One is not talking on the recent Senate Committee invitation to three sacked staff of NNPCL led by Mele Kyari to explain the where about of over N210trillion. Probably, part of the looted funds expended on mockery projects; places of worship for public sympathy and political calculation, sponsorship of jesters, pimps and women of easy virtue to pilgrimage, and bribing political party officials for endorsement to contest elective offices.
Or the theft of over N109billion by former Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, who channeled a minute portion of the proceeds of the crime to acquire a traditional title from Daura Emirate, or the several retrievals of stolen public funds from Godwin Emefiele, dismissed Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Yahaya Bello a.k.a the white lion, who suddenly transformed from the white lion he claimed to be, to a rattled pussy cat while in EFCC net over N80billion theft of public funds, and several other scandals, committed against the welfare of Nigerians by agents of the Devil who had the opportunity to occupy responsible positions in government.
On October 1, 2026, Nigeria will be celebrating its 65 years of independence from colonial rule as what we have on paper. But is Nigeria truly an independent nation, or was there only a change of baton on October 1, 1960, from prudent British colonialists who laid a solid foundation for good governance to indigenous corrupt and thieving colonialists?
Getting to 65 years of age Nigeria wobbles and falters and stutters as if it is suffering from juvenile delinquency in the absence of mother care.
Nigeria from my rating as a committed patriot and revolutionary cannot be rightly called a Nation as it is presently under Tinubu by any definition, but a Rogue State superintended over by Rogues and their appendages. Rogue Partisans and Rogue Political Actors. Rogue Ethnic Paladins. Rogue Clergy (Rogue Pastors, Rogue Imams, Rogue Traditional Priests).
Those are closely followed by Rogue Unionists, Cashtivists, Military Operators, Electoral Umpires and a Rogue INEC. Rogue Big Business, and a Rogue Citizenry. Nigeria is bleeding profusely for lack of the requisite manure necessary to grow patriotism and patriots.
At 64, Nigeria is a country that abhors truth. State operators pride in the ability to deceive and steal. Falsehood and Tommycat are considered priceless to state propaganda. The President is a parochial liar and deceiver, the Senate President is an unintelligent robot and a clown, and the Deputy Senate President swims in the sea of falsehood and pretence, and so is the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives; they are proud Yes-men busy rubber-stamping everything the executive arm desires. The Judiciary is a business centre for the highest bidder to obtain palatable justice with the judiciary adjudged one of the most corrupt in the world. Are the sub-national governments of any difference? Your Guess is as Good as Mine!
Nigeria of today has no space for REALITY, no room for empirical thinking, no knack for expertise, no commitment to due process and probity, no respect for order, no desire to build a reliable future for posterity, and no dedication to duty. Nigerians are fans of debauchery, of platitudes and of deceit. We are easily dribbled, deceived and abused.
At 64 Tinubu delivered a nationwide broadcast full of platitudes and tall promises without empirical. How can an economy grow where the cost of energy, power, and funds are astronomical? How can an economy survive when the cost of doing business is killing businesses? How can an economy and a nation grow when inflation is always on steady rise, when the value of the currency is unsteady, unpredictable and glaringly on a jingle-over?
Nigeria is not yet on the path to near recovery, let the people not be deceived. And that is why the 2025 Independence Day celebration called by Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) was rife, trite, and recondite. How can a country that has no reliable statistics on anything but shamelessly say that things are getting better? A nation that removed fuel subsidy without a near exact figure of the millions of litres of fuel/PMS it consumes daily. On what statistics was this nation paying fuel subsidies over the years to rogues and big businesses? Until people are called to refund the subsidies stolen, and the opaqueness of the operations of NNPCL is put to an end, and all those who headed the corporation or any of its subsidiary since 1999 are summoned to account for their misdeeds on the endless Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of our ‘scrap’ refineries and other scams, Nigeria may not reach the dream promised land unless there is change of presidential baton in 2027.
Again, until those who govern put primacy on the safety of lives and property, on growing national infrastructure, on education, on true fiscal federalism, on devolution of power, and on holistic overhaul of the dysfunctional enterprise called Nigeria, our search for redemption would only amount to proverbial Wait for God to Do it!
We are daily entertained with series of lies on the defeat of insurgents and other security challenges bedeviling every part of the country. We daily read unbelievable figures of wasted insurgents that we cannot challenge. Nigerians are clearly more unsafe anywhere and everywhere in their country today than ever before.
The past 10 years under APC leadership, Nigerians are feeling the democratization and liberalization of terror on high scale. Villages and farms are deserted. Highways are not safe. Schools and homes are soft targets. Non-state actors are fully in charge, holding command over spaces, places, and overtaxing farmers in prone areas before being allowed access to their legitimate farmlands, whereas the Commander-In-Chief busies the country with defections, lopsided appointments, arrest of opposition players, unnecessary foreign tours, medical tourism, promises, and platitudes. Whereas spokespersons of the President engage in trading falsehoods, ethnic and regional bating and baying, fiercely deepening the nation’s fault lines and deviously dividing the country even more.
Under Tinubu who claims being a political strategist, the democratic stage is under siege, the greatest and hopeless siege ever out of fear of defeat in 2027. The present watch and system hails state capture. Supports and sides with electoral larceny and corruption that superintends over flawed polls and elections and stifles the right to dissent, harasses and harangues protesters, journalists, labor unions, and whistleblowers.
The system hails criminals, looters and scammers as Very Important Persons (VIPs), but lampoons critics of the rot, and calls whistleblowers BLACKMAILERS OR EXTORTIONISTS. That is the present level of our decay and degeneration under Tinubu.
Those who ‘successfully’ escaped with their loot but are waiting for nemesis are pretentiously, mischievously, and sheepishly respected within their communities for what they can offer in terms of monetary support to the vulnerable, while some hurriedly joined the ruling party, APC, for an escape route from arrest and retrieval.
The present crop of leaders or is it looters and scammers are ensconced by profligacy, waste, wanderlust, they are people with extreme poor leadership credentials. They squander public funds at will on anything fanciful, unserious, valueless and unnecessary, brand new official vehicles, official residences, large convoys, presidential palaces and jets without effectual, efficient and effective investment in critical matters of importance. How can an economy grow where the government majors in profligacy, waste and wanderlust?
Hope, according to Obafemi Awolowo, is the last milk in the human breast. Yes, we are a country of pretending religious men and women, we have men and women of ‘God’ whose merchandise is faith and hope, and the light in our space is perennially dimmed by those who swallow the deceit, the demagoguery and the shenanigans of political operators. Of what value will the sponsored defection of State Governors to the ruling party be to the stability of the democracy when the whimsical dialogue of the deaf remains the predilection of the State, when the younger ones are silenced and denigrated, when activists who expressed their rights to protest against bad governance are still languishing in detention facilities? When credible opposition leaders are hunted and hauled to detention for their stand against bad governance? Who then is gas lighting who? Who is deceiving who? Who will subscribe to the deceit? Definitely, only those hypnotized APC sheepish followers stationed to sing On Your Mandate We Shall Stand for recognition!
Nigerians should better know beyond the obfuscating blindfolds of politics and politricks that at 64 years of independence, the country is not yet a nation; that at 64, Nigeria under Tinubu is more disunited than years back. Nigeria has become a theatre of absurdities where perfidy, mendacity and debauchery are the acts of state; at 64 the political ideology of political actors remains ‘me, myself, my family, I, my friends and blood relations’; at 64 Nigeria is still grappling with the urgency of now, we are yet to accept that save and except this dysfunctional superstructure is restructured the present slide in the abyss will remain.
All said and done, APC has not killed Nigeria in totality. It is not yet a dead country. It has only been admitted and placed on oxygen support in the intensive care unit, seeking urgent rescue and redemptive intervention from Positive Thinkers and Fixers that opposition has in abundance to offer.
As citizens, we should not allow our lives to be snuffed out by APC grave diggers on the corridor of power from the slightest opportunity to return to the site in 2027. Allowing them a return to site, means succumbing to their wishes of sniffing live out of us. God save Nigerians from the hands of our tormentors and kleptomaniacs.
Lest I forget, the grapevine has it that some of those who heavily looted some federal government MDAs while in service are now trumpeting their gubernatorial aspirations on the platform of the ruling party, APC. How can a responsible Nigerian, struggling to regain freedom, vote again for such characters? How can the treasuries of states be trusted to such itchy-fingered criminals? Let’s be on our knees in prayer!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues.
