Good morning,
The woman at the IDP camp in Borno did not call the National Human Rights Commission to complain about discrimination. She called because her children had not eaten that day, and the food distribution had skipped her tent again. The NHRC recorded 384,196 complaints of rights violations in October alone, a 13.4 per cent rise on September, and 180,000 of those came from camps for internally displaced persons. The largest category was discrimination. The commission’s executive secretary, Tony Ojukwu, said displacement must not deprive people of dignity. It does. The complaints total for the year has crossed 2.5 million, which is not a backlog but a register of state failure, kept by an agency with no power to arrest, prosecute or compensate.
Here is the contradiction of the same week. The biggest companies in Nigeria paid ₦3.412 trillion in income tax between January and September, up 73.31 per cent, roughly the size of the entire 2022 federal health budget. The money is real. So is the question of what it buys. In Nasarawa, the Minister of Women Affairs handed out cash grants, sewing machines and refrigerators to between 100 and 200 women at a pre-rally event, and Nigerians asked why there is money for campaign handouts but none for ambulances or steady power. In Jigawa, President Tinubu promised reliable electricity and lower living costs, three years after asking voters to hold him accountable for the same pledge. And on live television, a campaign council member invited the host to dial 112, the emergency line the government launched in April, to prove it worked. The call did not connect. The host dialled again. Nothing. The service that is supposed to send help when your neighbour is attacked at night could not survive a demonstration staged by its own supporters. The line is the cheapest part. The dispatch centre, the operators, the vehicles that actually arrive: those are the expensive parts, and those are the parts that campaign rhetoric skips. This is the social contract in miniature. The state collects the tax, makes the promise, stages the handout and announces the hotline. Then the hotline rings into silence.
The institutions that are supposed to police the contract are not faring better. INEC has finalised disciplinary proceedings against 54 officers implicated in double registrations and removed 1.6 million invalid records, but it has not published the penalty for each officer or said whether any case has gone to prosecution. Detection without visible punishment is housekeeping, not accountability. On the Auchi-Aviele road in Edo State, a group of young men stopped a police checkpoint, searched the officers and recovered ₦4,200 allegedly extorted from motorists. The police faulted the team and issued a query. That is the standard sequence: a video appears, a unit is stood down, a file moves. A crowd that searches policemen has stopped trusting the chain of command. Discipline promised after a viral clip is not discipline. It is public relations.
And yet. In Dakar, Praise Ugoh, a sprinter who missed selection for the shorter races she came for, entered the 400 metres almost as an afterthought and won Nigeria’s first ever Youth Olympic gold at the distance, in a personal best of 52.76 seconds. “I should never doubt myself,” she said afterwards. In Lagos, Nollywood actress Bimbo Ademoye offered a ₦1 million bounty for information on whoever filed a copyright claim on her YouTube film, because the platform pays the claimant first and asks questions later, and the dispute process moves at the speed of a support ticket. A bounty is not a policy. But it is what you do when the system will not act.
So the woman in the camp, the taxpayer in Surulere, the driver on the Auchi road and the filmmaker in Lagos are all learning the same lesson from different directions: the contract is not being honoured. The tax is paid. The promise is made. The hotline is announced. The officers are queried. The file moves. And the help does not come. What holds the country together is not the institutions that are supposed to, but the sprinter who wins a race she did not enter and the creator who funds her own enforcement because no one else will. That is not a system. It is a series of individual rescues, and it is exhausting.
Warmly,
Lolade