Udeaba Gerald @Udeaba - Twitter Profile

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16 days ago

Nigeria Is Healing. We Are the Wound It Forgot. At dawn in this country, two people are counting. In the cool rooms of Abuja, a man counts upward. He counts the points the market gained yesterday. He counts the billions of dollars now resting in the nation's savings, almost fifty of them, a number that glows like a clean wound stitched shut. He counts the way prices, which once climbed like fire up a curtain, have slowed to a walk. He counts growth, almost four in every hundred. Then he says the word he has waited three years to say. Stable. The country, he says, is stable. He is not lying. This is the part that breaks you. The numbers are true. In a yard in Lagos, a woman is also counting. She counts the cups of rice left in the bag, and there are fewer than yesterday, because the bag that cost thirty thousand naira when her first child was born now costs ninety. She counts the naira in her wrapper against the fuel that has climbed from two hundred to over thirteen hundred for a single litre, and the arithmetic refuses to forgive her. She counts her wage, the new minimum wage, seventy thousand naira a month, a number bigger than any wage she has ever earned. Then someone teaches her the cruel trick of turning it into dollars, and she learns that her seventy thousand today buys less bread than thirty thousand bought in 2019. The number went up. The life went down. She counts, and counting takes something from her each time. This is the riddle of Nigeria in 2026. The country is rising. The people are sinking. And both are happening in the same body, at the same hour, under the same flag. Understand the medicine, and you understand the pain. Three years ago the government broke something that needed breaking. It tore away the fuel subsidy that had swallowed the treasury wholly. It freed the naira to find its true and brutal weight. This was a doctor setting a shattered bone. The setting was right. The bone needed it. But a doctor who has set a bone has not healed it. He has only begun the long scream. And while the bone of the nation knits itself back, slowly, in a language only investors and economists can read, the flesh around it howls in a language every mother knows by heart. They fixed the scoreboard. They have not yet fixed the game. They healed the chart and forgot the household. But hunger, terrible as it is, is not the deepest wound. The deepest wound is fear. Walk to any gate in this country, that iron line between a family and the night, and you will find it locked earlier than it used to be. This year the gunmen took schoolchildren from their classrooms in the north, lifting them out of arithmetic and into ransom. They took a retired general, a man who once commanded armies, snatched off a road like a stray goat. They ambushed a governor's right hand and left four bodies behind. They seized a surgeon, a man whose two hands knew how to close a wound, and his fellow doctors had to threaten to abandon a whole hospital just to beg the country to find him. And above all of this hangs a number too vast to feel. Thirty-five million Nigerians, the watchers of world hunger now warn, will not have enough to eat in the dry months ahead. Thirty-five million. The largest harvest of hunger this nation has ever counted, in a land where the soil is willing and the farmer is too afraid to walk to his farm. So picture it plainly. The books are getting better. The kidnappers are getting better. The economy is recovering, and the people are disappearing, and the same morning newspaper that prints the cheerful chart prints the names of the missing one column over. Then, last year, a stranger came to the gate. He was the president of America, and he looked at our burning villages and our stolen children and our churches turned to ash, and he did not speak the way a polite friend speaks. He named us a country of particular concern.

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Udeaba Gerald

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