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If there would be a time Nigeria must restructure, that time is NOW. Or it risks being dragged down by institutionalised laziness. Surely, there are moments in the life of a nation when neutrality becomes betrayal and caution becomes cowardice. Nigeria has crossed that line.
What we are witnessing today is not simply bad governance or uneven development; it is a national suicide pact, sustained by denial, sentiment, and a fiscal structure that rewards failure while punishing productivity.
The investigative work by Colin Bine published in December 2025 should have jolted the country awake. Instead, it has been received with the usual Nigerian shrug, another scandal, another outrage, another week. Yet Bine’s work is different. Not because it uncovers corruption; Nigeria is numb to that, but because it exposes a pattern of governing philosophy that has metastasised across parts of the country, particularly in the North, and is now threatening the survival of the federation itself.
Colin Bine’s article documents the most damning detail of all: 73 percent of out of school children are in the North, specifically the North-West and North-East. He said this is not a hidden crisis but known for years. Yet, as Bine demonstrates, northern governors have responded not with classrooms but with ceremonies.
Ten billion naira for Hajj seats in Kebbi. Two and a half billion naira for mass weddings in Kano. Billions for Ramadan feeding across multiple states. Billions more for ministries of religious affairs. Fifty-six billion naira in security votes, largely unaccounted for.
All this while schools collapse, teachers flee, and children roam the streets. This is not poverty but plunder dressed as piety.
What Bine reveals is not merely reckless spending. It is a system that has elevated ritual above reason, entitlement above effort, and dependence above development, while using religion, insecurity, and national unity as shields against accountability. This system is dragging Nigeria backward. And if it is not confronted honestly, it will take the entire country down with it.
Every month-end, governors troop to Abuja like clockwork. The pilgrimage is not for ideas, innovation, or performance review. It is for FAAC, federal allocation. No questions asked. No productivity benchmarks required. No consequences for failure. This ritual alone explains much of Nigeria’s stagnation.
When states know that survival is guaranteed regardless of effort, effort becomes irrational. When a government can neglect education, fail to industrialise, mismanage security, and still receive massive federal transfers, reform becomes optional. This is not federalism; it is institutionalised dependency.
The tragedy is not just that some states generate very little internally. It is that they are not compelled to care. Why struggle to build industries, improve taxation, or educate a competitive workforce when oil money will arrive every month regardless?
Colin Bine’s investigation shows what these handouts are spent on: ceremonial generosity, religious bureaucracy, opaque security votes, and symbolic welfare, programmes that pacify but do not empower. Not engines of growth. Not investments in human capital. Not systems that endure.
Nigeria has created a perverse arrangement where economic barrenness carries no penalty. This is not compassion. It is sabotage. Nothing exposes the moral incoherence of Nigeria’s fiscal structure like the VAT regime.
In any rational federation, consumption taxes largely return to where economic activity occurs. In Nigeria, VAT is pooled and redistributed in ways that defy both logic and fairness. States with minimal commercial activity still receive huge shares of VAT generated overwhelmingly by productive regions. This is not redistribution to correct inequality. It is appropriation without contribution.
States that host ports, factories, financial services, and large markets generate the bulk of VAT. Yet states with little commerce still collect comparable sums, then deploy them without accountability, often on non-productive expenditures. This arrangement is fundamentally unjust. It punishes enterprise and rewards indolence. It tells productive states that their effort will be harvested for others, while telling unproductive states that effort is optional.
No nation can survive such a message indefinitely.
This is why fiscal restructuring and resource control provoke near-hysterical opposition from sections of the North. Not because they are unjust, but because they threaten a long-standing comfort zone built on federal rents.
Restructuring would expose realities long buried under oil money: States would have to live closer to what they earn. Education would become a necessity, not a slogan. Waste would become expensive. Failure would finally have consequences.
For a political class that has perfected governance without development, this is terrifying.
It is far easier to invoke “national unity” than to explain why billions are spent on rituals while children remain uneducated. It is easier to accuse others of selfishness than to confront decades of elite failure. But unity that depends on injustice is not unity. It is coercion.
One of the most disturbing insights from Colin Bine’s work is how religion has been transformed from a moral compass into a political alibi. Public funds are poured into pilgrimages, religious ministries, festivals, welfare for converts, ceremonial feeding, and symbolic acts of piety. Meanwhile, the intellectual and economic foundations of society are neglected.
This is not faith. Faith restrains power. What we are seeing is the politicisation of belief, using religion to sanctify irresponsibility and silence criticism.
Questioning these priorities is framed as hostility to faith. Demanding accountability becomes sacrilege. And so budgets are shielded by sanctimony. But no religion commands leaders to abandon the future. No scripture celebrates ignorance. No moral tradition equates holiness with the destruction of human potential.
What is happening is not devotion. It is elite manipulation of belief to maintain control over an impoverished population.
Even more corrosive than religious profligacy is the culture of security votes, huge sums released to governors without audit, oversight, or transparency.
In a sane system, insecurity would trigger scrutiny. In Nigeria, it triggers larger allocations. This has created a perverse incentive structure where a crisis becomes profitable. Violence justifies secrecy. Failure attracts funding. Peace becomes inconvenient.
As investigations referenced by Bine suggest, insecurity has evolved into a renewable political resource. Ending it would require transparency. Transparency would expose waste. Waste would threaten power. A lot of those in the corridors of power are complicit or see the insecurity as a cash cow. So, the crisis continues.
This is why terrorism is often ethnicised. Why decisive action is resisted. Why excuses are manufactured? Because solving the problem would disrupt a lucrative arrangement.
Nigeria cannot industrialise while subsidising anti-development governance. It cannot compete globally while millions of children are written off as expendable. It cannot preach greatness while operating a federation that rewards laziness and punishes effort.
The consequences are already visible: national insecurity, economic stagnation, electoral volatility, and international embarrassment. The North’s internal crisis spills across the country, affecting everyone.
Yet honest conversation remains taboo. Criticism is muted by fear of being labelled divisive. Silence is preferred to truth. Some prominent citizens have rejected war on terrorists, labeling it as war on the Fulani. One is hard put to wonder why unless this is a tacit confirmation that the Fulani are the terrorists waging war against Nigeria. But silence has not saved Nigeria. It has only deepened the rot.
Colin Bine’s investigation forces a reckoning Nigerians have postponed for too long: this system is broken, unjust, and unsustainable. Nigeria must stop pretending that fiscal restructuring and resource control are theoretical debates. They are survival imperatives. States must be compelled to develop capacity, not cultivate dependency. Contribution must matter. Productivity must count. Handouts must end.
No region has the moral right to drag an entire country down because it refuses to reform. No state should indefinitely consume what it does not earn. No federation survives when laziness is protected by sentiment and enforced by law. Restructuring is not punishment. It is discipline. And discipline is what Nigeria desperately lacks.
Budgets are moral documents. They reveal what leaders truly value when rhetoric is stripped away. Today, too many Nigerian budgets value ritual over reason, ceremony over capacity, appeasement over progress, and survival politics over future building.
Nigeria must decide whether it wants to be a country, or continue as a redistribution racket. The choice is no longer abstract. It is urgent. Restructure, or be dragged down by those who refuse to rise.
History will not negotiate with sentiment. It will not reward excuses. It will only record outcomes.
And time, merciless as ever, is running out.
Wishing all the best of Yuletide!
