By: Mustapha Lawal
Ah, Nigeria! The land where the sun rises with promises and sets with excuses.
Two years ago, we welcomed His Excellency, President Bobo the Bold, into the sacred chambers of Aso Rock. A man of vision, they said. A builder who has built the best state amongst its contemporaries. A man of action, they proclaimed. And indeed, action we have seen, though perhaps not the kind we anticipated.
From the onset, President Bobo embarked on a mission to redefine our plight. Subsidies? Gone. Naira? Floated into the abyss. Taxes? Multiplied like rabbits in mating season. The result? A nation where the average citizen now considers a full meal a luxury.
But fear not, for our leader assures us that this is the path to prosperity.
“Endure now, enjoy later,” they chant from the corridors of power.
Meanwhile, the market woman in Osogbo skips meals to send her children to school, and the businessman in Onitsha watches his sales plummet, not for lack of demand, but because his customers can no longer afford to demand.
Security, that ever-elusive promise, remains a mirage. While some areas boast of improved safety, many parts of Nigeria still bleed.
Banditry, kidnapping, communal clashes, these are not just headlines but daily nightmares for real people. Yet, the official narrative tells a different story: one where silence reigns and “state of emergency” is only declared when state resources, not citizens, are affected.
Ah, the narratives!
In the age of information, or should I say misinformation, our government has mastered the art of alternative facts. Speeches are now riddled with exaggerated claims, obscured meanings and unclear figures.
Remember the recent argument over whether a loan request was actually a loan, or just an innocent framework to potentially borrow when the stars align?
And who could forget the “$30 billion in foreign investments“? Even fact-checkers, ‘those professional enemies of progress’, found no trace of this bounty. One has to wonder if these figures are summoned by incantation, the same way campaign promises appear and disappear like WhatsApp status updates.
The spokespeople, bless their hearts, are another gift. One minute they say one thing; the next, they clarify it into oblivion. It’s a performance, really, a theatrical display of contradiction, where the truth plays the supporting role no one wants to acknowledge.
But credit must be given where it’s due. Perhaps the most successful export of this administration is not crude oil, but talent.
Not through policy, mind you, but through sustained hardship so effective that even die-hard patriots are now Googling “How to relocate to Canada with a goat.” It’s not brain drain; it’s strategic diaspora deployment, our new foreign policy.
And yet, in this grand experiment, hope refuses to die.
Two years remain in President Bobo’s reign. Two years to switch from PowerPoint politics (not even governance) to people-first progress. Two years to replace graphs with groceries, and buzzwords with bread.
We’re not asking for miracles. Just a little honesty. A little sense. A little governance that doesn’t treat empathy like a footnote and hunger like a feature of reform.
Because hunger is real.
The despair is real.
And sadly, so is President Bobo.
Mustapha Lawal is a fact-checker by day and a professional eyebrow-raiser by night. He spends time sifting through misinformation so you don’t have to and occasionally writing satire to stay sane. He tweets at @themuslaw.
