This is not governance. This is a political magic trick where the magician makes responsibility disappear while demanding applause for a disappearing act that has left 140 million Nigerians in poverty and millions abducted.
Let us begin with the constitutional fact that no amount of blame-shifting can erase. Security is on the Exclusive Legislative List. The federal government, led by President Bola Tinubu as commander-in-chief, bears sole constitutional responsibility for the armed forces, the police, and the internal security of the federation. Not state governors. Not local government chairmen. Not village vigilantes. Tinubu.
Yet under his watch, the numbers have become a national scandal. According to data tracked by The Peoples Gazette, 597 schoolchildren have been abducted since Tinubu took office on May 29, 2023. Nearly six hundred children torn from their classrooms. That is 199 children kidnapped every single year of this administration. In May 2026 alone, just days before this writing, armed bandits struck again, and Defence Minister Christopher Musa went on Arise Television to rate the government's security performance at 70 percent. When asked about the abductions, Musa did not cite equipment failures or troop shortages. He blamed hunger for quick wealth and, remarkably, the failure of family values. He added, You cannot rule out politics. Act of sabotage to make the government look weak and ungovernable.
The minister blamed the hungry. He blamed the family. He blamed saboteurs. He blamed politics. He did not blame Tinubu.
The scale of insecurity under this administration defies comprehension. A security expert, Professor Oyesoji Aremu, delivering a public lecture at Adekunle Ajasin University in May 2026, cited data attributed to the National Bureau of Statistics revealing that Nigeria recorded approximately 2.2 million kidnapping incidents in a single year, with ransom payments estimated at N2.2 trillion. The professor described this as the emergence of a well-organized ransom economy driven by banditry, kidnapping syndicates, and insurgent networks across the country. 2.2 million kidnappings. 2.3 trillion naira paid to criminals. This is not insecurity. This is an industry.
The bloodshed is equally staggering. Beacon Security and Intelligence Limited, a risk management firm, tracked data showing that between January 10 and March 31, 2026, the first three months of this year alone, 2,350 people were killed in Nigeria. The firm recorded 1,117 abductions within that same period, with its managing director, Dr. Kabir Adamu, noting that these are only reported cases and that the actual figures are almost certainly higher. Across the North-West specifically, conflict monitoring datasets indicate several thousand fatalities and abductions in 2025, with a mid-year report estimating approximately 6,800 deaths and 5,402 kidnappings in the first half of 2025 alone.
The hunger Musa mentioned is real and it is catastrophic. The United Nations World Food Programme reported in early 2026 that 35 million Nigerians are facing acute food insecurity, driven by conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and the systemic collapse of local food systems. In Borno State alone, 15,000 people are expected to face catastrophic hunger and famine-like conditions. The WFP further warned that it would completely run out of resources for emergency food and nutrition assistance by March 2026. The government did not step in. There was no emergency declaration. No supplemental budget. No presidential address. Instead, the administration continued its spending spree on priorities that defy all logic.
The 2026 Appropriation Bill, labeled the Budget of Consolidation and totaling N68.32 trillion, allocated N115 billion to reintegrate former militants under the Presidential Amnesty Programme. That represents a 76.9 percent jump from the N65 billion earmarked in both 2024 and 2025. The programme has received at least N700 billion in the past decade alone, according to budget documents. Meanwhile, the health sector received a marginal increase from N2.40 trillion to N2.48 trillion. Education inched up from N3.50 trillion to N3.52 trillion. These are rounding errors compared to the N15.80 trillion the government set aside just to service existing debt. Debt service alone now consumes more than the entire budgets for education, health, and social protection combined.
Consider the budget execution data. According to GovSpend, a platform that tracks government disbursements and was cited extensively by Punch newspapers, actual spending on arms, ammunition, and military equipment peaked in 2024 at N40.84 billion before collapsing to just N819.46 million in 2025. The Ministry of Defence alone spent N33.22 billion on a single day July 26, 2024 for what it described as critical and urgent operational equipment. Where is the transparency on that purchase? Where is the result on the ground? The ammunition appears to have vanished into thin air, much like the political will to secure Nigerian children. In 2025, Nigeria allocated over N6.57 trillion to security and defence more than the combined budgets for education at N3.52 trillion and health at N2.48 trillion yet the violence continues unabated.
The British economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote that the avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward. The Tinubu administration has inverted this: the avoidance of responsibility is the only political pursuit that still carries any reward.
Consider the budget execution data. According to GovSpend, a platform that tracks government disbursements and was cited extensively by Punch newspapers, actual spending on arms, ammunition, and military equipment peaked in 2024 at N40.84 billion before collapsing to just N819.46 million in 2025. The Ministry of Defence alone spent N33.22 billion on a single day July 26, 2024 for what it described as critical and urgent operational equipment. Where is the transparency on that purchase? Where is the result on the ground? The ammunition appears to have vanished into thin air, much like the political will to secure Nigerian children.
The World Bank released its Nigeria Development Update in April 2026, and the findings were devastating. Poverty has hit 63 percent, meaning approximately 140 million Nigerians now live below the poverty line. That is up from 56 percent in 2023 when Tinubu assumed office. Even as headline inflation eased from 34.80 percent to 15.15 percent, the bank explicitly noted that household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset still-elevated inflation, and poverty has yet to begin declining. The cumulative impact of earlier price spikes has simply erased any welfare gains. Families are not recovering. They are drowning.
Yet the chorus of blame grows louder with each data point. The presidents spokespersons blame global oil prices. They blame the Central Bank. They blame state governors for failing to invest in agriculture, even though the federal government controls land policies, water resources, fertilizer distribution, and the Agricultural Development Fund. They blame the opposition for sabotaging the economy. They blame the poor for lacking family values.
But here is the question the APC does not want Nigerians to ask: Who put those governors in power?
As of May 2026, the All Progressives Congress controls 31 out of 36 state governorships. Thirty-one. That is 86 percent of all Nigerian states. The remaining five governors are either from opposition parties or, as political analysts have noted, secret allies of the APC-led federal government. The governors the APC spokesmen tell Nigerians to hold responsible for insecurity, for failing to complement federal efforts, for not doing enough on agriculture these are the very same governors who rode to power on the back of Tinubu's political machinery. They won their party's primaries because Tinubu and his structure anointed them. They stood on his mandate. They campaigned in his name. They are in office because he willed it.
When the Progressive Governors Forum, comprising all 31 APC governors, converged on Eko Hotel in Lagos on March 23, 2026, they did not gather to criticize the president. They gathered to hold a crucial meeting on the state of the nation after first visiting Tinubu at his Ikoyi residence to congratulate him on his state visit to the United Kingdom. The governors are not Tinubu's adversaries. They are his political offspring. They owe him. And when the time comes for the 2027 elections, they will deliver their states for him as repayment for the primaries he handed them.
President Tinubu himself, speaking at an interfaith Iftar in February 2026, pushed back against allegations that his administration was orchestrating the collapse of opposition parties. He declared, I have no gun. When they accused me of killing the opposition, but I didnt have a gun. I could have given myself a license when I have the authority. This was meant as a denial of political strong-arming, but it accidentally confessed to something else entirely: the president acknowledges he has the authority, he could act, but somehow, nothing is ever his fault. He has a license to fix security, fix hunger, fix poverty. He simply chooses not to use it.
The Greek philosopher Plutarch, in his Lives, observed that the blame of those who mismanage public affairs is not to be laid upon the people, but upon the men in whom the people have trusted. The Nigerian people trusted Tinubu with the presidency. They trusted him with the exclusive constitutional mandate over security. They trusted him with the budget. And in return, they have received 140 million poor, 35 million hungry, 2.2 million kidnapping incidents, and 597 abducted schoolchildren.
If the governors are failing, who appointed their party chairman? Who anointed their candidates? Who presides over the APC as its national leader? Who benefits from 31 governors who owe their political existence to his blessing? To blame the governors and exonerate Tinubu is to blame the branches while pretending the root does not exist. To tell Nigerians to hold governors accountable while refusing to hold the man who selected those governors accountable is not logic. It is insult.
The finance minister and budget office have offered their own confessions by implication. The 2026 budget projects that expected revenue will plummet from N36.35 trillion in 2025 to N34.33 trillion in 2026. The deficit will expand from N13.39 trillion to N23.85 trillion. Debt servicing will rise from N14.32 trillion to N15.80 trillion. In plain language, the government is borrowing more, earning less, and spending more on past debt than on future survival. Dr. Muda Yusuf, chief executive of the Center for the Promotion of Private Enterprise, put it directly: the debt service cost is too high, and it is crowding out expenditure for other aspects of the budget. The government knows this. They have admitted it by the numbers. And still, they blame everyone else.
What makes this strategy so effective, and so dangerous, is its simplicity. Blame the governors whom you handpicked. Blame the family. Blame the hungry. Blame the saboteurs. Blame the global economy. Blame the opposition. Praise only Tinubu. Praise him when the stock market rises, even if poverty rises faster. Praise him when fuel subsidy is removed, even if hunger is the consequence. Praise him when a single road is commissioned, even as 597 children remain unaccounted for.
The German political theorist Hannah Arendt, writing about the nature of authoritarian blame-shifting in The Origins of Totalitarianism, noted that the most effective way to maintain power is to create a labyrinth of explanations in which no single person can be held accountable. The Tinubu administration has built this labyrinth, and Nigerians are lost inside it. Every path of inquiry leads to a dead end. You ask about insecurity, and they show you a governor. You ask about hunger, and they show you a global price shock. You ask about poverty, and they show you a statistic about family values. You never reach the center of the labyrinth. You never reach Tinubu.
But the center exists. The president signs the budget. The president commands the armed forces. The president appoints the minister who blames family values. The president presides over a party that controls 31 state governments. The president handed the levers of power to those very governors in the primary elections of his party. The president praises himself while his ministers blame the hungry. The APC logic is now etched into the Nigerian experience: for every failure, everyone except Tinubu is guilty. For every success, real or imagined, no one except Tinubu is worthy of praise.
So who is deceiving who? The APC expects Nigerians to believe that the 31 governors Tinubu installed are the problem, but the man who installed them is the solution. They expect us to hold governors accountable while pretending the president has no influence over the party that controls 86 percent of the federation. They expect us to blame the states for insecurity while the Constitution places security exclusively in federal hands. They expect us to praise Tinubu for any marginal improvement while excusing him from any catastrophic failure.
The Roman philosopher Seneca, in his Moral Letters to Lucilius, wrote: It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. The Tinubu administration has wasted three years. It has wasted trillions of naira. But most tragically, it has wasted the lives and futures of millions of Nigerians whose only crime was to be born into a country whose leaders have mastered the art of escaping blame.
No governor abducted those 597 children. No family value failed those children. No global economy pulled them out of their classrooms. The blame belongs exactly where the APC refuses to place it. The praise belongs exactly where it is never due. And the Nigerian people, hungry, poor, and afraid, are left holding nothing but the logic of those who have abandoned them.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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