Viewpoints Africa One need not be a profound philosopher to discern the melancholy truth: Nigeria is ensnared in a cycle of hopelessness. At the close of every administration, citizens exhale in relief, only to discover that the successor eclipses the failures of its predecessor, so that nostalgia for once-despised regimes becomes the national mood. This paradox is the gravest tragedy of our republic: we replace bad with worse, mediocrity with calamity, corruption with impunity, incompetence with disaster.
When Goodluck Jonathan assumed the presidency in 2010, he carried the hopes of millions who believed his humble origins might inspire reformist leadership. For a fleeting moment, Nigerians dreamed of renaissance. But the dream swiftly soured. His tenure coincided with the rise of Boko Haram, which mutated into a monstrous terror machine. The abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 exposed a state too weak to protect its own children. Corruption deepened the despair. Billions in oil revenues went unaccounted for, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation became a byword for fiscal opacity. Jonathan’s apologists insist he meant well but was unlucky. Yet nation-building is not about luck; it is about vision, courage, and discipline, and his government fell short on all counts.
If Jonathan’s reign was a disappointment, Muhammadu Buhari’s was a calamity. Nigerians hailed him as the incorruptible general who would rescue the nation from decay. In 2015 he rode a tidal wave of goodwill. By 2018, as that goodwill began to thin, I argued in a piece titled “Buhari: Lessons on Functional Leadership and Strategy”, published in The Punch, that the moment still demanded discipline, institution-building, and restraint rather than slogans and sentiment. Alas, history delights in irony. The man who promised to kill corruption presided over a system that grew even more indulgent of it. His government became associated with opacity and scandal, from billions reportedly siphoned in the humanitarian ministry to recurring debacles at the NNPC.
Security worsened. Boko Haram persisted, but now bandits, herdsmen, and kidnappers turned highways into corridors of fear and villages into graveyards. Mass abductions of schoolchildren became grim routine. The economy collapsed into two recessions in eight years. Inflation soared, unemployment metastasized, and millions of young people languished without hope. Buhari’s “anti-corruption” mantra became a hollow echo. Worse still, his government displayed authoritarian reflexes, silencing dissent, banning Twitter, and eroding judicial independence. By 2023, Nigerians believed the country had struck rock bottom. Yet rock bottom, it turns out, has subterranean chambers.
Enter Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who styled himself as the “most prepared candidate” in Nigerian history. For decades he projected the aura of a master strategist, the builder of Lagos, the kingmaker ready to wear the crown. Many believed that at last a technocratic politician would steer the ship of state. Yet within months of his inauguration, Tinubu surpassed the failures of his predecessors. His government is fast becoming a case study in how not to govern a fragile nation. With one rash declaration, “subsidy is gone,” he plunged millions into penury. Subsidy removal may have been inevitable but executing it without safeguards was economic cruelty. Overnight, transport fares tripled, food prices doubled, and the naira convulsed into freefall. His decision to float the currency triggered a monetary massacre, annihilating savings and driving inflation to historic levels. Nigerians today endure the sharpest erosion of living standards in decades.
The danger is compounded by Tinubu’s penchant for presenting cosmetic gestures as reform. These pseudo reforms, dressed up in the language of courage, are little more than theatrics. He governs as though his pronouncements are sacred decrees immune to scrutiny. How else does one explain the opaque Lagos–Calabar coastal highway project, his cavalier appointments dripping with cronyism, or the steady erosion of Nigeria’s moral and political values, so much so that “On Your Mandate We Shall Stand” now resounds at state events as though it were the national hymn? These are not the hallmarks of a reformer but of a ruler intoxicated by mandate and mistaking it for divine right.
The common thread linking Jonathan, Buhari, and Tinubu is the absence of authentic nation-building. Nigerian leaders are intoxicated by the narcotic of power but destitute of vision. They lust after fleeting applause while recoiling from the arduous discipline of reform. They preside over an education system that manufactures certified illiterates because a docile populace is easier to manipulate. They showcase flyovers, airports, and rail projects not purely for development, but because such ventures provide convenient cover for inflated contracts and misappropriation. While the public marvels at concrete and steel, the treasury is quietly drained and institutions wither.
The tragedy of the present is sharpened by memory of the past. Nigeria once had leaders who, for all their flaws, attempted genuine nation-building. Obafemi Awolowo invested massively in education, offering free and world-class schooling across the Western Region. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the great Zik of Africa, expanded civic consciousness and a cosmopolitan outlook in the East. Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, drove agricultural and institutional renaissance in the North. They were imperfect, but they demonstrated what is possible when leadership is animated by service rather than plunder.
The opposition today offers no respite. Obsessed with “sharing the national cake,” its figures hunger not for reform but for access. Every leading politician dreams of being president, and none hesitate to sabotage progress if it blocks their path to the banquet of power. In this sense, they are not an antidote but a mirror of those already enthroned.
Yet history shows the cycle can be broken. South Korea, poorer than Nigeria in the 1950s, rose to become a technological colossus through education, industrial policy, and institution-building. Singapore, under Lee Kuan Yew, demonstrated how discipline and meritocracy could transform a resource-poor state. Rwanda, scarred by genocide in the 1990s, rebuilt through accountability and investment in human capital. These examples confirm that nation-building is not rocket science. It is brick by brick, one small genuine act after another, sustained over decades.
Nigeria’s tragedy is not a lack of potential but a lack of builders. Our leaders wreck rather than build, plunder rather than reform, stagger from slogan to slogan while the republic burns. Until Nigeria produces leaders who see the nation not as a banquet to devour but as a legacy to bequeath, the cycle will continue. What is required is a radical reordering of priorities: institutions above personalities, education as foundation, accountability as creed, and leadership that esteems posterity’s judgment above immediate gain.
If Nigeria is to escape this doom loop, reform must finally move beyond rhetoric into structure. Nation-building begins with institutions intentionally designed to outlive the whims of individuals: an electoral system that makes theft of mandates prohibitively difficult, a civil service insulated from partisan loot-sharing, and courts whose independence is not negotiable currency. Education must be treated not as a budget line to be trimmed but as a protected national investment, shielded from executive caprice and funded with the seriousness of a security priority. The economy must be rebuilt around productivity rather than rent extraction, with clear rules that choke off the discretion through which corruption breathes. None of this is glamorous, and none of it yields instant applause, but it is precisely the unsexy discipline of institution-building that distinguishes nations that escape dysfunction from those condemned to rehearse it endlessly.
This transformation will not occur within a single electoral cycle, nor will it be delivered by slogans masquerading as vision. It will demand sustained fidelity to institution-building, a willingness to sacrifice short-term applause for long-term stability, and leaders who fear the judgment of history more than the vanity of power. Nigeria will rise only when authority bends to rules, when education is defended as the nation’s spine, and when accountability is enforced without discretion or exception. Until that discipline takes root, every election will continue to arrive bearing the promise of morning, only for citizens to awaken once more to a darker night. History will not be kind to those who had the chance to build and chose instead to wreck.
Abayomi Ojo is a Senior Change Management Consultant.
Contact: samyom5@yahoo.com
