Nigeria’s Descent into a Police State of Denial, Economic Ruin, and Political Persecution
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)
Three years. Three years of “Renewed Hope” that has delivered nothing but renewed hunger, renewed inflation, renewed insecurity, and renewed despair. Three years of a presidency that has become unmoored from reality, detached from the suffering of the people it supposedly governs, and consumed by a desperate, paranoid quest to eliminate every political opponent and silence every dissenting voice before the 2027 elections.
Three years of Bola Ahmed Tinubu – a man who once stood as a champion of democratic resistance, who marched and protested and demanded accountability – now presiding over the systematic dismantling of that very democracy, turning Nigeria into something between a police state and a personal fiefdom, where elected governors are suspended by presidential decree, journalists are prosecuted for Facebook posts, and an economy once capable of sustaining 200 million people has been detonated by five words uttered on an inauguration podium.
Let us begin with the economy – because this is where the pain is most visceral, most immediate, most unforgivable. When Tinubu took the oath of office on 29 May 2023, he inherited…
The consequences are documented in damning, irreversible, internationally verified data. The Afrobarometer survey of March 2025 – a rigorous polling exercise conducted across Nigeria – found that more than nine out of ten Nigerians (93 per cent) say the country is heading in the wrong direction. Only 6 per cent believe it is on the right course. Nearly nine in ten citizens (88 per cent) describe the country’s economic condition as “fairly bad” or “very bad”, up 30 percentage points since 2020.
Three-quarters report poor personal living conditions. Most devastatingly: 95 per cent of Nigerians say they or someone in their household went without a cash income at least once in 2025. Eighty-two per cent experienced food shortages. Eighty-two per cent lacked access to medical care. Seventy-four per cent could not access clean water. These are not poll numbers. These are the screams of a people abandoned by their government, translated into percentages.
And what does the government say to all of this? Bayo Onanuga, President Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, appeared on Arise Television and declared, with the straightest of faces, that he personally does not see the level of hunger Nigerians are complaining about. “We have been pigeon-holed into certain assumptions and conclusions. It’s like in the early days of this government. Somebody did a voice-over saying that we are hungry. Since then, people have been saying that,” he said. He cited the new road that has cut his travel time from Ajah to Lagos Island, and expressed concern that the media was “creating the problem” by reporting insecurity.
Onanuga is a man whose sense of the national condition is defined by his commute from Ajah to Lagos Island on a new coastal road. While 95 per cent of Nigerians went without a cash income last year, he found that his Ijebu people “have stopped complaining” now that they have a concrete road. This is not tone-deafness. This is a different reality altogether. This is what a government looks like when the people inside it have stopped being Nigerians and become something else – a privileged caste insulated from the country they nominally govern, able to look at 93 per cent national despair and say: “I don’t see it.”
For sheer, brazen disconnection from the national experience, however, nothing compares to what unfolded in Ile-Ife on 8 December 2025, at the 10th coronation anniversary of the Ooni of Ife. First Lady Senator Remi Tinubu was being installed as Yeye Asiwaju Gbogbo Ile Oodua – a title previously held by the late Hannah Idowu Dideolu Awolowo, wife of Obafemi Awolowo. Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State mounted the podium to deliver his congratulatory remarks in his characteristic style, beginning with a brief song.
The First Lady strode to the podium and told him: “I’m giving you five minutes to finish your speech. The music is enough.” When the governor, in his customary composure, continued singing, she returned and said: “I will turn off the microphone.” A constitutional nonentity – an unelected First Lady with no office, no legal standing, and no authority whatsoever – publicly issuing a deadline to a democratically elected Chief Executive of a Nigerian state, before a national audience, at a cultural event in his own territory.
The backlash was seismic and deserved. Dele Momodu condemned it as “totally repugnant to openly disgrace, insult and bully the Chief Executive of Osun State before a global audience.” Rufai Oseni observed simply: “Nobody could ever do this to President Tinubu as governor of Lagos.” The First Lady dismissed the national outrage as critics who “amplify minor missteps” – a response so self-revealing it required no further commentary.
This is the First Lady who, at the same event, prophesied: “By 2026, Nigeria will be in prosperity. Other countries will come and borrow money from us.” Nigeria, which in 2025 had 63 per cent of its population in poverty, was going to begin lending money to other nations in 2026. The same Nigeria whose grid has collapsed over twenty times since her husband assumed office. The same Nigeria where 95 per cent of households went without a cash income last year. Other countries will come to borrow money from us. This is not hope. This is psychosis dressed in electoral regalia.
But what the Adeleke incident truly reveals is the culture of impunity that has metastasised at the very top of this administration. It reveals a presidency that confuses the exercise of power with its unlimited licence. Nowhere was that confusion more catastrophically on display than in Rivers State in March 2025, when President Tinubu declared a state of emergency in the state and suspended Governor Siminalayi Fubara, Deputy Governor Ngozi Odu, and all elected members of the Rivers State House of Assembly for six months, replacing them with a sole administrator in the person of retired Vice Admiral Ibok-Ette Ibas.
The suspension of elected officials in a civilian state, by a civilian president, in a functioning democracy, on the grounds of a political quarrel that the president himself had helped engineer, drew immediate condemnation from human rights lawyers. Inibehe Effiong stated plainly: “President Tinubu has no constitutional authority to suspend the Governor of Rivers State or members of the Rivers State House of Assembly.” Festus Ogun concurred: “The emergency powers outlined in the 1999 Constitution do not grant him such authority.” And yet it happened. The governor was suspended. An admiral was installed. Six months of elected governance were erased by presidential fiat.
When Fubara was finally restored to office in September 2025, he acknowledged that his continued tenure depended on the “special favour” of President Tinubu. No elected official in a functioning democracy should ever have to describe their legitimacy as a gift from the president. That sentence – “I remained in office because of the special favour of President Tinubu” – is the single most damning sentence uttered by any Nigerian governor about the state of democracy in this country.
The ultimate price of that “special favour” was paid on 9 December 2025, when Fubara formally defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the All Progressives Congress. In doing so, he joined Delta’s Sheriff Oborevwori, Akwa Ibom’s Umo Eno, Enugu’s Peter Mbah, and Bayelsa’s Duoye Siri – all of whom had similarly moved from PDP to APC in preceding months. The result is historic and alarming: for the first time in Nigeria’s democratic history, all six South-South states are now governed by the APC.
The once-impregnable PDP stronghold of the Niger Delta has been swept into the ruling party’s column – not through the persuasion of voters, not through the logic of ideology, not through the force of policy, but through the mechanics of pressure, emergency rule, judicial orders, and what the PDP described as “self-inflicted” defections driven by existential calculations rather than conviction. This is how the Tinubu administration is building its 2027 majority: not by governing well, but by making the cost of opposition too high to sustain.
The machinery of that coercion has a name: the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. In August 2025, former Sokoto State Governor and serving Senator Aminu Waziri Tambuwal was detained by the EFCC over alleged fraudulent cash withdrawals totalling N189 billion during his tenure as governor – a tenure that ended two years before his arrest. At precisely the same moment, the EFCC extended an invitation to former Imo State Governor Emeka Ihedioha. Both men are key leaders of the opposition coalition that has coalesced around the ADC.
The commission also opened an investigation into former Senate President David Mark, a decade after his last day in office. The ADC described the timing as “a choreographed media trial targeted at bringing coalition leaders into disrepute,” questioning why the EFCC had suddenly found urgent grounds to investigate its national chairman a decade after the fact, Ihedioha more than five years after his governorship, and Tambuwal two years after leaving Sokoto. HURIWA warned that “the EFCC is not the property of the APC and it certainly is not a re-election task force for Bola Tinubu.”
Atiku said it with characteristic precision: “It is as though today, anyone who associates with the opposition is a target for phantom corruption allegations and, it is as though, as soon as they are coerced into the political agenda of President Tinubu, their ‘sins’ are forgiven.” “We have seen how the EFCC has been used to empty opposition state governors into the ruling party, and the tea party is not about to end anytime soon,” he added. He is not wrong. The pattern is undeniable. And it is contemptible.
The assault on press freedom and civic expression has been equally systematic and equally documented. Media Rights Agenda’s landmark mid-term report, “The Onslaught Intensifies,” documented 141 incidents of attacks on journalists, media workers, and ordinary citizens for the peaceful expression of their views between 29 May 2023 and 29 May 2025 – the first two years of the Tinubu administration. Of these 141 incidents, 61 cases (43.26 per cent) were perpetrated by operatives of the Nigeria Police alone.
The DSS accounted for a further seven. The most disturbing pattern in the report is the systematic abuse of Section 24 of the Cybercrime (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act – a provision so broadly drafted that it has been weaponised to arrest anyone who types a critical sentence online. The commission included the arrest of human rights advocate Dele Farotimi, journalist Emmanuel Uti of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism, Edo-based blogger Destiny Ekhorutomuen, and four editors and reporters from Informant247 in Kwara State.
MRA’s Communications Officer Idowu Adewale stated with controlled fury: “It is deeply ironic and troubling that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, himself a former pro-democracy activist and owner of multiple media outlets, now presides over an administration increasingly defined by the repression of the very freedoms he once championed.”
The international community has been sufficiently alarmed to take the extraordinary and unprecedented step of public condemnation. In June 2025, the Heads of Mission of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Finland in Nigeria issued a joint statement criticising the Nigerian government’s abuse of the Cybercrime Act and calling for urgent reform of both the law and its implementation. Five democracies, speaking with one voice, issued a formal diplomatic reprimand to the Nigerian government over the way it treats its own journalists and citizens.
This has never happened before in Nigeria’s democratic history. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a fire alarm. And what did the administration do? Nothing. Vice President Kashim Shettima subsequently appeared before a press audience and claimed, without embarrassment, that no journalists had been harassed in Nigeria since Tinubu took office. CPJ, which had documented at least 56 journalists assaulted during the #EndBadGovernance protests alone – with masked security forces firing bullets and tear gas at 18 working journalists – responded with a letter demanding accountability. The Vice President’s claim was not a misunderstanding. It was a lie. And it tells us everything about an administration that has learned to govern by denial.
This culture of denial reached its most grotesque expression on 16 April 2026, when Tinubu addressed the coordinators of his Renewed Hope Ambassadors and said, in what appeared to be an unguarded moment of candour: “The truth is I took over from myself. The late Buhari is me; he was a partner. If I took over from him, is that not from myself?” He was attempting to deflect criticism that he had inherited a broken economy. Instead, he handed his critics their most powerful argument in his own words.
Three years of the most painful economic suffering in living memory – the subsidy removal without safety nets, the naira devaluation that wiped out the savings of millions, the inflation that turned a meal of rice into a monthly crisis – and the President’s response is: “I took over from myself.” He has therefore owned everything. Not just the reforms he introduced, but the 16 years of APC policy under Buhari and himself before that. The economic architecture of Nigeria’s present catastrophe – the chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, the dependence on oil rents, the failure to diversify, the institutionalised corruption – all of it is his. All of it is him. He said so himself.
The irony that runs like a poisoned river through all of this is that Tinubu was once, genuinely, on the right side of history. He faced down Sani Abacha. He endured exile. He stood with NADECO and with the democratic aspirations of millions of Nigerians who wanted their country back. He was jailed, harassed, and persecuted by the same machinery of state repression that he now controls. And the tragedy is not merely that power corrupts, though it has corrupted. The tragedy is the specificity of the reversal.
The man who once demanded that governments protect journalists now heads a government that uses the Cybercrime Act to jail them. The man who once marched for the right to protest now heads a government that shot protesters – at least 24 of them, most in the head or torso, suggesting intent to kill. The man who once invoked democracy as a sacred value now suspends elected governors by decree and threatens to give opposition critics “eyeglasses” so they can see the progress he insists they are missing. The progress that 93 per cent of the population cannot find. The prosperity that 88 per cent of Nigerians say is “fairly bad” or “very bad.”
The brain drain accelerating under this administration is itself a referendum on the quality of governance. Doctors, engineers, nurses, academics, lawyers – the most educated, most ambitious, most capable Nigerians – are leaving in numbers that have no precedent. This is not migration. This is evacuation. It is what happens when a country’s brightest minds calculate the cost-benefit of staying, and conclude that no benefit exists. The government calls them disloyal.
The government implies they are abandoning their country in its hour of need. But what country abandons its people to 93 per cent collective despair, to a food system where 82 per cent go hungry, to a healthcare system that received 0.02 per cent of its capital appropriation, to a security environment where retired generals are kidnapped and beheaded on public roads – and then wonders why the educated are buying flight tickets? The japa exodus is not a betrayal of Nigeria. It is Nigeria’s population voting with its feet on the performance of this government. And the vote is unanimous.
The question that now confronts Nigeria is not whether Tinubu’s administration has failed. That verdict is in – delivered not by opposition politicians, not by hostile journalists, not by foreign institutions, but by the people themselves. Ninety-three per cent of the country’s own citizens say it is going in the wrong direction. The question is whether this administration, having failed so comprehensively, will have the grace to accept its failure, change course, and submit itself to the honest judgment of the ballot box in 2027 – or whether it will continue its project of institutional capture, opposition persecution, and democratic demolition in a desperate attempt to win an election its record cannot win for it.
The signs are not encouraging. An administration that invites the heads of five democracies to reprimand it for press freedom violations, then responds with silence and denial; that deregisters five opposition parties through a court that flouted its own superior’s order; that deploys emergency rule to suspend an elected governor into defection; that tells a nation experiencing 93 per cent despair that it will soon be lending money to foreigners – this is not an administration preparing for a democratic contest. This is an administration preparing for a coronation.
The Nigerian people are not without resources in this fight. Their most powerful weapon is not a party, not a coalition, not a candidate, but their memory. They remember what it cost before the subsidy was removed, and what it costs now. They remember the petrol at N185 and the petrol at N1,000 and the Transport fares that tripled overnight. They remember the naira at N460 to the dollar and the naira at N1,700 to the dollar and what that did to their savings, their business capital, their children’s school fees in foreign currency. They remember the 24 protesters shot in the streets, and the children who collapsed in court from hunger after weeks of detention for attending those protests.
They remember the generals who died in bandits’ captivity, the teachers beheaded on camera, the schoolchildren still unrescued in the forests of Oyo State. They remember. And in a democracy – however battered, however bruised, however besieged – memory is sovereign. The 2027 election is a reckoning, not a ceremony. And every Nigerian who went to bed hungry last night is a plaintiff.
The hunger is not a statistic. The insecurity is not a headline. The repression is not an abstraction. They are the lived daily realities of 200 million people who did not sign up for this – who voted, in their millions, for a different future, and received instead a president who tells them he took over from himself, a First Lady who threatens to cut off a governor’s microphone and prophesies loans to foreign nations, and a presidential aide who, from the comfort of his Lagos commute on a new coastal road, cannot see the hunger. Nigeria deserves better than this. Nigeria demands better than this. And if this administration cannot provide better than this, then 2027 must.
Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)
