By Anthony Ada Abraham
Nigeria’s tragedy is not a mystery, it is a wound that keeps bleeding because those entrusted to heal it are the very ones reopening it every day.
Everyone is desperate to “arrive” and feast. No one is willing to stay back and fix what is broken. They wear the mask of concern, speak the language of patriotism, but behind closed doors, it is all a performance, an elaborate deception designed to keep the cycle of looting alive while ordinary Nigerians sink deeper into suffering.
It hurts even more because the solutions are not impossible. They are not distant dreams. They are right in front of us.
If one man can build a working refinery while a state-owned institution has remained lifeless for decades, what excuse is left?
It becomes painfully clear that failure is not accidental, it is deliberate.
When a government abandons fixing power and instead looks for shortcuts, it is not just policy failure, it is a quiet announcement that darkness is here to stay. And the people are left to adapt, to endure, to survive in a system that was never designed to serve them.
They tell you “there is hope,” but even that hope has been reduced to survival, something as basic as food becoming the only promise. Dreams have been traded for daily bread.
Now that a few courageous voices are rising, ready to contribute and change the system, barriers are quickly erected, forms priced outrageously, doors slammed shut just to ensure that only the same recycled few remain in power.
It is a system built to exclude, to silence, to frustrate.
And then you ask yourself, what is the true meaning of governance in all of this? When those in power have no intention, no urgency, no genuine plan to fix the nation, what exactly are they governing?
The hypocrisy cuts deep. They preach that Nigeria is safe, that all is well, yet their own families live far away, enjoying the very systems they have denied their own people. That contradiction alone tells a painful truth.
Maybe one day, leadership will come with a condition: live here, raise your children here, use the same hospitals, the same roads, the same schools. Feel the pain of the people you claim to lead. Only then will governance become real.
But until that day comes, we remain trapped in a cycle of self-deception, telling ourselves that things will get better, clinging to hope that feels increasingly distant.
And the hardest truth to swallow?
At this rate, that better Nigeria may not come in this century.
