TINUBU SPREADING AGONIES, MISERIES, SUFFERING IN NIGERIA
HE MUST BE VOTED OUT COME JANUARY 16, 2027
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
THE SHAKESPEARE THAT FOUND ME AGAIN
I was not looking for Shakespeare.
I was rummaging through the accumulated sediment of a life spent in books and struggle, that particular corner of my reading room in Ado Ekiti where old volumes lean against newer ones, where pamphlets from the human rights years share shelves with party strategy documents, where the past and the present exist in an uneasy, instructive proximity.
The book was there as it had always been. Spine cracked. Pages yellowed at the margins the way only truly loved books yellow, not from neglect but from use, from argument, from the friction of a mind pressing back against a text that pressed first.
And there, on a page I had visited long ago in a season I no longer precisely remember, was the red biro mark. My mark. My old habit, unchanged across decades. Whenever a line seized me, whenever a sentence reached through the centuries and grabbed the lapels of the present, I underlined it in red. Not black. Not blue. Red, because some truths deserve the colour of urgency.
The line I had marked was from Richard II. Shakespeare, writing about a kingdom in collapse, about a ruler who had forfeited the trust of his people through vanity and extraction, gave these words to a broken king contemplating the ruin around him:
“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.”
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
I looked around me. At the price boards in the market that change faster than the goods beneath them. At the generator fumes that replace electricity in every street of every town in this country. At the young men at the junction whose industry and ambition have been replaced, by this government’s deliberate policy, with idleness and despair.
Shakespeare was not writing about Nigeria. But Nigeria in 2026 has made itself the perfect annotation to his text.
WHAT IS SO TERRIBLE THAT THE EARTH BLEEDS
The earth is bleeding. Not as metaphor. As fact.
There is a particular kind of Nigerian sorrow that does not announce itself loudly. It does not riot in the streets, though it has earned the right. It does not weep in public, though it weeps every night behind closed doors. It sits quietly at a market stall with goods that do not sell. It walks home slowly after a long day that produced nothing. It skips a meal and tells its children it is not hungry. It stares at a hospital bill and understands, with a cold and terrible clarity, that the sum on that paper is a death sentence.
This is the sorrow that Tinubu has manufactured. Not accidentally. Not as collateral damage. As policy.
The farmer in Ido Ekiti who planted maize last season could not afford diesel to pump water for irrigation. He returned home with less than he planted. The trader in Ikole market who built her small capital across fifteen years of discipline watched it evaporate in eight months of Tinubu’s exchange rate arithmetic. The civil servant in Abuja who takes three buses to work because the one bus he used to take now costs more than his daily meal budget arrives at his desk hollow and leaves it hollower.
A mother in Ekiti boils water on a firewood stove because gas is now a luxury. A father in Kano has withdrawn two of his four children from school because fees have become a choice between learning and eating. A graduate in Port Harcourt, brilliant and willing, has spent fourteen months sending applications into silence. He has stopped counting the rejections. He has started counting the days.
This is not poverty as Nigeria has always known it. This is engineered destitution, visited upon people who were already struggling by a government that looked at their suffering and decided to deepen it.
THE DOCUMENT THAT REFUSED TO STAY BURIED
Two days before I found the Shakespeare, I had found something else in that same corner of accumulated years.
An old Nigerian political document. Its pages carrying the smell of paper that has witnessed history and been shelved without resolution.
A prostrate figure on the cover. A headline that hit like a verdict. And a quote from an unnamed Nigerian, unnamed because he was every Nigerian, who said that he had been hopeful when a new democratic government came to power, but that hope had since dissolved entirely, leaving nothing at the end of the tunnel but more darkness.
Inside its pages, a corn seller waited for buyers who never came. A market trader earned almost nothing and told the reporter she had come very close to ending her life. A published list of survival advice told citizens to cook at home, avoid expensive food, travel by public transport, cut all entertainment, and form food co-operatives with their neighbours.
I read that list and I did not find it strange. I found it familiar. Because those same tips have been circulating on Nigerian WhatsApp groups since 2023. Nobody attaches a year to them anymore. They have become timeless, which is another way of saying that the suffering that produced them has become permanent.
Decades later. The same hunger. The same advice. A different man in Aso Rock and a deeper grave beneath the feet of the poor.
WHAT OBASANJO AND ATIKU LEFT AND WHAT TINUBU BURIED
Obasanjo and Atiku inherited ruins in 1999. Three decades of military governance had hollowed the treasury, wrecked the institutions, and reduced Nigeria’s international standing to that of a pariah state. The task before them was not development. It was resurrection of a nation from the ruins of military plunder.
And they delivered.
Under their administration, Nigeria’s GDP grew from fifty-eight billion dollars in 1999 to two hundred and seventy billion dollars by 2007. The Paris Club debt that had strangled the country for decades was negotiated away entirely. The external reserves, once a source of national embarrassment, were rebuilt into a formidable buffer. The banking sector was consolidated into an engine capable of funding enterprise and growth. Anti-corruption institutions were established for the first time as serious instruments of governance rather than decorative ones. Atiku Abubakar, as Vice President, drove a bold liberalisation agenda that expanded the space for private capital, created employment, and laid the foundation of a modern Nigerian economy.
By 2007, Nigeria stood taller than it had stood in a generation. The world took notice. Investors arrived. The ordinary Nigerian, for the first time in decades, had reason to believe that the arc of governance was bending toward his wellbeing.
That is the inheritance, carried and built upon across subsequent years, that Tinubu ultimately received when he was handed the keys to Aso Rock in May 2023. He received a country that, for all its wounds under Buhari, retained the memory of functional institutions. He received a naira that still traded within a range ordinary Nigerians could plan around. He received a subsidy system that stood, however creakily, between the poor and destitution.
And within one hundred days, he removed that floor.
He announced it at his inauguration like a man proud of the blow he was about to land, as though the pain of twenty million poor Nigerians was the price of his economic courage rather than the cost of his political recklessness.
The naira collapsed. Petrol tripled, then quadrupled. Transportation costs consumed wages. Food costs consumed whatever transportation left. And the people, already tired, already bruised, bent further under this new and deliberate load.
Obasanjo and Atiku took fifty-eight billion dollars and built it into two hundred and seventy billion, bequeathing to Nigeria a legacy of growth, credibility, and possibility. Tinubu took that inheritance and ground it into dust.
It is not new wisdom circulating on those WhatsApp groups. It is old suffering with a new and remorseless author.
THE PROGRAMME BEHIND THE SUFFERING
I use the word programme deliberately.
A programme implies design. It implies that the outcomes we are observing are not accidents of governance but products of governance, that someone decided that certain Nigerians would bear certain costs so that certain other Nigerians would enjoy certain benefits.
The removal of the fuel subsidy without a social protection net was a programme. The floating of the naira without a stabilisation mechanism was a programme. The tax reforms that burden the poor while international extractors negotiate bespoke arrangements was a programme. The Renewed Hope palliative distribution, managed by party structures, photographed for propaganda, and inadequate by every honest measure, is a programme.
It is a programme designed to harvest from those who have little in order to sustain those who have much.
Shakespeare named this disease four centuries before Tinubu contracted it. In Julius Caesar, Brutus delivered the line I had also marked in red:
“The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.”
When power no longer feels the pain it causes. When the man who removed the subsidy has not once stood in a fuel queue. When the man who governs the hungry has not missed a meal.
And from Timon of Athens, the play Shakespeare wrote about a society where theft had become the organising principle of all human relations, comes the verdict that describes this Nigeria precisely:
“The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun; the sea’s a thief…all that you meet are thieves.”
The toll collector on the road you built with your taxes. The electricity distributor who bills you for darkness. The government that took your subsidy, handed you a palliative, and called the transaction a policy.
All that you meet are thieves.
Shakespeare was writing about ancient Athens. He was writing about Nigeria in 2026.
JANUARY 16, 2027
He must be voted out.
Not because opposition is a ritual. Not because it is someone’s turn. But because the evidence is plain, documented, and alive in the bodies of suffering Nigerians who deserved better and received worse.
He must be voted out because the mother who skips her meal so her children can eat is not a statistic. She is a citizen. She is a verdict on a government that saw her hunger and looked away.
He must be voted out because the teacher who cannot afford to appear at work every day of the month is not a failure. He is a mirror held up to a state that has made honourable service economically impossible.
He must be voted out because dashed hopes, when they become a government programme, are no longer merely a political failure. They are a moral crime against a people who placed their trust, however reluctantly, in the hands of the state.
He must be voted out because the earth is bleeding and the man responsible is sleeping soundly.
Richard II knew what it meant to govern a people into sorrow. He knew the weight of the epitaphs he had written on the bosom of the earth. Tinubu does not even know he is writing them.
That is the final indictment. Not malice alone. Not incompetence alone. But the compound catastrophe of a man with enormous power and no remorse, who disjoins, daily, feeling from consequence, comfort from governance, and himself from the country he was elected to serve.
The Narrative Force, operating across all thirty-six states and the Federal Capital Territory, will be there on January 16, 2027. The ADC will be there. The coalition of Nigerians who understand that this country’s story does not end with Tinubu will be there.
We will vote. We will count. We will defend the count.
The earth has bled enough.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
June 2026
