Something strange is happening in Nigeria. A government ostensibly elected by the people to improve their living conditions is actively running a peonage system designed to make the people indebted and keep them in perpetual and absolute servitude. This might be a global first.
The Tinubu presidency has weaponised hunger and poverty to turn Nigeria into a serfdom and the people into serfs who can be controlled with bags of rice, wads of naira and sundry handouts. Politicians fondly call it “empowerment.” It’s a word that is cruelly accurate: The people are so enfeebled by poverty they are like patients on a sickbed who need intravenous drips to muster just a little energy to do what they once did with ease.
In place of affordable petrol, the people get selective discounts at selective service outlets. In place of affordable education, the government is offering student loans to families who have been paying school fees with relative ease for generations. And when workers threaten to go on strike because their take-home pay cannot take them home, the government offers a one-off transport bonus two months to election.
Nigeria has turned from a country of affluence to a nation of grinding poverty in the blink of an eye. Millions of people now wear poverty as a badge. The beg for transport fares to get to work. They borrow to eat breakfast. They rely on crowdfunding for weddings, to pay hospital bills and to bury their dead.
Meanwhile, the First Lady has reportedly been advising Nigerians to take up roasting corn and frying bean cakes (akara) as a means of livelihood – an insult on marble to a once proud and hardworking people who are simply asking for a stable economy, a secure environment and improved infrastructure to thrive.
What Nigerians are facing today under APC is institutionalised peonage, where the government continues to squeeze the people until there is no confidence remaining and no space left to breathe.
Economically, emotionally and spiritually, the people are stripped bare, humiliated and left to bear their shame.
Continued inflation has forced people who were once well-fed and thriving into acute want. How do you explain the fact that a trader who used to make millions buying and selling between Lagos and Cotonou is now back home in the village because the naira has depreciated so severely that cross-border trading has become unsustainable?
President Tinubu is busy borrowing and funnelling billions to buy off governors who will help him rig elections, while those same governors are busy squeezing the poor masses, despite their coffers overflowing with Tinubu’s “largesse.”
In Enugu State, the governor has transitioned from a smooth-talking, suit-wearing entrepreneur and politician into a Judas Iscariot who taxes the poor and adds to their sorrow instead of wiping away their tears.
It is the moral duty of every Nigerian to ensure that those who have led us into this valley of tears, this present mountain of sorrows and this desert of poverty, are punished at the ballot box.
It is our civic and prophetic duty to challenge a system that manufactures mass poverty and suffering on a scale that is overwhelming hardworking Nigerians.
Poverty must not become a political instrument of control. Hunger must not become a weapon of governance, and the dignity of Nigerians must never be reduced to a bag of rice or a handful of naira notes.
**Fr Augustine Anwuchie is a Nigerian Catholic missionary working in Niger Republic
