Nigeria’s Overpaid Lawmakers: Feasting While the Lights Go Out

 

Nigeria is not being misgoverned; it is being slowly looted, as overpaid elites feast while darkness, hunger, and fear spread—until one spark triggers a collapse no one will be ready for.

In Nigeria today, while ordinary citizens struggle to survive blackouts, hunger, and daily fear, a tiny political elite is quietly bleeding the nation dry, turning public offices into private vaults and pushing the country toward a sudden, unstoppable collapse no one will see coming until it explodes. This is not a slogan. It is a pattern, repeated so often that it has begun to feel normal. And normal, in a failing state, is the most dangerous lie of all.

This is not mismanagement anymore. Mismanagement sounds clumsy, like a dropped plate. What is happening now is deliberate extraction. The kind that wears a suit, smiles for cameras, and signs budgets with steady hands. Nigeria’s lawmakers sit at the center of this storm. On paper, their salaries look harmless. A senator’s basic annual salary has long been officially placed at roughly 13.5 million naira. That figure is waved around whenever critics raise their voices. But everyone knows the paper salary is a decoy. The real money lives elsewhere.

Allowances are where the vault opens. Housing, furniture, vehicle loans, constituency projects, travel, hardship claims, and running costs stack on top of one another like bricks in a private fortress. Over the years, civil society groups, budget analysts, and investigative journalists have repeatedly estimated that when all allowances are added, the annual cost of a single senator to the Nigerian state runs well above 200 million naira. Multiply that by 109  senators, then add 360 members of the House of Representatives, each with their own river of perks, and the picture stops being abstract. It becomes grotesque. When the bucket is gold, the well dries faster.

All this happens in a country where the minimum wage struggles to keep pace with inflation and where a large share of the population survives on the edge. Recent poverty assessments have placed more than 60 percent of Nigerians below the poverty line. That is not a typo. More than half the country wakes up every day calculating how to eat, how to move, how to stay alive. Food inflation has surged. Rice, bread, cooking oil, and fuel prices jump so often that salaries feel like rumors. Yet the political class remains insulated, sealed off by convoys, security details, and allowances that rise even when the economy falls.

Electricity tells the story better than speeches ever could. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and one of its largest economies, still struggles to generate more than 4000 to 5000 megawatts of power for over 200 million people. Blackouts are not emergencies; they are routines. Businesses burn diesel to survive. Hospitals ration power. Students read by phone light. The cost of private generators drains households and companies alike, acting as an invisible tax on survival. Meanwhile, legislative budgets remain bloated, defended as the price of democracy. When the lights go out, excuses glow brighter.

Security is no better. Kidnapping for ransom has spread from remote highways into villages and city streets. Armed groups roam rural areas, forcing farmers off their land. Food insecurity deepens not only because of climate pressure or global shocks but because people are afraid to plant and transport what they grow. Official figures and independent tallies over the past few years have shown thousands of kidnapping cases annually, with ransoms running into billions of naira. Communities pay because the state cannot protect them. Yet lawmakers’ security votes and personal protection never seem to shrink. Fear is privatized. Safety is reserved.

History does not whisper here; it shouts. Nigeria has seen this movie before. In the years leading up to past political ruptures and military takeovers, the same signals flashed red. A ruling elite grew richer. Institutions weakened. Public trust collapsed. Ordinary people adapted by lowering expectations, then by lowering hope. When the break came, it felt sudden only because denial had been loud. A crack ignored becomes a collapse remembered.

The psychology of this moment is as dangerous as the economics. Overpaid lawmakers do not just drain resources; they drain empathy. When leaders no longer experience darkness, hunger, or fear, they begin to treat suffering as background noise. Policy becomes theater. Accountability becomes a joke told in private. Citizens, watching from the outside, begin to see the state as something that happens to them, not something that belongs to them. That is when loyalty dies quietly.

Fuel policy offers a sharp example. The removal of fuel subsidies in 2023 sent petrol prices skyrocketing, doubling or worse in many areas almost overnight. Transport costs exploded. Food prices followed. Ordinary Nigerians were told to endure the pain for long-term reform. Some reforms are necessary. But pain without shared sacrifice is poison. Lawmakers did not slash their allowances. Convoys did not shrink. The message was clear even without words. Endure means you. Adjust means you. When belts tighten, only the poor feel the pinch.

Corruption scandals deepen the rot. Constituency projects are approved, funded, and then abandoned. Schools exist only on paper. Clinics have signboards but no staff. Each uncompleted project is a small betrayal, but together they form a pattern of contempt. Investigations come and go. Prosecutions stall. The cycle repeats. People stop asking when things will improve and start asking how to escape. Emigration becomes a dream. Survival becomes a plan.

What makes this moment explosive is the youth factor. Nigeria is young, restless, and online. Millions of young people face unemployment or jobs that barely pay. They see the numbers. They see the luxury. Social media does the accounting in public. Every allowance, every convoy, every careless statement is screenshotted and shared. Anger travels faster than reform. When patience dies young, rage grows fast.

States rarely collapse with fireworks and warnings. They collapse like a chair with termites, holding steady until the moment it doesn’t. Nigeria risks that kind of fall. A disputed election. A sudden spike in prices. A major security failure. Any spark could ignite a system already soaked in resentment. When that happens, no legislative privilege will buy immunity.

This is why the image of lawmakers feasting while the lights go out is not exaggeration. It is diagnosis. A country where representation becomes extraction cannot stand forever. Numbers do not lie, even when politicians do. You can drain a nation quietly for only so long before the silence breaks. And when it does, the collapse will feel sudden only to those who refused to count.

 

 

On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my  “Brief Book Series” worth exploring. You can also read the books  here on Google Play: BriefBook Series.