This is a challenging and perilous time for Nigerians. At home. Abroad. Nowhere is safe. Nowhere offers comfort. The homeland is haunted by violence. The diaspora faces a different cruelty; one marked by alienation, racism, and, sometimes, death. 

If our citizens aren’t taking their own lives, they are being murdered. In mid-March, the Punch newspaper reported a grim story: “A woman, yet to be identified, jumped from the Third Mainland Bridge into the water by the UNILAG waterfront. It happened around 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday”. She was one of many citizens who had taken their own lives. Who died wrongfully, as the irreplaceable Fela Kuti sang in Army Arrangement. 

A few days ago, another citizen died. He was 77. His name? Olatunji Bolaji. Uber driver. Gunned down in Philadelphia. Far from home. Far from rest. A fellow citizen in the autumn of his life. He should have been enjoying retirement. Instead, he was grinding for survival in a foreign land. Imagine that. A man of that age should be relaxing. Rocking chair. Sunlighting. Playing with the grandchildren. Tending the family. But he was eking out a living. Driving strangers around the streets of Philly. Hoping for tips. Dodging bullets. Then one day, death found him through bullets. In a land that promised the American dream.

His story is not unique. It is very Nigerian.

It is the story of citizens who work themselves into the grave. Home offers no dream. Homeland offers no peace. Abroad offers no safety. Fellow citizens are hunted down here. Remember Bokkos. Compatriots haunted there and everywhere. And the reason? Rulers loot, citizens die; or pay the price abroad in sweat, in tears, and too often, in blood. This is not hyperbole. It is the truth. Our rulers loot. They pillage the public treasury. They drain the commonwealth. While they toast champagne in Dubai, our compatriots sweat in Baltimore. While their children shop in Harrods, our citizens mop floors in Tesco and Sainsbury’s. While they fly private jets to London, Madrid, and elsewhere to watch the matches of their beloved football clubs, our elderly citizens drive cabs in New York.

Ours is a country of engineered despair. A carefully constructed machinery of theft, grinding dreams into dust. Our country is no longer a country, it is a crime scene dressed as a republic. While the powerful elites gorge on stolen wealth under the sun, poor citizens are cast into exile where they

wander from one winter to many winters, burdened by the cold, loneliness, and the aches of broken dreams; where they remain exiles from the universe of human dignity and victims of racial atrocities.

This is the Nigerian tragedy. 

The world watches our citizens flee our country in droves. At airports. Through the desert. On Mediterranean boats. They are the new boat people. Some make it. Some sink. Some die gasping for air. Mothers clutching babies. Fathers praying with dry lips. Our country has no shame. No remorse. No plan. Pa Bolaji did not flee in a boat. He flew. Legally. But he still died trying to live. Killed by a gunman. Maybe a stranger. Maybe not. But the real culprits wear agbadas, Senators and Babanrigas. Some wear long red caps. Others wear bespoke beaded caps. They bear titles. “Honourable.” “Excellency.” “Distinguished”. The real killers are not in Philadelphia. They’re in Abuja. They remind me of Shahrazad’s tale in the Arabian Nights, “The Envious and the Envied”. A demon spares a man’s life but makes him an ape. He lives, though cursed. But our rulers? They seem not spared. Not merely transformed. They walk like ghouls, dead to conscience, alive only to greed.

Let’s not be polite. Let’s not pretend. Our country kills its own. Not only with knives, but with hunger. Not only with bullets, but with bad policies. Not only with bombs, but with broken promises. The unnamed lady who jumped into the Lagos lagoon and Pa Bolaji are symbols. Mirrors. They reflect what our country has done to the citizens. Stripped of dignity. Stripped of comfort. Forced to give up on life after everything fails. Forced to take own life. Forced to hustle at seventy-seven. Dead in the public. Dead with nothing in the purse but a phone, a few Naira. Or killed with nothing in the pocket but a few dollars. Hope: the most dangerous pill citizens are meant to swallow daily. Our citizens wake up with it. They sleep with it. They carry it like a cross to Golgotha. They hope the country will change for the better. Hoping they survive one more day. Hoping they don’t end up like the unnamed lady or Pa Bolaji. Many do. But many do not.

Many Nigerians in Italy clean toilets. Selling oranges in Libya. Doing warehouse shifts in London. Babysitting in Dubai. All of them victims. Victims of a country that doesn’t care. A government that only remembers its citizens during elections. And forgets them at the counting table. Our citizens abroad are treated like animals. Chased from jobs. Denied visas. Harassed by police. Beaten by racists. Sometimes killed. But the looters back home stay silent. They don’t care. Their passports are diplomatic. Their cars are bulletproof. Their children are foreign-born. Our citizens are mere statistics to them. They don’t see Pa Bolaji as a father. A husband. A grandfather. They see a headline. A footnote. Another citizen gone. 

One less citizen to fear. But I see him. I see the millions like him. Old men in supermarkets stacking shelves. Elderly women cooking in nursing homes. Young men working triple shifts. Students skipping meals. All of them are our compatriots . They are all struggling. They carry the flag in their pockets. But it burns in their hearts. Yet, they send money home. In 2024 alone, diaspora remittances to our country stood at $20.98B billion. Remittances. A lifeline to families back at home. Still, they get nothing in return. No embassy support. No respect. Not even words of condolences when they die or are killed. They’re invisible. Like Pa Bolaji. Until they’re dead.

Then, Abike Dabiri writes eulogies. She tweets condolences. If she doesn’t, the Very Dark Man sets up the ring light and camera to call attention to the fate of Citizen X. Netizens hashtag “JusticeForCitizenX.” Then, they move on. Until the next citizen dies. Somewhere else. For something else. And the cycle continues unabated.

Our rulers loot. We die. Even at home, death stalks us. If you’re not killed by hunger, you’re killed by herdsmen. If not by kidnappers, then by bad roads. Or by bandits and terrorists. Or by hospital negligence. Or by the police. Or the army. Or ritualists. Or cultists. Or by poverty. Remember the young husband whose pregnant wife died in his arms because he couldn’t pay the fees demanded by doctors. Homeland is a graveyard. Citizens bury their dreams there. They bury potentials. They bury children. Our country offers no protection. No healthcare. No jobs. No safety. Just prayers. Just pain. And yet, our rulers smile while appearing on TV. They blame past governments. They blame God, putting every death which results from their negligence as an act of God. But never themselves. Never the system. Never their greed.

Our country has oil. Our country has gold, land, the sun and the sea. But our citizens cannot feed. They don’t enjoy power. They don’t have hope. Citizens die slowly. Some die quickly. Newspapers’ obituaries now read, “s/he died after a brief illness”. And still, our rulers loot. They sign humongous budgets. Award bogus contracts to themselves. Build roads to nowhere. Declare fake GDP growth. Boast of “lifting people out of poverty.” All lies. On the ground, the truth walks barefoot. Today in our villages and towns, children go hungry. In the cities, youth wander jobless.

 In the slums, mothers give birth in darkness. Unlucky ones die in darkness. The future looks away. Ashamed. There’s no plan. No direction. Just survival. Citizens have mastered endurance. But endurance is not a virtue. It is a wound dressed as a medal. Citizens shouldn’t have to suffer to prove our strength. They should live. Simply live. Like other citizens of the world. With dignity. With comfort. With peace. But our rulers have made that impossible. Lucky Dube, the late reggae icon, sang about rulers building prisons, not schools. He was mistaken. Here, they build flyovers to nowhere, not schools. They donate what they stole from the commonwealth to book launches of their “Comrades -At- Loot”, not hospitals. They arm thugs, not police. They empower criminals, not citizens. They fly abroad for medicals, while the masses die at home.

And when citizens complain? They send soldiers. When citizens protest? They shoot them. When citizens cry out? They mock them. Hear Akpabio: “Let them protest, let us be eating”. What a disparaging way of mocking citizens who called attention to their conditions. But our citizens will not stop speaking. They will name every injustice. They will remember every victim. They will tell the world what it means to be citizens of Nigeria. Not just a citizen, but a survivor.

The unnamed lady would not have taken her life. Pa Bolaji should not have died the way he did. They deserved more. They deserved our country. A better country they probably dreamt of as youngsters. The country our citizens dream of still. Dreams don’t feed the hungry. They don’t stop flying bullets. Our citizens must rise to change their lot at home before the desperate journey abroad ends in death without dignity. 

The time to act is now. Not just with protests. But with strategy. With resistance. With voting. With solidarity. With truth. Citizens must hold the rulers and the looters accountable. In the courts. In the streets. In their memories. They must say their names. Call out their thefts. Expose their lies. Because every time they loot, someone like the pregnant wife of the citizen who couldn’t afford the consultation fees demanded by doctors dies. And the next time, it could be you. Or me. Or someone we love.

Let that sink in.

Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja