Nigeria Has An Answer For Everything That Is The Problem.
Nigerians have become used to explanations. When petrol goes up, there is an explanation. When people die in custody, an investigation is announced. When communities are overrun by kidnappers, security agencies are said to be working on it. When floods destroy homes, there is a warning somewhere that came before the water. By the time the explanation reaches the public, however, people have often already paid the price.
That is the part that should worry us.
Because an explanation is not necessarily an answer, and in Nigeria the two are increasingly being treated as though they mean the same thing.
Consider what has happened with petrol. Nigerians were told that the subsidy could no longer be sustained and that its removal would force the country to confront the true cost of fuel. There was also an expectation that greater domestic refining would reduce the country’s dependence on imported petroleum products and, in time, make the market less vulnerable to the pressures that had repeatedly pushed prices upwards. Yet petrol is now selling at around ₦1,400 a litre in Lagos and Abuja and as much as ₦1,500 in parts of the North, while diesel has crossed ₦2,000. The Dangote refinery is operating at full capacity, but international crude prices continue to influence what Nigerians pay at the pump.
The explanation is not difficult to understand. Nigeria can refine more of its own crude and still remain exposed to movements in the international oil market. Domestic refining can reduce dependence on imported finished products without making the country immune to the price of crude from which those products are made. Economically, that distinction is important.
For the Nigerian household, however, the economics are experienced rather differently. The commuter pays more to get to work, the trader pays more to move goods, the manufacturer absorbs higher production costs and the family already cutting back on food, school expenses or medical care has to decide what can be sacrificed next. The fact that there is a sound explanation for the price increase does not make the burden disappear.
That is why the question surrounding economic reform cannot stop at whether government can explain why prices have risen. The more consequential question is whether the reforms are changing the economy sufficiently to enable Nigerians to live with those prices. A reform that removes an unsustainable subsidy may have a defensible economic rationale; what citizens will ultimately judge is what the country does with the economic space created by that decision and whether, over time, people have more productive opportunities, stronger incomes and greater resilience than they had before.
That distinction becomes much harder to ignore when the subject is human life.
The deaths of 37 suspected illegal miners in NSCDC custody in Minna have understandably generated anger and demands for accountability. Survivors have described severe overcrowding and said an unidentified substance was sprayed inside the cell before detainees began experiencing breathing difficulties. The precise circumstances and cause of the deaths remain subject to investigation, while senior officers have been suspended and a panel constituted to establish what happened.
There should be no hesitation about demanding the truth. People who entered state custody alive died there, and their families have every right to know what happened to them. If evidence establishes negligence, misconduct or criminal responsibility, those responsible should face the consequences prescribed by law. But that obligation to pursue justice does not justify deciding beforehand who is guilty. The investigation must be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including where that evidence may clear somebody who has already been publicly associated with the tragedy.
What happened in Minna therefore requires two kinds of seriousness at the same time: seriousness about the deaths and seriousness about the process through which responsibility is established. The first without the second becomes vengeance; the second without the first becomes bureaucratic indifference. Neither is justice.
Yet even after the investigation has identified what happened and who was responsible, Nigeria will still have to confront a more uncomfortable question about the conditions that made such a tragedy possible. Who was responsible for the facility? What procedures governed the detention of the suspects? What medical attention was available? What happened when people began showing signs of distress? At what point should somebody have recognised that the situation had become an emergency?
Those questions matter because state responsibility does not begin with an investigation after people have died. It begins when the state takes custody of them.
The illegal-mining dimension of the Minna tragedy raises another issue that Nigeria has repeatedly struggled to confront. Illegal mining is a serious problem, and the environmental damage and risks to communities cannot be dismissed. But the people who enter dangerous pits are only one part of the economic chain. Minerals extracted illegally do not disappear underground; somebody buys them, transports them, finances their extraction or profits from their sale. If enforcement concentrates primarily on the people at the most visible and vulnerable end of the chain, the state may demonstrate activity without necessarily disrupting the business that makes the activity profitable.
That is a recurring feature of Nigerian governance: the state often becomes most visible at the point where a problem has already reached its most vulnerable victim.
The security crisis illustrates this painfully. In Niger State’s Borgu area, residents recently protested over the continued captivity of hundreds of people abducted during attacks in August. Local residents put the number at close to 700, although the precise figure remains subject to verification. The federal security agencies can point, with justification, to ongoing operations, intelligence gathering, arrests and rescues, and those efforts should be assessed on their actual results rather than dismissed simply because the public is impatient for immediate answers. But for the families whose relatives remain in captivity, an assurance that operations are continuing does not resolve the uncertainty that has entered their homes.
This is not an argument for pretending that complex security operations can be reduced to a press conference or that every operational detail should be disclosed. It is an argument for recognising that government activity and public safety are not interchangeable concepts. An operation can be underway while people remain frightened. A rescue can take place while other families are still waiting. A security agency can be working and a community can still reasonably ask why it remains exposed.
The distinction is equally important with flooding. The warning issued by Nigeria’s hydrological authorities and the subsequent advice to residents in vulnerable areas of Lagos and other states to move to safer ground were important because advance information can save lives. But warnings cannot become the permanent substitute for preparation. Where flooding repeatedly affects the same communities, the country has to confront the less convenient questions surrounding drainage, blocked waterways, building approvals, land-use planning, waste disposal and the capacity of emergency agencies to act before a predictable hazard becomes a disaster.
None of this means that government explanations are inherently dishonest or useless. Governments need to explain difficult decisions, especially when those decisions impose immediate costs on citizens. Security agencies need to explain what they can about operations. Investigators need to establish facts before responsibility is assigned. Scientists and emergency agencies need to explain risks so that people can respond to them. A functioning state requires explanation.
What it cannot afford is allowing explanation to become the final stage of governing.
Nigeria has become unusually comfortable with telling citizens why something happened after they have already experienced its consequences. The reasons may be international crude prices, inherited debt, climate change, criminal networks, weak institutions, illegal mining, poor infrastructure or the failures of previous administrations. Many of those explanations may contain genuine truths. The problem begins when identifying the cause creates the impression that the work of government has therefore been done.
It has not.
The purpose of an explanation should be to make the next decision better. If an investigation reveals a failure in a detention facility, the institution should change the procedure that allowed it. If insecurity exposes a weakness in intelligence or local protection, that weakness should be addressed. If illegal mining survives because enforcement reaches only the miners and not the commercial network around them, the enforcement strategy has to change. If flooding repeatedly overwhelms the same communities, warnings must be accompanied by the infrastructure and planning necessary to reduce the damage. If economic reforms make fuel more expensive, the broader economy has to become sufficiently productive to give citizens more than an explanation for why they are paying more.
This is particularly important as Nigeria moves towards another election season, because political competition will produce an abundance of explanations. Those seeking to retain power will explain what they inherited and what they have changed; those seeking power will explain why the country has failed and what they believe they can do differently. Nigerians will hear competing statistics, competing histories and competing accounts of responsibility.
They should listen to all of it, but they should not allow the argument to end there.
The question worth carrying through every speech, every policy announcement and every explanation is what happened after the explanation. Did the institution become safer? Did the community become more secure? Did the household acquire greater economic room? Did the warning produce preparation? Did the investigation produce institutional change? Did the reform produce a stronger capacity to withstand the pressures that made reform necessary in the first place?
These are not questions that belong exclusively to government or opposition. They are the ordinary questions of citizens who have spent too long living at the receiving end of public policy.
Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of people capable of explaining its problems. It suffers from the much harder task of converting what those explanations reveal into institutions that work differently the next time the problem appears.
That is why the country should be careful about becoming impressed by explanations, however polished they may sound. An explanation can tell us why petrol became expensive without making the household more prosperous. It can tell us why a security operation is difficult without making the family of a kidnapped citizen less frightened. It can tell us why a flood occurred without making the next flood less destructive. It can tell us how a tragedy in custody happened without guaranteeing that another family will never have to bury someone who entered the state’s care alive.
At some point, Nigerians will stop being satisfied merely by knowing why something went wrong.
They will want to know what was changed because it went wrong.
And that may be the question Nigeria’s many explanations have been postponing for far too long.
Stephanie Shaakaa shaakaastephanie02@gmail.com
08034861434
