The Audacity of Nigerian Leaders to Ask for Patience: How Long Is Long Enough?

Patience Is Not a Governance Strategy

There is a particular kind of boldness that only Nigerian politicians possess. It is not the boldness of vision. It is not the boldness of accountability. It is the breathtaking, jaw dropping boldness of a man who has done absolutely nothing, yet looks you in the eye and says, “Give us time.”

Time for what, exactly?

Nigeria turned 64 in 2024. Sixty four years of independence. Sixty four years of oil wealth. Sixty four years of patient, long suffering citizens who have buried their frustrations under prayers, hustle and the unshakable Nigerian spirit. And still, at every turn, the answer from the top is the same: wait.

The audacity is not just remarkable. It is almost impressive.

We Have Heard This Before, Word for Word

Cast your mind back. Every administration that has walked through Aso Rock has carried the same script. The words change slightly but the music is always the same.

“We met an empty treasury.”

“The previous government destroyed everything.”

“We are working. The results will come.”

“Nigerians are resilient people.”

That last one is the most insulting. Resilience has become a compliment used to normalize suffering. When a government calls its people resilient, what it is really saying is: we are glad you can survive what we refuse to fix.

Nigerians are not resilient because they choose to be. They are resilient because the alternative is despair. And their leaders know this, which is exactly why the ask for patience never stops coming.

The Arithmetic of Patience Does Not Add Up

Let us do some simple math.

A Nigerian child born the day Olusegun Obasanjo returned to power in 1999 is in their mid twenties today. That child has lived their entire conscious life under the democracy that was supposed to fix everything. They have never known stable electricity. They went to underfunded schools. They graduated into a job market that does not want them. They watched the naira lose value so aggressively that their savings became a joke.

And today, a politician stands before that same young person and says: be patient.

Patient for what? They have already given their entire youth to the waiting room of Nigerian governance. At what point does patience become something darker? At what point does it become surrender?

Subsidy Removal, Naira Freefall and the New Suffering

The current dispensation came in with a bang. “Subsidy is gone” was not a whisper. It was announced like a victory, a bold economic move that was supposed to signal a new seriousness about governance.

What followed was not reform. What followed was a cost of living catastrophe that hit the poorest Nigerians hardest and fastest. Fuel prices exploded. Transport costs doubled. Food prices climbed so aggressively that the average market visit became an exercise in grief.

The naira, already wounded, collapsed further. Businesses shut down. Families recalibrated their entire existence around survival.

And the message from above? This is necessary pain. Stay the course. Be patient.

Necessary pain is a phrase that sounds reasonable in an economics textbook. It sounds very different at 5am in a market in Kano or a bus stop in Oshodi where a woman is calculating whether she can afford both rent and food this month. Spoiler: she cannot afford both.

The Political Class Lives Outside the Consequences

Here is what makes the patience request so deeply offensive.

The people asking for patience are not experiencing what patience costs. Nigerian senators earn some of the highest legislative salaries in the world relative to their country’s per capita income. Government officials move in convoys, live in estates with their own power supply, send their children to schools abroad and access healthcare in London while public hospitals at home run out of gloves.

They are not waiting with you. They are not patient with you. They are comfortable while asking you to endure.

That is not leadership. That is audacity dressed in an agbada.

What Patience Has Cost Nigeria

While Nigeria has been busy being patient, things have been moving in the wrong direction.

Brain drain has accelerated into a full blown exodus. Doctors, engineers, nurses, teachers and young professionals are leaving in numbers that should terrify any serious government. They are not leaving because they do not love Nigeria. They are leaving because Nigeria’s leadership has made it clear that merit, hardwork and sacrifice are not enough to build a decent life at home.

Infrastructure that should have been sorted decades ago remains a daily embarrassment. Roads that kill. Airports that shame. Railways that promise and disappear. Power that exists mostly as a concept.

Security has deteriorated across regions. Farmers cannot farm. Travelers cannot travel without calculating risk. Entire communities live under the shadow of violence that the state has proven unable or unwilling to contain.

This is what patience has produced. More of the same, with better branding.

The Citizen’s Verdict

There is a quiet verdict being delivered by ordinary Nigerians right now. It is not being delivered at the ballot box, though it should be. It is being delivered in choices.

The choice to leave the country. The choice to stop voting. The choice to build personal solutions to public problems, buying generators, digging boreholes, hiring private security and enrolling children in private schools.

Every one of those private solutions is a vote of no confidence in the state. Every generator humming in a Nigerian compound is a citizen saying, loudly and clearly: I have stopped waiting.

The leaders have not noticed. Or perhaps they have noticed and simply do not care.

How Long Is Long Enough?

So back to the question the headline dared to ask.

How long is long enough?

The honest answer is that we passed “long enough” a long time ago. We passed it when children started sitting on the floor in public schools. We passed it when a doctor’s salary could not pay rent in the city where the doctor works. We passed it when “I want to leave this country” stopped being a dramatic statement and became a practical life plan for millions of young Nigerians.

Patience is a virtue. But it is not a substitute for governance.

Nigerian leaders do not need more patience from their citizens. They need more accountability to them. They need budgets that reflect the people’s reality. They need consequences for failure. They need to understand that the social contract is not a blank check drawn on the goodwill of a suffering population.

The audacity to ask for patience is one thing.

The audacity to have done so little to deserve it is another thing entirely.

Nigeria is waiting. But Nigeria is also watching. And one day, sooner than the political class imagines, the waiting will be over.

Whether that ending is hopeful or catastrophic depends entirely on whether anyone in power is paying attention.

– Bello Omobolaji, Abuja