By Tony Edemenaha
Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French economist and deputy in the French National Assembly (1801–1850), warned us long ago: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
If Bastiat were a Nigerian today, he would not need to write treatises. He would simply buy a nomination form, contest an election and be appointed Chairman of the Committee for the Legalisation of Plunder.
We are a nation that has perfected the alchemy of absurdity. We have turned dysfunction into doctrine and rot into ritual. What elsewhere would be a scandal that topples governments is here merely Tuesday’s headline, debated for two days on television and buried by Friday by a more spectacular heist.
Let us call this thing what it is. The Nigerian elite—that fraternity of agbada and safari suit, of turban and cassock—is not divided by party, faith or ethnicity. Those are costumes for the carnival. They are united by a far more potent creed: a rapacious greed that has no tribe, no tongue and no religion. Their only political party is Profit; their only constitution is Appetite. The rest is theatre for the poor.
In politics, we have institutionalised the bizarre. We run a democracy where votes are counted before they are cast, where the people are sovereign only in the preamble of a constitution they never wrote, and where the legislature that should be a marketplace of ideas has become a warehouse for money laundering.
Our parliament is an expensive shrine where men enter with modest means and exit as Dubai landlords. They make laws in the morning and break them over lunch, then, in the evening, form a committee to probe why people don’t obey them.
It is Orwell served with jollof rice: we are all equal, but some are more equal and therefore entitled to constituency projects that exist only in PowerPoint presentations.
We applaud them. We give them chieftaincy titles.
In religion, we have monetised salvation. God has been privatised and listed on the Stock Exchange. On Fridays and Sundays, the same politicians who stripped the treasury dry during the week will be seen in the front pews, shouting the loudest “Amen” and “Allahu Akbar”, offering thanks for safe stealing.
The pulpit has become an extension of the Presidential Villa—it no longer comforts the afflicted; it afflicts the comfortable with guilt if they fail to pay tithes on stolen funds. We have pastors who own private jets while their congregants cannot afford bicycle tyres, and who preach prosperity while their communities lack boreholes.
Faith, which should have been our compass, has become our opium, skilfully administered by merchants in cassocks who bless every fraud so long as the offering is fat. We pray for electricity while those we pray with are the ones who sold the transformers.
In matters of ethnicity, we have made a fine art of cutting our noses to spite our faces. The elite, whether from Sokoto or Onitsha, Ogbomoso or Warri, meet in Abuja, clink glasses, share oil blocks and agree on one thing: that the rest of us must never meet.
So they send us home with poisoned gifts—ethnic suspicion, herdsmen-versus-farmers narratives and carefully curated hatred. The average Nigerian from the creeks has more in common with the farmer in Gusau than either has with the senator who represents them, yet we have been taught to see the enemy in our neighbour’s dialect rather than in the common thief who steals in fluent English.
It is the oldest trick in the book of tyrants: divide the village so the chief can sell the communal land.
And socially, what is left? We have become a nation of excellent mourners. We are experts at condolence visits, the poetry of hashtags and the choreography of outrage.
A school building collapses and kills children because someone diverted money meant for cement; we tweet #JusticeForOurChildren for 48 hours, then enrol our own children in a private school owned by the same man.
A civil servant is beaten to death in his office, like a goat trussed for barbecue, and we wait for a committee. Always a committee. In Nigeria, a committee is what government sets up when it wants the corpse of truth to decompose beyond recognition.
We have elevated mediocrity into merit and sycophancy into statecraft. The man who can defend the indefensible on live television is rewarded with an appointment; the woman who speaks truth is branded an enemy of progress.
We have built a legal system that authorises plunder. The law is a spider’s web: it catches small flies—the petty thief who steals a phone is paraded naked—but the big wasps who steal pension funds fly through in chartered flights.
Our anti-corruption agencies growl like lions on posters and mew like kittens in the dock. We have a moral code that glorifies plunder: we call a looter “a generous man”, a thug “a grassroots mobiliser” and a shameless opportunist “a detribalised Nigerian”. Honesty has become a form of mental illness to be pitied.
But history is a stubborn teacher. No fortress of injustice has ever stood forever. The Romanovs thought they would rule until eternity, until the bread queues became too long. The French aristocrats thought cake was an adequate substitute for justice until the guillotine taught them economics.
The urgency now is not merely to change government, but to change the narrative. To refuse to be accomplices in our own violation.
For too long, our humanity has been raped, repeatedly, systematically and with impunity, and we have been told to be patient, prayerful and tribal. The poetry of protest must return to our hearts—not the protest of stones and bonfires alone, though those have their place, but the protest of saying no; the protest of refusing to clap for the thief; the protest of demanding accountability from the mosque, the church, the village square and the Senate chamber.
The Nigerian people are not weak; we are only wearied. We are not docile; we are only distracted. But weariness has a limit. Even the most patient goat will one day bite the man who persistently pulls its tail.
The task before us is simple and profound: to dismantle the republic of plunder and reclaim a republic of the people. To insist that public office is not an oil well that religion is not a business enterprise and that ethnicity is not a licence to loot.
If we do not, then we shall continue this macabre dance—a nation of two hundred million souls marching in circles to the tune of a few piper-thieves, until we dance ourselves off the cliff.
And when that happens, not even a committee will save us.
