Nigeria: Where the thinker starves, thief posts, poverty trends as progress, by Mahfuz Mundadu
In memory of Professor Abubakar Roko and the intelligence that preceded his death.
He died because he thought. Not because his body failed, but because his country failed his mind. Professor Abubakar Roko, a man who held the minds of thousands in his lectures, needed 13 million naira to live. But the system did not blink. It stared coldly as another lamp was extinguished. There was no state-of-emergency, no intellectual uprising, no ministerial condolence, not even a shrug. For in this republic of forgetfulness, the death of a scholar is not a tragedy. It is a routine. A system perfected over decades where burial is cheaper than treatment, and silence more profitable than survival.
In this theatre of the absurd, a dead intellectual is more useful than a living one. A corpse demands nothing. It collects no arrears, writes no open letters, leads no strikes, and raises no inconvenient questions. It is the perfect civil servant. The perfect scholar. A still mind in a still coffin. Nigeria does not bury its thinkers out of grief. It buries them to maintain order.
But Professor Roko’s death is not an anomaly. It is policy by other means.
Today, universities resemble mortuaries of intellectualism. Empty labs. Unpaid lecturers. Students who learn JavaScript from YouTube while their professors queue at ATMs for a salary that never came. Yet outside these ruins, the government beams with pride. Economic advisors post charts. Special assistants release photo ops. They speak of GDP, foreign direct investment, “fiscal tightening” and “free market.” The language is sterile, but the pain is not.
This is not reform. It is necropolitics. It is economic Darwinism on steroid where the survival of the poorest is explained away by a data analyst with Spreadsheet and PowerPoint.
The ruling class has found a brilliant solution to dissent: starve it. They need not ban protests; they priced them out. They did not jail professors; they just stopped paying them. They did not censor newspapers; they made them unaffordable. They engineered an economy that rewards silence, glorifies struggle, and monetises obedience. If you complain, you are told to “ to be patient.” If you suffer, you are told to “stay resilient.” If you perish, you become a number.
In their world, everything trends, except the truth.
You open your phone and see a state governor praised for commissioning a borehole in 2025! You look outside and your tap is dry. You scroll past a minister’s photo in a Dubai conference on innovation.
Meanwhile, your university can’t afford printer ink. The contradiction is not seen as a crisis. It is rebranded as “strategic communication.”
We now live in a nation where poverty is gas lighted, hunger is politicized, and policy failure is aestheticized into “achievements.”
This generation of politicians builds nothing but illusions. Even its economic hardship comes with PR strategy. Fuel subsidies are removed with no social safety nets. Currency is floated while the market drowns. Inflation soars, but the tweet threads are smooth.
Food becomes luxury. Rent becomes fiction. Transport becomes footwagon. Yet the presidency’s social media handlers spin it as “bold fiscal policy.” Bold indeed, for a people expected to survive on bravery alone.
How do you tell a man with no breakfast that inflation is transitory?
How do you tell a woman whose salary is now tissue paper that market forces are to blame?
How do you explain to a jobless graduate that he is part of a “long-term restructuring”?
The only thing being restructured is suffering; expanded, digitized, and mass-produced.
And yet, the rulers celebrate. They hold economic summits while their citizens hold empty stomachs. They attend youth conferences while their youth flee. They post reports with bullet points while people queue for rice with bullets in the air. In their world, the more the people suffer, the louder they cheer. Pain becomes policy. Dispossession becomes a doctrine.
This is not incompetence. It is an ideology.
It is the belief that to govern is not to serve, but to starve. That reality is whatever gets the most retweets. That accountability is a press release. That the masses are not citizens, but algorithms. The economy becomes a canvas for curated suffering. The public becomes a lab rat in an IMF experiment. And dignity becomes a commodity traded for applause.
But what happens when the applause fades? When the hashtags go quiet? When no one is watching?
That is when reality speaks. And reality says: the nation is starving while its rulers are staring.
The question is no longer whether Nigeria’s ruling class cares. It doesn’t. The question is how long the rest of us will pretend that this is normal. That a nation can bury its thinkers, mock its poor, bankrupt its youth, and still parade itself as a beacon of hope.
It is not normal.
It is not normal that a nuclear physicist is a Bolt driver.
It is not normal that professors borrow to buy paracetamol, or worst still resort to ararraɓi.
It is not normal that our brightest minds flee while betting apps flourish.
It is not normal that food prices change weekly while ministers change cars monthly.
And it is not normal that in the middle of all this, the state throws a party for itself, while the citizens are too hungry to buy ragadādā.
Let’s be clear: this politicians didn’t inherit poverty; it invested in it. Poverty is now a policy. Hunger is budgeted. Neglect is appropriated. And all of it is carefully wrapped in buzzwords, data dashboards, and sponsored hashtags.
This is not nation-building. This is nation branding while it is collapsing.
The difference? One builds people. The other builds perceptions.
And when perception becomes governance, reality dies. And when reality dies, the people do too, quietly, in hospitals that lack oxygen, in universities that lack chalk, in homes that lack hope.
But the government posts a drone shot of an AI doctored dual carriageway, suggesting that all is well.
Until the next Roko.
Because the real tragedy isn’t just that Professor Roko died.
It’s that his death was cheaper than his life.
That his silence served the state better than his speech.
That his coffin was funded faster than his care.
And so we ask again: Who is next? The thinker or the Twitter thread?
We have a choice. Either we keep dancing to the rhythm of press conferences, or we rip off the mask and stare down the truth. Either we become the architects of our own dignity or the decorators of our own graves.
Because a country that celebrates its own decline on social media is not a nation. It is a yahoo-yahoo union.
And eventually, even the best filters can’t hide the rot.
But perhaps the most dangerous illusion of all is the belief that this can continue indefinitely. That a nation can crush its thinkers, punish its poor, price its youth out of hope, and tweet its way to peace.
History has never been that forgiving.
Where reform becomes a performance, revolution becomes a prophecy. When governments are no longer responsive, and the people are no longer patient, the street becomes the classroom, and chaos becomes the syllabus while anarchy becomes the curriculum.
This is not alarmism. This is arithmetic.
You cannot tax hunger.
You cannot fine despair.
You cannot sermonize poverty into submission.
When dignity is discounted and the educated are discarded, what remains is a volatile mix of anger, nostalgia, and flame. And when that mix explodes, it does not knock politely on the gates of the powerful and the empowered fools. It storms them.
Sudan once had universities. Somalia once had engineers. Libya once had thinkers. Until they had nothing but ruins and regrets.
We are not special. We are not exempt.
We too are made of fuel and frustration.
We too are dancing on the edge of a matchbox.
And no amount of social media spin can out trend a spark when the air is scotch and dry.
This is not a threat. It is a plea.
Let us act while the clock still ticks. Let us dignify reform before revolution becomes the only voice left. Let those in power remember that the luxury of indifference never lasts long. That no regime, no matter how loud its propaganda, survives the wrath of a people whose hunger has outgrown their fear.
A stitch in time saves not just nine, but nations.
Nigeria, if not careful, may soon discover that the cost of ignoring its intellect is not just collapse but contagion.
To be warned is to be forearmed.
And the warning is now.
