By David Yakubu
For over twenty-five years, Nigeria has managed to do something remarkable: we have kept the military in the barracks and maintained an uninterrupted stretch of civilian rule. By the standards of our history, this is a victory. Yet, for the average Nigerian watching food prices soar and electricity grids collapse, this victory feels hollow. We go to the polls, we change leaders, parties swap places, but the quality of life rarely improves. This persistent stagnation forces us to ask a hard question: is the problem just the people we elect, or is it the system they inherit?
The harsh reality is that our democracy isn’t malfunctioning; it is working exactly how it was designed, not for the citizens, but for the politicians. In most developed nations, politics is a vehicle for public service. In Nigeria, however, politics has become our most lucrative industry. It is the only sector where the returns on investment are guaranteed to be higher than in manufacturing, technology, or agriculture. When a candidate spends billions of Naira to purchase nomination forms, secure party tickets, and campaign, they are not making a donation to the country; they are making an investment. Once in office, their primary obligation is to recoup that investment for themselves and their godfathers, with the public interest relegated to a distant second place.
This “politics as business” model explains why corruption is so difficult to kill. It isn’t just about greedy individuals; it is about a system where the cost of accessing power is so high that only those willing to loot the treasury can afford to compete. As long as political office remains the quickest route to immense wealth, our elections will be desperate, violent scrambles for the keys to the bank, rather than contests of ideas. We are trying to run a democracy on the software of a commercial enterprise.
This dysfunction is deepened by the way our country is structured. We practice a system where thirty-six states gather in Abuja every month to share money from oil revenues, much like children waiting for a monthly allowance. This “feeding bottle” federalism has killed the spirit of innovation. Because governors know the federal allocation will come regardless of their performance, there is little incentive to do the hard work of building local industries or widening the tax base. A governor doesn’t need to be creative or productive to pay salaries; he just needs to be in the good graces of the center. This turns our federating units into administrative outposts rather than engines of economic growth.
Perhaps the most tragic outcome of this setup is the rise of the “Do-It-Yourself” Nigerian. Over the years, the breakdown of the social contract has forced citizens to become their own local governments. We generate our own electricity, we drill our own boreholes for water, and we pay for our own security in gated estates. Because the average Nigerian provides their own governance, the state has become irrelevant to their daily survival. This disconnect breeds a dangerous apathy. Nigerians haven’t given up on politics because they don’t care; they have disengaged because they have learned to survive in spite of the government, not because of it.
Therefore, waiting for a “messiah” to save Nigeria is a waste of time. A clean leader inserted into a dirty system will either be frustrated or corrupted. If we want true change, we must stop focusing solely on who rules us and start focusing on the rules themselves. We need to make political offices less financially attractive so that they appeal to servants rather than investors. We need to give states the power to manage their own resources, so they stop waiting on Abuja. Until we fix the structure, our elections will remain expensive rituals that change the drivers but never fix the broken engine of the car.
