The big questions are – has the government conducted and written the results of the 2027 elections? Why is the government pre-empting the outcome of the elections against it and therefore, using taxpayers’ money to prepare for legal fireworks in its favour? Can the opposition (if it survives the current brutal onslaught by the government) match the federal government’s war chest in post-election legal clashes? Can Nigerians, in all sincerity, trust the judiciary, given its notorious reputation in recent times? Indeed, interesting times are ahead in the country.
By Promise Adiele
There is no hiding place for millions of Nigerians. The excruciating poverty in the country is real. It continues to blaze with implacable fury. Millions of households are caught in the economic crossfire presided over by the APC government in the last eleven years. President Bola Tinubu recently confirmed that he was actually in charge under the late Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. Last week, he admitted before a credulous audience in Abuja that he took over from himself because he was in charge under Buhari. His audience sheepishly applauded the offensive declaration. Given the amnesic nature of Nigerians, they forgot to connect the dots between a government that impoverished the masses from 2015 to 2023 and another government that improved on every strand of economic dishonour from the former government.
It means that President Tinubu has always been part of the process that brought Nigeria to bankruptcy in the last eleven years. He admitted as much. During the 2023 election campaign, he declared that he would continue from where Buhari stopped. Nigerians thought it was a mere political rhetoric to convince the naive. Since taking over, he has plunged the country into the recesses of an economic and socio-political crucible. It gets worse every day with no signs of abating. Although Nigerians are always regaled by a sterile assurance of economic recovery, three years down the line, the prognoses are ominous. Yet the drums of re-election in 2027 resonate to deafening degrees.
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The global apex bank, the World Bank, recently emphasized the increasing poverty in Nigeria. In its Nigeria Development Update (April 2026) titled “Nigeria’s Tomorrow Must Start Today: The Case for Early Childhood Development” released in Abuja, the bank pointed out that poverty in Nigeria rose to 63 per cent in 2026, showing an increase from 56 per cent in 2025. Furthermore, the bank revealed that out of Nigeria’s estimated population of 200 million people, 140 million are multi-dimensionally poor, living below the poverty line. These realities indicate that the famed economic reforms by the government are not working or are working to further impoverish the populace.
If the standards of living of Nigerians are to be gauged by the economic performance of the government, it simply means, without ambiguities, that the country is wallowing in a cesspool. Positive economic reforms do not take more than a year to be reflected in people’s lives. In Nigeria, it has been three years, and the country continues to descend unhindered down a slippery slope of organized economic illiteracy. Today, Nigeria owes N152.4 trillion, up from N87.38 trillion in 2023. President Bola Tinubu borrowed $6.45 billion in the first sixteen months of his administration. In 2026, he has borrowed $21.19 billion, 4 billion Euros, and 15 billion Yuan. Yet, poverty holds his country by the jugular.
Over the years, Nigeria’s social spaces have been ruled by a culture which rewards failure and public misconduct with accolades. That explains why people of questionable character inevitably find themselves in positions of power and authority. Ours is a generation where mediocrity climbs Olympian heights to be rewarded at the highest stage. We frown at any new energy that disrupts the existing criminal status quo, which empowers a few but impoverishes millions. It is an entrenched system maintained and sustained by human principalities with overflowing, unimaginable, stupendous wealth from inscrutable sources, but not so far away from criminal tendencies.
Except for a handful, there is hardly any Nigerian politician completely free from iniquitous, felonious baggage. They all strut our socio-political corridors, plundering our collective patrimony with shameless continuities. They burglarize the exchequer, turning it into their private purse. Then, go on to enact laws that protect their sleaze preoccupations. Nigeria’s political hierarchy is a cult, where members are bound by an unspoken resolve to liquidate the country and conduct its requiem on the hills of infamy. Today in Nigeria, there is hardly any difference between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. It is a tripartite coalition designed to annihilate the opposition and erase democracy from our political register.
Politics aside, every Nigerian should be deeply concerned about the World Bank’s revelations concerning Nigeria’s economic fortunes. Nigerians should be worried. Anyone who is not worried about the increasing rate of poverty in the country deserves an urgent psychiatric examination or, better still, an urgent exorcism from the nearest dibia or balalawo. Deliverance from our Christian brethren can also be useful. If Nigerians refuse to see the ominous indications of their economic survival through the World Bank’s revelations, it simply means that we are complicit in empowering our traducers, and ours could be a long way to freedom.
Are Nigerians helpless? Absolutely no. The increasing number of poor people and the ferocity with which poverty invades millions of homes in the country do not portend well for the future of Nigerians. Yet, an election is the only legitimate way to aggregate the mood and pulse of a people. That is why millions of Nigerians are salivating over the prospects of the 2027 general elections. But given that Nigeria’s comprador bourgeois class has extended its manacles over the country’s political structures, many people believe that the 2027 election is a forgone conclusion. It ended before it started.
When some of us on the left call out the present government for its perfidious proclivities, many people think we are noisemakers. How can one explain that the federal government has set aside the mind-boggling, totally insane amount of N135.22bn for post-election litigations in the 2026 budget? In what it calls “Electoral Adjudication and Post-Election Provision” the government anticipates that it would be rejected in the 2027 polls. True to character, it has designed a mechanism to counter legal proceedings in the aftermath of the election by setting aside that colossal amount of money. Other issues can be handled through various state instrumentalities of coercion. It is only a government presided over by a coterie of insensate, callous individuals that would set aside that amount of money for an election that has not taken place while the people whirl daily in poverty.
The big questions are – has the government conducted and written the results of the 2027 elections? Why is the government pre-empting the outcome of the elections against it and therefore, using taxpayers’ money to prepare for legal fireworks in its favour? Can the opposition (if it survives the current brutal onslaught by the government) match the federal government’s war chest in post-election legal clashes? Can Nigerians, in all sincerity, trust the judiciary, given its notorious reputation in recent times? Indeed, interesting times are ahead in the country.
But the Nigerian situation is not hopeless, even though it looks hopeless. The wave of gloom and despondency in the country would not be the first time in history that a country found itself in the same situation. The greatest threat to rescuing Nigeria from the hands of a fiendish political class is the number of citizens who applaud the current tragic procession for one cosmetic reason or another. It defies every strand of reason that anyone with conscience, who subscribes to reason and equitable judgment, would support these malicious developments and their wretched testimonies in the country. Understandably, anyone benefiting from this government one way or another can support the government to continue in 2027.
But it defies logic that victims of the current economic blisters in the country would sing the praises of the government, showing a maniacal support for continuation in 2027. Such persons have swallowed the bait of ethnicity and religion spewed by the power protocol to keep the populace consistently divided. If the Nigerian social space can rid itself of these classes of people, if by some stroke of divine intervention, all Nigerians irrespective of ethnicity and religion would bond, if the army, police, civil servants, students, lecturers, market women, lawyers, business people, and all classes of Nigerians would see from the same prism that their country is headed for the rocks under the present government, then half of the gloom towards 2027 would have been removed.
If 140 million impoverished Nigerians can decide to take their fate into their hands and reject the coming storm, then the redemptive process would have commenced in earnest. Does power not belong to the people anymore? If millions of Nigerians agree that their currency is almost useless, weakened by inconsequential economic policies, then the recovery process would have commenced. The army is part of the impoverished populace. They are also victims of the maladministration and political rascality in the country. Losing senior military officers regularly is never a tea party. The police are also victims of the political fraternity in the country. Unfortunately, these classes of Nigerians would be used against their fellow poverty-stricken citizens in the 2027 elections. That is the crux of the matter. Nigeria’s redemption must commence with a radical awareness that repudiates invidious politics but seeks to enthrone a new egalitarian order. Space would not permit me to examine the alternatives before Nigerians. But the point is, there is poverty of a ferocious dimension in the country, and as 2027 beckons, Nigerians have a choice.
