Nigeria cannot continue to operate a system in which citizens are expected to trust what they cannot independently verify. The philosopher Karl Popper taught the importance of institutions that make it possible to correct political mistakes without depending on the moral perfection of individual rulers. That insight is crucial. Nigeria does not need leaders who merely promise to be angels; it needs institutions designed on the assumption that human beings can be tempted by power and money. Strong institutions must therefore make stealing difficult, detection likely and punishment certain.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s debt tells another part of the story of how tomorrow is being consumed today. The Debt Management Office reported total public debt of about ₦153.29 trillion as of 30 September 2025, comprising external and domestic obligations. Debt itself is not automatically evil. Responsible borrowing can finance infrastructure, education, transportation, electricity and productive investments that generate future revenue. The danger arises when a country borrows repeatedly without creating sufficient productive capacity to repay the loans or when borrowed resources are poorly managed.
Debt then becomes an intergenerational transfer of suffering: today’s political class enjoys the expenditure while tomorrow’s young Nigerians inherit the repayment. A nation cannot continually borrow against children who have not yet voted, have not yet found employment and have not yet built their homes. When debt service consumes fiscal space that could otherwise support education, health, infrastructure and productive employment, the future becomes collateral for the present. Nigeria’s economic crisis is therefore not simply an accounting problem. It is a moral problem. It asks whether today’s leaders have the ethical right to mortgage tomorrow for political survival today.
Aristotle argued that the purpose of political association is connected to the good life of the community. Politics, in the Aristotelian sense, is supposed to create conditions in which human beings can flourish. When politics instead produces debt, unemployment, insecurity and poverty while concentrating wealth around political elites, the political community has betrayed its purpose.
And who pays for this betrayal? The Nigerian youth. The young Nigerian graduates from university and discovers that academic excellence does not guarantee employment. The entrepreneur begins a business and confronts unreliable electricity, multiple taxes, poor infrastructure, limited access to affordable credit and an unstable economic environment. The young professional considers migration because the country appears unable to reward talent. The young farmer confronts insecurity, inadequate storage and weak market access. The young scientist watches laboratories remain underfunded while political extravagance flourishes. The young citizen sees politicians who have occupied public life for decades returning with promises about the future while the future itself appears to have disappeared.
The World Bank estimates that the share of Nigerians living below the national poverty line rose to about 63% in 2025, with an estimated additional seven million people falling into poverty that year. This is the contradiction at the heart of Nigeria: a country rich in human beings, natural resources, intellectual capacity and entrepreneurial energy, yet burdened by poverty and weak institutions. The youth are not necessarily poor because they lack talent. Many are poor because the political economy has failed to convert national resources into broad-based opportunity. Their future has been stolen not in one dramatic event but gradually-through decades of bad policy, corruption, institutional weakness, economic exclusion and political complacency. The tragedy is that a nation can steal from its young people without ever putting a hand into their pockets. It steals from them by denying them the roads, schools, electricity, security, jobs and institutions that should have been built with the wealth of the country.
Yet Nigeria must not surrender to fatalism. The remedy begins with a fundamental transformation of political culture: public office must cease to be treated as an investment from which the politician expects a financial return. Political parties must become genuine institutions of ideas rather than vehicles for the distribution of patronage. Internal party democracy must be strengthened. Campaign finance must become transparent. Public procurement must be digitised and made genuinely open to scrutiny. Budgets must be linked to measurable outcomes. Government contracts should have publicly accessible information showing the contractor, amount, implementation stage and evidence of completion. The Auditor-General, anti-corruption agencies, judiciary, legislature, media and civil society must be protected from political intimidation. NNPC and other state-linked enterprises must operate under rigorous transparency and independent oversight, with petroleum revenues and transfers to the federation clearly traceable.
Debt should be contracted primarily for projects capable of producing measurable economic and social returns. Most importantly, Nigeria needs a deliberate programme of generational political renewal. Youth participation must move beyond being used as campaign crowds, social-media warriors and election-day mobilisers. Young Nigerians must enter political leadership as policymakers, legislators, governors, ministers, entrepreneurs and institutional reformers. This does not mean excluding older politicians simply because of age; it means ending the culture in which political power is treated as hereditary property.
The ultimate question, therefore, is not whether Nigeria has enough money. It is whether Nigeria has enough political morality to use its money for the people. Socrates taught that the unexamined life is not worth living; a nation, too, must examine itself. Nigeria must examine why a country with oil, gas, arable land, brilliant minds, enormous entrepreneurial energy and a huge market can still permit millions of citizens to live in poverty.
It must examine why political power attracts such intense competition, why public office can become a pathway to private wealth, why institutions frequently bend before political influence, and why generations of young Nigerians are asked to sacrifice for a future that powerful people themselves appear unwilling to build. The answer cannot simply be another election slogan. Nigeria needs a new political philosophy-one that treats power as stewardship rather than ownership, public wealth as a trust rather than a prize, and political leadership as a temporary responsibility rather than a lifelong entitlement.
When leaders feast on tomorrow, they do not merely consume money; they consume possibilities. They consume the school that could have educated a child, the factory that could have employed a graduate, the hospital that could have saved a mother, the road that could have connected a farmer to a market, and the innovation that could have transformed an entire generation. Nigeria’s future is not an abstract idea waiting somewhere in the distance. The future is sitting in today’s classrooms, struggling in today’s businesses, searching for jobs today and preparing to vote tomorrow. If the political class continues to consume that future, one day there may be nothing left to govern except the ruins of what could have been. The time has therefore come for Nigeria to stop asking merely who will rule next and begin asking the more important philosophical question: what kind of nation are we leaving behind for those who come after us?
