This is grand larceny, not governance

There is always a difference between a country and a nation. The country is a territory with a government and political sovereignty. A nation is a people who share a sense of collective identity that is based on history, culture, language, ethnicity, tradition or a shared homeland. The Igbo nation, the Yoruba nation and the Arewa nation are typical examples. So are England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that make up Great Britain. Nigeria has never been a nation because of its many divergences that it has failed to galvanize. And one of those failures was manifested last week when Arise TV scrutinized aspects of the 2026 Federal budget.

What we have today is the moment a country's budget becomes a confession and ceases to be a financial document. Nigeria reached that moment last week when Arise News laid bare a single page of the 2026 Appropriation Act. On that page was the sum of N8.05 billion earmarked for the construction, renovation and equipping of churches and mosques across the country. One billion naira was allocated for musical instruments for churches in Bende. One billion naira for solar panels for mosques in Zamfara North. Three hundred and fifty million for churches and mosques and financial support for religious leaders in Bakura. Two hundred and eighty million for the renovation of a mosque in Oyo. The list runs to 509 items, split between N1.91 billion for churches and N6.14 billion for mosques. And that was not buried under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, because Nigeria does not have one, and should not have one, but under the Industrial Arbitration Panel, the Energy Commission, the National Agricultural Development Fund and the Institute for Agricultural Research in Zaria.

The agency that is supposed to arbitrate industrial disputes is now saddled with buying drums of paints for renovating churches. The agency that is supposed to solve Nigeria's energy crisis is now asked to wire mosques. The institute that should be developing improved seedlings to feed 230 million hungry Nigerians is now forced to plaster the walls of a place of worship. If one wanted to design a textbook case of state failure, no one can possibly design it better than this. What we have here is not budgeting. This is money laundering with official letterhead. This is grand larceny.

Government apologists will definitely argue that N8 billion is small money in a budget of over fifty trillion. That is the favorite gimmick of conduit pipes in government. They make the figure sound small so that people will not ask where the rest of the money went to. But the issue was never the amount. The issue is the logic. If the government can so casually insert half a thousand religious projects into agencies that have no business with religion, what else can it not insert? If it can allocate one billion naira for church musical equipment while federal universities have been on a rolling strike for a decade because laboratories have no equipment whatsoever, what does that tell the people of Nigeria about its sense of priority? If it can find money for the renovation of a mosque in a constituency while primary health centres in that same constituency have no gloves, paracetamol or healthcare personnel, what does that tell a concerned Nigerian public about its conscience?

Nigerians no longer believe in the budget defence ritual that plays out on television every November. Senators in agbada and sewn-to-fit caps ask questions that they had already pre-agreed on. Heads of agencies appear, bow, promise to do better, and disappear. Then the real budget is written in the night, in hotel rooms and private offices, where projects are inserted like contraband. The Budget Office becomes a clearing house for constituency extortion. The National Assembly, which is supposed to be the guardian of the country’s treasury, becomes the cornerstone of its kleptocracy. And the politicians wonder why some Nigerians no longer want to be Nigerians. They have no pride in being seen as, known as, or called Nigerians. These are some of the reasons. And yet, many Nigerian politicians still hang on to that twisted appeal to the masses: ‘no matter how bad a native government is, it is still better than any foreign domination’.

Sometimes, it feels good to be blunt about some of these issues because, in many instances, politeness has not helped that country. When you take a young man in the East whose village school has had no teacher for years, whose roads swallow buses during the rainy season, whose brother was extorted at a police checkpoint and then told to go and pray about unemployment, and you show him a federal budget that prioritizes N1 billion for musical instruments for churches in another lawmaker's village, you are radicalizing him. When you take a young woman in Zamfara whose child died because she could not afford just N5, 000 for blood transfusion at the General Hospital, and you show her a budget that gives N1 billion to solar panels for mosques while her entire local government has not had public electricity for six months, you are teaching her that Nigerian is not her country.

This is the connection the political class in Abuja has refused to make, out of ignorance or arrogance. Nigerian politicians must understand that self-determination agitations in their country are not much of the exhibition of tribal sentiments. They are economic verdicts. People do not wake up and decide they hate Nigeria. They wake up and realize Nigeria has for decades made no room for them except as statistics for power grabbing. The IPOB agitator, the Yoruba nation agitator, the angry young man in the Niger Delta who sees oil pipelines crisscross his poisoned farmland while his community drinks water that is hugely contaminated, they are all responding to the same signal that was broadcast on Arise News last week: that the federal government has become an elaborate sharing formula for elites, and that religion and ethnicity are simply the wrappers used to make the sharing look legitimate.

Why do separatist messages resonate on WhatsApp and TikTok more than ministerial press releases? Because the separatist can point to budget lines like we have on the floor. He can say, look, they have money for their church project in Bende but they do not have money for your dialysis. They have money to renovate a mosque in Oyo but they do not have money to fix the Ibadan to Ife road that has killed 200 people this year alone. And nobody in government can answer him, because there is no answer.

Perhaps, the political class thinks Nigerians are forgetful. But nothing can be further from the truth. They think the people would be outraged for two days and then move on to spend their time on Big Brother and Premier League. They could be right, because they have weaponized poverty to ensure that the people cannot sustain focus. A man who is contemplating where his next meal would come from cannot sustain a protest for three weeks. But what they mistake for forgetfulness is actually stored resentment. Nigerians are not forgetting. Nigerians are recording. Every line item like this fake budget is being recorded in the mind of the market woman, the okada rider, the unemployed graduate. And one day, that recording will play back.

It is easy to call agitators enemies of the state. The harder question is: what has the state done to deserve loyalty? Loyalty is not decreed. Loyalty is earned. You earn loyalty by being present in the lives of your people. By ensuring that when a woman goes into labour at 2 am in Gombe, there is light in the hospital and a doctor on call. By ensuring that when a child in Makurdi goes to primary school, there is a roof that does not leak and a teacher who is paid on time. By ensuring that when a young graduate in Owerri or in Ikeja applies for a job, the job goes to one that merits it, not to the man whose uncle inserted a church project in the budget.

For more than twenty years since the return to democracy, government after government promised to focus on the people, to make their welfare government priority. Obasanjo made the promise. Yar'Adua promised. Jonathan promised. Buhari promised. Tinubu promised Renewed Hope. Yet the same pattern continues. The budget for the State House, for SUVs, for foreign trips, for religious patronage has continued to grow. The budget for the things that make a country livable continues to shrink or is simply not released.

The truth every politician must understand is that no country survives forever on the patience of its poor. So, the government should reverse itself and put the immediate needs of the people at the front of the national agenda because without them there will be no country to govern. Health first. Stock the primary health centres. Enforce health insurance that actually works, so that a mother does not have to choose between food and medicine, or food and safe drinking water. Then, fund agricultural research that actually reaches the farmer instead of using agricultural institutes as ATMs for mosque projects.

Fix storage and transportation so that tomatoes do not rot in Jos while families starve in Lagos. Pay teachers a living wage and rebuild classrooms before you rebuild places that already have billions in tithes and zakat to sustain them. Stop erecting estates for the rich in Eko Atlantic and build low cost houses for working-class families. Construct safe, affordable rail and road network that allows goods and people to move without fear of kidnapping or fatal potholes. Government should do this, and stop pretending they do not understand why the country is pulling apart at the seams.

The agitator for self-determination is not created in a radio station. He is created in the budget office. He is created when a citizen sees with his own eyes that his government has the money, has the power, has the opportunity to change his life, and intentionally chooses to buy drums of paint for the renovation of a church instead. This is not governance. This is not even mis-governance. This is grand larceny, and history has never been kind to those who mistake a country's endurance for its consent.

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