Good morning,
A NAFDAC team walked into a residential building in Agege last week and found a factory. The product was Aishetu Adams Bitters, with a NAFDAC registration number that didn't exist. The manager was arrested and the facility sealed. It was the latest in a run of busts: ₦985 million in substandard drugs destroyed in October, ₦2.6 billion in counterfeits destroyed in Rivers, twenty pharmacies and patent medicine shops closed in Benue, and trailers of revalidated expired drinks seized in Lagos. NAFDAC is doing the work and deserves praise. But every seizure is a confession that the shelves were already poisoned, and the agency cannot inspect its way out of a market that rewards counterfeiters.
Then there is Dayo Israel, the APC National Youth Leader, who posted a video of brand-new 2026 Toyota Prado SUVs on Sunday and explained they were for “committed selected youth leaders” to aid election mobilisation. Seven vehicles, roughly ₦1.12 billion, and a deleted post once the comments turned. In the same week, a video circulated of soldiers on the frontline soaking bread in stream water because they had nothing else to eat. A party that can find ₦1.12 billion for Prados and nothing for rations has told you exactly what it values. And in Lagos, a bus driver and a female passenger fought over a ₦200 fare, grappling in the street until the windshield shattered and police had to pull them apart. Two hundred naira. Less than a quarter of a dollar. It cost both of them more than the fare ever could. Atiku Abubakar says a President cannot light a fire and then blame the neighbours for the smoke. He is right.
The institutions are moving in their own directions. The NCDC has identified two additional suspected Ebola cases and expanded contact tracing to 53 primary contacts after the confirmed case in the FCT, faster than 2014, though the hospitals remain the question. The DSS picked up Rilwan Olawale, an NDC mobiliser, from his Lagos home at 1am on Sunday, and his party still does not know where he is. The IGP has proposed a 200 per cent gratuity for retired police officers, a good idea that has not been approved and may never be funded.
INEC is risking criminal prosecution because Yiaga Africa says it has not published the national voters’ register online as the Electoral Act requires, with officials facing fines or six months in prison. In Benin City, comedian Porkupyne is in critical condition after suspected political thugs attacked him over his criticism of the state government, an attack Atiku has blamed on the APC. And in Anambra, police have arrested Chima Ofoeke over the murder of 23-year-old Mmesoma Umeorini, who went missing on 16 October and whose body was found after she reportedly ended their relationship.
A factory of fake bitters. A fleet of Prados. Soldiers soaking bread in a stream. A windshield broken over ₦200. These are not separate stories. They are the same story: a country where the people at the top have stopped pretending to share it with the people at the bottom, and the people at the bottom are left to fight over scraps.
Warmly,
Lolade