When news broke that Aso Rock was going solar, a few clapped. Some saw it as a bold move toward sustainability. But many others heard something else. A door shutting, permanently, on shared national suffering. With 24/7 solar power humming through the veins of the Villa, the cries of the national grid collapsing will become, at best, white noise  and at worst, irrelevant. What use is the Minister of Power’s number to a president who will never again sit in darkness?

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The symbolism is impossible to ignore. One more thread has been cut between the leaders and the led. Our power outages, our candlelit exam preparations, our sweltering hospitals and sweating classrooms  they will become distant folklore to the executive. While we roast in blackout-stricken homes, the corridors of power will glow in uninterrupted light. The same kind of light that blinds.

Last week, a little girl asked her mother why their ceiling fan hadn’t moved in two days. The mother lied gently, “The fan is sleeping.” The truth? There had been no electricity for 96 hours. Her school had asked for an assignment typed and printed, but she couldn’t do it  not for lack of brains, but because there was no power, no laptop, and no hope. In Aso Rock, the fans never sleep. The lights never go out. But in this girl’s world, even the air has betrayed her.

It’s not just electricity. Governance in Nigeria has become a series of executive solo flights, no passengers, no itinerary, and certainly no empathy. In aviation, our leaders skip over our tarmac turmoil, hopping into publicly funded jets that whisk them over the headaches of domestic travel  overpriced tickets, delayed flights, decrepit terminals. From 35,000 feet, it’s hard to hear the groans of a nation.

On our potholed roads, they sit cocooned in bulletproof convoys, so layered in steel and sirens they can no longer recognize what a “bad road” is. We complain of insecurity, but they move with more personnel than a military base. When kidnappers strike or road accidents claim lives, they glance vaguely at press releases, not because they don’t care  but because it’s no longer their world. The disconnect is total.

When it comes to health, the line between parody and policy is barely visible. A leader sneezes, and a plane is fueled. A mosquito buzzes, and he’s flown abroad. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to debate whether to trust paracetamol or the herbal concoction from Mama Kudi. Our hospitals ask for blood before you get a bed, and your savings before you get oxygen. You arrive with malaria and leave with debt.

Visit any public hospital at 2 a.m., and you’ll see the real Nigeria patients on benches, IV drips hung on nails, nurses praying instead of prescribing. One man recently joked, “If you survive the queue, you may survive the illness.” Meanwhile, one mosquito bite and our leaders are airborne to London. They no longer trust the health system they were elected to fix. Their prescription is exile.

But to the men in charge, this too is a distant sound like rain on a tin roof while you’re asleep in luxury.

And education? The only time professors are remembered is during elections as tools to tally votes. Once the ballots are counted, they revert to being nuisances who strike too often and research too little. Their salaries are too much, their demands unreasonable. But that’s because our leaders never truly encounter them. Their own children are tucked away in UK dorms and Ivy League quads, far from ASUU threats and convocation delays. They build private universities, not to improve the sector, but to opt out of it completely. The disconnect has become a doctrine.

We, the citizens, have become ghosts to our leaders visible only during campaigns, valuable only as votes. The rest of the time, we are mere noise. In the economic theatre, we watch in disbelief as our daily bread becomes a monthly luxury. Sugar, milk, eggs once kitchen staples, now financial puzzles. The government doesn’t subsidize our breakfast, it subsidizes its own indifference.

The economy groans beneath fuel prices that multiply like amoeba. Gas cylinders are now ornaments. Firewood is a backup plan. Even the air feels taxed. We’re told there’s no money to fix our woes, but every month, new convoys roll out, new jets take off, new opulence emerges. The same hands that demand sacrifice gorge themselves at the altar of national wealth, wealth that belongs to all, but is shared by few.

They speak of fiscal discipline while building mansions in the desert. Their policies are physical burdens  crushing us under inflation, stagnation, and frustration. Yet, we must smile. We must not protest too loudly, or we become threats. They come down only every four years, bearing bags of hollow promises filled with hot air. They say to us, with a smirk hidden beneath political language. Catch me if you can.

What’s left for the ordinary Nigerian?

We are now told subtly, cruelly  to govern ourselves. Find your own power. Secure your own street. Dig your own borehole. Teach your children what the state has forgotten. Be your own ambulance, your own police, your own government. Build a house, light it, guard it, feed it, heal it. Be Nigeria, alone. You are on your own.

This is not a republic. It is a retirement home for the powerful and a survival contest for everyone else.

But even in the silence of our frustration, something stirs. Maybe the only solution now is to remember power, real power, is not just in the villa, or in convoys, or in solar panels. It is in the millions who refuse to be ignored. It is in voices that refuse to be quiet. It is in the tears that become anger, the anger that becomes change.

We do not ask for miracles. We are not even asking for comfort. We ask only that our leaders remember us not during rallies, not through jingles, not in billboards with smiling faces. But in budgets. In decisions. In conscience. We ask that they return from their solo flights long enough to walk our streets barefoot, hear our children cough at night, and feel, if only for a moment, what it means to be ruled in Nigeria.

Until then, the solo flight continues.