There is a brutal, foundational law in politics that the APC leadership is actively defying – the masses do not vote theories or spreadsheets; they vote survival. Across Nigeria today, that survival is not just threatened – it is actively collapsing.
As the American politician Adlai Stevenson once warned, “A hungry man is not a free man.”
Markets are now instruments of torture. Transport is a financial assault. Protein has become a relic of memory. In homes across the country, refrigerators stand utterly silent and empty, not as passive symbols of misfortune, but as the irrefutable evidence of a failed government policy. Yet, in the middle of this profound national crisis, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is already audacious enough to whisper of re-election for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. This is not audacity; it is an insult bordering on outright contempt.
The APC’s defence is stale and predictable: “tough decisions were necessary.” Fuel subsidy removal. Exchange-rate unification. IMF-approved reforms. The people are commanded to suffer through the fire today so that a mythical, better tomorrow might eventually materialise. But tomorrow is perpetually grounded.
Yes, global financial institutions cheered these measures. Yes, the Central Bank boasts of technical revenue shifts and reduced arbitrage. But Nigerians do not feed their children with charts and statistics. They require food. And rampant food inflation has turned the simple act of preparing a basic meal into a humiliating financial negotiation.
To enact sweeping economic reform without establishing a firewall of social protection is not leadership; it is an act of cold indifference. Subsidy removal may have been necessary, but the execution was an act of economic vandalism. The established IMF playbook demands sequencing: protect the poor before unleashing the shock. Nigeria did the exact opposite.
The subsidy was violently yanked. Palliatives were reduced to bureaucratic whispers. Millions were thrown naked into a fiscal hurricane. Transport costs instantly doubled; food prices followed with predatory speed. APC apologists call it reform. The people felt it as total, sudden abandonment.
When a government deliberately removes cushions before impact, it forfeits all moral authority to demand patience or allegiance.
Exchange-rate unification was sold as a liberation from corruption. What followed was a spiral of volatility, panic, and ruin. The naira is in freefall. Businesses are paralysed. Import-dependent sectors are bleeding out. Even the IMF now issues warnings that liberalization without core productivity and security is simply an open invitation to chaos.
For the ordinary household, the equation is terrifyingly direct – when the naira crashes, the refrigerator is emptied.
A nation cannot eat, trade, or thrive in an atmosphere of terror. Farmers have been driven out of their own fields at gunpoint. Transporters run a daily gauntlet of death on critical highways. Food scarcity is now actively being produced by insecurity, compounding inflation. Kidnapping and organized banditry have become lucrative, state-level enterprises.
Yet, the APC casually discusses re-election as though the widespread violence consuming the nation were a negligible distraction. You cannot seek a second mandate while your citizens fear the very roads, farms, and forests that sustain the republic. The silence from the presidency on the daily massacres and abductions is not just negligence; it is a profound failure of the core duty of governance.
Who Is Cheering? Not the woman in the market square. Not the father on the minimum wage. Not the farmer who risks death for a harvest. Not the generation of restless youth. The only applause comes from the politically insulated – the elite who view policy outcomes as footnotes, not life-or-death realities. This is not popular mandate; it is a tiny echo chamber of self-soothing power. Disregard all press releases. Ignore the accolades from global institutions. The final, brutal referendum is being held right now, not in Abuja, but in Nigerian kitchens.
Can families afford protein again? Can payslips survive a full 30 days? Can parents plan for tomorrow without parparalysing dread? If the answer to these questions is NO, then the talk of re-election is not a political strategy—it is a dangerous delusion.
Re-election is not an automatic inheritance; it must be earned through demonstrative relief. And until that relief is tangibly felt—not intellectually explained—the APC is campaigning against a singular, formidable opponent it can neither rig, intimidate, nor spin:
The empty refrigerator. And that opponent, tragically, is currently winning the war for the soul of Nigeria.
Postscript: Loud Abroad, Exposed At Home: The Hypocrisy of Nigeria’s ECOWAS Posture
Take the case of Benin Republic President Patrice Talon came to power on reformist promises, including a public commitment to limited tenure. Nearly a decade later, that pledge lies abandoned. Opposition parties have been weakened, rivals jailed, and the political space narrowed through controversial judicial processes. One case — a female opposition figure sentenced under an early-morning court ruling — remains a stain that human-rights advocates have not forgotten yet Nigeria’s eagerness to play “Father Christmas” of West Africa becomes not just ironic, but an act of grossly irresponsible abandonment of its own people.
This raises an unavoidable question Nigerians must ask – not rhetorically, but seriously- Are we fending democracy, or merely protecting power?
Democracy does not die only by military coups. It also dies by prolonged incumbency, the deliberate crippling of opposition, judicial weaponisation, and the normalisation of state-sanctioned fear.
Nigeria cannot credibly offer hope to the region while actively losing the peace at home. Charity must begin at home. Security must begin at home.
Democratic restraint must begin at home. Until then, our regional leadership will remain loud abroad – and indefensibly exposed and fraudulent at home.
*Lanre Ogundipe, a Public Affairs Analyst, Former President Nigeria and African Union of Journalists sent this piece.
