By Tony Edemenaha
In my primary school in Orerokpe, there was a boy named Friday who insisted the sky was green. Every morning, he would point up and declare it, daring the rest of us to disagree.
For a week, we argued. By the second week, half the class started saying “yes, green” simply to avoid his tantrums. By the third week, the teacher had to stop a fight between Friday and a girl who still saw blue.
That is how a generation starts to rot: when someone with a louder voice decides reality is negotiable, and everyone else learns that the price of telling the truth is exhaustion.
Nigeria is living Friday’s week right now. Only the sky we are being told is green is our security, our economy and our leadership.
As 2027 draws closer, the drumbeat is already here: campaign songs, borrowed slogans and photo-ops in floodwater with rolled-up trousers. And with them comes the old trick — calling white black and demanding that we applaud the paint job.
A generation is doomed not when it suffers, but when it loses the language to describe its suffering.
When leaders — political, ethnic, religious, or the Instagram kind — stand on podiums and rename hunger “austerity”, insecurity “manageable friction” and failure “strategic repositioning”, they are not governing. They are gaslighting 230 million people into doubting their own eyes.
We have seen this movie on repeat.
A governor will commission a bridge to nowhere, cut a ribbon under the hot sun and call it “infrastructure renewal”. Bandits will sack a village, and the press release will call it “an isolated incident”, while the governor adds, “No life is worth more than another”, as if arithmetic were a eulogy.
Inflation will eat into a minimum wage, and an aide will tell us on television that “the indices are improving”.
White becomes black, and we are expected to adjust our vision as though we were switching television channels.
The danger is not just the lie. It is what the lie does to us.
When “white” is called “black” long enough, three things happen.
First, we stop trusting our senses. A mother in Zamfara who buries her son after an attack begins to wonder if perhaps she is “overreacting”. A trader in Onitsha whose stock now costs twice as much begins to think perhaps she is simply “bad with money”.
A graduate in Ibadan sending out 50 CVs a month starts to believe the problem is his font, not the economy.
Second, we start punishing truth-tellers. The journalist who reports the numbers, the youth who asks questions at a town hall and the cleric who says, “This is not right”, become the troublemakers — not the thieves.
Third, we lower the bar until the floor disappears. A fraudulent mandate that delivered poverty becomes the baseline for the next fraud. “At least he is not as bad as…” becomes our national anthem, sung in four-part harmony.
2027 is not just another election cycle. It is a national examination, and the invigilator is time.
The questions are not hidden: How do we govern a country where farmers fear their farms more than drought? Where a bag of rice costs a civil servant’s salary? Where hospitals exist but healing is a rumour?
Where “leadership capital” — that old-fashioned idea of competence, character and courage — is in such short supply that we recycle tired faces and call it “experience”?
Experience without results is just old age with a title.
Nigeria’s complexity is real, and pretending otherwise is another way of calling white black.
We are not one village. We are a federation of histories, tongues, faiths and grudges that predate WhatsApp.
The North’s insecurity is not the South-East’s economic chokehold. The Niger Delta’s environmental debt is not the Middle Belt’s land conflict. The South-West’s urban unemployment is not the North-East’s IDP crisis.
To sell one slogan for all is to peddle a one-size-fits-none agbada. It looks grand on the mannequin, but it strangles everyone who wears it.
Yet what do we get from many leaders? Rhetoric.
Campaign narratives polished by consultants who have never spent a night without electricity. “Renewed Hope.” “Let’s Do More.” “Our Turn.” “It Can Only Get Better.”
Beautiful words. Empty calories.
They fill the ear and starve the belly. They tell us to focus on the optics while the substance decomposes. They ask us to clap for “digital transformation” while we queue for petrol with jerrycans. They want us to celebrate “ease of doing business” rankings while small businesses drown in levies and darkness.
Wit has always been our survival tool. Nigerians can joke while the house burns because laughter is cheaper than fuel and therapy.
We turn hardship into a meme: “It’s not my portion.” “How una dey manage?” “God abeg.”
But wit without interrogation becomes anaesthesia.
We laugh at the absurdity until we forget to be angry at the injustice. We circulate “resilience” videos while the managers of our commonwealth manage only their own accounts.
Resilience is not a policy. It is what people do when policy fails them.
The imperative is urgent because 2027 will not be decided in February alone, but in the months we have now.
Between now and then, we must do what leaders refuse to do: interrogate.
Interrogate the data, not the drama. Ask uncomfortable questions in comfortable rooms.
If security votes are billions, why are highways still hostage zones? If subsidy “savings” exist, where is the hospital that opened because of them? If our GDP is growing, why is poverty still such a persistent reality? If leadership capital is abundant, why does every crisis meet us improvising like students without a syllabus?
This requires a different kind of citizen.
Not the one who dances at rallies for ₦2,000 and a bag of rice, then spends four years complaining on social media.
Not the ethnic defender who says, “Our son must rule”, even when our son rules badly and empties the treasury.
Not the religious leader who calls white black because the caller funded the church roof or mosque renovation.
It requires citizens who treat their vote like a contract, not a carnival ticket. A contract has terms, deliverables and consequences for breach.
Let’s borrow another metaphor from the village.
When a farmer’s yam is rotting in the barn, he does not solve it by changing the name of the barn. He does not call it “strategic tuber repositioning”.
He checks the roof, checks the storage and examines his own negligence.
Nigeria’s barn is leaking.
Insecurity, economic hardship and leadership deficit are not “narratives”. They are yams rotting.
You do not fix rot with rhetoric.
You fix it with inspection, accountability and new hands willing to get dirty. Hands that understand that governing is not photography; it is plumbing.
As 2027 approaches, we will be tempted.
Tempted by big men who suddenly remember our names after four years of amnesia. Tempted by ethnic mathematics that says, “This time, it’s our turn to call white black.”
Tempted by religious brokers who trade pulpits for patronage and call it “divine mandate”.
Tempted by “youth inclusion” that means one 35-year-old aide taking selfies.
The antidote is simple and hard: refuse the rename.
Insist on calling things what they are.
If the sky is blue, say blue. If the mandate was fraudulent and life got worse, say so. Loudly. At the market, in the church or mosque, on the timeline and in the voting booth.
Silence is also a vote — for the status quo.
A generation that accepts leaders who rename reality has already signed its own obituary. It has agreed to live in a world where words mean nothing and promises mean less.
But a generation that interrogates, measures promises against potholes and votes beyond tribe and title can still turn the night back into evening.
It can still demand receipts, not just slogans. It can still choose leaders who do not need to repaint reality to look good.
Friday eventually stopped saying the sky was green. Not because he saw sense, but because we stopped pretending with him.
The day we all said, “No, it’s blue,” together, his voice lost its power.
Peer pressure works both ways. It can normalise lies, or it can enforce truth.
Nigeria’s Friday is on stage again.
The microphones are bigger, the consultants are foreign and the budget is larger. But the sky is still blue.
Our lives, our safety and our future are still ours to define.
2027 is close.
Let’s stop dancing to rhetoric and start interrogating reality. Let’s stop clapping for paint jobs and start inspecting the foundation — before the night comes early and we forget what daylight looked like.
A country cannot survive on renamed suffering. It survives on named problems and solved ones.
The time to name them is now.
*Tony Edemenaha, poet and social commentator, writes from Asaba
