the most efficient tool of domination. Nigeria’s system is not malfunctioning—it is functioning exactly as its designers intended. Every padded budget, every vanishing project, every ghost worker, every rigged allocation, every untraceable subsidy payment; each is a meticulously placed brick in an empire built on suffering. Poverty is not a malfunction in Nigeria. It is state policy.
The elite harvest nectar from a hive they did not build, while the poor absorb the venom of decisions they did not make. Professors drive tricycles, engineers sell phone chargers in traffic, nurses beg for posting letters, and graduates rewrite their CVs the way prisoners mark days on a cell wall. The absurdity is the new normal. Nigeria has become a republic where the incompetent prosper and the competent are punished, where talent is insulted, and where brilliance is treated as a threat rather than an asset.
The so-called “national cake” is not shared but looted. The banquet is exclusive, the invitations selective, the cost of each feast deducted from the very bone marrow of the masses. Inflation now behaves like an unrestrained beast, devouring salaries and swallowing hope. Food prices mutate with the frequency of viral strains. Parents withdraw children from school as if education has become a luxury commodity. Housewives negotiate meals like military tacticians planning an evacuation. Families ration electricity, water, food, sanity, infact, everything. Survival has become a daily referendum.
Meanwhile, the political class is insulated from the inferno. They glide through streets in fortified convoys, encased in tinted luxury, escorted by sirens that scatter the very citizens whose taxes sustain their arrogance. They attend hospitals abroad while local clinics cannot treat malaria. They debate national issues with theatrical detachment while citizens drown in the consequences of their negligence. Nigeria has perfected a grotesque spectacle where leaders behave as if they are governing a foreign country.
The poor keep getting poorer not because they lack talent but because the system requires their suffering to survive. A population in pain is easy to manipulate. Hungry citizens do not challenge power; they negotiate with it. This is why every election cycle is powered by bags of rice, sachets of salt, and crumbs of patronage. Poverty is the fuel of Nigerian politics. The masses pay taxes the elite evade, absorb inflation the elite ignore, endure public schools their children will never attend, and queue at hospitals the elite mock. They pay bribes for services that should be public rights. They are punished for crimes the elite commit.
Corruption in Nigeria is not mere misconduct—it is a national identity, a career path, a cultural inheritance. A thief who steals billions becomes a philanthropist. A politician who bankrupts a state becomes a kingmaker. A civil servant who siphons funds becomes a chieftain. The newspapers call them stakeholders. Communities call them big men. Only reality calls them by their real name: saboteurs. Meanwhile, the poor man who steals garri becomes a criminal deserving maximum penalty. This nation has perfected moral inversion.
The social contract has collapsed beyond recognition. Government no longer behaves like a covenant—it behaves like a cartel. Citizens are not protected; they are exploited. They are not served; they are drained. Every policy failure is absorbed by the poor. Every financial miscalculation is deducted from their living standards. They bleed for mistakes they never participated in. They carry burdens designed for them by people who cannot spell their names.
The youth, who should be the nation’s vanguard, have become its most brutalized demographic—over-schooled, under-employed, psychologically exhausted. Certificates now function like relics of extinct futures. Talent migrates. Potential suffocates. Dreams shrink. The country hemorrhages brilliance with a speed that should alarm any society still interested in survival. When the youth speak, the state labels them unruly. When they innovate, bureaucracy strangles them. When they protest, force descends upon them with merciless precision.
Nigeria’s women endure the harshest dimensions of this national tragedy. They carry the domestic, emotional, financial, and psychological weight of families buckling under inflation. They stretch meals, ration resources, negotiate with scarcity, and hold households together with the resilience of steel disguised as tenderness. Their contributions are enormous, yet their recognition is microscopic.
The path forward demands more than cosmetic reforms or rhetorical promises. It requires a structural disruption of the political machinery that thrives on mass misery. Redistribution must go beyond palliatives. Accountability must transcend press conferences. Institutions must be fortified, not merely funded. The nation must decide whether it will continue feeding a political elite that consumes public wealth like oxygen, or whether it will finally reclaim itself.
Nigeria stands at a moral crossroads. The poor are asking the simplest question a citizen can ask: What is the value of belonging to a country that does not belong to you? A state that cannot guarantee dignity has already failed. A nation where crumbs are celebrated as blessings can never prosper. If the national cake is truly national, then every Nigerian must taste it—not as leftovers, not as handouts, but as rightful beneficiaries of their own nation.
Until then, the feasts of the few will remain the famine of the many—and the tears of the poor will continue to sweeten the wine served at the tables of the powerful.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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