by Mohammed Bello Doka
15 June, 2026.
The numbers are not opinions. They are the cold arithmetic of a country being systematically destroyed. In March 2026, the Global Terrorism Index reported that Nigeria recorded 750 terrorism-related deaths in 2025, a 46 percent surge from the previous year. The country now ranks fourth globally among nations most affected by terrorism, up from sixth place. While terrorism deaths fell by 28 percent globally in 2025, Nigeria was the only country in the Sahel region where both deaths and incidents increased simultaneously. Civilians accounted for 67 percent of attacks. The government allocates billions to security. The blood keeps flowing.
The economic data paints an even darker picture. The World Bank confirmed that poverty levels have climbed from 56 percent in 2023 to 61 percent in 2024, reaching 63 percent in 2025. That is approximately 140 million Nigerians living below the poverty line. The former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, responding to the report, stated that this is not reform but regression on a monumental scale. He noted that with over 60 percent of Nigerians now living below the poverty line, up from about 40 percent just a few years ago, the crisis is neither accidental nor unavoidable but the direct outcome of poorly conceived and harshly implemented policies, from the abrupt removal of fuel subsidies to the chaotic devaluation of the naira.
The education sector has collapsed into a national emergency. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization estimates that over 20 million Nigerian children are out of school, the highest number of any country on earth. The Federal Government puts the figure at 15 million, but even that conservative estimate is a catastrophe. In the northern states, the literacy rate among women falls below 30 percent. According to the World Bank, Nigeria's adult literacy rate stands at approximately 62 percent, meaning that nearly four out of every ten adults cannot read or write a simple sentence.
But the most damning evidence of negligence lies not in what the government fails to allocate but in what it approves and then deliberately withholds. The distinction between budget approval and cash release is the difference between a government that pretends to work and a government that actively sabotages its own people.
In 2025, the National Assembly passed a total budget of 54.99 trillion naira, with a capital component of 16.76 trillion naira . But approval on paper does not translate to money in bank accounts. The Federal Ministry of Finance operates a cash-planning system that releases funds only when revenue is available in the treasury. What this means in practice is brutal and simple: billions of naira approved by the people's representatives for roads, hospitals, schools, and water projects are never released. The money exists in the law. It does not exist in reality.
The scale of this withholding is staggering. A Vanguard investigation published in April 2026 revealed that eight major ministries received only 9.13 billion naira out of their combined capital budget of 1.218 trillion naira, a funding gap of 98.7 percent . The Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, disclosed before the House of Representatives Committee on Healthcare Services that his ministry received only 36 million naira out of the 218 billion naira approved for capital expenditure in the 2025 budget . Zero point zero two percent. Not two percent. Zero point zero two percent.
The story is the same across every sector that touches the lives of ordinary Nigerians. The Ministry of Women Affairs received 394.8 million naira, just 0.44 percent of its approved capital budget of 89.8 billion naira. The Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy received 202 million naira, about 1.7 percent of its 353 billion naira capital budget. The Ministry of Transportation received 2.5 billion naira, about 1.0 percent of its approved 256.7 billion naira. The Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, tasked with reducing a housing deficit estimated at over 22 million units, received only 2.0 billion naira out of its 100 billion naira capital budget . The Ministry of Water Resources received 1.0 billion naira out of 80 billion naira. The Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security received 3.0 billion naira out of 120 billion naira .
The Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, appearing before the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations in February 2026, attributed the poor release of capital funds to the government's decision to halt reliance on ways and means financing from the Central Bank of Nigeria . He said the policy was necessary to restore macroeconomic stability. That may be true. But explaining why the money is not being released does not build a single kilometer of road. It does not equip a single hospital. It does not put a single child in a classroom.
The government's own accounting reveals the depth of the crisis. According to the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Atiku Bagudu, discussions with the National Assembly had resulted in an agreement to move 70 percent of the 2025 capital allocation into the 2026 fiscal framework . Seventy percent of approved capital projects will simply be rolled over. Not completed. Not cancelled. Rolled over. That means the money approved for 2025 will sit in the budget as a theoretical promise while the roads remain unfilled, the hospitals remain unequipped, and the water remains undrinkable.
The National Assembly has repeatedly extended the implementation period for the capital component of the 2025 budget. The deadline was first moved from December 2025 to March 2026, then to June 2026, and finally, just yesterday on June 14, 2026, the House of Representatives approved a third extension to September 30, 2026 . The capital budget of 2025 will now run alongside the capital budget of 2026. This is not governance. This is a permanent state of budget limbo where approvals mean nothing and releases mean everything. The Acting Head of Research at BudgIT, Adejoke Akinbode, explained that this overlapping execution creates planning uncertainty, procurement congestion, contractor payment delays, and weak monitoring outcomes . The budget has become a largely theoretical document rather than an executable development plan.
The Federal Ministry of Finance has disputed the narrative of total collapse, stating in March 2026 that total capital expenditure in 2024 reached 11.59 trillion naira, about 84 percent of the capital budget, while provisional figures for 2025 show spending of roughly 11.7 trillion naira, or 76 percent performance . The ministry argues that focusing solely on MDA cash releases provides an incomplete picture because project-tied funds from multilateral partners often bypass federal accounts. This defense, however, does not explain why the Minister of Health received 36 million naira out of 218 billion naira. Development partners did not build the hospitals. The Nigerian government did not fund them.
Legislative consultant Akinloye Oyeniyi, in an interview with Arise News in February 2026, made a devastating allegation: the Ministry of Finance is deliberately withholding capital funds while prioritising recurrent spending to avoid civil unrest . He argued that paying salaries and administrative costs while abandoning capital projects undermines national progress and accused the ministry of sabotaging the government's own development agenda. When the Ministry of Finance can pay civil servants but cannot release money for hospital equipment, the message is clear. Recurring expenses keep the government running. Capital expenses keep the people alive. The government has chosen itself.
It is against this backdrop of approved but withheld funds, of budgets that exist only on paper, of poverty rising while allocations sit unspent, that the APC has launched its final assault on democracy itself. On June 15, 2026, a Federal High Court in Abuja ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission to deregister the African Democratic Congress, the main opposition party, along with four others. The case was instituted by Hon. Nnanna Igbokwe, a known member of the All Progressives Congress who openly defected from the PDP to the APC on the floor of the House of Representatives in December 2017. A member of the ruling party filed the lawsuit that killed the opposition. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a court docket.
The directive to destroy the ADC did not come from the shadows. It came from the highest office in the land. Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to the President, stood at a public event in April 2026 and told an ADC lawmaker, and these words are preserved on video, Honourable Abejide, my charge to you is to stay in that same ADC. Fight them. Scatter them. We like what you are doing. Good luck in court. The President's Chief of Staff promised the support of the presidency for the destruction of an opposition party. He wished the destroyer good luck in court. Weeks later, the court delivered deregistration. When the executive openly strategizes the elimination of opposition and the judiciary completes the mission, what remains is not a democracy but a regime.
The same anti-democratic machinery has been deployed against the Peoples Democratic Party. The Supreme Court ruled on April 30, 2026, invalidating the party's national convention and stripping the PDP of a valid National Working Committee. The party that ruled Nigeria for sixteen years now has no recognized leadership. Two factions fight for control. One faction is backed by Nyesom Wike, who serves as a minister in the APC cabinet while retaining his membership in the PDP. There is no formal alliance. There is no coalition agreement. There is simply a man who sits in the Federal Executive Council of a ruling party while belonging to the opposition.
The pattern is unmistakable. The APC is using the courts and state institutions to eliminate opposition parties while the Ministry of Finance withholds the funds approved to keep Nigerians alive. The 2027 election is being set up not as a contest but as a coronation. The government is betting that hunger will make people passive. It is betting that fear will keep people at home. It is betting that the 2027 election can be turned into a one-party affair without the country erupting.
The examples of what happens next are not distant history. In Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko eliminated all opposition and ruled for 27 years. The economy collapsed. When he fled in 1997, the state collapsed with him, triggering the Congo Wars that killed over five million people. In Somalia, Siad Barre's one-party rule lasted fifteen years before the state simply vanished in 1991. Somalia has been a failed state for thirty-five years. No government. No courts. No schools. Just warlords and hunger. In Syria, the Baath Party ruled for forty years before the 2011 protests. The regime responded with bullets and barrel bombs. Over 600,000 people have been killed. Fourteen million people have been displaced. Half the pre-war population is either internally displaced or living as refugees.
Nigeria is larger than all of these countries. With over 230 million people, Nigeria is the most populous black nation on earth. A breakdown of law and order in Nigeria would not be a localized crisis. It would be a continental catastrophe. If Nigeria collapses into the kind of state failure seen in Zaire, Somalia, or Syria, the death toll would be measured in the millions. Refugees would flood across the borders of Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Benin. The Lake Chad Basin, already destabilized by Boko Haram, would become a zone of total chaos. The entire West African subregion would be destabilized for generations.
The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote that he who does not prevent a crime when he can, in effect, commands it. Every Nigerian who watches the deregistration of opposition parties, the weaponization of the courts, the approval of budgets without release, the starvation of the people, the abduction of schoolchildren, and the suppression of protests, and says nothing, is not a neutral observer. Silence is not innocence. Silence is complicity. The government is betting that Nigerians will stay silent. That bet must be proven wrong. Nigerians must speak. Nigerians must organize. Nigerians must stop Tinubu now. Because if they do not, they will watch him burn the country to ashes, and the fire will consume them too and Tinubu? He will rule over the ashes.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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