It is widely accepted, at least in the Country of Particular Concern and the Republic of Perpetual Adjustment, that the highest form of patriotism is economic suffering properly theorised. This, perhaps, is the only coherent explanation for why a national currency, once tenuously anchored to material reality, was ceremoniously released into the open, like an endangered bird, only to reveal that flight had never been part of its design.
The architects of this policy described the act as “floating”. For me, a doctoral student, the experience is neither buoyant nor liberating; it is a slow, methodical drowning. Prices no longer rise; they mutate (else, how do we explain that a kilo of turkey is over 10,000 naira). The cost of a single academic text now demands either institutional benevolence, divine intervention, or a quiet renegotiation of one’s ethical boundaries (Illegitimate means of income, not piracy, please! I am not a barbarian). The currency, in its liberated form, has become philosophical: it exists, certainly, but only as a proposition. One does not spend it; one interprets it.
Before this monetary emancipation took full effect, engineered, no doubt, by unseen hands enamoured with theory, arrived the equally visionary excision of fuel subsidy. It was a policy executed with such refined brutality that it warrants inclusion in performance studies curricula: an exemplary demonstration of how suffering may be staged, managed, and rhetorically beautified.
Its most remarkable feature, however, is its circular logic. A doctoral colleague once proposed a partial removal of this same subsidy and was met with emphatic resistance. Yet, with admirable ideological elasticity, that resistance later transformed into consensus. On a ceremonially charged morning, the subsidy was not merely reduced but declared extinct; banished with the casual authority reserved for inconveniences.
The aftermath unfolded with theatrical precision. Transportation costs surged beyond predictability, electricity tariffs performed an upward choreography of relentless escalation (I cannot confirm the official banding of my location; however, empirical evidence suggests we are operating well within the experimental parameters of Band Z) and food prices undertook a form of metaphysical ascension; departing so completely from affordability that they now exist primarily as memory.
Unfortunately for this doctoral subject, the timing of her personal decisions borders on the tragicomic. Whether driven by inherited stubbornness or an ill-timed commitment to autonomy, she exited the fragile economic shelter of her family at the precise moment when survival became an intellectual problem. Independence, much like certain political transitions, reveals itself as an elegant fiction, compelling in theory, corrosive in practice.
Consequently, my intellectual orientation is forced to recalibrate. Once preoccupied with epistemology and theoretical frameworks, I now confront more immediate ontological concerns. The central question is no longer how knowledge is produced but rather “under what conditions eating remains possible”. Survival emerges as the most rigorous form of scholarship: empirical, unstructured, and entirely unfunded.
Naturally, these developments must be situated within a suitably expansive global framework. Across the Atlantic, the looming possibility of another geopolitical spectacle (tentatively conceptualised here as the “Trump War”) offers a convenient interpretive distraction. Within this schema, local economic collapse is reframed as a minor subplot in a broader narrative of global instability.
Inflation, accordingly, loses its immediacy. It is no longer a direct assault on daily existence but a narrative device, an atmospheric condition within a larger drama. Hunger acquires an almost intellectual dignity, repositioned as an incidental effect of history rather than a failure of policy. In this way, this doctoral student is invited to experience deprivation locally while interpreting it globally; a cognitive manoeuvre that offers the faint illusion of consolation.
Yet reality, characteristically, resists abstraction. Reports from Jos (arriving with grim symbolic timing) circulate with the consistency of scholarly publication: reviewed by catastrophe and issued in endless succession. But even these disruptions are swiftly absorbed into a national culture of deflection.
Attention shifts seamlessly, from crisis to ceremony, from mourning to orchestrated celebration. The birthday of the Supreme Steward of Economic Experimentation becomes a national exercise in performative loyalty. Governors, those indefatigable custodians of allegiance, engage in elaborate acts of praise composition, each striving to outdo the other in rhetorical excess while remaining uniformly detached from the demands of governance.
A new metric of success quietly emerges: not development, not security, not welfare, but the lyrical intensity of devotion. Governance, it appears, has been reconstituted as applause, measured not by outcomes but by volume.
Within this environment, academic life acquires a distinctly tragicomic texture. Research is conducted under conditions that oscillate between inconvenience and impossibility. Conferences depend on unstable infrastructures, fieldwork collapses into improvisation, and the doctoral thesis itself begins to mirror the economy it inhabits: perpetually revised, structurally fragile, and always on the verge of breakdown.
Perhaps the most profound achievement of this economic order, however, lies in its reconfiguration of aspiration. This doctoral student no longer seeks intellectual distinction or scholarly contribution. Her ambitions have been systematically reduced; to eat without calculation, to move without negotiation, to exist without constant reinterpretation.
In this regard, the system is undeniably efficient. It simplifies life not by resolving its complexities but by eliminating its possibilities.
Thus, one arrives at an inevitable conclusion: the country moves on, powered by speeches, sustained by sheer endurance, and guided by a logic that makes both economics and satire look inadequate. Satire thrives on exaggeration, but in this case, reality is already doing the job.
*Omoh Giwa writes from a place where hunger is no longer metaphor but method.