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Aare Amerijoye Dotb
On a sweltering Thursday morning in June, 45-year-old Mama Suliat stood under the scorching sun in Ojota market, her fingers trembling over a basin of rotting tomatoes. She had just sold a plastic cup of garri for ₦400 , enough to buy one sachet of milk and half a loaf of bread for her two children’s breakfast. By midday, she had made ₦2,800 , not enough to replace the slippers her son lost the previous week, and certainly not enough to pay the ₦18,000 monthly rent she owes her landlord, who has threatened eviction for the third time this year.
That same morning, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, freshly returned from a medical sojourn in Europe, was presiding over a closed-door FEC meeting in a newly renovated executive chamber , cooled by imported Swiss air conditioners and adorned with Italian leather chairs. On the table? A request to approve ₦90 billion for Hajj pilgrims, ₦21 billion for the Vice President’s mansion renovation, and ₦15 billion for a Presidential yacht , all in a country where over 130 million people live in multidimensional poverty.
Mama Suliat is not a metaphor. She is real. She is the face of millions in Ekiti, Osogbo, Makurdi, Lokoja, Jalingo, Akure, and Maiduguri , Nigerians who now survive, not live, in a country where government is more generous with luxury than with livelihood.
Her husband, a civil servant in the state education ministry, earns ₦71,000 monthly ,a figure celebrated in some states as the new minimum wage milestone. While states like Ekiti,Edo, Osun, and Borno have implemented ₦70,000, federal workers and many others are still trapped in the suffocating ₦30,000–₦50,000 wage wilderness.
But here is the arithmetic of agony:
Transport to work: ₦36,000/month
Family feeding (barest minimum): ₦120,000/month
Rent: ₦20,000/month
Electricity: ₦15,000/month
School levies: ₦10,000/month
Health & Miscellaneous: ₦60,000/month
Total Monthly Needs: ₦261,000
Salary: ₦71,000
Monthly Deficit: ₦190,000
This is not just an economic crisis. It is a national mugging dressed in public policy. The Nigerian worker today is employed but impoverished, paid but punished, counted but crushed.
How heartbreaking it is to compare this present hell with the reality under the Obasanjo/Atiku administration, when workers were buying cars from their salaries, building homes without stealing, and proudly paying tuition fees without kissing the feet of loan sharks. In those days, teachers could afford decency, farmers could afford dignity, and traders ,from Aba to Zaria , were building homes and sponsoring children’s weddings with the proceeds of honest trade. There was hope. There was breath. There was movement. Students were fed and focused, not famished and frustrated. Civil servants could retire with roofs over their heads, not under the shade of regret.
Compare that to Tinubu and his coterie , men and women whose stomachs do not know the taste of sacrifice. Their children school abroad. Their meals come with menus and wine lists. While workers beg for ₦10,000 transport stipends, our rulers pocket ₦160 million in vehicle allowances, in one of the poorest nations on the planet.
Let us recall Tinubu’s own words from his opposition days:
“Subsidy is fraud. Remove it and redirect the money to infrastructure and the poor. Nigerians will feel it immediately.”
,Tinubu, 2012, Occupy Nigeria protest
Subsidy is gone. Nigerians are feeling it alright ,in their bones, not in their roads. Fuel now sells for ₦900/litre, food prices have tripled, and the only thing subsidised is elite comfort.
He once declared:
“Any government that spends more on governance than on the governed has failed its people.”
Yet under his reign, billions are budgeted for bulletproof SUVs, palatial upgrades, and flamboyant foreign junkets,while only ₦10,000 in palliative crumbs are tossed to the poor, as if poverty can be cured by sachets of rice and expired promises.
And who can forget his fiery call:
“Power is not given; it is taken! And it must be taken to serve, not to squander.”
Well, it was taken. And now, it is hoarded and weaponised. The Nigerian presidency has become a throne of exclusion, a pulpit of paradox, and a fountain of famine-disguised-as-policy.
The contradictions? They dance daily like masquerades in a nation of make-believe:
Fuel subsidy “gone”, yet oil marketers smile while citizens groan.
Naira “floated” for fairness, yet manipulated for political gain.
Debt “discouraged”, yet $2.5 billion borrowed without blinking.
This is a regime of reckless rhythm, where policies come like tornados and their effects linger like plagues.
The Nigerian worker, like Mama Suliat’s husband, is not lazy. He wakes at 5 a.m., teaches, toils, pays taxes. But he is deliberately underpaid, nationally ignored, and politically mocked.
The cruelest irony? The man who once marched with the masses now masters the machinery that muzzles them.
As Kahlil Gibran wrote:
“Pity the nation that wears a cloth it did not weave, eats a bread it did not harvest, and drinks a wine it did not press.”
That is Nigeria under Tinubu: a banquet of betrayal , where the president governs in opulence and distributes institutionalised poverty to the masses like holy sacraments.
Let it be etched into the tablets of time:
This regime has not only failed the people ,it has mocked them, taxed their tears, and buried their dignity under designer budgets.
But history is not always written by the powerful. In the end, the Nigerian masses shall rise , not just in anger, but in awareness. And when they do, may the palaces remember:
“The power of the people is always greater than the people in power.”
The Narrative continues…
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force.
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