As the Federal Government filed 13-count treason and terrorism charges against former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources Timipre Sylva and five others over an alleged coup plot, many Nigerians found themselves grappling with a question few dared ask aloud – what if it had succeeded?
The six defendants – Mohammed Ibrahim Gana, Erasmus Ochegobia Victor, Ahmed Ibrahim, Zekeri Umoru, Bukar Kashim Goni and Abdulkadir Sani – were arraigned on April 22, 2026, while Sylva, a former Governor of Bayelsa State, remains at large. The charges include treason, terrorism financing, suppression of intelligence and money laundering.
A Nation Squeezed From Every Direction
The reaction across social media and in private conversations has been telling. Rather than outrage at the alleged plotters, a significant undercurrent of sympathy – even quiet hope – has emerged. After years of deepening economic hardship, unchecked insecurity and a political class that appears to grow wealthier as the masses sink further, is the sentiment really surprising?
Under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration, the abrupt removal of fuel subsidies without adequate compensatory measures pushed millions deeper into poverty, triggering what the IMF confirmed as Nigeria’s worst cost-of-living crisis in nearly three decades. The naira has collapsed. Inflation has ravaged household budgets. Food prices have soared beyond reach for ordinary families.
Yet amid this suffering, the administration has pursued an aggressive taxation agenda that many see as designed less to build infrastructure than to extract from citizens what little they have left. New levies, tolls, and tax harmonization schemes have multiplied, with agencies created and cronies installed to oversee the collection apparatus. Total tax revenues surged from N711 billion in May 2023 to N3.635 trillion by September 2025 – a fivefold increase that has not translated into visible improvement in the lives of ordinary Nigerians.
The Cabal and the President’s Son
Accusations of a wealthy cabal operating behind the scenes – arranging power, distributing contracts and capturing state resources – have dogged the administration since its inception. President Tinubu himself faced questions about his path to power long before taking office, with opponents alleging voter intimidation and political thuggery during the 2023 elections.
His son, Seyi Tinubu, has become a lightning rod for accusations of usurping the nation’s wealth. The controversy grew so visible that rapper Eedris Abdulkareem released a protest song directly addressing Seyi, urging him to tell his father about the suffering of ordinary Nigerians – after which the Federal Government promptly instructed broadcast stations not to air it.
The privatization drive, meanwhile, has seen government agencies and national assets handed to political allies, a pattern critics describe not as economic reform but as state capture dressed in the language of efficiency.
Terror Without End
What crystallizes the failure of governance more acutely than Nigeria’s security crisis? Despite sitting atop vast oil wealth, the country remains arguably the most freely terrorized nation on earth. Mass killings, kidnappings numbering in the hundreds at a time, and terror reprisals have become routine.
Churches and mosques are ravaged with near-equal frequency. Terrorist groups have established parallel court systems across swathes of the north. Recent intelligence reports indicated jihadist elements were on a mission to capture the nation’s capital itself. Between July 2022 and June 2023 alone, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 reported kidnapping incidents, with approximately N5 billion paid in ransoms – money flowing directly from impoverished communities to armed groups.
Under both the PDP and now consecutive APC administrations, the nation has been wrecked in debt while the cabal has never been richer. The terror sponsors – widely known to be political bigwigs who finance elections and install candidates – remain too powerful to touch. Many are accused of using armed groups to drive farming communities from their land into displacement camps, then seizing the vacated territory for illegal gold mining, cattle ranching, or their own agricultural ventures.
Trump Saw the Opening
The chaos has not gone unnoticed internationally. Former US President Donald Trump attempted to leverage Nigeria’s religious violence to advance American interests in the country’s oil sector, framing intervention as a defence of persecuted Christians – even as both Muslim and Christian communities suffered equally under the reign of terror. All groups remain subject to the violence. All remain hostage to a government that appears unable or unwilling to protect any of them.
A Coup as the Only Way Out
It is against this backdrop – economic strangulation, political capture, institutional decay, and unrelenting terror – that many ordinary Nigerians have arrived at a grim conclusion. With elections compromised by money and intimidation, institutions hollowed out by patronage, and security forces unable or unwilling to protect citizens, a military intervention begins to look less like a threat to democracy and more like its last remaining possibility.
Whether the coup plot was real, exaggerated, or manufactured to justify further consolidation of power remains an open question. What is not in question is the depth of desperation that has brought a nation of over 200 million people to the point where charges of treason are met not with alarm, but with quiet disappointment that the plotters did not succeed.
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