I headed out on a hot afternoon to the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria. Unfortunately for me, the President was using the same route I was driving. Yes, I said unfortunately.
Before I could realise what was happening, I saw military trucks on the popular Aso Drive, forming a blockade way ahead of his passage. Policemen, soldiers, and other paramilitary forces, fully armed, stood guard on the roads to make sure there was no vehicular movement.
I was frustrated, delayed, and arrived at my destination really late, after a very long convoy had finally passed.
Nobody was allowed anywhere near that road while it happened. No shouting, no getting close enough to be seen or heard at all. Just soldiers, barricades, and the distance the state puts between itself and the people it is supposed to be serving.
This kind of show of force can, perhaps, be excused for a president, but have you ever stood by a Nigerian roadside while the convoy of a governor, a minister, a senator, or now, shockingly, even a deputy governor or a director or head of some agency, trails the road with its own heavy convoy? You hear the sirens first. Then the outriders on motorcycles. Then the long line of SUVs with tinted glass.
The Toyota Land Cruisers, the Prados, the Lexus LX570s and LX600s, the Hiluxes running escort, the G-Wagons. Then the ambulances, the fire trucks, sometimes an armoured tank, and finally the security truck at the rear, like a period at the end of a sentence.
Every head turns. Everyone is impressed by this movement.
Even the ground is not left out. On Nigeria’s untarred roads, the dust seems impressed too. You know it by the way it settles afterward. Slower than it rose.
But not everyone stays quiet while the convoy passes.
In Lagos, Nigeria, outside the Central Mosque, one man in the crowd found the courage, or the desperation, to shout what many were feeling as President Tinubu’s convoy went by:
“Ebi n pa wa o!” — We are hungry.
(Tribune Online, June 2026: tribuneonlineng.com/nigerians-not-hungry-really-mr-onanuga)
It was one voice, but it travelled further than the sirens. The clip went round the country in hours, because it said, in three words, what millions were already carrying.
Even the men inside these convoys know it. Speaking at the National Institute for Security Studies graduation ceremony on the 9th of December, 2023, Vice President Kashim Shettima said something few in his position are honest enough to say out loud:
“But now as we cruise around in our bulletproof cars, you will see contempt palpably glaring in the eyes of the poor.”
(Kashim Shettima, NISS Graduation Address, 9 December 2023: youtu.be/gXFEM3I1RJk, 1:17:48–1:17:57)
Coming from the second-highest office in the land, that is not a small thing to admit. It means the people inside the convoy can see the anger on the faces outside it. They just keep driving.
Nigerians are angry, a lot of them are not angry that this is an extravagant cost on government coffers, or that so much security and protection is spent on just one VIP.
Instead, many are angry that they are not the ones sitting in that SUV, blasting the chilling AC at “mortuary standard.”
We do not merely tolerate that spectacle in this country.
We expect it.
A governor who moves through his state with a lean convoy is not admired for restraint. He is quietly investigated by rumour.
A senator or government official who declines to make a “grand donation” at a wedding or a burial is not praised for modesty either.
Instead, people murmur after he leaves the hall, wondering if things are hard for him, or calling him stingy outright.
We have built, without quite meaning to, a culture where the size of your convoy is treated as a referendum on the size of your relevance.
And here is the honest, uncomfortable question underneath it: how many of us, given the chance, would choose the rickety tricycle over the convoy of SUVs? Truly?
If we are honest, not performing humility for an essay but actually honest, I think few of us can say with certainty that we would drive the modest car once we reached that level of power.
And I think we already know what would happen to the few who tried.
Family would call. Not to celebrate the restraint, but to ask if something was wrong– “How far, dem never give you budget?” — they will ask.
Friends would gently suggest that a man in his position
“should not be suffering.”
Somewhere, a well-meaning aunt would be praying, quite sincerely, that he “locates” a contract, or “settles well” from one allocation or another so she gets a slice of the “national cake.”
No wonder you see lavish, very expensive thanksgiving ceremonies in worship houses the moment someone is appointed into any government office at all.
This is the part I think we get wrong when we talk about corruption in Nigeria.
We talk about it as though it is purely a supply problem, bad men seizing what does not belong to them.
We rarely talk about the demand side.
The society that raised the bar so high that restraint itself now reads as suspicious.
The pressure is not only on the politician to acquire.
It is on him not to disappoint the people around him by becoming wealthy and not staying modest.
Corruption, in a strange and quietly heartbreaking way, is sometimes less a personal failure of character than a transaction society itself has priced in.
Here is a number worth sitting with.
In August 2026, Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori disclosed his own official salary in public:
“My salary is ₦503,000 today in Delta State. Permanent Secretaries earn more than the governor; their salary is ₦900,000, while mine is ₦503,000.”
(Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, Asaba, August 2026)
At the pump price of petrol as I write this, roughly ₦1,300 per litre, that ₦503,000 salary buys about 387 litres of fuel. A large SUV of the kind used in these convoys, a Land Cruiser or a Prado, averages somewhere around 6 kilometres per litre in real city driving, with the AC running and the engine often just idling in traffic. That means the governor’s entire monthly salary, on paper, could fuel one SUV for roughly 2,300 kilometres. That is his whole salary for just one car.
Now picture the actual convoy.
Not one SUV, but twenty, sometimes thirty, moving together, engines running, air conditioning on, covering hundreds of kilometres in a single day between one commissioning event and the next.
If a convoy of 25 vehicles covers even 150 kilometres in a day, that is roughly 625 litres of fuel burned before sunset, worth over ₦800,000 in a single day.
More than his entire month’s salary, spent on fuel alone. This is even before you count the drivers, the security details, the maintenance, or the escorts on motorcycles. Multiply that across a year of commissioning ceremonies, campaign stops, and official visits, and you are looking at a fuel bill that runs into hundreds of millions of naira, dwarfing what the man at the centre of the convoy is even paid to hold that office in the first place. The salary was never the point. The convoy was always the real economy, and the sad part is, you do not need to wait until someone becomes a governor or a minister to see this pattern.
You can already see it fully formed in student politics, years before any of us hold “real power or real money.”
Watch a Nigerian student union election closely, and you will notice something uncomfortable. The same instincts that drive a senator to donate millions at a wedding, or a governor to arrive somewhere in a thirty-car convoy, already exist in a twenty-year-old contesting for SUG president.
The aspirant who suddenly finds a car for the campaign season, when nobody remembers them owning one before.
The candidate who starts “settling” senior student leaders and campus influencers with money, data, and small gifts, long before they settle their actual manifesto.
The way a win is followed almost immediately by a change in appearance, in company, in the way people are expected to approach you.
We do not learn this behaviour from nowhere.
We inherit it, the same way we inherited the country’s politics, by watching it happen around us since childhood and quietly absorbing what it teaches about how power is supposed to look.
Long before we are old enough to run for anything real, we have already learned the grammar of it. Impress before you are questioned. Perform wealth before you are trusted. Arrive in something bigger than you actually are.
I know this because I was not immune to it either, not as a critic on the sidelines, and not even fully as a leader myself.
I remember being on the other side of this, before I understood it. Long before I became a student leader, I was one of the students on the sidelines, laughing.
I remember watching people contest for SUG positions in my early university days, and my colleagues and I would reduce their seriousness to what they wore.
“He dey wear slippers?”
we would say, and laugh.
“He dey use Android like you and me”
someone would add, and that, somehow, was meant to be the punchline.
As though a leader’s worth could be measured in the brand of the phone in his pocket.
I remember, more than once, watching a sitting SUG President trek across campus under the scorching sun of the ancient Benin City, and my colleagues, who were also trekking on that same road and under the same conditions provided by the scorching sun and heat, would laugh about it. Not with malice, just the careless laughter of people who did not yet know what student leadership actually costs.
We looked at ordinary young men and women, still finding their feet, and quietly graded them against a standard borrowed from the very political culture we claimed to despise.
It was only after I entered the system myself- school level, national level, continental level, now global- that I understood something humbling.
Those guys we laughed at were just normal students like us doing something most of us were too comfortable to attempt.
Now, from inside the system, I see the same perception but from the opposite side.
The same casual, careless judgment. The same assumption that a title must come with a certain look, a certain car, a certain effortless wealth.
Otherwise, something must be wrong with you, or worse, something must be wrong with your leadership. Some students even say you are not fit to lead if you “no guide”
The electioneering culture, even at student level, mirrors the national sickness almost exactly.
Long before an aspirant gets anywhere near their electorate, they are spending, not campaigning, spending.
Gifting wine and drinks to so-called “leaders” whose blessing is treated as a prerequisite for legitimacy.
Sending gifts to graduated ‘seniors’ whose goodwill can supposedly swing a bloc of votes. By the time actual campaigning to the actual electorate begins, the aspirant’s resources, and sometimes their dignity, are already thin.
Some, to compensate, borrow or arrange a flashy ride for the campaign period alone, because in our political imagination, wealth reads as credibility, and modesty reads as weakness.
It is a rhetoric we know well in the national space too: the quiet, recurring insistence from the powerful that their wealth is proof of their innocence.
One day to President Tinubu’s inauguration, at the Inter-Denominational Church Service held at the National Christian Centre in Abuja, First Lady Senator Oluremi Tinubu stood before the country and said:
“God has blessed my family, we don’t need the wealth of Nigeria to survive but to do the right thing.”
(Senator Oluremi Tinubu, National Christian Centre, Abuja, May 28, 2023. Source: Channels TV)
She went on to promise that her husband’s administration would use public resources properly and set the country on the right path.
Musician B-Red, son of Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke and cousin to Davido, popular afrobeats artiste, said something even more direct in an interview about his family’s political future:
“If my dad, Governor Ademola Adeleke, becomes the President of Nigeria, things will improve drastically. We don’t need politics for money; we have been rich for a long time. My family is only in politics to help.”
(B-Red, interview on his family’s political trajectory)
He added that he would not personally wish the presidency on his father, because of the stress and pressure tied to the office. Even the people closest to power admit what it costs. They just don’t admit what it costs the rest of us.
The subtext of both quotes, intentional or not, is unmistakable.
We are already rich, so trust us with your money.
You hear a version of that same logic across the entertainment and political elite alike: the flaunting of jets and convoys not as excess, but as a kind of alibi.
“Look how much I already have. Why would I need yours?”
There is a song by LadiPOE, featuring Buju, called “Feeling,” where one of the lyrical lines is about a man throwing himself a party and then acting surprised when the guests arrive. It is a boastful, carefree record about self-celebration, but I cannot listen to it anymore without thinking of our governors, senators, ministers, and now, student leaders.
The ones who quietly organise award ceremonies, invite the press, and emerge with a plaque crowning themselves “Governor of the Year,” as if the honour descended from heaven rather than from their own events committee or the student leader who obstructs the planning of a student event just because he/she wants a plaque and recognition from the organizers.
Throw yourself a party. Act surprised. It could have been written for our political calendar.
That habit of manufacturing your own image has a smaller, quieter cousin at the student level, and I meet it constantly, in different forms.
There are the letters.
The requests for sponsorships.
Student bodies, individuals, and entire associations reach out with the quiet assumption that because I hold a title, I must also hold some money in reserve.
That leadership, at whatever level, comes with a stipend I can simply redirect toward their needs.
This is not so different from what happens in the political landscape that we grew up watching and condemning, where government officials sponsor events they have no real stake in, purely to be announced as headline sponsor, purely to bank goodwill with an influential organiser ahead of the next election season, and it shows in where student leaders actually spend their access–the echo chambers of politicians.
Walk into the waiting rooms of government officials, the National Assembly, a minister’s office, a commissioner’s reception, and you will find them littered with student leaders, sitting in rows, wearing the branded caps of different associations, holding brown envelopes.
Open one of those envelopes, and you will rarely find a proposal for research funding, a partnership framework, a policy suggestion, an advocacy paper, or even a simple request for a travel grant to attend a scientific or academic conference.
Instead, what is written inside is often a demand for cash, in exchange for an endorsement, an award, a photograph, or a title.
Such a waste of access!
Rooms that could hold real conversations about policy, research, or the future of an entire student body, reduced to a queue for handouts, and the official on the other side of that desk rarely resists it.
He is not thinking about the paper he never received. He is thinking about the photo op, especially with students, the picture that will make the local pages and his social media handle, making him look like a man of the people.
He is thinking about the votes he hopes that cap in the room can deliver to him, and the association it represents, when election season comes.
I remember, in my first year at the University of Benin, older colleagues told us that the sitting SUG president and members of his executive council each had official vehicles.
We believed it completely. It was only after some of us got into the system ourselves that we discovered it was a lie– one more myth passed down to make the office look bigger than it actually was, the same way the older political class dresses up its own excess.
If a rumor like that can survive years of retelling among students who have never seen the car in question, imagine how much of what we admire in politics at every level is built the same way, on stories nobody has bothered to check.
For a few of us, we did not enter this system because of that perception, or because we wanted to become what we assumed leaders were supposed to look like.
We entered because we wanted to change the system itself. I know I have changed, and I am still changing, across every organisation I have led in, including in the non-profit world.
That kind of change is slow and often invisible, but it is the only kind that matters.
I need to be honest here too.
Not every student leader in Nigeria behaves this way, and not every government official either.
There are aspirants who campaign on ideas and nothing else, and there are officials who genuinely want to see young people build something real. This essay is not about them.
It is about a pattern large enough, and normal enough, that most of us can recognise it immediately without needing an example explained.
If I could ask anything of the government officials who do want to support student leadership, it would be this.
Sponsor a research grant.
Fund a delegation to an academic or scientific conference.
Back a genuine policy proposal or an advocacy campaign with actual resources, not just a photo opportunity.
Support the partnerships that outlive an administration, not the events that only last as long as the cameras are rolling.
That is the kind of sponsorship that changes a country.
A brown envelope changes nothing except who eats next.
And to student leaders, slow down!
Slow down on the perception we are performing for and the one we are chasing.
Student leaders should not be ashamed to turn down financial requests.
Say no when you do not have it.
I am not saying do not help.
Help, but do not buy students a plate of rice and turkey in public and then go home to eat garri and groundnut in private.
That gap between the image and the reality is exactly what we claim to condemn on the bigger political stage, and a lot of us have not yet recognised that we are already standing inside it.
This reality should cause a kind of national shockwave, because it explains more about this country than we like to admit. A vast majority of Nigeria’s political leaders who schooled in Nigerian institutions were once student leaders themselves.
The values were learned then, in SUG offices and departmental unions and faculty associations, long before any of them ever stood behind a podium with a national flag.
What we tolerate, and reward in ourselves now is simply what we will inherit as a country later, on a bigger stage, with higher stakes.
If you are a student leader reading this, I want you to know the financial strain you feel is not a sign you are doing it wrong.
It is a sign of how much you are carrying inside a value system inherited from a bigger, older sickness. One where restraint looks suspicious, self-celebration looks like leadership, and generosity is confused with governance.
None of that was built by us. We only grew up inside it, laughing at slippers and Android phones, before it turned around and started grading us the same way.
There is a generational reality show in the Nigerian Leadership system.
We call our politicians corrupt from a distance, the way this current crop of politicians and leaders called the military rulers of their time as students- corrupt- but they have always been closer than that.
They are the real “Big Brother Naija” and the current set of student politicians/leaders, the housemates.
Whether we admit it or not, we have been studying them since before we knew we were being taught.
The real work now is learning to unlearn the lesson.