EMMANUEL PETER ADAYEHI
Executive Summary: This essay argues that the comparison between President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Lee Kuan Yew, and between contemporary Nigeria and Singapore, is analytically invalid. The Tinubu administration cannot be compared to Lee Kuan Yew, because Lee Kuan Yew domesticated production through institutions, export led manufacturing, and anti corruption enforcement, while the Tinubu administration has relied primarily on price increases, tariff adjustment, and revenue extraction without a corresponding transformation of distribution, production, and institutional capacity. Using comparative political economy, official Nigerian data, and Singaporean economic history, this essay further argues that organised labour under Comrade Joe Ajaero and Comrade Festus Osifo has failed to provide the unified, independent resistance required by workers. It concludes that a productive alternative must be grounded in the production centred platforms associated with Mr Peter Obi and Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, a vision the writer shares.
1. Introduction And Research Question
The central research question of this essay is: does tariff increase constitute structural transformation? The answer advanced here is no.
Vice President Kashim Shettima and other leaders of the All Progressives Congress, APC, have invoked Singapore as a model for Nigeria. The invocation is politically convenient, but historically and economically misleading. Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990, did not become a manufacturing and human capital hub by transferring the cost of state failure to citizens. It became a hub by building the Economic Development Board, the Housing and Development Board, a disciplined civil service, and an export oriented industrial base, and by enforcing anti corruption law through institutions with real authority (Lee, 2000; Menon, 2015).
Nigeria, by contrast, has increased the price citizens pay for electricity, fuel, and transport, while the structural constraints of distribution, generation, and productive capacity remain unresolved. This essay therefore distinguishes between two models: the Singapore model of domesticated productivity, and the Nigerian model under Tinubu of domesticated hardship. The two cannot be placed on the same level, because their sequences, institutions, and outcomes are opposite.
2. Analytical Framework: Production, Distribution, And Institutions
This essay adopts a structural development framework. Development is measured not by revenue collected, but by three outcomes: first, the share of manufacturing and productive services in output; second, the reliability of infrastructure distribution; and third, the real income and living standards of workers.
On each measure, the Singapore experience and the Nigerian experience diverge sharply, as Table 1 shows.
Table 1: Comparative Structural Indicators, Singapore And Nigeria
Indicator Singapore Nigeria
GDP per capita at independence or takeoff About US\$500 in 1965 About US\$2,200 in 2023, World Bank estimate, with wide inequality
GDP per capita after Lee Kuan Yew era About US\$13,000 in 1990 No comparable structural break, growth averaged about 2.9 percent in 2022 to 2023
Manufacturing share of GDP Rose from 14 percent in 1965 to 22 percent by 1975 Manufacturing remained below 15 percent of GDP in most recent years, dominated by oil and informal trade
Corruption Perceptions Index, 2024 84 points, ranked 3rd of 180 26 points, ranked 140th of 180
Multidimensional poverty Negligible by the 1990s, with universal housing and education expansion 62.9 percent, about 133 million people, in 2022
Headline inflation, peak period examined Low and controlled during industrialisation 34.80 percent in December 2024
Singapore’s GDP per capita rose from around US$500 in 1965, at the same level as Mexico and South Africa, to about US$13,000 in 1990, surpassing South Korea, Israel, and Portugal, and manufacturing’s share rose from 14 percent to 22 percent by 1975 (Menon, 2015). Nigeria’s multidimensional poverty, by contrast, was 62.9 percent in the National Bureau of Statistics 2022 report, approximately 132.93 million citizens deprived across health, education, living standards, work, and nutrition (National Bureau of Statistics, 2022).
The Corruption Perceptions Index for 2024 places Singapore third in the world with 84 points, while Nigeria scored 26 points and ranked 140th of 180 countries (Transparency International, 2025). This 58 point gap is not cultural. It is institutional. Lee Kuan Yew built institutions that punished corruption. Nigeria, in the argument of this essay, has built institutions that negotiate with it.
Lee Kuan Yew governed a small island with no oil, no large domestic market, and no natural resources, and he built production. Tinubu governs Africa’s largest population and one of its largest oil producers, and he has built price increases. That contrast is why the comparison fails. Singapore proves what disciplined institutions can do without resources. Nigeria proves what undisciplined institutions can waste with resources.
3. Electricity Tariffs Are Not A Distribution Solution
On 3 April 2024, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, approved an increase for Band A customers, those receiving 20 to 24 hours of supply, from approximately N68 per kilowatt hour to N225 per kilowatt hour, an increase of more than 230 percent (NERC, 2024). NERC stated that the change would reduce the 2024 electricity subsidy by about N1.14 trillion (NERC, 2024).
The government justification was cost reflectivity and fiscal relief. The evidence, however, shows that tariff adjustment did not resolve distribution failure. Band A customers represented only about 15 percent of 12.5 million customers, yet the increase affected commercial and industrial consumers most exposed to energy costs (NERC, 2024). Within days, NERC fined the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company N200 million for billing lower band customers at the Band A rate, demonstrating that the distribution and metering system itself could not reliably implement the policy it was designed to enforce.
More importantly, subsidies did not disappear. Official regulatory figures later showed federal electricity subsidy obligations reached nearly N1.94 trillion in 2024 alone, and N536.4 billion in the first quarter of 2025, a 13.7 percent increase on the previous quarter (NERC, 2025, cited in Leadership, 2025). Tariff increase, therefore, functioned primarily as revenue and debt management, not as a solution to generation, transmission, metering, and collection losses. The problem in Nigeria is largely distribution, not price alone, and price without distribution reform transfers institutional failure to workers and small manufacturers.
This is the opposite of the Singapore sequence. Singapore first built reliable power, ports, housing, and skills, and then attracted production. Nigeria is raising price first, and promising infrastructure later.
Table 2: The Erosion Of The Minimum Wage In One Picture, 2019 To 2026
Method note: Inflation figures below are annual average CPI inflation. Real wage is calculated by the author as nominal wage divided by the cumulative CPI index, rebased to 2019 = 100. It is an author calculation from published averages, not an official NBS real wage series. The 2025 CPI series was rebased by NBS, so 2025 must be read with that change in method in mind. The 2026 row is provisional.
Year Average inflation Nominal minimum wage Real wage in 2019 naira Electricity price, what changed Petrol, indicative pump price
2019 11.4 percent N30,000 N30,000 Average tariff about N25 per kWh in MYTO 2015, rising toward N32 to N46 in reviews About N145 per litre
2020 13.3 percent N30,000 N26,490 Average allowed tariff N34.5 per kWh About N145 to N162 per litre
2021 17.0 percent N30,000 N22,651 Service based tariff phased in, Band A rising toward N68 per kWh About N165 per litre
2022 18.9 percent N30,000 N19,058 Average tariff N64 per kWh in MYTO 2022 About N185 per litre, scarcity higher
2023 24.7 percent N30,000 N15,288 Average allowed tariff N60.4 per kWh N175 to N200 in May, then N617 after subsidy removal
2024 33.2 percent N70,000 from July N26,773 Band A N68 to N225 per kWh on 3 April 2024, average allowed tariff N109.2 per kWh N668 in January, peak near N1,030 in October
2025 23.0 percent N70,000 N21,765 Subsidy obligation N536.4 billion in Q1 2025 alone About N800 to N900, Dangote competition period
2026 Provisional, end period outlook about 10 percent N70,000, unchanged Lower than 2025 if prices rise at all, exact figure not yet final Average allowed tariff N124.3 per kWh in May 2026 N1,300 to N1,400 in May 2026
Average inflation rose from 11.40 percent in 2019 to 13.25 percent in 2020, 16.95 percent in 2021, 18.85 percent in 2022, 24.66 percent in 2023, 33.24 percent in 2024, and 23.01 percent in 2025. The average tariff rose from N25 per kWh in MYTO 2015 to N60 per kWh in 2020 and N64 per kWh in MYTO 2022, and the simple average allowed tariff across the 11 DisCos rose from N34.5 per kWh in 2020 to N60.4 in 2023, N109.2 in 2024, and N124.3 in May 2026. Petrol rose from about N175 per litre in May 2023 to between N1,300 and N1,400 by May 2026, about 643 percent in three years.
3B. What Table 2 Proves, In The Writer’s Argument
Table 2 proves three things that rhetoric alone cannot prove.
– First, N30,000 lost almost half its value before it was replaced. A worker on N30,000 in 2019 needed about N78,437 in 2024 just to buy what N30,000 bought in 2019, on the author’s cumulative calculation. Labour accepted N70,000. That was already below the 2019 purchasing power level, before the April 2024 tariff shock.
– Second, N70,000 lost value within one year. In 2019 naira, N70,000 in July 2024 was worth N26,773. By 2025 it was worth N21,765. The worker did not get a pay rise in real terms. The worker got a smaller real wage with a larger nominal number.
– Third, price rose on every front at once. Electricity, petrol, and food rose together, while the wage was fixed for three years. That is why Festus Osifo is right, in this essay’s position, that N70,000 has become inappropriate, and why a three year review without indexation is not protection. It is a slow cut.
This is the material meaning of multidimensional poverty in Table 1. The NBS figure of 62.9 percent, 133 million people, is not an abstraction. It is a worker who pays N225 per kWh for Band A, N1,030 per litre at the 2024 peak, and transport at an all time high, on a wage worth N21,765 in 2019 terms. A supervisor cannot dismiss this as emotion. It is arithmetic.
4. The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, Land, And Procurement Transparency
The Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway illustrates the institutional argument. The project generated national controversy over procurement transparency, cost, compensation, and displacement. Critics in public debate questioned the absence of a fully open competitive bidding process visible to the public, the scale of the contract, and the fate of individuals, families, fishermen, traders, and communities whose land and livelihoods lie on the corridor.
This essay does not claim to resolve the full legal record of the contract. It makes a narrower, defensible scholarly claim: a development project that cannot demonstrate transparent procurement, published cost benefit analysis, and fair, timely compensation for displaced landholders cannot be presented as equivalent to Singapore’s disciplined, plan led infrastructure model. In Singapore, infrastructure was sequenced through the Economic Development Board and statutory planning, with housing and industrial estates built to serve production. In Nigeria, infrastructure controversy has reinforced public perception that revenue and contracts, not productivity, drive state action.
That perception is reinforced by the corruption data in Table 1. When a state scores 26 of 100 on perceived public sector corruption, large projects require exceptional transparency to retain legitimacy. That transparency has not been demonstrated to the standard required by world best practice.
5. Labour Under Ajaero And Osifo: Division, Accommodation, And The Esele Benchmark
The failure of labour is central to this essay, and it must be judged by record, not by rhetoric alone.
On 18 July 2024, President Tinubu, Comrade Joe Ajaero, President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and Comrade Festus Osifo, President of the Trade Union Congress, TUC, agreed on N70,000 as the new national minimum wage, replacing the N30,000 wage that expired on 18 April 2024 (Federal Government of Nigeria, 2024). Organised labour had demanded N615,000, then reduced its demand to N250,000, before accepting N70,000 (Channels Television, 2024). Joe Ajaero stated that acceptance was based on the promise of a review every three years, rather than five years, and on other incentives attached to the agreement (The Cable, 2024).
The analytical problem is not the figure alone. It is the context. Headline inflation reached 34.80 percent in December 2024, and food inflation was substantially higher for much of 2024 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2024). Petrol, which sold for between N650 and N750 per litre when labour agreed to N70,000, rose further in subsequent months, while transport costs remained at an all time high for workers (Channels Television, 2026, reporting Ajaero). A wage fixed in July 2024 could not, without indexation or a stimulus, protect real income through 2025 and 2026.
It is in this context that Osifo’s later position becomes significant. Osifo has argued that N70,000 has become inappropriate because times have changed and a new wage increase should be made available. That position is analytically correct. A nominal wage without inflation adjustment is a real wage cut.
The division, however, remains the central weakness. Joe Ajaero has subsequently insisted on a fresh review, and has cited states paying N104,000 in Imo, and N100,000, N85,000, N84,000, and N75,000 elsewhere, to challenge the affordability argument used in 2024 (Channels Television, 2026). Osifo, by contrast, has been presented in public debate as more openly uncomfortable with the government’s proposal. Whether this is a genuine strategic difference or a product of divide and rule, the effect is the same: workers face a divided labour front at a moment of multidimensional poverty, insecurity, and skyrocketing food and fuel costs, with no corresponding daily stimulus.
Compare this with former TUC President, Comrade Peter Esele. Under Esele, labour’s public posture was more consistently independent and confrontational on fuel, wages, and institutional reform. This essay does not romanticise that era. It argues, on the basis of public record, that independence from government, rather than negotiation inside the Presidential Villa as the primary strategy, produced clearer pressure for structural change.
Labour institutions, like other Nigerian institutions, are criticised in this essay for going cap in hand to government for financial gains and incentives, including the 36 compressed natural gas buses promised in the 2024 agreement, rather than independently building wealth, strike funds, research capacity, and productive alliances with manufacturers. That is not a moral insult. It is a structural observation: an institution dependent on government goodwill cannot credibly discipline government policy.
6. Importation, Innoson Motors, And The Opposite Of Singapore
Singapore’s industrial policy was explicit: attract foreign investment, but require export, skills transfer, and local linkage. Manufacturing rose, services followed, and the port became a logistics hub because production needed a port, not because a port was built to justify itself (Menon, 2015).
Nigeria’s importation of large numbers of foreign SUVs, including for official use, while local manufacturers such as Innoson Motors struggle for patronage, finance, and infrastructure, is the reverse sequence. Importation is an impediment to productivity, job creation, and employment when it substitutes for domestic assembly, parts manufacturing, and engineering skills.
A productive state would practise strategic procurement: buy Nigerian, assemble Nigerian, and export Nigerian, with transparent standards and competition. That is domestication of productivity. The current pattern domesticates consumption and externalises jobs.
OK – Obi/Kwankwaso must therefore be understood not as a slogan, but as a production system: science in research institutes, technology in factories, engineering in power and transport, and mathematics in planning, costing, and data. Singapore displayed STEM in output. Nigeria, in this essay’s argument, displays it mainly in speeches.
7. Conclusion: The Obi And Kwankwaso Plan, And The Writer’s Position For A New Nigeria
I, Emmanuel Peter Adayehi, share the same optimised vision for a better Nigeria that is contained in the plans of Mr Peter Obi and Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. I do not present that vision as a slogan. I present it as a sequenced alternative to the Tinubu model, judged by the same Table 1 and Table 2 indicators. The Tinubu administration cannot compare to Lee Kuan Yew, because it has not built the institutions, production base, and human capital that Lee Kuan Yew built. The Obi and Kwankwaso plans, in my assessment, attempt to build them.
The Obi plan, brought into this essay: In Our Pact With Nigerians: Creating a New Nigeria, Obi and Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed set seven priorities, led by security, and by a shift “from consumption to production by running a production-centred economy that is driven by an agrarian revolution and export-oriented industrialization”. The plan prioritises human capital through robust investment in STEM education, health, and infrastructure, leapfrogs Nigeria into the Fourth Industrial Revolution through science and technology, improves access to finance for MSMEs, youths, and women, and pursues institutional reform, rule of law, and decisive action against corruption. That is the Singapore sequence in Nigerian form: first secure the country, then produce, then build skills and infrastructure, then export.
In this writer’s reading, Obi’s most important break with the current model is the link between Obi/Kwankwaso OK and production. Obi proposes re-skilling youths for synergy in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and a venture capital like fund for young entrepreneurs, with incentives redesigned for investors in industry and an apprenticeship system for technical expertise. STEM is therefore not a speech. It is a factory, a farm, a laboratory, and a job.
The Kwankwaso plan, brought into this essay: In My Pledges To You, his 152 page manifesto, Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso promised to treat education as investment, not expenditure, to mop up 20 million out of school children in four years, to make WAEC, NECO, JAMB, and NABTEB registration free, to give JAMB results a four year lifespan, and to harmonise scholarships for the less privileged. He stated plainly that examination bodies are not revenue generating agencies, and that no Nigerian child shall be denied WAEC, NECO, or JAMB because of inability to pay exorbitant fees. He also pledged to expand security personnel, bringing total armed forces to one million, and to listen to Nigerians on restructuring rather than impose rigidity.
In this writer’s reading, Kwankwaso supplies what Obi’s production plan needs: the human base. A country cannot run a production centred economy with 20 million children out of school. Kwankwaso’s free examination and mass education plan is therefore not welfare. It is the first stage of industrial policy.
The combined presidency, as this writer argues it should be judged: Should Peter Obi and Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso make the presidency, together or in succession, Nigeria should be judged in their first term by five tests, all taken from Tables 1 and 2.
– 1. Does the real wage in Table 2 rise, through indexation or a living wage, and through lower transport and energy costs, not through nominal announcements?
– 2. Does manufacturing share rise from below 15 percent toward Singapore’s 22 percent benchmark, through agrarian revolution, export industrialisation, and patronage of Innoson Motors and other local manufacturers?
– 3. Does the average allowed tariff fall in real terms because distribution losses fall, metering rises, and generation is reliable, rather than because subsidy is hidden?
– 4. Does the Corruption Perceptions Index move from 26 toward 84, through institutional reform, rule of law, and digital governance, as Obi pledges?
– 5. Does multidimensional poverty fall from 62.9 percent, through free education, STEM skills, MSME finance, and security that allows farming and trade to return?
If those five move, Nigeria will have domesticated productivity. If they do not move, the presidency will have failed by its own standard, and labour must say so.
My position is therefore clear, and I state it in the first person so no supervisor can mistake it for neutrality: I support a new Nigeria built on production, not tariffs; on education, not extraction; on institutions, not cap in hand politics. I support the Obi production plan and the Kwankwaso education plan because, brought together, they sequence Nigeria the way Lee Kuan Yew sequenced Singapore, adapted to a federal, 220 million person, oil dependent country: secure the people, educate the people, power the factories, and let the workers earn a wage that Table 2 shows is real.
Labour must return to independence. Government must return to production. Nigeria must return to its workers. A better Nigeria is possible, and it is optimised when production, education, and integrity are built together.
References
– Channels Television. (2024, July 18). Why labour accepted N70,000 minimum wage. Channels Television.
– Channels Television. (2026). NLC’s Ajaero insists on minimum wage increase, says states pay above N70,000. Channels Television.
– Federal Government of Nigeria. (2024). Agreement on the N70,000 national minimum wage, 18 July 2024. State House, Abuja. Reported by Channels Television and The Cable, 18 July 2024.
– Kwankwaso, R. M. (2022). My pledges to you [152 page manifesto]. National Democratic Congress Party.
– NDC, Obi, P. G., & Baba-Ahmed, Y. D. (2022). Our pact with Nigerians: Creating a new Nigeria [62 page manifesto]. NDC Party.
– Leadership. (2025). Federal electricity subsidy obligations, Q1 2025. Leadership, reporting NERC quarterly data.
– Lee, K. Y. (2000). From third world to first: The Singapore story, 1965-2000. Times Editions.
– Menon, R. (2015). An economic history of Singapore, 1965-2065. Keynote address, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore Economic Review Conference, 5 August 2015.
– National Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Nigeria multidimensional poverty index. NBS.
– National Bureau of Statistics. (2024). Consumer Price Index and inflation report, December 2024. NBS.
– National Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Consumer Price Index report, December 2025 and CPI rebasing note. NBS.
– Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission. (2024). April 2024 supplementary order to the Multi-Year Tariff Order: Band A tariff adjustment from N68 to N225 per kWh. NERC, 3 April 2024.
– Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission. (2025). Quarterly reports, Q1 2025: Electricity subsidy obligations. NERC, cited in Leadership (2025).
– The Cable. (2024, July 18). Labour leaders: We accepted N70k minimum wage after three-year review pledge. The Cable.
– Transparency International. (2025). Corruption Perceptions Index 2024. Transparency International.
– World Bank. (2024). Nigeria development update. World Bank.
– World Bank. (2025). Nigeria development update: Poverty and household welfare. World Bank.
Notes:
4A. Debt, Subsidy Removal, And Corruption As A Cankerworm: The Writer’s Poor Observation
In 63 years, 16 successive governments in Nigeria, led by separate leadership, borrowed 46 trillion. In just a span of just three years, Bola Ahmed Tinubu borrowed 120 trillion and also removed a long age fuel subsidy. That has sparked up wide debate by political actors, political observers, political gladiators, and political contexts of narration around and outside the spheres of government and in government circles.
And as widely observed, in the last 63 years, 16 successive governments of Nigeria led by separate leadership had put together borrowed 46 trillion in total. But so amazing and worrisome is it that in just three years Bola Ahmed Tinubu has borrowed over 120 trillion and removed the long aged fuel subsidy. The worker was told to sacrifice. The state continued to borrow. The question is simple and it has not been answered: what did the borrowing buy for the Nigerian worker, for the farmer, for the trader, for the mother who cannot pay hospital bills, and for the child who cannot pay WAEC fees?
This is my poor observation, and I state it as a Nigerian, as a worker, and as a scholar. Corruption has become a cankerworm eating deep into our fabric system, into our very corporate existence, not just as a nation, but damaging our nation’s local and global reputation. We have been made the laughing stock of the world today, and a talking point in the globe, for corruption, for dismal leadership, with unaccredited roads, with no reliable electricity, with unaccredited hospitals, with moribund industrial layouts, with poor health care centres, and with a country that has become one of the worst countries in the world to live in, due to the wanton destruction of lives and properties by men of the underworld, kidnappers, bandits, territorial and waterways sea pirates, and criminal elements like Boko Haram, Islamic fundamentalists and jihadists, and all kinds of individuals and persons engaged in high profile social vices and other related offences, at home and abroad.
Nigeria is one of the worst places on the planet to do business and also to live, due to its humongous criminal representation and history, under Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s watch. This high level corruption illustrates why multilateral financial institutions are constrained, and why they constrain both themselves and their overseas partners, from doing business well in a highly corrupt country like Nigeria under Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s watch. No serious investor will bring long term capital, factories, and jobs to a country where contracts are not honoured, where land is not secure, where power is not reliable, and where public money disappears into private pockets. Corruption is not a story in this essay. Corruption is the reason Table 2 is true. Corruption is the reason the wage falls while the debt rises.
Names such as that of Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila ring a bell in the United States of America for swindling and defrauding a client in the United States of America. Before he became Speaker and then Chief of Staff, he practised in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Supreme Court of Georgia suspended him for 36 months after he admitted that he took US$25,000 paid in settlement of a client’s personal injury claim, failed to pay it to the client, withdrew it for his own use, and repaid it three years later. That record follows Nigeria abroad, and it follows this government abroad, whenever Nigeria speaks about integrity, whenever Nigeria speaks about Singapore, and whenever Nigeria asks the world to trust its institutions.
Then there is Wike’s son. Jordan Ezenwo Nyesom-Wike, a 25 year old son of Nyesom Wike, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory in Nigeria, has been the subject of public attention due to a high profile US$2.1 million land fraud and civil lawsuit.
The US$2.1 Million Land Dispute Case
– The allegations: Businessmen Safwan Garba G.Y. and GY Global Oil and Gas Nigeria Limited filed a civil suit, marked CV/008/2026, and a petition with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, against Jordan Wike. The petitioners claim Jordan agreed to facilitate the acquisition of 60 hectares of land in Abuja, 30 hectares in Katampe and 30 hectares in Guzape, for US$2.1 million, alleging US$2 million was meant for his father and US$100,000 was his own fee.
– Justice Sylvanus Oriji of the FCT High Court ordered Jordan to produce his American passport as part of the proceedings.
– The claimants’ lawyer also filed an application with the Chief Judge requesting the transfer of the case over concerns of potential bias.
– The civil case has been adjourned for continuation to December 1, 2 and 14, 2026.
Jordan denies the claim, and the court has made no final finding. But the case itself is the shame. Land is the foundation of production. When the son of the Minister who controls Abuja land is in court over a US$2.1 million land deal, Nigeria is named and shamed abroad, and Nigerians abroad are named and shamed with it.
Then there is David Umahi, Minister of Works and Housing, enmeshed in a 15 trillion naira Calabar Coastal Highway. A highway of about 750 kilometres, awarded without open competitive bidding, with a cost put at about N15 trillion, with no one single master design at the start, and with a cost that the minister himself later says is unknown. That is not Singapore. Singapore built infrastructure to serve production, with a plan, with a design, and with discipline. Nigeria builds a highway to serve contracts, and the worker pays for it with a wage that is worth less every year.
Then there is Oluremi Tinubu and the SUV donation of 30 vehicles, and the seven brand new 2026 Toyota Land Cruiser Prado SUVs confirmed for APC youth leaders, at a time when workers cannot pay rent, when mothers cannot pay hospital bills, and when students cannot pay transport. These names, these cases, these donations, are all naming and shaming Nigeria and Nigerians abroad. Yet some few ignorant and myopic individuals are asking Nigerian voters to re-elect such an irresponsible sick government of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who has also been alleged in public debate to have been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and to have taken morphine in public, a very sick man who needs help with his health to get well, and who must not be allowed to continue to deceive us.
Nigerians, we need a change, and prayers from Mecca or Medina alone will not save us. We must not allow a very sick man who needs help with his health to get well to continue to deceive us, as the time has come to reclaim our land and our common hegemony as a great African nation in the Savanna region of the tapestry, as it originated from the ancient cradles of civilization to the modern civilization of potentially the most populous black nation on earth. We must also remember that history beckons Nigeria for us to write our name in gold in the annals of our history, as an epoch making epic event, and through our socio-economic impacts on security and the security of Africa, we have a great role to keep Africa for Africans, years to come, for generations yet to come, and for the people of Africa.
Nigeria is the cornerstone of African prosperity, unity in diversity and culture, and the will of progress to be driven by energy, industrialization, high capital growth on average, that will secure and promote food security in Africa, for Africa, greatness in development that will last forever, and the generations of Africa years to come. God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria and God bless Africa, and beyond that which, as Africans, we yearn for, to liberate Africa from the shackles of poverty and food insecurity and corruption. Long live Africa, for Africans.