TDThere is a peculiar cruelty in being educated, qualified, and hungry in a country of 220 million people sitting atop one of the world’s great oil reserves.
The Nigerian worker who rises at four in the morning — before the city stirs, before the mosquitoes have finished their night shift — and walks miles to earn less than a thousand dollars a month is not a statistic.
He is the indictment of every government Nigeria has elected since independence.
We are a nation that cannot keep the lights on. We sweat in the dark, swat mosquitoes in the silence, and stare through our windows at cars we can no longer afford to drive.
Fuel prices have made personal transport a luxury. Electricity remains a rumour.
And now, advancing faster than any government reform programme, comes artificial intelligence — ready to render redundant the very degrees that Nigerian families sacrificed everything to obtain.
Let us be honest about what this means. When AI eliminates the white-collar jobs that justified the suffering of a university education, what argument remains for endurance? What social contract survives that theft?
The Devil We Know
There is a real possibility — one that should terrify every Nigerian who still believes in the democratic experiment — that Nigerians will vote for another Tinubu term. Not out of love, but out of exhaustion.
The logic of the dispossessed is not irrational: when every alternative candidate arrives compromised, when every political closet rattles with skeletons, the calculation becomes one of managed damage rather than genuine hope.
I have deliberately refrained from engaging the other candidates. I have, on limited occasions, offered counsel to Peter Obi — not because I have endorsed him, but because I consider him less dangerous to democratic survival than the alternatives.
Yet I must be direct: the tribal weaponisation of the Obi brand is costing him the presidency. His base, at its loudest, does not resemble a national movement. It resembles a siege.
If Peter Obi is serious about governing Nigeria — all of Nigeria — he must address this directly, in a speech, on the record, without ambiguity. He must say clearly that he represents every tribe, every faith, every region.
Anything less and he will find that the votes he needs most are the very votes his most fanatical supporters are actively repelling.
17 Million Voices Silenced
There are approximately 17 million Nigerians living outside the country’s borders. They are taxpayers, remittance senders, advocates, and ambassadors. They are also, inexplicably, disenfranchised.
The reform permitting diaspora voting must be fully operationalised — not as a post-Tinubu gesture, but as the first order of democratic business once this administration ends.
The priority now is singular: Aso Rock must change hands. Everything else follows from that.
The Children Still in the Forest
But let us not pretend that electoral outcomes alone will resolve what is broken. There are children sleeping tonight in Nigerian forests — traumatised, cold, afraid, in pain.
They are there because politicians paid the terrorists who took them. This is not conspiracy. It is the open, documented, shameful reality of Nigeria’s security ecosystem.
And we have developed a national capacity to concentrate on everything except what demands urgent concentration.
This is not a failure of intelligence. Nigerians are among the most intelligent people on earth. It is a failure of will — specifically, the will of the educated elite, the comfortable class, the people who have found the exits and called it success.
On Dictators and Delusion
Tinubu does not have the intellectual architecture of a dictator. Dictators are a specific breed — historically singular, ideologically coherent in their violence, and capable of sustaining systems of terror through sheer force of personality.
Africa has produced them, and they have all ended badly. You can relocate an African dictator from his village, but the village travels with him.
What Nigeria has is not dictatorship. It is decomposition — a slow institutional rot administered by men without the vision to build and without the honesty to stop stealing.
The Reckoning
There will be no messiah. There will be no miracle. What is coming is something more democratic and more brutal than either: a reckoning driven by hunger and depression, forces that have historically done what ballots alone cannot.
When people can no longer absorb the cost of endurance, they stop enduring.
The educated elite — those not yet broken by what has broken their countrymen — must stop being complicit bystanders.
Corruption contracts may fund this quarter’s lifestyle. They will cost the next generation its country.
We are at sea. Without life jackets. Surrounded. But somewhere ahead is a bearing star. Nigerian common sense — patient, sharp, and ultimately ungovernable by those who underestimate it — will find it.
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Kio Amachree | Worldview International | Stockholm
