On Friday, March 27, the Federal Government directed civil servants in Abuja to work from home, not in response to a national emergency, not out of concern for public safety, but to accommodate the national convention of the All Progressives Congress.
Abuja is almost at a standstill. Roads are quiet, shops are closed, and people who rely on daily work are stuck figuring out what to do. This is not about convenience or safety. It is about a city being rearranged for a party, while ordinary lives are put on hold.
It looks routine. It is not.
Countries rarely lose their balance all at once. It happens in smaller ways, in decisions that seem harmless at the time, in adjustments that feel too minor to question. Then one day, the pattern is impossible to ignore.
A political party, no matter how powerful, is not the state. Its meetings, its negotiations, its internal calculations belong to it. The moment the government begins to shift its own routine to make room for those activities, something has already gone wrong.
That line matters.
What is at issue here is not a single workday. It is the thinking behind it. In a country where time has become one of the most expensive things ordinary people have, you do not move it around casually. You do not treat it as something that can be paused and resumed without consequence.
For many Nigerians, a day is not just a date on a calendar. It is income. It is access. It is present. Even within the civil service, where working from home may sound harmless, it changes things in ways policy does not always admit. Work slows. Decisions wait. Processes stretch. What looks like a simple adjustment on paper rarely stays simple in practice.
And this is how it begins.
A road is cleared because it is convenient.
A process is delayed because it is easier.
A workday is adjusted because no one thinks it matters enough to resist.
At some point, it stops being governance.
Because a government that can shift its own rhythm for a party has started to confuse what belongs to the country with what belongs to itself.
That confusion does not announce itself. It settles in quietly. It grows in the background. It becomes normal before anyone thinks to challenge it.
Nigeria does not have the luxury of that kind of drift. Not now. Not with the kind of economic pressure people are under. Not in a system where consistency is already fragile, and trust is already thin.
Serious governments understand what their decisions signal. They know that discipline is not just about big policies, but about the small choices that show whether boundaries still mean anything.
This choice sends the wrong signal.
Political parties will always gather. They should. But they do not get to bend the system around themselves. They are meant to operate within it, not the other way round.
Anything else is not efficient. It is entitlement.
And entitlement rarely stops where it begins.
In the end, this is not really about a convention. It is about a standard, and whether it still holds.
Because once a government becomes comfortable adjusting itself for a party, it has already taken a step it may not fully understand.
A quiet step, almost invisible.
But one that moves it away from the people it is supposed to serve.
Stephanie Shaakaa
08034861434
