By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Nigeria is no longer governed. Nigeria is occupied.
The old colonial masters at least had the decency to be foreigners. They came, they extracted, they insulted the natives, and nobody pretended they loved us. The present occupiers are worse. They speak our languages, wear our agbada and babariga, sit in our Villa, and loot our future while their court jesters dance on the graves of our hope and call it Renewed Hope.
This is the Tinubu government. A colony of jesters. A regime that has turned the misery of 200 million people into a punchline.
THE FOUR WORDS THAT KILLED A NATION’S TABLE
On 29 May 2023 the first joke was told. “Subsidy is gone.” Four words, spoken before the applause of the inauguration had died down. No plan. No cushion. No mercy. It was not policy. It was a sentence passed on the poor.
Within weeks the danfo driver doubled his fare, the market woman halved her stock, and the family pot that once boiled twice a day boiled once, then not at all.
The cruelty is not even the worst part. The hypocrisy is. In January 2012, this same man, then an opposition leader, wrote that abrupt subsidy removal was a punishment on ordinary Nigerians. He knew. He wrote it down. Then he did it anyway, more brutally than anyone before him, and dared the people to cry.
And the savings? Nigerians were promised schools, hospitals and roads. In July 2026 his own Finance Minister, Taiwo Oyedele, admitted to Reuters that the money had been swallowed by debt servicing. The people bled. The creditors feasted. The colony smiled.
He knew it was cruel. He wrote it down. Then he did it anyway.
THE JESTERS OF ASO ROCK
Every tyranny needs clowns, and this court is overflowing with them.
When the Catholic Bishops of Nigeria walked into Aso Rock on 28 July 2026 and told the President the nation was bleeding, Cardinal Onaiyekan reported that the President replied that the nation was not bleeding and the economy was fine. Not bleeding. Tell that to the mother in Maiduguri burying her son. Tell that to the father in Ogbomoso who sold his motorcycle to pay school fees. Tell that to the young man in Aba who now calls the Sahara desert a better option than his own country.
And when the bishops spoke truth, the jesters did not fix the wound. They attacked the priests.
In August 2025, standing in Brazil before the world, the President announced that corruption had been eliminated in Nigeria. Months later Transparency International scored Nigeria 26 out of 100, 142nd of 182 nations. The joke told itself.
The jesters write essays about growth figures inflated by a rebased economy, as if a hungry man can boil a percentage and feed his children with a chart. They are not spokesmen. They are court entertainers paid to make the king laugh while the kingdom starves.
A hungry man cannot boil a percentage.
TREASON: THE CRIME OF BEING HUNGRY
If you want to know the soul of a government, do not watch it when the people clap. Watch it when the people cry.
In August 2024 hungry Nigerians took to the streets under #EndBadGovernance. The colony answered with teargas and live rounds, and human rights organisations reported protesters killed across several states.
Then came the act that should forever stain this administration. In November 2024, children were dragged into a Federal High Court in Abuja and charged with offences including treason. Children. Emaciated, exhausted, some collapsing in the dock before cameras that carried the shame to every corner of the earth.
Treason. For asking for bread.
Only when the nation rose in disgust did the charges disappear. But a government that once looked at starving children and saw enemies of the state has told us everything we need to know. It does not fear hunger. It fears the hungry.
It does not fear hunger. It fears the hungry.
THE GRAVEYARD LEDGER
Let the record speak.
Food inflation at 17.52 per cent in June 2026. Headline inflation at 15.91 per cent and rising again. A minimum wage of 70,000 naira, worth about 47 dollars, a monthly salary that cannot buy a bag of rice and transport to work in the same month. Roughly six in every ten Nigerians counted as poor by the World Bank.
The Tiv farmer in Benue watches his yam barn from a displacement camp. The Fulani herder has lost his cattle to the same bandits who took his neighbour’s daughter. The Ebira graduate in Okene has written a hundred applications into silence. The Onitsha trader’s container rots at the port under duties he can no longer pay. The retired teacher in Ado Ekiti counts her pension and weeps.
While all this happened, the President took delivery of a new Airbus A330 in August 2024. And on 30 May 2026, Major General Rabe Abubakar of the Nigerian Army was abducted. He died in captivity on 13 June. A general. If the colony cannot protect the men who wear its stars, the farmer on the Zamfara road is nothing but a number waiting to be counted among the dead.
THE SECOND TERM FANTASY
Now the jesters are singing again. Second term. Four more years. The governor of the colony speaks of meeting his opponents in the field as though the presidency were a wrestling match whose result is already in his pocket.
Let them sing. The song will end at dawn.
Governors do not own votes. In 2023 the APC held Lagos, its fortress since 1999, and still lost the presidential vote in Lagos. The governors now stampeded into the ruling party bring sirens, banners and convoys. They cannot bring the thumb of a starving man.
The arithmetic is merciless. Three Southern candidates will tear one Southern electorate into pieces, while the North, which has buried more of its children to bandits and insurgents than any other region, has only one of its sons on the ballot, the ADC candidate, Atiku Abubakar. A President whose survival depends on the North has spent three years giving the North every reason to reject him.
And the rigging dream? The Electoral Act 2026 now makes electronic transmission of results mandatory. The Nigerian voter of 2027 is not the voter of 2023. He has learnt. He will vote, he will wait, he will watch, and he will guard his result sheet like the life of his child. Because it is.
Governors bring convoys. They cannot bring the thumb of a starving man.
THE JOKE IS OVER
Every court jester eventually tells one joke too many. The final joke of this colony is the belief that Nigerians, beaten with teargas, starved by policy, insulted by spokesmen, and threatened with treason for hunger, will queue on 16 January 2027 to ask for more.
No people on earth vote for their own chains twice.
The laughter in Aso Rock is growing louder because it is growing nervous. The jesters can feel the silence in the markets, in the motor parks, in the mosques and in the churches. It is not the silence of surrender. It is the silence of a people taking aim.
On 16 January 2027 the natives will stop being the audience. They will become the executioners of this regime’s ambition, with nothing but the ballot. And the colony of jesters will discover that the people it made to cry have saved the last laugh for themselves.
122 days remain.
#ColonyOfJesters #Atiku2027 #16January2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
16 September 2026
