Nigeria’s Pain Is Not Surgery, It Is Neglect

By Abidemi Adebamiwa

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s remark comparing the hardship of Nigerians to a painful surgery is both misplaced and insensitive. Surgery is meant to heal. It is done with anesthesia, with full disclosure, and with the consent of the patient. Nigerians have been given none of these conditions. Instead, they are forced to endure hardship without choice, without relief, and without any sign of recovery.

A surgeon does not feast while his patient lies bleeding. Yet this is exactly the picture the president’s analogy creates. In medicine, the doctor explains the risks, reassures the patient of a plan, and offers a clear path to life after pain. Nigerians have received none of this. Instead, they are told that subsidy removal, a collapsing naira, and rising prices are somehow cures. The daily reality is that life is getting harder, not better.

What Nigerians face is not healing but abandonment. In true surgery, the doctor shares responsibility for both the procedure and the outcome. In Nigeria, leaders shield themselves from the pain of their own policies. They draw steady salaries, travel abroad for medical care, and live on public funds, while ordinary people are left with hunger, failing infrastructure, and insecurity. This is not shared sacrifice. It is neglect.

As John Maynard Keynes reminded us, in the long run we are all dead. His words were not cynicism but a warning to leaders that people cannot be asked to wait endlessly for relief. Keynes, the English economist and philosopher whose ideas reshaped modern policy and helped inspire institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, argued that governments must act in the present to stabilize economies, not postpone solutions to a distant future. That warning still matters. Nigerians cannot feed their families on promises.

True leadership does not glorify pain, it reduces it. Nigerians are not afraid of sacrifice when it is shared fairly, made transparent, and tied to a clear timeline. But sacrifice without fairness, without results, and without shared burden is not reform. It is punishment.

Mr. President, suffering is not medicine. Pain is not reform. Hardship is not healing. What Nigerians need now is not rhetoric but action.

Abidemi is a political analyst and the Managing Editor @ Newspot Nigeria