In the United States, China, Brazil, or Singapore, public office is not a lifetime annuity. Former presidents and ministers return to classrooms, write books, or serve on foundations. Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami went back to academia.
Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, taught at MIT Sloan. David Gergen, advisor to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, spent decades at Harvard. Public service there is a passage to modest living and reflection, not endless privilege.
Nigeria offers a brutal contrast. Here, when politicians leave office, they do not retire as citizens. They emerge like crowned princes, strutting the land in private jets or convoys of SUVs, trailed by aides who bow at every command.
They hold no university chairs, write no enduring books, and rarely devote themselves to community service. Instead, they orbit around gossip, deal-making, and consumption.
Where does the money come from? Not from their salaries. No minister’s pay can fund decades of chartered flights, palatial estates, or armored entourages.
Yet Nigeria’s political class sustains such obscene lives while the nation they looted sinks into hunger and despair.
The cruelty is not abstract. Millions of Nigerian children are stunted by malnutrition; millions more wander the streets instead of classrooms — the highest out-of-school population on earth. Our hospitals are warehouses of suffering, without drugs. Elders beg in motor parks. Widows sleep in churchyards. The blind and crippled stretch out bowls under the sun.
What little should have been theirs — the subsidy for food, the budget for clinics, the pension funds — was siphoned into mansions and motorcades.
Nigeria’s retired politicians live not just on stolen money. They live on the stolen bread of widows, the stolen dignity of the crippled, the stolen hope of orphans. They live on the hunger of children who faint in class because their leaders flew away with the meal subsidy.
They live on the unpaid salaries of teachers and the abandoned lives of the mentally challenged roaming our streets. Their wealth is the blood tax of the powerless.
The root is oil. By centralizing petroleum rents in Abuja, Nigeria created a pot that belongs to everyone in theory but to no one in practice. Unlike nations where revenue depends on taxation, ours depends on extraction and sharing. That makes political office the highest-paying investment in the land. Whoever controls office controls rents. Procurement becomes a feeding trough. Leaving office is not retirement; it is coronation.
Meanwhile, citizens are cast aside. Nigeria now bears the title of “poverty capital of the world,” despite its oil riches. We live with sprawling camps of beggars, classrooms without roofs, and hospitals without drugs. The children our politicians invoke in speeches grow up hungry, illiterate, and sick, while those who ruled over them jet off to Dubai for annual medical checkups.
The moral wound is deep. In countries where leaders retire into academia or philanthropy, there is at least the appearance of giving back. In Nigeria, what we see is the opposite: the theft of the weak followed by a life of luxury. It corrodes public trust, deters honest young Nigerians from politics, and poisons faith in democracy itself.
What is to be done? The remedies are not mysteries. Decentralize revenues so states generate and account for their own resources. Enforce post-office asset declarations with real consequences. Make procurement transparent. Reform political financing, so office is not a return-on-investment scheme.
But reforms will not happen unless Nigerians demand them. The essential question every citizen must keep asking is this: How can a retired governor live like a prince when widows in his state are starving?
How can a former minister build castles while the blind and crippled beg for food at roundabouts? If we fail to ask and insist on answers, the cycle will continue — and so will the hunger, poverty, and hopelessness.
History teaches that nations either confront their contradictions or are broken by them. Nigeria’s contradiction is clear: a tiny elite living off the stolen lives of the poor, while the vast majority are trapped in misery. Until this is resolved, no oil revenue, no export boom, and no reform speech will make a difference.
That is why my book is not just a chronicle of grief. It is also a case file. The stories in it — the tears of widows, the hunger of orphans, the cries of the blind and crippled, the despair of our elders — are preserved as evidence. They are recorded so that those who have eaten their fill of the people’s bread will know that we know them, that we remember them, and that history will strip away every hiding place.
But history alone is not enough. If Nigeria’s rulers will not listen, then the world must. With part of the proceeds of this book, I will help fund a lawsuit in the ECOWAS Court of Justice: POOR NIGERIANS v. NIGERIA. It will not be about me recently having successfully sued Nigeria in Suit: BASIL ODILIM ENWEGBARA v. NIGERIA.
So, it will be about the millions whose rights have been trampled by Nigerian politicians, judiciary, public servants, and corporate oil cartels. The crippled beggars vs. retired minister in Dubai; the widows in the churchyards vs. ex-governors in their multimillion castles.
The charges are clear: Nigeria has violated the right to food, the right to health, the right to education, the right to social justice, and the right to dignity enshrined in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which Nigeria itself ratified.
By stealing bread from the mouths of the poor, by looting pensions and abandoning hospitals, by treating classrooms as procurement scams rather than sanctuaries of learning, Nigeria’s rulers have committed violations that rise beyond corruption — they are crimes against humanity itself.
The ECOWAS Court has heard cases before where governments were forced to answer for human rights violations. It can hear this one. And when it does, the world will know how a nation rich in oil condemned its people to beggary so its leaders could live like princes.
Let those who live on stolen bread understand this: their victims are not voiceless. Their cries will echo in the courts of justice. Their suffering will become a legal record. Nigeria’s retired princes may strut today, but they cannot outrun the verdict of history nor silence the testimony of the poor.
Basil Odilim Enwegbara is a public affairs commentator.