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Nothing about 2026 feels incidental. Nigeria does not step into it so much as it drifts here, bearing the weight of a previous year that refused to end quietly.

The country arrives with receipts folded into its pocket—grievances, catastrophes, breakthroughs and aspirations—each rustling to fate’s torrid leash.

This is not a threshold crossed cleanly. It is a season entered with the gait of a people who have learned to listen for danger and opportunity at the same time.

Politics hums beneath ordinary speech, turning casual conversations into coded rehearsals. Every movement of Nigerians and the state seems angled toward a reckoning that lies a year ahead.

The 2027 elections have leaked into the present, colouring legislation and inspiring alliances. Some of these have been accentuated as “betrayal” by supporters of Rabiu Kwankwanso, who label his longtime ally and Kano Governor Abba Yusuf’s switch from the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). But Camp Yusuf claims political self-preservation.

Lest we forget Rivers Governor Sim Fubara’s frantic lunge for survival by dumping the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to hoist the APC flag in the State House. Fubara joined APC, not out of love or ideological sympathy, but with the hope of quashing threats from his estranged political godfather and FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and a State Assembly bent on impeaching him.

Forget politicians seeking self-preservation; our survival as a nation is critically tied to this year, 2026. But do Nigerians sense this instinctively? A republic can feel when it is being tested, after all.

This is the year when institutions reveal their efficiency depths, perhaps. Habits, hardened over decades, will surface under pressure. The reflex to litigate politics, manage dissent instead of listening to it, and celebrate reforms faster than outcomes can mature, will meet a citizenry whose patience has thinned into hostile scrutiny.

On hostile scrutiny, the jury perpetually decides against the run of political and social realities. Thus, the inclination of large segments of the populace to imagine the worst about Nigeria despite undeniable flashes of progress across crucial sectors.

Amid palpable tension, the ruling party, APC, enters the year psyched with ambition yet plagued by unease. Size, in Nigerian politics, has never guaranteed coherence. It breeds factions, competing centres of gravity, and rival interpretations of loyalty. Party congresses loom, and with them the familiar permutations: parallel meetings, disputed delegates, and consensus discovered after dissent has been buried. Courts, once again, will be invited to settle quarrels that party execs and ideology fail to resolve.

Opposition politics moves differently, less encumbered by incumbency yet equally haunted by fragmentation. Economic pressure has given opposition language an edge it lacked in easier years. Inflation, transport costs, and food prices no longer sound like abstract failures. The impact is felt in kitchens and registers at bus stops and fuel stations.

Whether opposition figures cohere into a credible alternative matters less, for now, than the fact that competition itself has grown volatile. The certainty of outcomes has thinned as opposition politics, once strategised and choreographed, now improvises with guerrilla tactics.

Inside the National Assembly, re-election anxiety influences behaviour as legislators listen more closely to party structures than to public mood. Oversight softens, and controversial bills travel faster than persuasion ever could. The logic is simple: survival first, principle later.

This atmosphere makes law itself feel provisional. Nowhere is this clearer than in the arguments surrounding taxation. The tax reform laws have exposed a deeper crisis than statutory interpretation. Civil society question process as lawmakers dispute texts. The Presidency distances itself even as the chair of the tax reform committee offers clarification. Each political actor attempts to project authority, yet the real issue lies elsewhere.

Trust becomes scarce in the Nigerian clime, especially when citizens suspect that laws can shape-shift between passage and publication. Taxation ultimately thrives on belief; thus, compliance may congeal to resentment and even sabotage, if distrust persists. This is the terrain 2026 inherits.

Through it all, the economy splays into the year bearing bruises. Subsidy removal, currency volatility, and inflation have morphed from economic shocks to social conditions. Small businesses have collapsed and those that haven’t remain locked in an intense struggle against doomsday contingence. As households learn resilience, the government’s mantra of hope remains disciplined and insistent. Nigerians would rather “hope” translates to relief.

The proposed 2026 federal budget stands at roughly N58.18 trillion, ambitious in scale yet constricted by obligation. Debt servicing alone consumes N15.52 trillion, and the deficit is projected at about 4.28 per cent of GDP. Nigeria’s public debt, reported at N152.4 trillion by mid-2025, shadows every promise made at the podium.

A vast federal budget, heavy debt service obligations, and a persistent deficit sketch a portrait of ambition under constraint. Public debt figures require governments at all levels to demonstrate that borrowing translates into tangible improvement. As the pressures of reform travel downward, impacting citizens already stretched thin, anger will not stem solely from hardship.

Read Also: Mass poverty endangering survival of Nigeria’s Democracy — OAU Professor

Nigerians have endured difficulty before; what stings is asymmetry. Sacrifice preached downward the economic totem pole, while insulation persists above. Calls for citizenry endurance must be matched by ruling class restraint. Evidence of transparent accounting and governance will matter more than rhetoric.

Yet, cynicism persists through an unrelenting stream of discontent in the civic sphere. Social commentary is rife with the narratives of doomsayers: politicians, activists, and frustrated elites lustful for power or its fruits. These voices rage with venom, amid insecurity, spewing defeatism and prophesying Nigeria’s inevitable collapse. Behind their calls for change, subsists self-interest; the bitter taste of being left out of the corridors of influence. They are neither patriots nor prophets, but casualties of their unfulfilled desires. And the youth, in their vulnerability, have become their prey.

Any youth that emulates them will simply burden himself with disillusionment and perpetual cynicism until he can ill afford the luxury of dreaming. It’s about time Nigerians dumped cynicism and embraced enduring optimism. The love of country, though seemingly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, resonates louder than the critic’s flamethrower words.

The Good Nigerian does not look for scapegoats. He does not sneer from the sidelines, unwilling to engage unless conditions are perfect. He understands that patriotism is not in the cynical condemnation of everything but in the conscious, deliberate acts of sacrifice that improve the polity one gesture at a time.

Imagine the speed with which fuel stations increased the pump price of petrol from N735 – N750 per litre to N839 – N850 per litre; how nice it would be if they could rapidly effect price cuts when fuel price plummets.

Nigeria’s problem is not entirely shortcoming in governance but the absence of goodwill among the citizenry. The political elite did not fall from outer space or descend from the heavens; they are products of Nigerian homes, schools, worship houses and neighbourhoods. If we demand better leadership, we must, first, become better citizens.

More Nigerians could learn to emulate perhaps the Hausa tricycle driver who, in March 2025, scrawled on his tricycle: Ramadan Discount: From N200 to N100 per Drop. He did this while prices of fuel and food staples skyrocketed.

This year, and onward, Nigeria needs more men and women who’d rather give than take; who would rather mend than tear apart; who would rather chart the path to a brighter tomorrow than wail in the darkness and curse the times from a soapbox.