By Crispin Oduobuk
“You have no light,” the President said, as if the darkness were some peculiar local failing and not a major signature of his own reign.
It is mourning time again in Nigeria.
Not the quiet, dignified sort that binds a people under leadership that feels their grief. The familiar kind. The procedural kind. The kind that touches down with sirens, pauses on a runway, and lifts off before the dust has settled.
Your correspondent has seen enough of these episodes to recognise the pattern. Disaster strikes. Bodies are counted. The nation gasps. The President arrives.
Not quite to the scene. Let us not get carried away.
To the airport.
The latest chapter unfolded in Jos, Plateau State, where Palm Sunday attacks cut down at least 28 souls in cold blood. President Bola Tinubu did visit. That much must be acknowledged. But the visit stopped at Yakubu Gowon Airport, as though grief itself required security clearance.
And then came the moment that will linger longer than any speech.
“You have no light,” he observed to the grieving families assembled there.
An accurate statement, yes. Also a curious one. Here stood the chief custodian of the Nigerian state, remarking on the absence of electricity as though it were a minor local inconvenience, not a stubborn national failure that sits squarely within the remit of the office he occupies.
One almost expected a voice from the audience to ask, mildly: “Whose light, exactly?”
That question is not merely rhetorical. It goes to the heart of a deeper problem.
Because if the President can stand before citizens whose lives have been shattered and remark on the darkness as though he were a visitor from a well-lit planet, one must ask who holds him accountable for the light. Who holds his administration accountable for the security failure that led to 28 deaths. And if no one does, then what exactly is the point of the oversight institutions the Constitution so carefully designed.
The International Human Rights Commission has raised similar concerns, pointing to what it describes as a selective response to attacks and an inequality in government reaction to the Plateau violence. The warning is simple: perceived bias erodes public trust.
The Conflict Research Network West Africa goes further, insisting that the protection of lives must move beyond repeated assurances toward measurable results that communities can actually believe in. It has called, pointedly, on the National Assembly to exercise its oversight functions on defence spending.
Where, one wonders, is that oversight?
“You have no light” is a metaphor hiding in plain sight.
Darkness in Nigeria is not merely the absence of current. It is a condition. A way of describing the distance between those who govern and those who are governed. The President named the darkness. He even sounded frustrated by it. But he stood outside it, as though the switch were located elsewhere. As though responsibility, like electricity, is supplied from a different grid.
Your correspondent does not doubt the frustration was real. But when the man at the top speaks of national failure in the language of an observer, one begins to wonder who, precisely, is expected to fix it.
Ten minutes, we were told. That was all the time the President could spare in Jos. Grief, it seems, must now fit into a schedule tight enough to make even tragedy wait its turn.
To be fair, this is not a new script. Nigeria has perfected the art of ceremonial callousness.
After the Ikeja Cantonment bomb blast of January 2002, when over a thousand souls perished, President Olusegun Obasanjo showed up among the displaced in Oshodi. He climbed atop a car, barefoot, and when the crowd pleaded with him to inspect the damage, he told them: “Shut up. I don’t have to be here.”
The man who had sworn to lead them in their hour of need instead scolded them for asking more.
Then there was the dancing. After the Nyanya bomb blast in 2014, President Goodluck Jonathan flew to Kano for a campaign rally and sang and danced while families were still pulling bodies from the rubble. Two days after the Baga massacre in 2015, where Boko Haram slaughtered up to 2,000 souls, he was again seen dancing at his foster daughter’s wedding.
Different men. Same curious distance.
What makes this callousness particularly galling is how selective it is. When cameras roll and votes are at stake, our leaders can summon tears or righteous anger on cue. But when ordinary Nigerians lie dead from floods, building collapses or terror attacks, the response follows a ritual: a brief stopover, a televised promise of justice, and then a return to business as usual.
Watching that tarmac scene, your correspondent found himself asking a simpler question. Where is the legislative oversight that is supposed to give meaning to accountability?
The House Public Accounts Committee has the power to scrutinise public funds. The Senate Committee on Power oversees the electricity sector. The joint committees on Defence and Police Affairs can demand answers on security spending.
Have they?
Has anyone been summoned over the failures of the electricity sector? Has any committee demanded to know why communities in Plateau State remain vulnerable despite billions budgeted for security? Have there been hearings that matter? Reports that bite? Consequences that deter?
The answers, your correspondent suspects, would be disappointing.
A NILDS working paper has already documented failures in the electricity sector’s privatisation, noting weak enforcement by the regulator and recommending legislative action that would compel distribution companies to meet basic obligations or face sanctions.
Where are those laws? Where are the committees that should be driving them?
The silence from the National Assembly is as telling as the President’s ten-minute stopover. Because accountability is not a favour. It is a duty. And when those charged with enforcing it look away, the message to the executive is unmistakable.
Carry on.
The “you have no light” moment lingers because it captures something fundamental: the gap between recognising a problem and owning it. Between naming the darkness and switching on the light.
Closing that gap is the real work of leadership. It does not happen on the tarmac. It happens when a leader understands that in moments of tragedy, presence is not a scheduling problem. It is a moral statement.
It also happens when the National Assembly remembers that it exists not to applaud the executive but to hold it to account.
So here is what the country expects next time.
Not the airport, but the actual scene. Not a remark about what is missing, but a commitment to what will be done. Not ten minutes, but enough time that departure does not feel like relief. And not another hollow promise, but a clear account of how failure will be prevented, who is responsible, and when results should be expected.
And from the legislature, not silence but oversight. Not complicity but scrutiny. Not weak enforcement but action that makes citizens feel that someone, somewhere in Abuja, is paying attention.
Let the people track it.
Nigerians do not lack resilience. Visit any community struck by disaster and you will find neighbours becoming family, strangers offering comfort, humanity asserting itself where formal systems have failed.
What remains in question is whether that same spirit can find expression at the very top, and in the legislature that is meant to check it.
Perhaps it can. Leadership is not fixed. It evolves. It learns. Sometimes slowly, sometimes under pressure, but it learns.
Until then, the tarmac will continue to receive its distinguished visitors. The speeches will be delivered. The engines will hum. And the nation will carry on, as it always does.
But somewhere in that persistence is an expectation. Not loud, not dramatic, but steady.
That one day the President will not just touch down. He will arrive. And when he does, he will not need to ask why the lights are off. Because he will have made bringing the light a priority from his first day in office.
And that one day the National Assembly will not just convene. It will act. Because accountability is not a favour done to the executive. It is a duty owed to the dead.
Until then, we have the callous presidents of our perilous republic, enabled by a legislature that may well have forgotten its purpose. All of this is a situation only Nigerians can fix.
Crispin Oduobuk writes from Abuja.
