From Dancing While Nigeria Drowns
In Nigeria, they don’t say “serve your country.” They say, “Go and collect your share of the national cake.” A charming euphemism that makes looting sound like birthday celebration. A moral distortion so refined, even thieves quote scripture while slicing the nation into private portions.
But here’s the question nobody asks: Where is this cake, and who baked it?
Because by the time the masses arrive—hungry, barefoot, holding their PVCs like VIP tickets—the cake is gone. What remains are crumbs wrapped in national flags and excuses baked in bulletproof SUVs.
The idea of a “national cake” is Nigeria’s most successful scam. A linguistic fraud dressed in patriotic icing. It implies there’s a cake for all, baked from collective resources, to be shared with fairness.
But in reality?
It’s not a cake. It’s a crime scene.
Not a dessert table. A buffet of betrayal.
And it’s not national. It’s tribal, sectional, and spiritualized.
In the elite version of Nigeria, “sharing the cake” means inflating budgets, creating ghost projects, padding payrolls, and distributing contracts to cousins and campaign donors. Each government comes in, not to bake more, but to steal faster. The race isn’t to build the country—it’s to finish what’s left before the next guy comes.
Every appointment is an entitlement.
Every allocation is a buffet.
Every budget is a recipe for looting.
Ask a politician how he spent ₦8 billion meant for education, and he’ll say: “We have shared the cake across stakeholders.” Stakeholders? That includes his wife’s boutique, his brother’s construction firm, and a pastor who prayed for him during the primaries.
Even state governments have joined the bakery. They replicate Abuja’s model—collect allocation, announce empowerment, distribute wheelbarrows, then buy new Prado jeeps “for official use.”
Let’s be clear: Nigeria isn’t suffering from a lack of resources. It’s suffering from over-sharing—sharing the national treasury among a cartel of career cannibals in native wear.
They share everything except responsibility.
And when caught? They summon grammar.
“It was a procedural lapse.”
“Funds were re-routed for urgent community interventions.”
“The audit report is politically motivated.”
If pushed too hard, they drop the ultimate incantation: “It’s our turn.”
Read also: Garri, Gucci, And Government Contracts—Part 10
That phrase, more than any policy failure, has destroyed Nigeria. “It’s our turn” doesn’t mean progress. It means revenge. It means entitlement. It means, “Let me loot small too before you complain.”
And the public? Tired. Broken. Distracted.
We’ve normalized fraud. A man buys five properties after one contract and we hail him: “Omo, you sharp!” A governor diverts pensions and we say: “At least he dey do road.” A local government chairman commissions a borehole and it trends on Twitter like he discovered electricity.
We are complicit in our own scam. Because we too want a slice.
We apply for contracts not to deliver, but to chop. We enter politics not to serve, but to cash out. We hustle not just to survive—but to graduate into the league of cake-sharers. And until that ambition dies, the scam continues.
It’s all theatre—recycling the same thieves with different ethnic wrappers. They steal, defect, get re-elected, and repeat the same “strategic partnerships” that yield new Lexuses, not new schools.
Meanwhile, the real bakers—the teachers, the nurses, the farmers—go unpaid. The masses who kneaded the flour of our GDP are locked out of the bakery while career politicians sing birthday songs with forks in their hands and bullets in their escorts.
This isn’t a national cake.
It’s national cannibalism.
And the knife keeps changing hands.
Professor MarkAnthony Ujunwa Nze is a distinguished Nigerian-born investigative journalist, public intellectual, and global governance analyst, whose work spans critical intersections of media, law, and policy. His expertise extends across strategic management, leadership, and international business law, where he brings a nuanced understanding of institutional dynamics, cross-border legal frameworks, and executive decision-making in complex global environments.
Currently based in New York, Professor Nze serves as a full tenured professor at the New York Centre for Advanced Research. There, he spearheads interdisciplinary research at the forefront of governance innovation, corporate strategy, and geopolitical risk. Widely respected for his intellectual rigor and principled advocacy, he remains a vital voice in shaping ethical leadership and sustainable governance across emerging and established democracies.