By Erasmus Ikhide
AS Nigeria navigates one of the most precarious chapters in its democratic history, the optics of governance have become as critical as the policies themselves.
Currently, the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appears to be at a crossroads of priorities. While the ambitious 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway is being touted as a landmark achievement, a stark reality remains: you cannot drive a nation toward prosperity on a coastal road if the engines of industry are dead and the drivers are being slaughtered in the hinterlands.
To salvage the “Renewed Hope” mandate before the 2027 reckoning, the President must perform a radical strategic surgery. He must prune his agenda down to two non-negotiable pillars: Total Electricity Liberalization and Security Architecture Restructuring.
The Concrete Paradox: Asphalt vs. Electrons
The Coastal Highway, with its staggering ₦15 trillion price tag, is an engineering marvel but an economic distraction. In a nation where existing arterial roads are dilipidating into death traps, the decision to break new ground on a luxury coastal route feels less like development and more like a disconnect from the grassroots reality.
Nigeria does not suffer from a lack of roads as much as it suffers from a lack of energy. With the power sector requiring roughly $10 billion annually to exit its coma, the capital sunk into the coastal sands could have been the seed money for a decentralized, AI-driven energy revolution.
Without stable power, the “Eldorado” being painted by the administration’s media machinery remains a landscape of limitless darkness.
The Security Deficit: Beyond the Rhetoric
While the President’s advisers, led by figures like Bayo Onanuga, maintain a steady stream of sanctimonious grandstanding, the statistics on the ground tell a bloodier story. The daily slaughter of citizens by terrorists is not a perception problem that can be solved with media bile or clever press releases; it is a structural failure.
The current security architecture is archaic, reactive, and overstretched. An honest advisor would tell the President that 2027 will not be decided by how many kilometers of concrete were poured in Lagos, but by whether a farmer in the Middle Belt and other regions of the country can go to bed without the fear of being hacked to death.
The President must move beyond traditional policing and embrace a techno-sovereign security blueprint—integrating cybernetic grids and advanced intelligence—to curb the ravaging pillaging currently overwhelming the country.
The Danger of the “Yes-Men”
A leader is only as good as the truth he is willing to hear. The current advisory circle seems more interested in placating him with lies and manufacturing a false state of national bliss than in offering the honest truth.
When media aides resort to on-your-face impunity and vainglorious self-celebration while the national grid collapses and communal violence escalates, they are not protecting the President; they are insulating him from the very signals he needs to survive politically. This culture of sycophancy is the fastest route to outright rejection at the polls.
The 2027 Ultimatum: Retool or Retire
President Tinubu still has a window to pivot. If his mission is truly to develop the country rather than oversee a period of rapid pillaging, he must retool his cabinet and his focus.
The mandate is simple:
Switch the lights on and redirect the massive capital outlays from vanity projects to the urgent stabilization of the energy value chain. The President must stop the bloodshed and move from rhetoric to a total, technology-led restructuring of the security forces.
Anything outside these two priorities is mere noise. The President must realize that the Nigerian people cannot eat asphalt, and they cannot see the progress his aides describe in the dark. To ignore the twin crises of power and security is to invite a legacy of failure. The time to choose between grandiosity and governance is now.
Erasmus Ikhide contributed this piece via: ikhideluckyerasmus@gmail.com