Nigeria is not suffering from absence. It is suffering from deliberate indifference. Under Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the APC, hunger has been reorganised, systematised, and enforced with policy precision. This is not an accidental hardship of reform; it is a calculated condition of governance. The economy functions, markets operate, commodities circulate, yet life itself has been priced out of reach for the majority. Hunger has not been inherited; it has been administered.
This administration governs like an auditor of anguish, balancing spreadsheets while human beings collapse beneath the numbers. Food is present but unaffordable. Transport exists but punishes movement. Electricity flickers at costs that mock survival. Every essential is available, yet unreachable. This is not progress. It is economic theatre staged for elites, with suffering assigned to the masses as collateral.
William Shakespeare warned, centuries before modern economics, that “Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.” In Tinubu’s Nigeria, that evil word is reform, repeated until cruelty is baptised as necessity. Shakespeare’s tragedies were never about kings alone; they were about blindness. In King Lear, power mistakes authority for wisdom, divides the land without compassion, and creates a storm it can no longer command. Nigeria today lives inside that storm, not natural, not accidental, but summoned by arrogant decisions deaf to consequence.
Shakespeare understood that when rulers stop listening, suffering becomes structural. Tinubu’s policies speak fluently in figures but stammer in humanity. Taxes rise without cushions. Tariffs expand without protection. Costs multiply while wages are embalmed in the past. The people are told to endure, to adjust, to understand macroeconomics, as though hunger negotiates with theory.
Zora Neale Hurston, who walked among the forgotten and recorded their quiet devastation, once wrote that “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Nigeria is trapped in a year that screams questions, while power refuses to answer. Hurston understood that suffering is most lethal when it is normalised, when pain becomes routine, when despair is absorbed into daily planning. That is the stage Nigeria has reached.
Hurston also warned that “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Tinubu’s Nigeria has perfected this silence. Hunger has been privatised. It no longer protests in the streets; it negotiates quietly in kitchens. Parents calculate which meals can be skipped. Traders sell less while paying more. Youths plan exits instead of futures. Suffering has become orderly, and therefore convenient for power to ignore.
This government does not govern citizens; it governs endurance. Every policy is calibrated to extract without empathy. Taxation has abandoned its moral purpose and become an instrument of pressure. From communication to consumption, from shelter to movement, the poor are pursued relentlessly, while privilege floats safely above inflation. The social contract has been shredded, yet contributions are still demanded.
Shakespeare reminded the world that “When mercy seasons justice, it becomes a virtue.” Tinubu’s justice is unseasoned. Raw. Punitive. It demands sacrifice exclusively from those who have nothing left to surrender. Reform without protection is vandalism. Adjustment without compassion is tyranny. This administration practices both with chilling confidence.
Hurston would have recognised this terrain instantly. She would have seen the exhaustion in households where hope is rationed like sugar. She would have known that a nation where work no longer guarantees survival is a nation quietly devouring itself. She would have understood that when leadership grows distant from lived reality, cruelty becomes policy without ever announcing itself as such.
Nigeria has reached a point where suffering no longer shocks; it settles. Hunger has been bureaucratised. Pain has been justified with economic language. The people are no longer promised relief; they are instructed to adapt. This is not leadership. It is abdication disguised as courage.
History is merciless to such regimes. It does not preserve speeches or excuses. It records outcomes. It will remember empty kitchens in a land of abundance. It will remember children withdrawn from school, businesses strangled by costs, youths ageing under economic humiliation. It will remember a government that taxed survival and called it governance.
A country cannot be taxed into prosperity while its people are priced out of life. Hunger is not reform. Suffering is not progress. And a presidency that monetises pain forfeits moral legitimacy.
This is not a season of transition.
It is an era of calculated hardship.
And Tinubu’s name is written all over it.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
Director General,
The Narrative Force.
