22/05/2026
2027, THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS, AND WHY AMAECHI STANDS OUT
By Sopriala Membere
Columnist, Scholar and Member CRA’27 Advocacy Network
Nigeria’s cost of living crisis did not begin with inflation. It began long before food prices spiraled and transport fares became unbearable. It began the moment the Nigerian state gradually withdrew from the basic responsibility of making life bearable for ordinary citizens.
This is what makes the recent interventions of Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi whilst addressing ADC party faithfuls in Lagos, particularly significant. Beyond partisan politics, Amaechi’s years in public office were shaped by a governing philosophy that understood a simple but increasingly forgotten truth: the true purpose of government is to reduce the pressure of survival on citizens.
The unfortunate reality of Nigeria is that, the average citizen privately funds electricity, water, security, transportation, healthcare, and often even education simultaneously. The state increasingly exists not as the guarantor of survival, but as a distant observer to its own existence. Citizens are therefore forced to construct parallel systems around the failures of government. Generators replace electricity grids. Boreholes replace public water infrastructure. Vigilantes emerge where formal security collapses. Private schools substitute failing public education, while personal vehicles compensate for the near absence of reliable public transportation.
The consequence is devastating, as Nigerians are no longer taxed merely by government, they are taxed by the collapse of the Nigerian state itself.
What millions now spend daily simply to survive institutional failure has become one of the harshest invisible taxes in the country. Worse still, many citizens have gradually normalized this condition, accepting abnormal hardship as though it were a natural feature of Nigerian life.
Recent reforms under the administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu have only intensified this pressure. The tragedy is not necessarily that reforms themselves are irrational. Serious economies occasionally require painful adjustments. The deeper problem lies in the sequencing of those reforms, the absence of social protection for vulnerable Nigerians, and the reality that the enormous revenues generated from citizens’ sacrifices have not been meaningfully reinvested into improving public welfare.
Citizens can endure hardship when they believe suffering serves a collective national purpose. What destroys public trust in reforms is the perception that public pain merely finances elite excess, recklessness, and the continued culture of impunity within political circles–which is sadly the reality we are presently faced with.
I will go further to postulate on what makes Nigeria’s economic crisis fundamentally different from inflation in more functional societies. Here, hardship is cumulative. Every institutional weakness eventually arrives at the doorstep of ordinary citizens as financial pressure.
A failed road eventually becomes inflation. A collapsed rail system becomes food inflation. An unstable power sector suffocates businesses and destroys productivity. Weak public schools become crushing financial burdens for families struggling to educate their children, while for millions of poorer households, the absence of quality education becomes a quiet inheritance of limitation and despair. Insecurity, too, does not end in violence alone; it mutates into market scarcity, hunger, and death—a brutal “buy one, get two free” package delivered by the failure of the Nigerian State.
Bad governance never truly disappears. It merely changes form before eventually arriving in somebody’s kitchen, settling quietly into the daily lives, struggles, and suffering of ordinary Nigerians.
Of all the major aspirants positioning themselves for Nigeria’s highest office, this is perhaps what most distinguishes Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi. A careful interrogation of his years in public office, first as Governor of Rivers State and later as Minister of Transportation, reveals a politician who appeared to understand the dangerous chain reaction between institutional failure and economic hardship long before it became today’s national emergency.
During his years as the Chief executive in Rivers State, public attention often focused on the visibility of projects: roads, schools, urban renewal, and institutional intervention and expansion through agencies like the Rivers State Sustainable Development agency. Yet beneath those projects sat a broader philosophy of governance that is easier to appreciate today than it was in real time.
Amaechi governed as though he believed disorder itself was expensive, and he was correct.
The rehabilitation and expansion of road networks across Rivers State was not merely an urban project. It was an attempt to reduce the economic penalties imposed by movement paralysis. Every hour spent in avoidable traffic is an economic cost. Every failed road increases logistics costs. Every transport delay eventually raises market prices.
The same philosophy was evident in education. The famous model schools were often viewed politically through the lens of aesthetics or ambition, yet the deeper significance of public education is economic as much as it is social. In societies where governments effectively absorb the cost of education, families retain greater financial stability and room to breathe. But where public education collapses, poverty begins to reproduce itself across generations, and the child of the poor inherits limitation, thus condemning them to a ceratin faith.
The same philosophy was evident in healthcare, agriculture, and power investments under his administration in Rivers State. Amaechi appeared to understand that economic hardship is not caused by income alone, but also by the cost of societal failure.
In healthcare, his administration embarked on the construction and rehabilitation of primary healthcare centres and modern referral hospitals across the state, alongside investments in medical infrastructure intended to reduce dependence on expensive private healthcare. Illness remains one of the fastest routes into poverty anywhere in the world, and in countries with weak public systems, a single medical emergency can financially destabilize entire households for years. Amaechi’s healthcare interventions, whatever criticisms may exist around implementation, reflected an understanding that access to functioning public healthcare is itself a form of economic protection for ordinary families.
The same logic extended to agriculture. Long before food inflation evolved into the national emergency Nigeria faces today, the Rivers State government under Amaechi pursued agricultural revitalization through partnerships in fisheries, mechanized farming initiatives, and efforts aimed at reviving dormant state agricultural assets such as Risonpalm. The administration also promoted the Songhai Integrated Farms model as part of broader attempts to encourage agro-production and youth participation in agriculture. Beneath those policies was a recognition that food security is inseparable from economic stability. A country that cannot efficiently produce or distribute food eventually imports inflation into the homes of its citizens.
Perhaps even more significantly, Amaechi’s administration treated electricity not merely as infrastructure, but as an economic lifeline. Under his tenure, Rivers State witnessed substantial improvements in power generation capacity, with projects linked to the Trans-Amadi industrial axis and broader efforts that reportedly increased electricity availability in parts of the state. At a time when businesses across Nigeria were collapsing under the weight of generator costs and unstable power supply, the administration’s emphasis on electricity reflected an understanding that darkness itself is expensive. Every hour without stable power increases production costs, destroys small businesses, discourages investment, and transfers additional survival costs directly onto citizens.
Taken together, these interventions revealed a broader governing philosophy: that functional public systems are not luxuries. They are economic shields protecting ordinary people from the brutal cost of institutional collapse.
Yet these realities rarely dominate Nigerian political discourse because politics itself has become excessively performative. Leaders are increasingly evaluated through rhetoric, media choreography, online branding, and emotional signaling rather than measurable administrative results.
But hardship is rarely solved theatrically. No speech reduces food prices. No propaganda fixes logistics. No slogan lowers transportation costs. Eventually, governance becomes practical, not performative; systems either work, or ordinary people suffer the consequences.
This is where Amaechi’s later years as Minister of Transportation become especially relevant to contemporary conversations about the cost of living. Nigeria remains one of the most logistics-distorted economies in the world. Moving goods across the country is unnecessarily expensive, dangerous, and inefficient. Entire sectors operate under inflated costs because transportation systems remain weak, and the burden ultimately falls on consumers.
What the railway revival projects under Amaechi represented, beyond their political symbolism, was an attempt to reduce the structural cost of movement within the Nigerian economy. The Abuja–Kaduna rail line altered mobility patterns between both cities. The Lagos–Ibadan rail project targeted one of the country’s most commercially important corridors. The revival of the Warri–Itakpe line reconnected long-abandoned industrial routes, while inland dry port initiatives reflected broader attempts to rethink freight movement beyond the congestion of Lagos.
Critics may debate ex*****on timelines, borrowing structures, or project priorities. Those are legitimate discussions. But the underlying economic logic behind the transportation agenda was difficult to dismiss: societies become poorer when movement becomes inefficient.
Food rots before reaching markets. Trucks spend days navigating failed roads. Fuel costs multiply transportation expenses. Ports trap imports in bureaucratic stagnation.
The economy bleeds slowly through friction.
Perhaps this is where Amaechi’s broader political relevance now sits. Not in nostalgia. Not in personality cult. Not even necessarily in electoral politics. But in reminding Nigerians that governance has consequences far beyond press conferences and political entertainment.
Ultimately, the cost of living crisis is not simply about prices. It is about whether society itself is organized competently enough for ordinary people to “breathe”.
And Nigerians today are struggling to “breathe”.
The greater tragedy is that the country has gradually normalized conditions that should be considered economically violent. Citizens now casually discuss buying fuel for generators, drilling private boreholes, hiring private security, financing private education, and navigating catastrophic transportation systems as though these are natural features of modern life rather than evidence of failure in governance and institutional retreat.
Perhaps the most dangerous development of all is that Nigerians have gradually normalized dysfunction itself. A society does not become truly unstable merely because suffering increases, but because citizens begin adapting permanently to conditions that should never have been accepted in the first place; where darkness becomes normal, failed roads become routine, insecurity becomes familiar, and survival itself becomes a daily personal negotiation with state failure.
Yet the public career of Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi reflects a governing philosophy that insisted on a different idea: that government exists to reduce pressure, not multiply it; to absorb hardship, not transfer it to already struggling citizens.
In today’s Nigeria, where suffering is increasingly normalized, dysfunction is mistaken for endurance, and the cost of living crisis itself now threatens the very dignity of living, that idea no longer sounds merely political.
It sounds revolutionary.
