By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
The pounding rain woke me. I sip my morning tea in the dim glow of dark dawn, the rain drowning out everything. Outside my house on the street, the hums of Okada and random voices pierced through the rain drops. Out at the major road, heading to Lekki and Victoria Island, the usual chaos—danfo buses belching smoke, hawkers balancing trays of overripe plantain, even under the rain, and SUVs with tinted windows gliding toward the glittering towers of Ikoyi or Vi or elsewhere.
At 60, having lived on this neck of the country for 23 years, I’ve seen this road evolve from a dirt path to a tolled highway, its cracks patched intermittently with gravel and lies. They promised us progress when they started expanding it in the 2010s: “It will bring development,” they said. But the only things that grew were the ever growing traffic and the area boys and police checkpoints. Last week, another container truck overturned near Ajah, spilling its contents on the road and into the gutter. For hours, the crowd scrambled—traders, mothers, children—filling buckets with grains soaked in diesel. When the rain falls as it did today, most people collect water. But in Nigeria, even the rain feels borrowed.
My father, an Abiriba Aristocrat, often said to me in Igbo: “A horse flogged past exhaustion only learns to stand still.” He died of a medical condition that could have been dealt with in other climes. Now, here I am, decades later, watching Governor Sanwo-Olu unveil plans for a “Fourth Mainland Bridge” while the Third Mainland’s rusted underbelly weeps chunks of concrete into the lagoon. My nephew, Junior, left for Canada earlier this year. “Uncle, Nigeria is a dead horse,” he said, stuffing his things into a suitcase. “You keep feeding it, but it won’t gallop.” I ignored him then—not for leaving, but for saying aloud what I’d whispered at night since ‘83, when the IMF came and our naira began its freefall.
My neighbour’s business once thrived. He sold imported letherets which were essential to many families and enterprises. Now, he stocks Chinese goods which are way below standard and most times fake. The roads killed the Lions he often mused. Last month, a customer asked a vulcanizer in Sangotedo for a tire patch. “Oga, why does this country age backward?” he mused, his hands blackened with grease. “In the ‘80s, we had electricity. Now, even darkness is a luxury.” the customer laughed, but the truth stung. Another neighbor, Mama O, runs her cold store business on a solar panel rigged from scraps. Yet down the road, the refurbished billion-naira Eko disco Plant sits moribund and lifeless, its turbines looted for parts. When I asked a local politician recently, he shrugged: “Na who sabotage am?” As if sabotage were a force of nature, like harmattan.
They call us resilient. Resilient! What choice do we have? Last rainy season, floodwaters from a “world-class” drainage project swept away several shops and houses on many Estates in Labora. My friend, a civil engineer, had warned: “You can’t pave paradise without a plan.” They called him names and an enemy of progress. Now, he fixes generators in Owerri where he relocated, his degree gathering dust. Meanwhile, the commissioners dine at high brow restaurants in Victoria Island, Lekki or Ikoyi, their plates piled with food they don’t need and dollars wasted.
This morning, the news about Rivers State was still dominant in the various channels, all doing enough not to indict Wike or call out the National Assembly or the Presidency, and I chuckled. Last week, my cousin in Port Harcourt sent photos of the “Nyesom Wike Flyover”—a bridge to nowhere, its pillars already cracking, while militants sacked nearby villages. He who runs for nothing will collapse from hunger.
Nigeria is a horse we’ve all beaten—Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa—its flesh long gone, bones picked clean by vultures in agbada and various other native attires. Yet we saddle it daily, shouting “Ajah, Ajah, Ajah!” into the void. The horse stands still. We keep riding.
Nigeria is a nation suspended in a paradox of motion without movement, a society galloping furiously atop the skeletal remains of systems long decayed. The streets tell the story best: in Lagos, a mechanic in Oshodi jury-rings a generator with parts scavenged from broken units, cursing under his breath as he pays ₦5,000 daily to fuel a machine that should cost ₦500 to run. In Makurdi, a mother of six grinds millet under the flicker of a solar lamp gifted by an NGO, her children’s textbooks gathering dust since herdsmen razed their school. In Aba, a leatherworker stitches counterfeit designer bags bearing Italian labels, his craftsmanship world-class but his profits meager, siphoned by middlemen and policemen demanding “EgoỌjị.” These vignettes are not anomalies; they are the rhythm of a nation addicted to resuscitating corpses. The Dead Horse Theory—a metaphor for clinging to futile solutions—is Nigeria’s unwritten constitution. From the corridors of Aso Rock to the stalls of Mile 12, Ariaria or Ogbete Markets, the refusal to dismount dying systems has birthed a society where survival is an art, and progress a myth.
Consider our political landscape, where the same actors don new costumes every electoral cycle, their promises as recycled as the plastic bottles littering our streets and Lagoons. The 2023 elections, touted as a digital revolution with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), instead devolved into familiar chaos and farce. In Rivers State, thugs hijacked ballot boxes at gunpoint, while in Kano, political godfathers deployed “grassroots mobilizers” to buy PVCs for ₦5,000 each. When President Tinubu declared, “Subsidy is gone!” In his inauguration speech, it was less a policy shift than a tired rerun: Nigeria has attempted to remove petrol subsidies 12 times since 1986, each time retreating after public fury. The World Bank notes that ₦4.39 trillion ($9.7 billion) was spent on subsidies in 2022 alone—funds that could have built 2,000 primary healthcare centers. Yet, rather than confront the rot in refineries (Nigeria imports 90% of its fuel despite being Africa’s largest oil producer), successive governments double down on palliative economics. The National Assembly’s response? A 2024 proposal to spend ₦57.6 billion on luxury cars for lawmakers while allocating ₦5 billion to tackle out-of-school children, now numbering 20 million. This is Dead Horse governance: lavish saddles on a rotting steed.
The National Assembly, that hallowed chamber meant to echo the people’s will, has devolved into a tawdry theater where the lines between governance and gossip blur. The recent scandal involving Senator Natasha Akpoti and Senate President Godswill Akpabio—a salacious drama of alleged sexual harassment and character assassination—epitomizes the Dead Horse mindset: a grotesque distraction from the rot festering beneath. While Akpoti’s allegations of harassment and blackmail ricochet across social media, what does this spectacle mean for the trader in Port Harcourt whose shop was razed during the political crisis in Rivers State? Or the mother in Makurdi who sells her body to afford insulin for her diabetic child? The Senate’s circus mirrors the streets’ reality: a nation so addicted to chaos it no longer recognizes the stench of its own decay.
The declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State, ostensibly to quell political violence, is another act in this farce. President Tinubu’s decree, which sidesteps Nyesom Wike—the architect of the crisis and his political ally—exposes the hypocrisy of a system that punishes the powerless and protects the connected. For months, Rivers has been a battleground: thugs loyal to Wike and Governor Fubara clash in broad daylight, turning markets into war zones. In Diobu, a keke driver named Chima Okafor was shot in the crossfire, his tricycle—his family’s sole income—reduced to smoldering metal. “They fight for power, we die for nothing,” he mutters from his hospital bed, where nurses demand ₦10,000 bribes for painkillers. Yet, the state of emergency targets “hoodlums,” not the godfathers. How does one declare war on a fire while handing matches to arsonists?
This interregnum of lawlessness is symbolic of Nigeria’s broader shambles. The National Assembly’s sex scandals and Rivers’ artificial crisis are not isolated incidents; they are symptoms of a system that thrives on diversion. When lawmakers expend energy on lurid scandals, they evade scrutiny over the ₦344 billion padded into the 2024 budget for frivolities like “constituency projects” that exist only on paper. When the president deploys soldiers to Rivers while ignoring Wike’s $140 million luxury property empire (as revealed by the Pandora Papers), it reinforces a perverse truth: Nigeria’s democracy is a horse long dead, its riders now feasting on its carcass.
The streets, as always, bear the brunt. In Oyigbo, where the Rivers crisis has displaced thousands, children hawk sachet water to armored personnel carriers. A widow, Grace Amadi, recounts how her stall at Oil Mill Market was looted by men in police uniforms. “They stole my garri and N80,000. When I reported it, the DPO asked, ‘Do you want to die?’” Her story is Nigeria’s anthem: a people brutalized by the very institutions meant to protect them. Meanwhile, the political elite weaponize ethnicity and religion, fracturing communities. In Abuja, an okada rider and a shop owner, once neighbors, now eye each other with suspicion, their unity eroded by whispers of “Wike’s warriors” and “Fubara’s rebels.”
What does it say about a nation when its lawmakers prioritize bedroom scandals over legislating living wages? When a state of emergency becomes a tool for settling scores rather than saving lives? The Dead Horse Theory thrives here: instead of dismantling the systems enabling graft and violence, Nigeria’s leaders slap new labels on old poison. Akpabio dismisses Akpoti’s claims as “women’s issues,” while Tinubu reframes Rivers’ carnage as “security strategy.” Both acts are akin to stuffing lavender into a corpse’s nostrils to mask the stench.
And yet, the streets adapt, as they always do. In Bonny Island, displaced Rivers women weave baskets from bamboo, selling them to oil workers for pennies. In Abuja, youth corpers use TikTok to satirize the Senate’s scandals, their skits a digital rebellion against a derelict elite. But resilience is not redemption. Nigeria’s tragedy lies in mistaking survival for progress, chaos for normalcy. When will the riders dismount? When the horse’s bones turn to dust—or when the people finally rise to bury it?
The economy, tethered to the cadaver of crude oil, is a study in denial. Nigeria’s oil reserves—37 billion barrels—should be a blessing, but they’ve become a curse, a narcotic that dulls the urgency for diversification. In the Niger Delta, where gas flares light the sky like eternal torches, fishermen now paddle through oil slicks, their nets empty. “The fish are gone. Even the mangroves are dying,” laments Barinem Swanta, a community leader in Ogoniland. Meanwhile, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), which posted ₦803 billion losses in 2018, spins narratives of “renewed production targets.” Economists see through the charade: oil contributes just 6% to GDP but sucks 80% of budgetary oxygen. The recent currency float, intended to unify exchange rates, collapsed into a freefall—The naira was floated in 2023, leading to significant depreciation. However, by late 2024, the naira was trading around ₦1,710/$1 in the parallel market. Inflation for food, the true heartbeat of the masses, hit 40% in 2024, turning staples like rice and beans into luxuries. In Mararaba, a suburb of Abuja, civil servants earning ₦50,000 monthly now spend 75% of their income on food. “We’re eating once a day now—garri in the morning, hunger at night,” says Aisha Ibrahim, a mother of three. Yet, the government’s solution? A ₦5 billion partnership with foreign consultants to “rejig fiscal policy.” It’s akin to prescribing perfume for gangrene.
If Nigeria’s crisis were a Nollywood script, the elites would be the shape-shifting villains—part godfather, part leech, all parasite. They are the architects and beneficiaries of the Dead Horse State, a cabal of political dynasties, business oligarchs, and bureaucratic vampires who have turned the nation into a private buffet. Their role is not passive; it is predatory. From the National Assembly to the boardrooms of Ikoyi, they have engineered a system where failure is profitable, chaos is currency, and the people are collateral. Consider the infamous “Paris Club Refund” scandal: $418 million meant to settle state debts vanished into offshore accounts and phantom contracts, while teachers went unpaid for several months. Or the $16 billion power sector fraud under Obasanjo, a heist so brazen it left Nigeria darker than ever—literally and metaphorically. The $16 billion spent on power projects during Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration has been widely criticized. Investigations revealed inefficiencies, mismanagement, and lack of results, with the House of Representatives describing it as a “colossal waste” The elites did not stumble into corruption; they institutionalized it, weaponizing poverty to keep the masses docile.
The political elite, a revolving door of recycled kleptocrats, treat governance as a hereditary right. The same families—the Tinubus, the Sarakis, the Igbinedions—have dominated power since the ’90s, their wealth ballooning as the nation’s coffers bleed. Take the National Assembly: while 133 million Nigerians wallow in multidimensional poverty (NBS 2022), a single senator earns ₦29.48 million monthly in basic salary and “constituency allowances” for projects that exist only in press releases. In 2023, lawmakers allocated ₦70 billion to buy luxury cars and renovate their homes, the education sector was given 8.8% of the entire budget. Their audacity is biblical: they crucify the people on a cross of greed, then preach sacrifice from Dubai penthouses. When Senator Ike Ekweremadu was jailed in the UK for organ trafficking, Nigerians recoiled—not at the crime, but at the irony: our elites have been harvesting the nation’s organs for decades.
The business elite are no less complicit. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, built his empire on exclusive import licenses and backdoor subsidies while small businesses suffocated under multiple taxation. His refinery received a $2.5 billion lifeline from the Central Bank, even as millions of farmers starved amid a “post-subsidy” maize shortage. The banks, meanwhile, function as laundry machines: in 2021, the Pandora Papers exposed how Access Bank’s Herbert Wigwe stashed millions in offshore trusts while denying loans to tomato paste sellers. The economic elite’s creed is simple: privatize profits, socialize losses. When their banks fail, the NDIC bails them out with public funds. When their factories pollute, the villagers drink cancer.
The bureaucratic elite—permanent secretaries, INEC chairmen, CBN governors—are the system’s enablers, the clerks of the apocalypse. Former CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele’s “Ways and Means” fraud, printing ₦23 trillion without oversight, hyperinflated the naira into confetti. Meanwhile, INEC’s Mahmood Yakubu presided over the 2023 elections like an auctioneer, selling PVCs to the highest bidder in Kano and Rivers. Even the judiciary, the “last hope of the common man,” is a brokerage house. In 2024, a leaked audio revealed a Supreme Court judge negotiating a ₦10 billion bribe to overturn a governorship result. The law, for the elite, is a whip for the poor and a wand for themselves.
But perhaps the elite’s greatest crime is cultural: they have zombified the national psyche. Through Nollywood, they romanticize the “Big Man” myth—the notion that wealth justifies ruthlessness. Through religion, they peddle prosperity gospel, turning churches into ATMs and mosques into rally grounds. Through education, they sustain a colonial curriculum that produces graduates skilled only in reciting dead men’s thoughts. Their children study in Oxford and Yale, while public universities rot. When the #EndSARS protests erupted, they hired hoodlums to burn police stations and discredit the youth. When ASUU strikes, they jet to Switzerland for medical checkups.
The evidence is irrefutable: Nigeria’s elites are not stakeholders; they are undertakers. They do not ride the dead horse—they are the horse’s decomposing flesh. Every “policy” they enact—fuel subsidy removal, naira devaluation, privatization—is a scalpel slicing the nation into sellable parts. The Siemens power deal?And an alleged $2.3 billion kickback disguised as progress. The Lagos-Calabar Railway? A purported land grab for elites to flip waterfront slums into luxury estates. Even their philanthropy is a sham: the Dangote Foundation donates mosquito nets while his cement factories displace entire communities.
The streets know this truth. In Kaduna, where El-Rufai’s “urban renewal” bulldozed 30,000 homes, a graffiti reads: “They steal our today, sell our tomorrow.” In Owerri, where Hope Uzodinma’s “digital economy” is code for e-taxation, a trader spits: “Our leaders are like mosquitoes. They suck our blood, then complain we’re anemic.” The elites’ final betrayal is their exit strategy: when the chaos they engineered boils over, they flee to London and Houston, tweeting #PrayForNigeria as if they weren’t the architects of its ruin.
Nigeria’s Dead Horse gallops because the elites whip it. Until their grip on the reins is broken—by law, by revolt, by divine intervention—the carcass will stagger on, dragging the rest of us into the abyss.
The streets, however, are not passive. Young Nigerians, disillusioned by the Dead Horse orthodoxy, are crafting their own survival scripts. Take the “japa” wave: 73% of Nigerians aged 18–35 are actively seeking emigration, per a 2023 NOI Polls survey. Those who stay pivot to the hustle economy. In Enugu, 24-year-old Chidinma Nwosu runs a TikTok thrift store, reselling donated UK clothes to middle-class buyers. “My degree is in accounting, but no firm will hire without a ‘connection,’” she shrugs. Meanwhile, in the north, where 78% of women lack formal employment (NBS 2023), hawkers of “kunu” and “fura” navigate Boko Haram checkpoints and APC convoys with equal wariness. The entrepreneurial spirit is there—Nigeria has the highest rate of female entrepreneurs in Africa—but it’s a spirit shackled by dysfunction. A 2022 SMEDAN report revealed that 80% of SMEs fail within five years, strangled by erratic power, multiple taxes, and loan sharks charging 40% interest. “I paid ₦120,000 in bribes last year just to keep my shop open,” says Adewale Okoye, a printer in Ibadan. “The government claims they support business, but they’re the ones suffocating us.”
Nigeria’s dead horse syndrome has metastasized beyond politics and economics; it has become our cultural oxygen. We breathe the fumes of decay and call it perfume. The same inertia that keeps us saddling lifeless systems now infects our collective psyche, transforming hero worship into a national sport, vacuity into virtue, and moral bankruptcy into a trending hashtag. In Lagos, where billboards advertise influencers over inventors, and “clout” is the only currency that matters, we’ve built an altar to emptiness. The Nigerian dream, once a communal aspiration for progress, has splintered into a million shards of narcissism—each citizen a “content creator” broadcasting their irrelevance to an audience of bots and bored teens. The dead horse no longer just carries us; we’ve become the horse, our souls as hollow as its ribs.
Consider the cult of the “Big Man,” now democratized by social media. We no longer reserve our worship for politicians and billionaires; we bow to “Instagram senators” and “TikTok governors.” A 22-year-old influencer, known only for twerking in traffic, commands more followers than Nigeria’s entire civil service workforce. His content—videos of him spraying champagne on homeless people “for views”—earns him brand deals, while the homeless remain props in his poverty porn. Meanwhile, the National Theatre in Iganmu, once a crucible of Afro cultures and plays, crumbles into a weed-choked relic. We’ve traded substance for spectacle, depth for dopamine. The proof? A 2023 NOI Polls survey found 68% of Nigerian youth now prefer “content creation” to formal education. Why study engineering when you can go viral eating fufu in a bikini?
This cultural necrosis thrives on hero worship divorced from heroism. We cheer corrupt governors boasting about buying Premier League clubs while our hospitals lack paracetamol. We trend #ObiDient for a politician whose greatest achievement is a PowerPoint manifesto, then ignore the teacher in Lokoja selling blood to buy chalk. Our celebrities—musicians glorifying “yahoo” fraud, actors romanticizing political thuggery—are not outliers; they’re mirrors. When Burna Boy shouts, “I’m a giant, I don’t sleep!” over a beat sampled from Soweto, we miss the irony: Nigeria’s giants are all asleep at the wheel. Even our protests have become performance art. The 2020 #EndSARS movement birthed #SoroSoke, then birthed influencers selling #SoroSoke merch from Accra apartments. Activism, like everything else, is a brand—a dead horse draped in designer hashtags.
The family, once Nigeria’s moral anchor, is now a shipwreck. In Uyo, a mother auctions her daughter’s virginity on Facebook to fund her import business. In Sokoto, siblings sue each other over inheritance while their mother’s corpse rots unburied. The stats are grimmer: UNICEF reports 40% of Nigerian children now live in single-parent homes, while divorce rates have tripled since 2015. And the “baby mama” syndrome has become a pandemic. The village that raised the child has been gentrified into a gated estate, its gates manned by indifference. My neighbor, Mama Chidinma [name changed], works three jobs to feed her kids while her husband, a “pastor,” spends her earnings on miracle oil and Instagram models. “God will punish him,” she mutters, yet tithes faithfully every Sunday. We’ve normalized dysfunction, pathologized resilience.
Morality? A corpse dangling from the gallows of greed. Nollywood, once a moral compass, now peddles “The Rich Also Cry” porn—shows where the heroine is a side chick driving a Range Rover, her “virtue” measured in designer handbags. On Twitter, feminists and misogynists clash over who owns the narrative, while girls in IDP camps trade sex for sanitary pads. Our churches host “Holy Ghost orgies” (testimony nights where congregants compete over who suffered most), and our mosques double as polling units where imams auction endorsements to the highest bidder. When Bobrisky, the cross-dressing influencer, was arrested for fraud, Nigerians didn’t rage at the system that birthed him—they bought his “prison collection” wig line.
This is the grand paradox: a nation addicted to complaining about decay yet intoxicated by its stench. We lament bad governance but vote for Nyesom Wike because he “knows how to dance Shaku Shaku.” We mock the police for extortion, then bribe them to avoid traffic tickets. We are Schrödinger’s citizens—simultaneously outraged and complicit. We exist in a dual state of being valued and devalued, depending on how we fit into the narrative or needs of those in power.
The dead horse isn’t just the state; it’s us. Our values, our choices, our silence. Every time we share a politician’s birthday post for “follow-back,” every time we praise a celebrity’s “hustle” without questioning their ethics, we nail another plank to the horse’s coffin.
But here’s the tragic punchline: the horse was never alive to begin with. Nigeria’s cultural rot predates Jonathan, Buhari, Tinubu and even colonialism. It’s in our DNA—the belief that success is a solo sport, that community is for losers, and that morality is a tax on the poor. The 19th-century African slave trader who sold his kin for mirrors and gin? He’s the spiritual ancestor of the senator selling constituency project funds for a Dubai penthouse. The WhatsApp forward claiming “prayer can cure corruption”? The same magical thinking that made our ancestors sacrifice goats for rain.
To dismount this horse, we must first stop romanticizing its corpse. Let the influencers keep their hollow virality; let us rebuild theaters where art interrogates power. Let the politicians keep their stolen billions; let us teach our children that true heroism is the teacher who stays despite unpaid wages. The dead horse is dead. Bury it. Then, perhaps, we’ll stop dying with it.
Cultural narratives compound the crisis. Nigeria’s celebrated “resilience” has morphed into a toxic mantra, a justification for systemic abuse. Churches and mosques preach divine miracles over civic accountability. In Oyedepo’s Winners’ Chapel, congregants sow “seed faith” of ₦1 million and above for breakthroughs, while in Kano, imams blame economic woes on “sinful women.” The media, once a watchdog, now peddles escapism: Nollywood films glamorize “yahoo boys” (internet fraudsters), and Instagram influencers flaunt Dubai vacations funded by “blesser” sugar daddies. Even education, the traditional ladder for the poor, is collapsing. Universities have been known to be on strike for 18 of the past 48 months, yet Vice Chancellors drive luxury cars and collect estacode for foreign conferences. “I’ve spent six years chasing a four-year degree,” says Emeka Okafor, a UNN student. “When I graduate, there’ll be no jobs—just more ‘connections’ to beg.”
I kneeled once on the tiles of an air-conditioned megachurch in Lekki, hands raised as the pastor thundered, “Your miracle is here! Sow a generous seed for divine favor!” Around me, mothers clutch babies they can’t afford to feed, market women still in aprons, and jobless graduates murmuring prayers like incantations, hurried to give their all. The air smells of desperation and expensive perfume. I believe in Jesus—the one who flipped tables in the temple, who fed the hungry multitudes with five loaves, who said “blessed are the poor.” But in that marble-clad sanctuary, Jesus had been franchised. His gospel is now a prosperity app, His parables reduced to punchlines for offering baskets. Nigeria’s organized religions—mega-churches and politicized mosques—no longer save souls; they auction them. They are not sanctuaries but stock exchanges, trading in hope and fear, their vaults stuffed with the loot of a nation’s despair.
Take the Pentecostal industrial complex, where pastors double as CEOs. In 2023, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s Christ Embassy purportedly raked in ₦10 billion from its “Higher Life” conference, selling “miracle stickers” at prices as high as N50,000 and above per sheet. Meanwhile, his congregants in slums often walked or paddle kilometres to church through sewage, their children ravaged by cholera. Bishop David Oyedepo, proud owner of four private jets and a university where fees dwarf the national minimum wage, preaches “poverty is a sin.” His Living Faith Church’s leaked 2022 financial report showed ₦25 billion in assets—enough to build 50 primary healthcare centers. Instead, he erected “Covenant University,” grooming the next generation of elites to inherit a broken system. The message is clear: God helps those who help themselves… to the common purse.
The mosques fare no better. In Kano, former Governor Ganduje—videotaped stuffing dollars into his babanriga—donated ₦500 million to build a “world-class” mosque while 78% of the state’s schools lack roofs and qualified teachers. During Ramadan, politicians distribute rice stamped with their faces, turning piety into propaganda. In 2022, the Sultan of Sokoto decried Nigeria’s poverty, yet his emirs ride in convoys funded by land grabs from poor farmers. The Hajj commission, a cesspool of graft, charges pilgrims N3 million for trips marred by squalid tents and expired food, while officials pocket Saudi subsidies. Islam’s tenet of zakat (almsgiving) is now a PR stunt—a billionaire’s Instagram post of handing out noodles to the poor, while his factories dump toxins into their rivers.
This moral schizophrenia is Nigeria’s new creed. We preach “love thy neighbor” while dehumanizing the poor. Churches host “destiny nights” where worshippers “name and claim” miracles, yet ignore the homeless next door. Imams sermonize on honesty, then bless politicians who steal pensions. A Catholic bishop in Enugu allegedly suspended a priest for condemning Governor Ugwuanyi’s purported ₦50 billion “legacy projects”—a mausoleum and golf course—while teachers in his diocese earn N30,000 monthly. When the priest asked, “What would Jesus do?” the bishop replied, “Jesus didn’t meddle in politics.”
But this is political. Organized religion has become the elite’s moral shield, a holy veneer for systemic plunder. When #EndSARS protesters demanded justice, Pastor Tunde Bakare called them “ungrateful youths,” forgetting his own 2011 sermons comparing Nigeria to Egypt’s bondage. When Boko Haram abducted Chibok girls, Pastor Paul Enenche prophesied “divine rescue,” yet his church’s NGO never sent a single tracker. Religion’s complicity is most visceral in its silence: the Redeemed Church’s silence as herdsmen butcher farmers in Oyo; the Jama’atu Nasril Islam’s muteness as bandits kidnap pupils in Niger State.
The theology of prosperity has reprogrammed our conscience. A mechanic in Aba once told me, “If God wanted us to fight corruption, He’d send angels. My job is to tithe and pray.” This fatalism is by design. By framing poverty as spiritual warfare, pastors and imams absolve the state of duty. A mother selling akara to pay her child’s hospital bill is told, “Your faith is too small!”—never that healthcare is a right. A voter accepting N5,000 to elect a thief is assured, “All power belongs to God.” The Cross and Crescent have become chloroform, numbing the masses to injustice.
I still hold on to my faith—but not this faith peddled in most Nigerian Church PLC’s. The Jesus I know and believe chased money-changers from temples; ours builds temples for money-changers. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) lived humbly; our clerics rent private jets for “intercessory flights.” True spirituality should ignite moral courage, not complacency. When churches and mosques host voter education drives, they’re raided by police. When they speak against oppression, their permits “vanish.” Yet, they choose complicity—blessing governors who siphon funds, anointing presidents who weaponize poverty.
The cost is etched in our streets. In one of our South West State, a pastor’s son rammed his Mercedes into a keke rider, killing three. His father called it “the devil’s work,” paid off the police, and held a “deliverance service.” In Borno, an imam’s sermon on “patience” played as bombers leveled his village. Nigeria’s religions have become death cults, sacrificing the many for the few.
To resurrect this nation, we must reclaim faith from the fraudsters. Tear down the golden calves of megachurches; silence the Imams of greed. Let us worship in community kitchens feeding the hungry, in clinics healing the sick, in protests demanding justice. The road to redemption isn’t carpeted in velvet—it’s paved with broken chains. As the hymn says, “Faith without works is dead.” Nigeria’s faith is on life support. It’s time to unplug the machines and breathe life back into what’s real.
The Dead Horse approach infects even the justice system. In 2020, the #EndSARS protests erupted, with youth demanding an end to police brutality. The state responded with live bullets at Lekki Toll Gate, killing at least 12. Three years later, the judicial panels set up to investigate have produced few convictions, yet police extortion continues. In Delta State, ASP Musa Ibrahim (not his real name) admits, “We’re told to meet daily ‘returns’ of ₦50,000. If I don’t arrest innocent people, how will I eat?” Meanwhile, the EFCC pursues “cybercrime” cases with fanfare, ignoring the ₦165 billion stolen in the past five years through procurement fraud (PREMISE data). The message is clear: the system protects its own.
Is there hope? Rwanda’s post-genocide rebirth and Ghana’s tech-driven reforms offer templates, but Nigeria’s salvation lies in dismantling the Dead Horse mindset. It means taxing the elite—Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, pays 1% effective tax—not the market woman. It means shifting security budgets to education: allocating 15% to schools as UNESCO advises, not the current 5.3%. It means empowering states to control resources, as true federalism demands. Most critically, it demands courage to dismount—to let the dead horse decay, and plant seeds in the fertile soil beneath.
Nigeria’s governance landscape is littered with monuments to vanity—concrete carcasses that stand as testaments to a nation’s addiction to grandiosity over grit. Gogol’s Dead Souls, a satire of 19th-century Russian bureaucracy, finds eerie resonance here: a society where leaders trade in phantoms, celebrating the illusion of progress while the living endure the weight of their delusions. From the skeletal husk of Bayelsa’s Tower Hotel to the rusting turbines of Katsina’s Wind Mill, Nigeria’s governors have mastered the art of conjuring castles in the air while the ground beneath crumbles. These projects, bloated with stolen billions and empty promises, are not mere failures of engineering; they are moral crimes, spectral symbols of a system that feeds on the people’s hopes while leaving them hollow.
Take the Bayelsa Tower Hotel, a ₦8 billion colossus frozen in time, its unfinished floors home to bats and squatters. Six governors have presided over its decay since 2012, each cutting ribbons for photo ops before vanishing, leaving behind neither jobs nor tourists. For the fisherman in Yenagoa, whose creek was dredged to “beautify” the hotel’s vicinity, the project is a cruel joke. “They chased us away, saying the hotel will bring ‘development,’” he scoffs. “Now, the water is polluted, and my nets catch only plastic.” Nearby, welders repurpose the hotel’s abandoned steel rods into wheelbarrows, a grim metaphor for a state that cannibalizes its own future. The economic impact? Wasted funds that could have built 16 modern hospitals in a state where maternal mortality tops national charts. Instead, Bayelsa’s health budget remains a paltry 4% of its total expenditure, while the dead hotel devours resources like a zombie.
Cross River’s Tinapa Resort, a $350 million ghost town, epitomizes this necrotic governance. Conceived as a “Dubai of Africa,” its shops and cinemas now gather dust, guarded by weeds and apathy. Political interference—a euphemism for elite greed—suffocated its potential. The state diverted funds to fund Governor Ayade’s “Superhighway,” another phantom project that bulldozed ancestral forests and displaced 180 villages. In Calabar, a coconut seller, Mercy Edet, recalls Tinapa’s launch: “They promised jobs, but only contractors and politicians ate. Now, I sell to ghosts.” The resort’s failure cost 5,000 lost jobs and starved local businesses. Meanwhile, Cross River’s debt ballooned to ₦330 billion, forcing teachers to strike for unpaid salaries. Like Gogol’s Chichikov buying dead serfs, Nigeria’s leaders trade in dead projects, their value existing only in ledgers and lies.
Abuja’s Millennium Tower, a skeletal spire meant to pierce the heavens, instead pierces the nation’s conscience. Conceived in 2005 as a beacon of progress, its construction stalled as contractors abandoned sites over unpaid bills. Today, it stands as a tombstone for ₦100 billion squandered—funds that could have electrified 50 rural communities. For Musa, a janitor in the nearby Ministry of Finance, the tower is a daily insult. “They owe me eight months’ salary,” he mutters, sweeping dust in a building where directors drive SUVs fueled by estacode. The Tower’s shadow stretches beyond Abuja: in Kogi State, the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, a $8 billion white elephant, rusts in silence. Meant to industrialize Nigeria, it birthed only a cottage industry of scavengers stripping its carcass for scrap. A former engineer, now a motorcycle taxi rider, laughs bitterly: “We built a steel plant that can’t make a nail. Only in Nigeria!”
The Katsina Wind Mill project, a ₦4.4 billion ode to renewable energy, now spins tales of rot. Technical flaws left its turbines inert, a “green energy” farce in a state where 78% lack electricity. In Funtua, a village elder, Malam Sani, gestures to the decaying blades: “They told us this would bring light. Now, our children study under kerosene lamps, breathing fumes.” The project’s failure mirrors the River Niger dredging—a multi-billion-naira endeavor that deepened pockets, not waterways. In Lokoja, sand dredgers now mine the riverbed illegally, their profits funding warlords. For the fisherman Jibril, whose boat sank in a dredger’s wake, the project is a curse: “The government dug graves, not channels.”
The economic hemorrhage is staggering. Nigeria’s abandoned projects represent over ₦12 trillion in wasted funds since 1999, per the NEITI—a sum exceeding the combined 2024 budgets of health and education. These ghost projects drain life from the economy: contractors abandon sites, suppliers go unpaid, and youth employed during construction plunge back into joblessness. In Owerri, a bricklayer named Chika recounts working on the “Imo Mega Mall,” another abandoned vanity project: “They owed us six months’ pay. When we protested, soldiers beat us with sticks.” The mall’s carcass now hosts drug dens, its promise of commerce replaced by crime.
Gogol’s Dead Souls warned of societies consumed by illusions, where the living serve the dead. Nigeria inverts this: the dead—the phantom projects, the stolen billions—enslave the living. The National Assembly, complicit in this necromancy, pads budgets with fictitious allocations. In 2024, ₦344 billion vanished into “constituency projects” like the “Nass Centenary Park,” a park that exists solely in press releases. For the okada rider in Lagos, ferrying workers past the decaying Federal Secretariat in Ikoyi, the irony is visceral: “They build ruins, then call us lazy.”
What becomes of a nation that venerates voids? In the shadows of these dead projects, the common man forges a parallel economy—a survivalist rebellion. In Port Harcourt, women fry akara under the glittering shadow, their fires fueled by wood from the hotel’s scaffolding. In Katsina, boys kick makeshift soccer balls past the windmill’s corpse, their laughter defying the darkness. Yet resilience is not redemption. Nigeria’s tragedy lies in its refusal to bury its dead horses, to cease feeding specters. Until the veins of accountability are unclogged, until the living are prioritized over the ledger’s ghosts, the nation remains a carnival of the absurd, dancing on the graves of its own potential.
Nigeria operates on a twisted law of thermodynamics, where energy is neither created nor destroyed—only wasted. The nation is a closed system, a pressure cooker of squandered potential, where the elite siphon off heat (wealth) while the masses shiver in the cold. Einstein’s relativity, too, finds perverse resonance here: time dilates for the poor, stretching years into lifetimes of stagnation, while the rich warp reality, bending laws and space to hoard luxuries in parallel universes of privilege. The Dead Horse Theory is the governing equation: Nigeria rides carcasses, applying infinite energy to dead systems, expecting motion. The result? Entropy—a nation unraveling into chaos, its people trapped in a labyrinth of borrowed time.
Consider the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. In Nigeria, this translates to the alchemy of graft. Take the $8 billion Ajaokuta Steel Complex—a monument to energy conversion. Funds meant to industrialize the nation transformed into private jets and Swiss accounts. The energy of the people—their labor, taxes, hope—is funneled into a black hole of contracts for phantom projects: Abuja’s Millennium Tower, a “symbol of progress” that absorbs light (money) but emits nothing. For the artisan in Kano melting scrap metal into pots, energy conservation is survival: “They steal our future, so we recycle our past.” Meanwhile, the 2024 budget allocates ₦15 billion for “mystery projects” that exist only in Excel sheets. Nigeria’s energy isn’t lost; it’s looted.
Entropy, the Second Law, dictates disorder increases over time. Nigeria’s entropy is a national sport. The Katsina Wind Mill, a ₦4.4 billion attempt to harness renewable energy, now stands as an entropy engine: its inert turbines symbolize the chaos of a state that can’t even fail efficiently. In Lagos, traffic jams—a fractal of disorder—burn ₦4 trillion yearly in fuel and man-hours (NBS), while lawmakers float “helicopter subsidies” to soar above the mess. Entropy thrives in the civil service, where files vanish into bureaucratic event horizons, and in the streets, where potholes metastasize faster than repairs. “We live inside a broken phone,” says a mechanic in Aba, “sparks everywhere, but no call connects.”
On the other hand, Einstein’s Relativity—that time and space are relative to one’s frame of reference—explains Nigeria’s fractured realities. For the senators debating the “Sexual Harassment Bill” while entangled in scandals, time is a loop: every scandal resets, every term elongates. For the IDP in Borno, time is a flat circle: days blur into years, each sunrise a replay of hunger. The 2023 elections warped spacetime: INEC’s servers “glitched” in real-time, erasing votes into a digital abyss, while the wealthy bought seconds on private jets, escaping the nation’s gravitational pull. “Our leaders live in 2050, tweeting from Dubai,” quips a Twitter influencer, “while we’re stuck in 1960, lighting candles.”
The Dead Horse Theory mirrors Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results. Rivers State’s “state of emergency” is a relativity paradox: Wike, the crisis architect, exists in a privileged frame where consequences bend away from him. The people, however, are pinned in Newtonian reality—bodies in motion, battered by political forces. The government’s solution to banditry? More guns (energy input), ignoring the thermodynamic truth: violence begets heat (chaos), not order. In Zamfara, a farmer whose son was kidnapped retorts, “They pour petrol on fire, then pray for rain.”
Fashion, that fleeting mirror of society, reflects this decay. The rich flaunt “detribalized” agbadas woven from Ghana-Must-Go bags, while the poor stitch TikTok trends from secondhand clothes. A designer in Lagos jokes, “Our latest collection is ‘Power Holding’—outfits with battery packs sewn in.” Even innovation is thermodynamic: the “Okada rider” app, born from gridlock, turns bikes into Uber, converting kinetic desperation into cash. Yet, like the Third Law’s unattainable absolute zero, Nigeria’s youth hustle toward a prosperity they can’t reach.
Where does this leave us? Nigeria is a lab experiment gone wrong: energy squandered, time distorted, corpses saddled. The laws of physics mock our politics; relativity absolves the elite. To escape this thermodynamic doom, Nigeria must open its system—dismount the dead horse, redistribute energy (resources), let entropy cool into order. Until then, we remain a society where, as Fela sang, “water no get enemy”—yet pipes run dry, and the people thirst.
The question gnawing at the streets is simple: When will the exorcism begin?
Nigeria is not working. It has not worked for decades. It is a dead horse—its ribs picked clean by vultures of corrupt state, its hooves cracked from the weight of our collective delusion. Yet we mount it daily, whip in hand, screaming at its lifeless form to gallop. We have tried everything: the austerity of the IMF, the theatrics of “Vision 2020,” the billion-naira bridges to nowhere, and the hashtag revolutions that evaporate like morning dew. Each “solution” is a new saddle on the same rotting corpse, a fresh coat of paint on a coffin. The Ajaokuta Steel Complex stands as a mausoleum to our industrial dreams; Tinapa Resort, a ghost town mocking our entrepreneurial spirit; the Millennium Tower, a skeletal middle finger to the skies we once dared to conquer. Nigeria is not just broken—it is a necropolis of possibilities, a graveyard where hope is buried alive.
But what can be deader than death? The answer lies in our denial. Nigeria is dead, yet we refuse to mourn. We cling to its carcass, whispering incantations of “unity” and “resilience” while maggots feast on its flesh. The mechanic in Lagos who converts generator parts into cooking stoves knows it. The fisherman in Ogoniland, paddling through oil-slicked waters, knows it. The mother in Zamfara bartering her daughter’s dowry for a bag of rice knows it. We are all pallbearers at a funeral we pretend is a parade. Our “resilience” is not strength—it is Stockholm syndrome, a perverse loyalty to our captor. We have normalized dysfunction, baptized corruption, and canonized failure. Even our protests are performative: we scream into voids, our voices echoing back as memes and slogans. #EndSARS became #EndSarrs, a typo that typifies our fate—a nation forever autocorrecting into oblivion.
To fix Nigeria, we must first bury Nigeria. This is not defeatism; it is the bravest act of love. The Nigeria we know—the one built on colonial fault lines, fueled by petrodollar greed, and governed by gangster elites—must die. We cannot “restructure” a corpse. We cannot “reform” a ghost. We must reimagine life itself, from the personal to the political, the mundane to the monumental. It begins with the death of the Nigerian mindset: the resignation to “God dey,” the worship of “big men,” the celebration of suffering as virtue. The fisherman must stop waiting for Chevron to clean his waters and instead demand ownership of his resources. The trader must stop bribing the tax officer and ignite a collective strike. The youth must stop chasing visas and start seizing vacant legislative seats. Revolution is not a hashtag—it is a thousand daily acts of defiance against the lie that “this is how it has always been.”
The rebirth will be messy, a phoenix rising from ash and bile. It means dismantling the imperial presidency and redistributing power to communities. It means abolishing the oil subsidy and subsidizing solar farms in Sokoto and Ebonyi. It means taxing Dangote’s billions to fund primary healthcare, not funding Dangote’s refinery with public billions. It means replacing the “Nigerian Factor” with a new ethos: What we build, we protect; what we destroy, we mourn. Imagine a Nigeria where the Lekki-Epe Expressway is maintained by local cooperatives, not Chinese contractors. Where the Katsina Wind Mill is resurrected by engineers from Kano Poly, not Siemens. Where the National Assembly is a hall of thinkers, not thieves. This is not utopia—it is the bare minimum of dignity.
As I write this, the weight of my own hypocrisy crushes me. I am baffled—no, gutted—by the inescapable truth: Nigeria’s rot is not “out there” in the halls of power or the streets of cities. It is here, in my heart, a cankerworm gnawing at my conscience. I rail against the dead horse, yet I saddle it daily. I curse the darkness, yet I snuff out my torch to save battery life. For every headline I denounce—another governor looting, another school collapsed—I confront the uncomfortable whisper: You are complicit. You, too, are the betrayer.
The betrayal is in the small things. Last week, I gave a police officer N500 to avoid a phantom traffic violation. “Oga, why you dey stress yourself?” he grinned, pocketing the note. I drove off, rehearsing my anger, yet relieved. I am the system. It is in the WhatsApp groups where I laugh at memes mocking Peter Obi’s “Obidients” movement, dismissing his supporters as cultists, yet refusing to join any party myself. It is in my silence when Auntie Ngozi, a nurse, tells me she paid N200,000 to secure her son’s NYSC reposting. “Na so we dey do am,” she shrugs. I nod. Na so we dey do am. We are all method actors in this tragedy, reciting and acting lines written by ghosts.
Where are the consciences of this dead nation? They are buried under the rubble of our rationalizations. We curse the elites but envy their loot. We scorn “yahoo boys” but hail their Lamborghinis. We are a people split at the core—a nation of Janus-faced hypocrites, howling at the mirror we refuse to face. The 63-year-old professor who sells admission slots to the highest bidder was once an idealist. The pastor extorting “seed offerings” once preached in bush parishes for free. Even I, typing these words on my iPad powered by a generator I bought instead of joining the community solar project, am a Judas. We have all kissed the horse’s corpse, trading our morals for morsels.
This duality is Nigeria’s true pandemic. The father who berates his daughter for dating a politician’s son, yet asks her to “bring him home for Christmas.” The activist who tweets #EndBadGovernance from an iPhone bought with a corrupt uncle’s contracts. The journalist who exposes state corruption by day, then collects “brown envelopes” by night. Our conscience is not dead; it is schizophrenic. We are Fanon’s “wretched of the earth,” but also Marx’s “grave-diggers”—digging our own graves with the shovels of our compromises.
I think of my primary school teacher, Mr. Awums, in the 1970s Abiriba, who walked long miles daily to teach us under a mango tree. He believed in “Nigeria’s potential,” a phrase that now tastes like ash. When the soldiers came to town as they often do just after the war, he hid our limited textbooks under the floorboards to save them from soldiers burning “subversive materials.” He died in 2005, with thousands of unpaid pensions and retirement benefits. I inherited his rage but not his courage. I tweet about accountability but delete posts when followers dwindle. I am the betrayer.
Yet this betrayal is not ours alone. It is generational, historical—a relay race of letdowns. The British colonialists sowed the seeds of division; our founding fathers watered them with tribalism. The ’60s intellectuals who debated socialism in Ibadan’s staff clubs birthed the ’80s IMF apologists. The ’90s activists who marched for democracy became the 2000s governors stealing pensions. Each generation bequeaths the next a heavier chain. My niece, a 19-year-old student, sells all sorts of things in school, spending less time in studying. “Uncle, if I don’t hustle, how I go chop?” she asks. Her defiance mirrors mine at her age. The cycle continues.
But here’s the rub: conscience cannot thrive in a cemetery. Nigeria’s moral ecosystem is a wasteland because we’ve salted the soil ourselves. Religion, once a moral compass, now absolves us. “God will provide,” we chant, as we embezzle. Education, once a ladder, now teaches survival, not ethics. Even our proverbs betray us: “Onye wetara oji, wetara ndụ” (He who brings kola nut brings life). We’ve distorted it to mean “Bring lavish bribes, get favors.”
Is redemption possible? Only if we stare into the abyss within. The 2023 election was a test: 93 million registered voters, 25 million ballots cast. We blame INEC, but what of the 68 million who stayed home? We are a nation of bystanders, clutching our pearls as the house burns. To rekindle conscience, we must first admit we fueled the fire.
I return to the police checkpoint, the N500 note, my complicity. The dead horse is not just Nigeria; it is the part of me that accepts decay as destiny. To resurrect either, I must choose: keep riding—or dismount, and walk.
The world whispers that Nigeria is too big to fail. But bigness is not greatness. A nation that cannot keep its children alive, its lights on, or its leaders honest is already a cadaver. We have ridden this dead horse for 65 years, lurching in circles, mistaking motion for progress. The time has come to dismount—to walk, stumble, and crawl toward a new horizon. The phoenix does not fear the fire; it is born from it. Let Nigeria burn. Let us rise from its ashes, not as hostages of history, but as architects of a future where the horse is buried, the riders disbanded, and the road ahead paved with the bones of our delusions.
The streets are speaking. From the “agberos” (touts) of Agege to the feminists of Abuja, a subterranean reawakening brews. Fela’s lyrics echo: “Suffering and smiling.” But the smiles are fading. Nigeria’s Dead Horse gallop can’t continue; the bones are crumbling. The nation must dismount—or fall.
We owe this to the girl hawking sachet water acrossNigeria’s major cities. To the okada rider navigating potholes that swallow his profits. To the ghosts of Ajaokuta and the unborn.
Nigeria is dead. Will we ever live to say in fact Long live Nigeria?
