Monday April 06, 2026

Tinubu flew to Jos to mourn 28 dead. The airport had no electricity. He stayed ten minutes.

The chairs in the Yakubu Gowon Airport departure lounge are hard plastic. The overhead lights were on. Outside on the tarmac, a plane was waiting with its engines running because there was no time. And inside, mothers and fathers who had spent the week identifying bodies and digging graves sat in those hard plastic chairs and looked at the President of Nigeria.

He had ten minutes.

"You have no light here. I fly out in ten minutes."

At least 28 people were killed when gunmen stormed Angwan Rukuba in Jos North Local Government Area on the night of March 29, shooting indiscriminately into a crowd as Palm Sunday services were ending. Twenty-eight confirmed. Local leaders put the number higher. The Plateau State government imposed a 48-hour curfew. The University of Jos evacuated its hostels. Catholic dioceses across Nigeria moved Easter Vigil to daylight hours because the dark felt too dangerous.

Tinubu didn't reach Jos until Thursday, April 2. Four days after the massacre. And when he got there, he didn't enter the city. He met the families at the airport.

Think about what a bereaved parent sitting in that departure lounge was not saying. Not to the cameras. Not to the officials arranging seats. The thing running underneath everything else, the quiet question that doesn't have anywhere to go. Is this it? This is what we get? They flew here and they're leaving in ten minutes and my child is still in the ground and nothing in this country is going to change because of any of this.

Nigeria's grid has produced 13,000 megawatts of installed capacity and delivered fewer than 5,000 on most days for twenty years.

That fact sits beside those plastic chairs and does everything. It explains why the runway has no navigational aids. It explains why the President couldn't drive forty minutes into the city where people buried their children. It explains why a condolence visit became a logistics problem. It doesn't need commentary. It just needs to be placed right there, next to the grief, so the reader can feel what those families were sitting inside.

The Presidency explained why Tinubu couldn't stay longer. The Jos runway has no navigational aids for night operations. Without lighting infrastructure, takeoffs after dark aren't possible. The Chadian president's bilateral meeting ran long. By the time Tinubu landed, driving into Jos and back before nightfall wasn't feasible. So bereaved families were brought to the airport instead. He consoled them, promised 5,000 AI-enabled cameras for Plateau State, and left.

Ten minutes.

This is the pattern. Not Tinubu's character. Not his schedule. The pattern is what the airport visit made visible in a way that months of policy speeches never could. Nigeria's electricity failure is now so complete, so structurally embedded, that it determines where the President can and cannot go to mourn the dead. Not because of politics. Because of physics. You can't land a plane on a runway you can't see.

Tinubu made this exact promise in 2023. "If I don't give you constant electricity in four years, don't vote for me for a second term." That's the quote. It's been circulating since Thursday, set against the image of him in that departure lounge telling grieving families he has to leave because of the lights. Peter Obi cited it directly in a statement on Saturday. Nigeria now has the lowest per capita electricity consumption in the world. Below 30 percent of the African average.

The Presidency is not wrong that the visit was constrained by logistics. The logistics themselves are the story.

Here's the complication that easy outrage misses. Tinubu didn't create the Yakubu Gowon Airport's darkness. That darkness has a value chain stretching back through every administration since the airport was built. The Transmission Company of Nigeria, the local distribution company, the airport authority, and the generations of officials who signed off on budgets for infrastructure that never arrived. Tinubu stepped into a chair that came pre-loaded with 25 years of electrical failure. He made a promise he should have understood was structural, not just political. And now the structure is embarrassing him in the most public possible way.

None of that changes what the families in that departure lounge experienced. They buried people. They came to the airport to hear their president. He told them there was no light and he had to go.

The historical echo is from Benue State, June 2025. Tinubu visited Benue after attacks killed dozens. He entered the communities, met families, made promises. Those promises are still waiting. The pattern of visits, promises, and return to silence is established. What's new this time is the airport. What's new is that the darkness stopped him at the door before he could even begin.

You already know this feeling. The generator that cuts out exactly when you need it. The PHCN bill that arrives for power that never did. The business decision you couldn't make because you couldn't guarantee the lights. You've been calculating around the darkness for years. On Thursday, so did the President. The difference is that when his calculation failed, he got on a plane. The families in those plastic chairs went back to Angwan Rukuba.