_By Ibrahim Nasiru_
We love to mock the masses for trading their future for a pack of spaghetti and a ₦5,000 note.
Our commentators and intellectual class fill newspaper columns calling citizens ignorant and short-sighted. But those people are simply trying to survive the hunger that failed public policies created.
The real tragedy of our democracy isn’t at polling booths in the slums. It’s in air-conditioned boardrooms, scripted by the educated elite.
The doctor, the lawyer, the professor, the senior technocrat who trades integrity for board appointments, oil blocks, tax waivers, and padded government contracts is no different from the man on the street. Worse, actually.
The poor man sells his vote for daily survival. The elite sells his competence for greed. One is “stomach infrastructure” in rags. The other is stomach infrastructure in a designer suit.
These comfortable, educated enablers are the true architects of our stagnation. They have the knowledge to fix broken systems, yet they use their intellect to draft legal loopholes, spin deceptive PR, and defend incompetent leaders.
Not because they believe in the administration. Because they’re protecting access to the national cake. They calculate how a bad policy can benefit their private firms, then keep quiet in the face of corruption to keep their seat at the table of favors.
They look down on the masses for selling votes, while they sell out the country’s future for a new official vehicle and a plot of government land.
This betrayal peaks during elections, when elite professionals become the executioners of democracy. Politicians don’t rig alone. They rely on educated accomplices.
Respected professors sit as returning officers, manipulating figures and validating flawed results for cash and future appointments.
Top lawyers step into courtrooms, using legal gymnastics to defend stolen mandates and justify electoral subversion.Tech professionals in backrooms tweak software data or look away while the people’s will is killed.
The man on the street takes a food pack to survive the day. The elite builds, polishes, and legally locks the chains of bad governance around the necks of all Nigerians.
We must end the hypocrisy of blaming those at the bottom while ignoring the rot at the top.
The masses cannot give integrity they cannot afford. The elite has no excuse.
If doctors can be bought with hospital board seats, professors compromised with INEC appointments, and intellectuals silenced by corporate crumbs, then we have no moral right to lecture a hungry citizen on patriotism.
True betrayal doesn’t wear rags. It wears a designer suit, carries a PhD, and speaks polished English.
We’re at an urgent crossroad. The professional class must withdraw its intellectual labor from the machinery of state oppression.
To lawyers: Refuse to use your brilliance to legitimize electoral fraud.To academics: Reclaim the sanctity of the classroom. Refuse to be transactional executioners of rigged polls.
To corporate leaders and technocrats: Stop laundering incompetence and drafting loopholes that protect corruption for personal access to the national cake.
Organize your institutions – the NBA, NMA, ASUU, financial bodies – to be uncompromising shields for citizens, not tools for oppressors.
Use your intellect to build predictable justice, secure agricultural corridors, and demand economic productivity. Not to manage poverty.
If you don’t change course and choose institutional integrity over personal greed, you’ll learn this the hard way: an empire built on betraying its people is a house of cards.
When the illusion of handouts fades, the anger of the streets will overflow. On that day, slick PR and gated estates won’t shield boardrooms from public fury. Designer suits and flowing babban riga won’t save anyone from the storm.
—Chief Ibrahim Nasiru
_Public Affairs Analyst, Abuja_
