Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Every serious idea travels a short and honest road. From conception, to refinement, to implementation, to result. That is the natural life cycle of a promise made in good faith. A government that truly means well does not keep a whole nation standing in the sun, year after weary year, waiting forever for the harvest of its pledges. Somewhere between the manifesto and the misery, the fruit is supposed to appear. Somewhere between the campaign jingle and the citizen’s kitchen, a little relief is supposed to arrive.
We are still waiting. And the waiting has become a way of life.
THE TRILOGY OF GOLDEN WORDS
The All Progressives Congress did not arrive quietly. It swept in on the wings of three golden words, each unveiled with drums, each more magnificent than the last. Change. Next Level. Renewed Hope. A trilogy so beautiful it belonged in a museum rather than a manifesto.
And with each fresh slogan, the ordinary Nigerian woke up a little poorer than the morning he first heard it. Change gave us the loose coins in our pockets and very little else. Next Level took us to a level nobody had requested and nobody could afford. Renewed Hope arrived to renew a hope the two earlier slogans had quietly buried.
They promised us change. They handed us loose coins and asked us to call it destiny.
There is a particular genius in this. To fail is human. But to fail three times in a row, rebrand each failure with a shinier name, and still ask the people to clap, that is a craft. That is artistry. That is the APC.
THE SIX MONTHS THAT NEVER ENDED
Let us begin where the pain is most literal. Electricity.
We were told, with the confidence of men who had seen the future, that the power problem would be solved within six months. Six months. Not six years. Not six governments. Six honest months of decisive action, and Nigeria would glow like the cities we see in other people’s photographs.
Almost a decade later, we are still counting those months. We have counted them by candlelight. We have counted them to the roar of a thousand generators, that great national orchestra that plays every evening from Lagos to Maiduguri. We have counted them while the little pepper seller loses her goods to a fridge that has not tasted current in days.
The light at the end of the tunnel, it turns out, has itself been disconnected for non payment.
A WORD BEFORE I CONTINUE
Now let me choose my words with care, for words matter and people matter more.
I have brothers, sisters, elders and dear friends inside this so called progressive family. I have people there whom I hold in genuine esteem, men and women of good conscience who joined believing the slogans were sincere. They are precious to me, and I will not pretend otherwise.
But our elders taught us a stubborn thing. Truth is dearer than friendship. A physician who loves his patient does not lie to him about the fever. And so, with all the affection in my heart intact, I must still tell the truth about the sickness.
THE ECONOMY ON A STRETCHER
They swore they would build a robust economy, a proud and muscular thing that would stand tall among nations. Today that economy lies flat on a stretcher, breathing with difficulty, waiting for a doctor who keeps issuing statements instead of prescriptions.
The naira, once a currency a man could respect, has been quietly demoted to loose change. It has been so thoroughly humbled that citizens now carry it in bulk and count it in bundles, not because they are wealthy but because each note has been asked to do the work of a coin.
And here is the wonder of it. In its blind optimism, and after much theatrical dithering, the government found a way to lose on both sides of the ledger at once. With one hand it emptied our foreign reserves, that hard won cushion meant for the rainy day. With the other hand it borrowed feverishly, mortgaging tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the childhood of children not yet born. All of it, we were assured, in the sacred and holy name of infrastructure.
A government that borrows the future and spends it on excuses has robbed two generations with a single signature.
THE INFRASTRUCTURE THAT VANISHED
Which raises the only question that matters. Where, exactly, is the infrastructure?
We mortgaged the future to repair the road to prosperity, yet the road to any honest factory still runs through darkness, through collapsing power supply, through insecurity, and over a mountain of running costs that would break the back of a saint. The enabling climate for business that was so lovingly advertised remains a rumour, a beautiful rumour that no real investor has ever managed to confirm in the flesh.
Ask the small manufacturer why he closed his doors. Ask the young graduate why his certificate is gathering dust. Ask the trader why her capital shrinks each time she restocks. They will not quote you a slogan. They will quote you the price of diesel, the cost of a loan, and the going rate for despair.
WHERE THE COUNTRYSIDE BLEEDS
And then there is the matter of our lives, which the government also promised to protect.
Meanwhile the countryside bleeds. In too many communities the innocent are harvested by bandits with a boldness that would embarrass Thomas Hobbes himself, that grim philosopher who warned of a life nasty, brutish and short. He wrote it as a nightmare to be avoided. Under this watch, in too many villages, it reads like a description of Tuesday.
Farmers cannot reach their farms. Travellers whisper prayers at every bend in the road. Parents count their children twice, once when they leave and once, God willing, when they return.
WHEN THE ALTAR SPEAKS, THE PALACE SNEERS
It is one thing for a party man to say these things. It is another matter entirely when the shepherds of the nation’s conscience say them too, and are insulted for their trouble.
Consider this very year. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria carried the cry of the ordinary Nigerian directly into the Presidential Villa. They came not with insults but with the truth. They told the President plainly that the reforms had inflicted severe hardship, that families were weighed down by hunger, poverty, insecurity and a cost of living that climbs while wages crawl, and that public confidence in the fairness of our democracy itself was draining away.
And how did the government receive honest counsel from men who answer to God before they answer to any party? It disagreed. By the account of Cardinal John Onaiyekan, given later on national television, the President rejected the bishops’ assessment outright, insisting the economy was improving and that the nation was not, in his telling, bleeding. The Cardinal added a diagnosis of his own, that the people surrounding the President feed him a rosy picture while the real country burns just beyond the gate.
When the palace insists the nation is not bleeding, ask why it keeps changing the bandages.
Nor is this the grievance of one denomination. The Christian Association of Nigeria, under Archbishop Daniel Okoh, has said the same thing again and again, warning that the administration’s own policies are inflicting hardship on the people. In one festive season message it set aside the comfortable statistics entirely and simply named the wounds, irregular meals, school fees no parent can raise, businesses collapsing, and nights too anxious for sleep. On security it was blunter still, telling the government to stop manufacturing excuses and start protecting citizens who are being killed.
A former President of that same association, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, went further and said the quiet thing aloud, that this government has failed Nigerians and does not deserve another term. The National Christian Elders Forum echoed the plea, warning that the present direction of the country now offers apprehension where once it promised hope.
THE ART OF INSULTING YOUR OWN CONSCIENCE
Now watch the government’s reply, for it reveals everything.
Faced with bishops, cardinals and archbishops all pointing at the very same fire, the administration did not reach for a bucket of water. It reached for its spokesmen. Presidential aides rose, not to address the hunger, but to scold the messengers. One dismissed the Cardinal as more political than spiritual and dragged in the sympathies of a past election. Another pronounced it an abuse of clerical privilege for an elderly man of God to speak to his own countrymen on live television.
Let that settle for a moment. The economy is on a stretcher, the villages are in mourning, and the government’s most urgent business of the week was to lecture a cardinal on the etiquette of telling the truth.
Even fellow Christians recoiled. The Northern Christian Association called the conduct shameful and a disservice to the President himself, reminding his noisy defenders that honest counsel had been offered for the good of the nation, not for the comfort of a party.
There it is, the true face of the thing. A government that cannot solve the problem has perfected the reflex of abusing anyone who dares to name it. When the altar speaks, the palace sneers.
IN PRAISE OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS
Still, in the spirit of fairness, let no one accuse me of denying the party its record.
It has achieved unemployment on a truly industrial scale, an accomplishment few governments could match even if they tried. It has achieved an inflation that sprints ahead of every campaign promise and laps it twice for good measure. It has achieved a currency so weightless it practically floats, and a cost of living so high that survival itself now qualifies as ambition.
If suffering were a cash crop, our farms would overflow. If hardship were an export commodity, Nigeria under this government would be an undisputed superpower, courted by every nation on earth, envied for the sheer scale and consistency of our production.
They did not fail to deliver. They delivered hardship, in full, ahead of schedule, and under budget.
THE VERDICT
So let us weigh the promises against the punishment and let the scale speak for itself.
They promised change and delivered small change. They promised a robust economy and delivered a patient on life support. They promised light in six months and delivered a decade of darkness. They promised to guard our lives and left too many of us guarding our own graves. And when the holiest voices in the land begged them to listen, they answered with press statements and insults.
The verdict, therefore, writes itself in a hand no propaganda can smudge. The All Progressives Congress has failed Nigerians completely, comprehensively, and without the faintest excuse. And the only truly progressive act left for such a party to perform is to progress itself, gently but very firmly, towards the exit.
AND YET, MORNING COMES
But let no one mistake this for bitterness, for it is not. Bitterness looks backward. I am looking forward.
Nigerians are not begging for miracles. We are not asking that water flow uphill, or that the sun rise in the west, or that money grow on the trees in our compounds. We are asking only for the ordinary things that competent people deliver everywhere else on earth. Light we can switch on. A naira that still weighs something in the hand. A road a farmer can travel and return home whole. A night a mother can survive without fear. And leaders humble enough to listen when their own bishops weep for the people.
That is not too much to ask of those who govern us. It was never too much to ask.
And so the exit door is not the end of this story. It is the door swinging open onto everything this country was always capable of becoming. The hard times are not the permanent weather of our nation. They are the long, artificial night of a single failed experiment, and no night, however proud of its own darkness, has ever once refused the morning.
Nigeria has an appointment with something better. And it fully intends to keep it.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
4 August 2026
