Tuesday, 15 July 2026
The Federal Government hikes exam fees on a Sunday letter and cancels the hike by Monday. That reversal takes less than 24 hours. Three days' drive north, in Kajuru and Kachia, families are still waiting for anyone in government to say a word. A village head and six neighbours were taken from their homes before dawn.
The gap between those two speeds runs through the rest of the day too. Nigeria waives N34 trillion in import duty in a single year, more than the entire federal budget. It barely makes a headline outside a Senate hearing about agencies that skipped their own oversight session. Canada publishes a list of 27 African countries getting easier entry, and Nigeria, despite sending more people abroad than almost anywhere else on the continent, isn't on it. A former minister who allegedly forged his way into a federal ministry finally meets a court that checks his paperwork, two years and one resignation after the fact. In Zamfara, a grassroots girls' cricket programme that spent years building without anyone watching wins a global award nobody outside the sport was tracking.
Here's what it means. The Nigerian state has never lacked the capacity to move fast. Monday proved that in under a day. What decides who gets that speed isn't urgency or need. It's who has a platform loud enough to make ignoring the problem cost more than fixing it.
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