by Mohammed Bello Doka
19 March, 2026
When your strategy is a tragedy, the government cannot help but run as a tragicomedy. Even your most ardent supporters cannot smile; they can only grin through clenched teeth, pretending to praise achievements that, deep inside, wound them like open sores.
For three years, the chorus has been relentless. “Mr. Strategist!” they chant on X, TikTok and WhatsApp groups. “Asiwaju is a master planner. He removed the subsidy, floated the naira, and now Nigeria is reforming!” Supporters hail Tinubu as the bold visionary who dared what others feared. They post edited clips of him at international forums, declaring “the best is yet to come.” They flood timelines with #RenewedHope, insisting every hardship is a necessary sacrifice for a greater tomorrow.
Yet the numbers, cold and merciless, expose the hypocrisy.
According to the World Bank’s Nigeria Poverty and Equity Brief (October 2025), 139 million Nigerians — nearly 62 percent of the population — now live below the poverty line, up from 81 million in 2019. PwC projects the figure will hit 141 million, or 62 percent, by the end of 2026. The absolute number of poor Nigerians has almost doubled under Mr. Strategist’s watch. Rural poverty stands at 75.5 percent. Every household has become poorer, the Bank states explicitly.
Hunger has slid backwards. The 2025 Global Hunger Index gives Nigeria a “serious” score of 32.8, ranking it 115th out of 123 countries — worse than levels recorded two decades ago. Food inflation still ravages the plates of the very people told to “tighten their belts for tomorrow.”
Public debt has exploded. The Debt Management Office reports Nigeria’s total public debt stock reached ₦153.29 trillion as of September 30, 2025, having added another ₦900 billion in a single quarter. Debt service now consumes chunks of the budget that could have fed the starving or powered homes.
Power supply has collapsed again. In March 2026, up to 16 of Nigeria’s 33 power plants went offline due to gas shortages and N6.8 trillion in sector debts. Generation plunged to 3,700–4,000 MW, leaving 68 percent of installed capacity idle. In February 2026, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission recorded an average of only 4,102 MWh with a pathetic Plant Availability Factor of 32 percent. Factories shut. Hospitals rely on generators. Families sit in darkness while supporters on social media type “light up Nigeria” with one hand and defend the reforms with the other.
Insecurity has surged into nightmare territory. Nextier Advisory’s Nigeria Violent Conflicts Database for 2025 records 4,654 people killed and 3,141 kidnapped in 1,274 incidents. ACLED puts conflict-related fatalities at 11,968 in 2025 alone — more than Syria’s toll that year. Ransoms run into trillions of naira, dwarfing the defence budget. Children are snatched from schools while officials call it “isolated incidents.”
Ten-point-two million primary-age children remain out of school, according to UNICEF’s latest data, with Kano, Katsina and Jigawa alone accounting for 16 percent of that tragedy. Another 28 million children and adolescents lack access to formal schooling or digital learning. The government promises to return 15 million by 2027; meanwhile, the numbers keep rising.
And here is the cruelest irony: many of the loudest defenders of Mr. Strategist come from the very poor backgrounds that these policies have crushed hardest. They wave party flags in threadbare shirts, chanting “Jagaban!” while queuing for the same palliatives their leaders dismiss as “not enough.” Some receive N10,000 “data allowances” or one tranche of the ₦25,000 household stipend — paltry sums whose receipt is proudly screenshot and posted online as proof of loyalty. Their bank details and phone numbers are splashed across social media like trophies of surrender. They sell tomorrow’s dignity for today’s airtime, convinced that tribal, religious or ethnic solidarity will one day remember them.
As Niccolò Machiavelli warned in *The Prince*, “Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate necessity that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.” The supporters have become both victims and willing instruments, politicising their own starvation and the deaths of their neighbours for the sake of the party line.
When strategy becomes tragedy, governance descends into tragicomedy. The curtain rises on empty stomachs, dark homes, kidnapped daughters and schools without children, while the chorus in the gallery continues to grin and applaud.
The tragedy of Mr. Strategist is not merely that the reforms failed. It is that so many Nigerians, wounded by the very policies they celebrate, still force smiles through the pain — because admitting the truth would mean admitting they were deceived.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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Opinion