Nigeria is not collapsing. Neither is it reforming.
What the country is experiencing is something more deliberate, more controlled, and ultimately more dangerous: a managed breakdown. Living standards deteriorate, institutions weaken, and public trust erodes, yet the system remains stable enough to endure. Pain is normalised. Expectations are lowered. And power is preserved.
This moment is routinely described as a period of “necessary sacrifice” on the road to renewal. Nigerians are told to endure hardship today for prosperity tomorrow. But the structure beneath the suffering tells a different story. The hardship is not transitional. It is structural.
The central illusion of the present era is reform without restructuring. Prices are adjusted, subsidies removed, currencies floated, and austerity enforced, yet the underlying architecture of power remains untouched. As a result, pain increases while outcomes do not improve. Inflation rises without productivity. Liberalisation occurs without competition. Discipline is demanded without accountability.
This is not economic mismanagement. It is political economy functioning as designed.
Reform as Performance
True reform follows sequence. Institutions are strengthened before markets are exposed. Safety nets precede subsidy removal. Productivity expands before costs are transferred to citizens.
In Nigeria, this order is reversed.
Costs are imposed before capacity is built. Exposure comes before protection. The result is not transition, but shock without cushioning. Reform is applied decisively where it affects the general population and cautiously where it threatens elite interests. Subsidies benefiting the poor disappear swiftly. Privileges protecting the powerful are preserved, diluted, or delayed.
Citizens are asked to sacrifice without benchmarks, timelines, or consequences for failure at the top. Pain becomes mandatory. Results remain optional.
The language of reform is borrowed wholesale from global economic orthodoxy, but stripped of the institutions that make it meaningful. Markets cannot function where access is unequal. Competition cannot exist where monopolies are politically protected. Fiscal discipline cannot succeed where spending is opaque and discretionary.
Media amplification sustains the illusion. Policy announcements are repeated without interrogation. Structural critique is framed as resistance to progress. Dissent is personalised, not debated. Reform becomes something one either accepts emotionally or opposes irrationally.
External actors reinforce the cycle. Compliance replaces performance. As long as prescribed steps are taken, approval is granted regardless of social impact. This endorsement is recycled domestically as proof of success, even as living conditions deteriorate.
What emerges is a theatre of reform: policies enacted to signal seriousness, hardship inflicted to demonstrate commitment, and rhetoric deployed to suppress dissent. What is absent is disruption of the power arrangements that generate Nigeria’s recurring crises.
Where Power Actually Lives
To understand Nigeria’s trajectory, one must distinguish between formal authority and actual control.
Formal authority is visible. It occupies offices, signs documents, and absorbs public criticism. Actual power is quieter. It determines which reforms are permitted, which interests are protected, and which boundaries must never be crossed.
At the centre of real power is not a unified elite but a negotiated coalition: political financiers, security actors, economic gatekeepers, and external partners bound together by shared incentives rather than ideology.
Political godfathers fund access to office and enforce loyalty through economic leverage. Security institutions exercise practical veto power through control of force, intelligence, and enforcement discretion. Insecurity, far from being merely a failure of governance, often functions as political currency, justifying extraordinary budgets, reduced oversight, and expanded influence.
Economic power holders thrive on distortion. Exchange rate instability, subsidy regimes, regulatory opacity, and selective enforcement generate rents. Stability would reduce profits. Volatility sustains them.
External actors shape boundaries rather than outcomes. Credit, legitimacy, and diplomatic cover are exchanged for policy alignment, not structural accountability.
Within this ecosystem, elections do not transform systems. They renegotiate access. Faces change; incentives remain.
Following the Money
Nigeria’s political economy reveals itself most clearly through money flows.
Public revenue is centrally collected and selectively distributed. Budgets function less as planning tools and more as allocation mechanisms. Capital projects become vehicles for extraction. Completion is often less profitable than perpetuity.
Foreign exchange scarcity is not merely technical failure. It is an incentive structure. Multiple rates and discretionary access create predictable arbitrage opportunities for insiders. Volatility rewards proximity.
Subsidy regimes concentrate benefit in intermediaries. When removed, pain is universal and immediate. When present, gains are narrow and invisible. Either way, distribution, not production, is rewarded.
Tax enforcement targets the easy, not the powerful. Small businesses and the informal sector are squeezed while large scale evasion and protected exemptions persist. Security spending operates in parallel economies shielded by classification and emergency justification.
Debt completes the cycle. Borrowing fills gaps without fixing leakage. Servicing obligations then justify austerity, transferring the burden to citizens while reassuring creditors.
The system rewards access, not value. Productivity is punished. Proximity is profitable.
Unequal Burdens, Quietly Distributed
Hardship is widespread, but not evenly shared.
Regions with limited access to central power absorb policy shocks without buffers. Regions with leverage navigate the system more effectively. Ethnic identity, officially denied, remains a functional variable in representation across security, economic, and regulatory institutions.
Insecurity compounds disparity. Some threats trigger swift intervention; others linger unresolved. Perceptions of selective concern harden.
The South East illustrates cumulative exclusion: entrepreneurial energy constrained by infrastructure deficits, insecurity worsened by distrust, and limited federal investment reinforcing alienation. Resource rich regions endure extraction without commensurate development. In the North, poverty intersects with demographic pressure and persistent insecurity.
These outcomes are not accidental. Diversity is managed through containment rather than inclusion. Grievances are tolerated as long as they remain fragmented.
The danger lies in accumulation. Managed decline assumes discontent will not synchronise. History suggests otherwise.
What Comes Next: Scenarios, Not Prophecies
Three plausible pathways emerge.
Managed Drift remains the most likely. Incremental adjustment, normalised hardship, and continued elite stability. The system survives while capacity erodes.
Shock-Induced Realignment emerges if crises converge, fiscal, security, or political. This path is volatile. It may produce restructuring, repression, or temporary reset.
Elite Repackaging offers cosmetic renewal. New faces, recycled promises, unchanged incentives.
Across all scenarios, the decisive variable is elite coordination. As long as dominant interests align, reform remains performative.
Implications Across Society
Political actors operate within constraint, trading ambition for survival. Diaspora engagement faces opportunity without protection. Businesses adapt to uncertainty rather than planning for stability. Media and civil society operate within narrowing space. Citizens replace expectation with coping.
Adaptation sustains the system. It does not reform it.
Ultimately
This is not an argument for despair. It is an argument for clarity.
Nigeria’s condition is not chaos. It is order of a particular kind, stability without justice, reform without restructuring, pain without change.
Systems are not judged by intention but by incentive and outcome. By that measure, Nigeria’s present trajectory is legible.
Whether it remains permanent is not a matter of rhetoric, but of power.
By Hon. Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
Duruebube Ihiagwa ófó asato
Oblong Media Unlimited
Documenting reality as it is experienced, not advertised.
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