By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B.
There is a kind of suffering that does not scream anymore. It simply stays, quietly, like smoke trapped inside a room where the windows have been nailed shut.
In Lagos, a market woman I will call Aunty Kemi now sells “hope” in half-cups. Half-cup of rice, half-cup of beans, half-cup of garri. Not because her conscience suddenly became stingy, but because Nigeria’s reality has become too expensive for dignity. She used to measure food with a full scoop. Now she measures it with apologies. Her customers no longer ask, “How much?” They ask, “How small can it be, so I can still survive today?”
This is the country the APC says it is “reforming.”
And so let us name this thing without perfumes. When a government’s policies produce an economy where families must shrink meals, shrink dreams, and shrink their voices, then that government is no longer merely incompetent; it is at war with the people.
Yes, there are statistics, hard and cold, but the true indictment lies in the faces behind the numbers. Poverty has deepened, food has become a luxury, and the idea of stability has been reduced to propaganda. Inflation may be rebased, recalculated, or rhetorically massaged, yet hunger remains unrevised. What Nigerians experience daily is not an abstract economic cycle but a lived humiliation.
Fuel subsidy removal came without cushioning; electricity tariffs rose without reliability; taxes expanded without protection; and “reforms” arrived without reforming life itself. Nigerians pay like citizens of a modern state but live like tenants of a failed one. They fund public goods privately, power, water, security, education, healthcare, while government congratulates itself for fiscal bravery.
This is not reform. This is organised pressure.
Alexander the Great once warned that the fiercest battles are not fought with swords but against fear. A people conquered by fear, he understood, are already half defeated.
Nigeria today is governed through fear, fear of tomorrow’s prices, fear of illness, fear of unemployment, fear that effort no longer guarantees survival. A fearful people can be managed. A fearless people cannot.
And that is why truth itself has become dangerous under the APC era.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, confronting a far more brutal state, offered a simple rebellion. Refuse to participate in lies. Nigeria is now a theatre of official falsehoods, where suffering is renamed “adjustment,” pain is rebranded “patriotism,” and endurance is sold as national duty. But suffering is not patriotism. Suffering is evidence.
Mary Hartwell Catherwood once observed that there are moments, mere half hours, that stretch into centuries. Nigeria is trapped in such a moment. A few years of APC governance have dilated into a generational burden. Ordinary days feel like historical emergencies. Salaries have become rumours. Hope has become seasonal. Dignity has become negotiable.
When a government normalises abnormal suffering, it forfeits moral authority.
This is not a partisan quarrel; it is a civic alarm. A government that treats its citizens as collateral damage, that demands sacrifice without protection, that taxes exhaustion and calls it reform, is no longer governing with the people but against them.
History is patient, but people are not infinitely elastic. When hardship becomes permanent and explanations become insults, anger does not vanish. It organises, quietly, slowly, inevitably.
And that is why this heading is not rhetoric. It is diagnosis.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B is the Director-General, The Narrative Force (TNF)
