You’re a very stupid human. You lack empathy and every sense of situational awareness. Talk about it was Nigeria you would ask. You want to hear the “gist”. Now that you’ve heard the gist, will you bring the fetus back?.
We all came back from this visit and every single one of us fell ill. The air in that place is different. The environment is no place where any human being should have to live.
Yet, we saw children competing for space with houseflies and rodents. The water they drink is barely fit to look at. The rooms they sleep in are cramped and far from clean. Some sleep on bare floors, while others lie on mattresses that have become almost completely flat from years of use. No food. No electricity. Nothing.
Nigerians are suffering. And for a country with the resources Nigeria has, it is heartbreaking to see children subjected to such conditions while public resources are lost to corruption and waste. Every Nigerian child deserves food, clean water, a safe home, electricity, dignity and hope.
Keeping everyone (including Africans) completely ignorant about Africa and the central role it plays in the economic and natural world is a core feature of Europeanised education, not a bug.
You're not supposed to know that the DRC is the most resource-rich country in the world, with an estimated $24 trillion sitting under its soil. You're not supposed to know that the rise of "western civilisation" from the 15th century on was entirely made possible by European contact with Africa, and that the resources and labour extracted from coastal West Africa from 1492 onwards are the entire reason why both American continents exist in their current form.
You're not supposed to know that both WW1 and WW2 were essentially wars fought over the right to African colonial domination and expansion, and that even the uranium that was used in "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Shinkolobwe uranium mine in eastern DRC. You're not supposed to know that the reason the country of France exists in its current form is because tens of thousands of conscripted West African soldiers fought and won against the Nazis in Europe, and the French thereafter shipped them back to West Africa and massacred them at Camp Thiaroye in Senegal to avoid paying them their due wages.
You're not supposed to know that there was nothing cold about the so-called Cold War, because the vast majority of the hot theaters it was physically fought in were on the continent of Africa. (Zimbabwe, DRC, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Eritrea, Zambia etc). You're not supposed to know that the ongoing Ukraine war and the war in the Sahel are in fact the same conflict being fought by the same 2 sides, and that the reason France is desperately pushing funding and arms to Ukraine even as it falls into internal crisis is that Ukraine is acting as its proxy army in West Africa, as it tries to regain its lost colonial territories there, especially Niger where the cheap yellowcake uranium for its famously cheap nuclear energy used to come from before the 2023 revolution.
You're definitely not supposed to know that the entire global economy and system of trade as you know it is built on ruthless extraction from Africa and ensuring that Africa does not control anything it exports. You're not supposed to know that "Italian leather" doesn't come from Italy - it comes from Kano, Nigeria. You're not supposed to know that "Swiss chocolate" does not exist because cocoa does not grow anywhere in Switzerland or Europe - it comes from Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Nigeria. You're not supposed to know that Israel and the UAE control the global diamond and gold markets even though Israel has no diamond mine and the UAE has zero gold mines, because both resources are literally being stolen from the DRC and Sudan on an industrial basis.
You're basically not supposed to understand that the entire geopolitical world as you know it, rests entirely on extraction from Africa, poverty of Africans, and your own ignorance about where everything you use comes from.
Completely deliberate 500+ year-old feature, not accidental bug.
I’m extremely disappointed in us as Nigerian youths. Extremely.
I woke up this morning to get ready for work without electricity and without water. The last time we had power in my area was Saturday morning. This is Abule Ijesha, Lagos.
I work a 9–5. I earn a substantial amount every month, and yet I’m still dealing with something as basic as the lack of electricity and water.
And meanwhile, young people on Twitter are still allowing tribal sentiments and religious affiliations to divide us in 2026.
Do you people not understand how limited you are compared to young people in developed countries? Do you not understand that if anything happens right now, the politicians who are the most privileged among us have the means to leave this country while the rest of us remain here to deal with the consequences?
Do you genuinely think the elites care about the tribal and religious divisions they use to keep us fighting each other?
Your Commissioner of Environment and Water Resources in Lagos can be online flaunting a Patek Philippe while young people are struggling with basic infrastructure. And this is just a Commissioner.
They know exactly what they’re doing. They know that as long as we’re distracted by tribe, religion, sex, politics and whatever other silly division they can exploit, we won’t look up and ask the people actually responsible for our living conditions the difficult questions.
This is disgusting.
And honestly, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Not because we are powerless, but because we have failed woefully to recognize where our collective interests lie.
We keep fighting each other while the people benefiting from this dysfunction continue to live above the consequences of it.
We need to do better.
In 2016, Nina tried to facilitate the acquisition of Educare by GTBank for ₦600 million (about $2 million at the time). I declined the offer because I believed strongly in the potential of Educare.
She went on to introduce us to several schools, many of which became customers in our early days.
Since then, she has moved on to hold several senior positions at some of Nigeria’s top banks. Today, she is a Global Product Manager at Citi in Toronto, Canada, covering over 90 countries.
We have so many exceptional Nigerians like Nina leading major global institutions around the world.
Our problem has never been a lack of talent. We have the talent.
What we lack is the quality of leadership and the enabling environment needed to retain exceptional people, give them opportunities to thrive, and build world-class institutions here at home.
@enibieny@eric_gugua And you think Eric didn’t do any research before putting this out here? All of you supporting this administration, where is your conscience!!?
Not being able to trace the ancestry of your president is a national security risk.
Having a president who can be blackmailed with his criminal past is a national security risk.
I am becoming convinced that the version of democracy Nigeria copied from America simply does not work for Nigeria and after decades of dysfunction, pretending otherwise is becoming intellectually dishonest. It has created chaos and strong tribal division.
We created an enormously powerful presidency, weakened the regions, centralized almost everything in Abuja and built an unbelievably expensive political structure around sharing federal revenue.
Then we wonder why politics has become a fight to capture Abuja.
Go back to the era of regional government.
When M. I. Okpara was Premier of the Eastern Region, the East had its own parliament and substantial responsibility for its own development. Agriculture, industrialisation, education and economic development were not things everyone sat around waiting for Abuja to deliver. Okpara’s government pursued farm settlements, industrialisation and economic development as deliberate regional policy.
The North had Ahmadu Bello. The West had its own regional leadership. The regions had greater political and economic significance, and their leaders had to think seriously about how to develop their own economies.
That system was certainly not perfect the First Republic itself suffered severe political crises and ultimately collapsed in 1966. But there is something fundamental we should learn from its architecture.
Nigeria needs to stop running a political system designed as though 230 million people with enormous ethnic, cultural and economic differences are one homogeneous society waiting for instructions from Abuja.
The American presidential model may work for America. That does not mean Nigeria must worship it forever.
I would rather see us seriously debate a return to a parliamentary and genuinely federal system: stronger regions, greater fiscal responsibility, less concentration of power in one presidency and leaders whose political survival depends more immediately on maintaining the confidence of Parliament.
Our current structure has had decades to prove itself.
At some point, repeating the same political experiment and expecting a fundamentally different Nigeria stops being patience. It becomes a refusal to learn.
Singapore is particularly instructive not because it rejected democracy, but because it developed a parliamentary system with unusually strong state capacity, long-term planning and institutional continuity. Its political system has also been dominated by the PAP for decades, with critics pointing to significant constraints on political competition and some civil liberties.
Nations do not become prosperous because they copy a political system. They become prosperous when they build institutions capable of making difficult decisions, executing long-term plans and holding leaders accountable for results.
These are the 37 boys killed in Niger state.
Ibrahim Sani
Fahad Sa’adu
Abdulsalam IsmailAdvertisement
Usman Aliyu
Abubakar AlhajiAdvertisement
Sani Nasir
Sanusi KhalidAdvertisement
Ahmad Aliyu
Safiyanu AbdullahiAdvertisement
Suleiman Dantala
Idris Haruna
Sani Yakubu
Safiyanu Abubakar
Abdullahi Abubakar
Abubakar Musa
Abdul Mudassir
Suleiman Lawal
Usman Abdullahi
Samuel Sambo
Ibrahim Musa
Yusuf Nasiru
Umar Lawal
Isyaku Amisu
Bissallah Adamu
Abdulbari Suleiman
Shafisu Lado
Usman Ahmad
Usman Ibrahim
Sani Isyaku
Musa Ibrahim
Idris Bashir
Kabiru Suleiman
Emmanuel Emeka
Mu’awiya AbdulKarim
Abdul Gafar Abubakar
Usman Haruna
Yaro Salihu Soba
Don't forget their names.
https://t.co/qski6gMtIx