There is a moment in every nation’s story when the people are no longer merely governed, they are tested. Nigeria has reached that moment.
The government’s decision to delay the new tax law until 2026 has been hailed as relief, but let us not be deceived. What Nigerians received was not compassion, it was a stay of execution. Like a man with a knife to his throat who is told not today, the reprieve is temporary, the fear unrelenting.
For months, Nigerians have staggered under a weight no human shoulders were built to bear. At Mile 12 market, a mother stretches her naira until it breaks, walking away with half the food she planned to buy because prices doubled overnight. At a petrol station in Makurdi, a mechanic buys fuel in plastic cups just to keep his tools alive. In every corner of this country the same story repeats. Food inflation eats away at dignity, petrol prices climb like thieves in the night, electricity collapses at whim, and the naira crumbles with each dawn. Add to this a new fuel tax and the fragile rope binding survival to hope would have snapped.
But here is the wound that festers. Even in deferring this tax, the government has not confessed its real sin. Nigeria’s problem is not that her people do not pay enough. It is that their sacrifices are swallowed by greed. We are taxed in blood every day. At the hospital where a sick child is turned away because the system has collapsed. At the classroom where a teacher teaches without pay. At the roadside, where traders sleep in their stalls because home is too far and transport too costly. Nigerians have paid and paid in suffering and silence.
So when leaders tell us that in 2026 the burden will return, we must ask what will change between now and then. Will corruption suddenly retire? Will reckless spending shrink? Will the convoys of politicians that darken our roads disappear? Will lawmakers cut their bloated allowances? Or will 2026 simply be the year another knife descends on a people too exhausted to resist?
No empire of excuses has ever outlived the anger of the hungry.
If there is to be a tax at all, let it begin where wealth leaks unchecked. Tax the luxury jets that roar above our potholes. Tax the mansions powered by stolen public wealth while the national grid sputters. Tax the loopholes through which billions vanish daily. But do not come again to the roadside trader who sleeps on bare floors. Do not return to the mechanic who sweats over broken cars without light. Do not reach again for the teacher who feeds knowledge to children while his own home goes hungry. They are already paying the highest tax of all, the tax of survival.
Nigeria does not need more levies, it needs more leaders with conscience. What this country demands is not a pause but a rebirth. A government that bleeds with its people, that cuts its own flesh before reaching for theirs. Until then, every new policy is a mask and every promise is a lie.
The delay of this tax law must not be mistaken for mercy. It is only an intermission in a tragic play. The curtain will rise again in 2026. The question is whether Nigeria’s leaders will use this time to write a new script or whether they will force their citizens to act in a drama that ends with silence, ashes, and broken backs.
History watches. The people wait. And patience, like hope, has an expiry date. If leaders will not rewrite the script, then the people must. The ending of this story belongs not to those in power but to those who have carried the weight of this nation on empty stomachs and tired backs. When the curtain rises again, it should not be the people who bow.
If leaders will not rewrite the script, then it is the people who must decide the ending of this story.
This nation has been bent but never broken. If leaders fail, the people will rise, as they always have, from the dust into the dawn.
Stephanie Shaakaa
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