Tuesday 31 March, 2026
Palm Sunday, an empty market, and a state that manages crises instead of ending them.
On Sunday night, gunmen on motorcycles entered a market junction in Jos and opened fire. Between 14 and 27 people died, depending on who you ask. The governor visited in an armoured tank. A curfew was imposed. The community defied it to protest.
That's the shape of today. Not crisis. Not failure. System. Nigeria's institutions are all producing exactly the outcomes they are structured to produce. Its security architecture, its economic reform story, its health sector, its political class. The people living inside those outcomes are the ones absorbing the cost.
Today's edition runs through six of those moments. A predictable massacre that no deployment has stopped. A 15% inflation headline that hasn't arrived in Oyingbo market. A health bill that reorganises power while patients wait outside. An opposition that's building for itself, not for the voter. A cold room in Onitsha that's proof of everything. And a global award for a central bank whose reforms haven't reached the kitchen yet.
Let's dig deeper.
1. THE SCHEDULE
On Sunday evening, gunmen on motorcycles entered Angwan Rukuba, a market junction in Jos North, and opened fire indiscriminately. The police confirmed 14 deaths. Community leaders put the number at 27. Last year's Palm Sunday attack in the same region killed 54. The year before that, four died in Bokkos on Easter Monday. Same period. Same geography. Every year.
The federal government declared a national security emergency in November 2025 and announced thousands of new recruits. Plateau state has had military deployments for years. The Middle Belt is experiencing eight violent attacks per day on average. That number is after the deployments, not before them.
The mechanism isn't incompetence. This security architecture is functioning in a way where stopping the attacks is not the primary outcome. The governor visited. In an armoured tank.
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2. THE GAP BETWEEN THE NUMBER AND THE MARKET
Nigeria's headline inflation fell to 15.06% in February. That number has been celebrated in CBN press releases and government briefings as proof the hard reforms are working.
In March, a physical market survey across Mushin, Daleko, Mile 12, and Oyingbo found 43 of 68 tracked food items more expensive than last month. February had 23. Beans near doubled. A bag of rice runs between N90,000 and N110,000. Petrol climbed from N875 to N960 per litre in late February. Transport costs followed the same afternoon. Food prices followed two weeks later.
The 15% figure measures a basket. It does not measure the teacher in Iyana Ipaja who skipped buying beans this week because the price jumped and the month isn't over.
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3. THE BILL NO ONE EXPLAINED TO THE PATIENT
Nigeria's federal teaching hospitals spent months running at skeletal capacity earlier this year. Patients turned away at gates. Families administering drugs themselves in wards. "They are letting us die," one Kwara resident said.
That strike was about wages and broken agreements. Now the Health Sector Executive Bills 2026 are before the National Assembly. The bill, as drafted, places all medical and allied health professions under the regulatory authority of the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria. Nurses, pharmacists, laboratory scientists. The doctors' body. Nigeria loses roughly 2,000 doctors per year to emigration. The government's response is a bill about who controls who's left.
The government is reorganising authority. The unions are withdrawing labour. The patient is outside both conversations entirely.
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4. THE COALITION IS REAL. THE VOTER ISN'T IN IT.
On Monday, Kwankwaso formally resigned from the NNPP and joined the African Democratic Congress at a ceremony in Kano. Present: ex-Senate President David Mark, former minister Rotimi Amaechi, Peter Obi, Senator Dino Melaye, former APC National Chairman John Odigie-Oyegun.
Kwankwaso won 1.48 million votes in 2023. Obi won 6.1 million. A possible Obi-Kwankwaso presidential ticket is being discussed. The coalition maths look compelling on paper. Voter turnout in 2023 was 26.7%. Nearly three in four eligible Nigerians didn't vote.
Nigerian elections are not won by alliances. They are won by whoever makes participation feel worth it. That work hasn't started yet.
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5. THE COLD ROOM SHE BUILT BEFORE THE GRID ARRIVED
Amara Okonkwo started with one secondhand chest freezer and a shared generator in Onitsha in 2015. Today she runs four industrial cold rooms, three refrigerated vans, and twelve staff. She has never, in eleven years of operation, received more than six hours of uninterrupted grid power in a single day.
Her monthly diesel bill runs between N800,000 and N1.1 million. Her generator infrastructure cost more than her cold rooms. The Power Sector Reform Act. The privatisation of the DISCOs. The Electricity Act of 2023. Each one promised what the one before it promised. Amara watched each announcement from the same yard. Then she topped up the diesel.
It's not a tragedy. It's a tax for living in a system that never arrived.
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6. THE AWARD
The Central Bank of Nigeria was named Central Bank of the Year 2026 by the Central Banking Awards Committee in London last week. The recognition covers real work: inflation from 34.8% to 15.1%, the official and parallel market gap closed to under 2%, foreign reserves stabilised.
That kind of recognition affects investor confidence, sovereign credit discussions, and the terms on which Nigeria can access international capital. It is a real thing, earned by real reform.
The system is improving. The experience hasn't caught up.
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