By EBUKA UKOH

A nation is not sold in one dramatic transaction. 

Such is done quietly, piece by piece, project by project, and budget line by budget line. A sale happens whenever public responsibility shrinks, and private comfort expands without shame. 

Any student of history is fed up with the performance – year after year, party after party, tenure after tenure. The past year alone has given Nigerians enough material to ask an uncomfortable question: Who sold Nigeria? 

A recent controversy surrounding Farouk Ahmed, Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, did not begin as a budget debate. It started as a moral one. Aliko Dangote alleged that Mr Ahmed spent about $5 million on the secondary school education of his four children in Switzerland, and called for a public explanation and investigation. 

At current exchange rates, that figure sits at roughly ?7.5 billion. In isolation, the number might sound like a private family business. In context, it becomes something else entirely. 

Nigeria has over 18 million out-of-school children, the highest in the world. In that setting, spending is no longer neutral. It speaks. It announces priorities. It tells a story about who counts and who does not. 

To be clear, not all wealth held by Nigeria’s elite is illicit, and private success in itself is not a crime. The issue arises when extraordinary privilege is closely tied to public office in a country where widespread and persistent deprivation is prevalent. 

Education itself is not the problem. No reasonable society begrudges parents investing in their children. Plato warns in The Republic that neglecting education damages not only individuals but the entire constitution of society. The issue here is scale, context, and moral consequence. 

What ?7.5 billion Can Do

Seven-point-five billion is no abstract figure but a solid sum of money. With that amount, Nigeria could build 25 fully equipped school blocks at ?35 million each. Each block would contain six classrooms. Each classroom would accommodate 40 students. 

That means 6,000 Nigerian children are educated every year! Each block would employ 18 teachers. That is altogether 455 teachers. At ?125,000 per month, the annual wage bill would be ?675 million. Combined with construction costs, total expenditure comes to roughly ?1.5 billion. 

Nearly ?6 billion change remains! If that balance were invested in government bonds at 19 per cent, the annual yield would exceed ?1.1 billion. From that yield alone, Nigeria could fund libraries, laboratories, learning materials, utilities, meals, and maintenance for all 25 schools, pay teachers yearly, and still retain surplus funds for reserves and expansion. In effect, a permanent, self-sustaining education ecosystem emerges. 

The irony is stark. Nigerian children educated abroad would return to a society where millions of their peers never had the chance to learn. The bitter truth is that no nation sustains that imbalance without consequence. 

*A Pattern of Priorities 

The Farouk controversy matters because it is not isolated. It sits alongside a Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway,  passed off as visionary, while basic infrastructure collapses inland; a ?712 billion reconstruction of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, while primary healthcare centres lack electricity, and ?39 billion renovation of the Abuja International Conference Centre in a country where classrooms still operate under trees. 

None of these projects is inherently evil. Infrastructure matters. Renewal matters. But priorities reveal values. When prestige projects multiply while human capital grows like a cow’s tail, the problem is no longer funding. It is judgement. Nigeria has about 240 million people. If just 0.0001 per cent of that population, about 2,400 individuals with extraordinary access to resources derived largely from public systems, committed $5 million each to education, the impact would be massive and transformative: 60,000 school blocks built; over 14 million children educated annually, and more than one million teachers employed.That would not be charity. It would be a national reconstruction. What makes this pattern impossible to dismiss as a coincidence is who consistently bears the cost. Insecurity in Nigeria does not affect all parts of society equally. It lands hardest on the poorest, the least connected, the rural, the displaced, the undereducated, and those without proximity to power. Children are abducted from public schools, not private compounds. Farmers are killed on their land, not escorted through cities. Communities without influence become battlegrounds, while privilege moves under armed protection. When harm follows the same social lines repeatedly, it ceases to be random. It becomes structural. Experiences shaped so predictably are not mere happenstance. They are the outcome of choices made, priorities set, and protections withheld. 

Question for All of Us! 

The tragedy is not scarcity. It is the normalisation. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron once described Nigeria as fantastically corrupt. President Donald Trump called it a disgraced country. Nigerians [who prefer the lie on the altar of patriotism] rejected those labels as insulting. Yet reputations are not imposed. They are earned through patterns. 

Darkness thrives when people forget their power. History shows that societies fall not only because of the predatory elite, but because ordinary people stop insisting on accountability. That is how we begin to see slaves on horseback, while princes walk barefoot. 

“Who sold Nigeria?”  is not a question with one name as an answer. It is a mirror held up to our collective conscience. It asks what we tolerate and why. What we excuse and why. What we normalise and why. 

A new Nigeria is possible, and I believe it. But it begins with awareness. With numbers that refuse to be ignored. With citizens who remember that public office is a trust, not a licence. 

Nigeria has the people. The resources. The intelligence. What remains is the will.And that has never been for sale. 

•Ukoh, an alumnus of the American University of Nigeria, Yola, and PhD student at Columbia University, wrote from New York.