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OPINION: Desperate Crowds And Foods Of Death [Monday Lines]

Published

10 months ago

December 23, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

I died one bright day in 1969 – yes, died; crushed by a motorcyclist. It happened on Ileya Day (Eid el Kabir) in my hometown. I did not know, and still do not know, how it happened. All I know is that I was following my father to the eid praying ground in the morning, then I followed a crowd of other children to cross the road to the other side,…then I woke up in the afternoon, medics all over me, stitching and cleaning. Where I was turned out to be the Baptist Welfare Centre in neighbouring Iree town. A day that was supposed to be a day of feast almost turned grim in our home. For parents of the children who died last Wednesday in Ibadan, and families who lost loved ones on Saturday in Abuja and Okija, Anambra State, this Christmas and the New Year are certain days of mourning. May God comfort them.

The dead got eaten while looking for what to eat. I pray that the bereaved be healed of their mortal wounds. They do not have my parents’ luck: I came back from the dead, head heavily sutured. The children who went to Basorun in Ibadan on Wednesday last week didn’t come back; they won’t be back, forever. Every eid el Kabir reminds me of my own aborted (abortive) death. For the Ibadan, Abuja and Okija families, every year end henceforth will come with spectral, ghostly memories. What happened is an evergreen tragedy, monumental in all ways.

When a similar crowd crush killed 183 children in a hall in Sunderland, United Kingdom, on 16 June, 1883, one of the survivors contrasted the mood in his family with the atmosphere in unfortunate homes in that city: “In our house there was joy and thanksgiving, and one old neighbour laid his hand on my head and told me that my death had not yet been decreed. But in many homes, there was misery and desolation, many a heart was stricken with woe, and many a mother as she bent in sorrow over a loved one so strangely still (said that) indeed, the ways of God are not as our ways.” William Codling, who managed to escape the horrid incident with his sister, wrote the above in December 1894 (eleven years after the tragedy).

Death existed to kill the aged, but today, it is murdering the young, north, east and west. Why? Fuji music philosopher, Saheed Osupa, asks the same question in a song: “Ikú np’àgbà/ èwo ni t’omodé?/ Ilé ayé mà wá di rúdurùdu.” The world is spoilt. In his ‘Yoruba Responses to The Fear of Death’ (1960), Peter Morton-Williams describes death of the young among the Yoruba as “horrifying, an unnatural calamity.” It is true that what we call àìgboràn- headstrong foolhardiness – sometimes kills, but it is also true that the will of the enemy kills more. The enemy in the context of this death discourse is the Nigerian state. Mass misery was the enemy that processed the disasters of last week.

Hunger is a very jealous tenant; it habours no neighbour – not the fear of death, not of death itself. If the hungry feared death, they would know that an uncontrolled crowd is a barrel bomb that kills without borders. Hunger was the devil in the fatal gatherings of Ibadan, Abuja and Okija. I blame the lords of the land. On their watch, everyone begs, or rummages the trash can or joins deadly food rallies for IDP rations. Those are the options. The other available option is suicide – and many pursue life today in ways that suggest they do not mind dying as an escape route.

In 1883, what was promised the kids of Sunderland were toys and “the greatest treat for children ever given.” In Ibadan last Wednesday, what the children were promised was N5,000 for the first 5,000 of them that showed up. Some mothers heard that and put one plus one together: Two kids meant N10,000; three kids, N15,000. They did the maths and thought it was right to gather and rush their entire kids into that ground of death in search of hope. Many got there as early as 5am – five hours before the event was due to start; some mothers reportedly even slept overnight there with their kids to beat the queue. Some more desperate ones threw their kids across the fence into the already choked and charged school compound, the event venue. It was like feeding their future to the demon of misery. Mr. Oriyomi Hamzat, whose Agidigbo FM radio station partnered with the organizers, says in a trending audio clip: “I saw how people were falling on one another. As I was rescuing those that fell, more people were rushing and stepping on those that were on the ground because of small gifts. I pity that woman, and I pity myself. I will never do this again.”

In Okija, Anambra State, the promise was rice; in Abuja, it was imprecise ‘palliative.’ The Ibadan, Abuja and Okija gesture of magnanimity unfortunately turned to foods of death; a pledged gift of chickens took whole bulls from many families. In ‘The Gift, and Death, of Blackness,’ Joseph Winters of Duke University, North Carolina, United States, writes about what he calls “the gift of death.” Some gifts become poisonous when wrongly given; they kill. We have become so depraved that we volubly advertise philanthropy. Gordon B. Hancock, in a June 1926 Social Forces article, writes on “the evils which inhere in excessive advertising.” He asks one troubling question: “Is the unlimited sway of advertising compatible with society’s highest good?” Whoever is probing last week’s serial disasters should seek an answer to that question. An effusive promise of gifts on a popular radio station roused several thousands of hungry children and adults to the Ibadan funfair of death. Similarly hyped promises of gifts poured over two thousand school children into Victoria Hall in Sunderland in 1883 – 141 years ago. William Codling, who was quoted above, narrated how the Sunderland disaster happened: “It began something in this wise: A man delivered a handful of bills outside the school doors on the Friday night setting forth the entertainment in glowing terms and we were all wild to go.” And they went. As it turned out, no one left that venue, and all the Nigerian venues of last week, with what was promised. Instead, death, which was not promised, was the harvest. In the UK experience, a whole class of 30 Sunday School children were among those picked up dead from the stampede. In Ibadan, some mothers reportedly lost all they had to the tragedy.

Hunger, or even fear of hunger, push people to plunge into deadly irrationality. On Thursday, 24 October, 1918, eleven women, four children and a police officer died in a stampede at a market in Cairo, Egypt, simply because they feared they wouldn’t get enough cereals to buy. They were not looking for freebies; they died because they scrambled to buy what was scarce.

“In the aftermath of tragedies,” writes Ellen Walker in a November, 2022 article, “it’s easy to focus on the assignation of blame. But how well do we understand the causes of crushing crowds?” The piece is on ‘Death by Crowding.’ All probes and available literature on crowd accidents abroad blame the same issues: poor and “inadequate planning, excited crowd, lack of crowd management and a flaw or hazard in a facility” (J. F. Dickie, 1995: 318). We have those factors here compounded viciously by unremitting hunger courtesy of bumbling governance, and a colada of existential concerns.

Grim and tragic as last week was, will it be the last? We pray it is so, but it may not be unless we check the causes and yank off the throttle, drivers of such tragedies. In ‘The Life of Reason’, Spanish American philosopher, George Santayana, warns that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A passage in J. F. Dickie’s ‘Major Crowd Catastrophes’ published in 1995 suggests exactly that. Dickie writes about the Sunderland disaster of 1883 with 183 fatalities, the London crowd crush of 1943 with 173 fatalities; Bolton of 1946 with 33 fatalities; Glasgow of 1971 with 66 fatalities and Sheffield of 1989 with 96 fatalities. He then sculptures those crowd-crushing disasters into a dizzying revolving door of calamities. Because man does not learn from his bad experiences, they come in repeated times like Wole Soyinka’s Abiku. Dickie notes that “the Ibrox stand incident of 1902 in Glasgow reoccurred at Bastia in 1992 where the potential for an enormous tragedy existed. The crushing accident at Bolton in 1946 has a striking similarity with the Hillsborough disaster. The Sunderland catastrophe of 1883 is similar to the Bethnal Green incident of 1943 which repeated itself on a smaller scale in New York in 1992.”

We have them in Nigeria here too. I quote a BBC report of the Ibadan stampede and its predecessors: “Nigeria is grappling with its worst economic crisis in a generation, which explains why more than 10,000 people reportedly turned up for the event. There have been several similar incidents this year. In March, two female students were crushed to death at the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, near the capital Abuja, when a rice distribution programme by the state governor caused a crowd surge. At least 23 people were injured. Three days later in the northern state of Bauchi, at least seven people died in another crush when a philanthropist and businessman was giving handouts of 5,000 naira. Earlier in February, five people were reported killed in Lagos when the Nigerian Customs Service auctioned seized bags of rice. A crowd surge for bags of rice being auctioned for about $7:00 led to the trampling to death of five people with dozens more injured.” The BBC did that recap on Wednesday, four days before the twin tragedies in Abuja in the north and Okija in the east – a perfect completion of the usual pan-Nigerian triangle of evil.

I spend some of my valuable time watching power and its drama. This past week, I bit my lips watching the indiscretion of the president’s men organizing a voluptuous boat regatta for him in Lagos in spite of the Ibadan disaster. I shook my head at the politics of a last-minute cancellation of that boat regatta not because of Ibadan but because of similar disasters in the north and in the east. The president and his Lagos men were almost echoing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “What touches us ourselves shall be last served.”

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Of Kings, King Kong And Honour

The president has been busy with statements after statements mourning the dead. He needs to do more than issuing condolence messages. PR stunts of cancellation of a boat regatta won’t turn back hungry crowds from journeys of death. The president should convince himself that his policies are not life-friendly; they kill the poor and impoverish the rich. I hope he knows this and believes this and makes amends. He is his number one problem; the second are those who sing Emperor Nero’s anthem while his Rome burns. Fawning fans of power will insist that the president and his policies have clean hands in this mass death matter. They will talk of palliatives of the past as proof of the president’s humanity. Unfortunately, as Zimbabweans say, “you cannot tell a hungry child that you gave him food yesterday.”

Defenders of power would point at pre-May 2023 crowd-crush disasters in this country. They would say they happened before this regime; they would cite the several deadly stampedes outside Nigeria across decades and centuries. The Muslim among them would cite Quran 63:11: “Never will Allah delay a soul when its time has come.” The Christian among them would quote the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is no new thing under the sun.” Yes, a stampede in a Chicago theatre in 1903 killed 602; another in a Moscow stadium in 1982 killed 340. A stampede in Mecca in 1990 killed 1,425; many more follow-up crowd crush disasters in Saudi Arabia claimed hundreds of lives. Further down history in 1863, a Church stampede in Santiago, Chile, killed 2,000 persons. Regime backers here will use these figures to scent the arse of their palace. They won’t think of one distinguishing fact: in all those places, the disasters were not because the people were starving and dying. Even the Egypt food scarcity that birthed the disaster of 1918 was not because government was unfeeling; it was because a world war was ongoing. Here, there is no war, yet people are dying in droves as if there is a war here.

Kings and presidents should pause their greed, rethink their policies and create some space for the people. They can remain big without being “superfluous and lust-dieted.” They can let “distribution undo excess” so that “each man (will) have enough.” The words in quote here are from Shakespeare’s King Lear. And, ‘enough’ in every culture here means life’s basics: food, shelter, clothing and hope of advancement. It is only when the “houseless heads and unfed sides”, when the “poor naked wretches” are weaned of their want that the country can have peace and stop crying over spilt milk of fatal stampedes. In whatever remedial steps we may take, I see a need for urgency. We need to act fast, otherwise – and this is my conclusion here – the next stampede may not spare the elite.

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OPINION: Peter Obi And The Genius Of Yahoo Yahoo

Published

50 minutes ago

October 28, 2025

Editor

By Suyi Ayodele

Some Nigerians said it was wrong for Mr. Peter Obi to have labelled Yahoo Boys geniuses. I heard them and wondered whether ‘genius’ now has a new meaning apart from what the dictionary says it is.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (2007), on page 1091, defines genius as: “Natural ability or tendency, attributes which fit a person or particular activity. Natural aptitude, talent, or inclination for, to (something).”

Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, in the post titled: “Our Youths Need Redirection”, that he shared on his verified X handle, after a conference he addressed in Onitsha, Anambra State, said that “some of our so-called Yahoo boys are geniuses who need redirection, not condemnation.”

He did not stop there. He posited further by saying that the “creativity and courage” of the Yahoo Boys, “if properly guided, can drive innovation and national development. Our challenge is to channel their energy from deception to productive enterprise. I also stressed that the reckless pursuit of money destroys both character and community. Leadership must lead by example, for a nation that rewards dishonesty cannot build integrity. I urged our youths to rediscover the dignity of labour and embrace hard work and innovation. Nations are built not by miracles but by men and women who think, work, and build.”

Pray, what do the Yahoo Boys display if not aptitude? How do they succeed in fleecing people of their hard-earned money if not that the Yahoo Boys are naturally gifted and their victims stupid or greedy, or a combination of both? How does a 17-year-old boy convince a 60-year-old man to part with his money on the promise that the old man would be given an oil block? Who swindles like that if not a genius? And we have these geniuses in our homes as children, wards and relations. The attention we pay to them matters.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch at an old friend’s house at Ido Ekiti. His wife, also a friend, was generous with the pounded yam she served. We were almost through when their 15-year-old daughter came in with two of her friends.

The girls greeted us and made for their section of the house when my friend called his daughter back. He complained that he was having an issue with his android phone and asked her to check it. The girl asked what the issue was, and the father explained. What followed almost ruined our lunch.

Taking the phone from the father, the young girl said: “But I taught you how to fix this problem before, Daddy. I know you will soon call me again because of this.” It was not what she said that was the problem. The what-else-do-you-think-that-makes-you-to-forget manner she said it, was the issue. If an adult were to say those words, he would have simply called my friend an alakogbagbe (teach-and-forget soul)!

The girl simply punched some buttons and returned the phone to the father. “I have done it”, she said, giggling. The father, surprised, asked how, since he had locked his phone. The girl, laughing, simply said: “I know your password, even mummy’s and Uncle Tunji’s password.” She dropped the phone and dashed inside to join her friends.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: 24 Governors And Still Counting

We simply exchanged glances and continued with our lunch. But I could feel the tension. My friend’s wife was particularly embarrassed, but I felt nothing. Only God understands the ways of this generation.

While seeing me off, I decided to douse the tension, or minimise the reprimand I knew would follow once I departed. I quipped: “That’s a brilliant girl.” My friend responded: “Yes, but she can be rude. I have told her to watch how she talks.” I stopped and asked if the girl was rude or simply wondered why an adult should forget things easily. The wife joined the husband and affirmed that the girl was rude.

Then I said to the two of them: “I think I know what you people should do. Stop paying her school fees.” “Ha!” They both exclaimed, and I added: “Yes nao, sebi you said she is rude.” We all laughed at the joke, and I left.

My friend’s daughter will be 16 years old in June next year. But I was told that there is nothing she can’t design using computer applications! We have children like her in our homes; restless, brilliant, naturally impatient with perceived docility and outspoken to the point of seeming ‘rude’! What we do with them makes all the difference.

Teckworm, an online technology news and media company, on September 19, 2018, published an article: “Meet these 5 child hackers who could become top cyber security researchers.” The article, written by Maya Kamath, demonstrates how the society could guide negative prodigies into becoming useful members of the society especially in the field of Cybersecurity that is experiencing a shortfall of skilled professionals.

The first of the youngsters is Reuben Paul, a nine-year-old boy, and a third grader in Harmony School of Science, Austin, Texas, USA, who at a .B-Sides security conference, demonstrated how in a matter of minutes, hackers can easily steal all the important data from any Android smartphone including contact details, call logs and messages. The kid warned: “If a child can do it then a regular hacker can do it … so I just want everybody to be aware [and to] be more careful when you download games and stuff like that.” He went ahead to establish the Prudent Games and became the CEO at age nine!

Another kid is Betsy Davies, a seven-year-old British girl, who was able to hack the public Wi-Fi network following a short video tutorial. After 10 minutes, the article says: “Surprisingly, Betsy was able to hack the open Wi-Fi and steal the traffic of the volunteer in just 10 minutes and 54 seconds. Betsy managed this by setting up a Rogue Access Point which is normally used by hackers to carry out the “Man in the Middle” (MiTM) attack on the overly trusting web surfers to sniff web traffic.

The piece further mentions Kristoffer Von Hassel, a five-year-old kid hacker, the piece further states, “exposed the Xbox password flaw for which he has been officially added to the list of Microsoft’s recognized security researchers. We can expect a five-year-old kid to play the Microsoft Xbox Game as well as know the operating system. However, just imagine if a five-year-old kid starts finding a security vulnerability in the system. It just seems impossible; however, little Kristoffer Von Hassel discovered a back door into one of the most popular gaming systems and that is the Xbox Game.”

Another wonder kid identified only as “An Unnamed Canadian”, said to be 12 years old and a fifth grader, “launched a series of Denial-of-Service (DoS), spoofing and even defacement attacks against the Canadian government websites in support of the Quebec student protests. It seems the young protester even passed the data which was stolen from the government websites to the Anonymous group in exchange for video games. The young hacker was from Montreal and also pleaded guilty for being responsible for the shut down of a number of government sites including the Quebec Institute of Public Health and the Chilean government.”

The last of the quintet is a 10-year-old security researcher, who goes by the pseudonym ‘CyFi. According to the article, “The young Californian school girl first discovered the flaw when “she started to get bored” with the pace of farm style games. The first DefCon Kids at DefCon 19 was held in August 2011, where CyFi presented her findings on the zero-day flaw in the games on the iOS and Android devices which was confirmed to be of a new class of vulnerability by experts. While speaking to CNET, CyFi said: “It was hard to make progress in the game, because it took so long for things to grow. So, I thought, ‘Why don’t I just change the time?’”

CyFi’s, whose “real identity is being protected… was already a Girl Scout and a state ranked downhill skier. In addition, the little girl was already an artist who gave a spontaneous 10-minute speech in front of a thousand people at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”

The Nigerian society also has more than enough shares of those young and brilliant children. What we do with them as a people is what makes the difference. While more developed societies harness the potential of such youngsters and turn them into useful members of the community, often brand and blacklist them here, calling them derogatory names instead of seeking ways to change their orientation.

In our cities and towns, we see them everyday. Young boys in their teens and early twenties driving flashy cars. A friend, who teaches in one of the state-owned universities, once told me how young boys in his school created a massive car park for themselves. He said that the situation became embarrassing such that the university authorities had to ban students from driving their cars within the campus. When I asked if that measure had stopped other students from buying their own cars, my friend answered in the negative. So, what is the effect of the ban?

Who are these super-rich kids behind the wheels of exotic cars that we see in our neighbourhoods? How did they get the money? What do they do for a living? On February 8, 2022, I published a piece titled: “The Yahoo in us all: Whose conscience have we not scammed.” In that piece, I submitted that “The issue of Yahoo Boys, Yahoo Plus and HK, are not social problems that just hit us all suddenly. No. The Nigerian society gradually moved into this present level of moral decadence, which has reached a bestial level, where sucklings now kill to make money.”

Regrettably, nothing in the submissions above has changed today! Rather, we have moved from a bad situation to an even worse one, and the worst may still be ahead. The moral decadence in our society today has become so pervasive that no segment of the society is spared. Ironically, the leaders we should look up to for direction are also complicit.

A community led certificate forgers, drug barons, ex-convicts, corrupt politicians and adults without childhood playmates cannot question the moral decadence of the youths! The Yahoo Boys of our society today are products of failed parentage. While the influence of peer groups bears some responsibility, the erosion of family values carries the greatest share of the blame.

More importantly, society’s response to the activities of these Yahoo Boys and girls will, no doubt, go a long way in transforming some of them into good citizens. This, I believe, is what Peter Obi meant when he said that “some of our so-called Yahoo boys are geniuses who need redirection, not condemnation.”

What Obi is saying is: Check these guys out, study them, understand their modus operandi and see how they can be re-oriented to channel those talents to positive ideas that will make them good and acceptable members of the society. That is exactly what a sane society does. The five kids mentioned by the Techworm are clear examples of how a negative path can be redirected.

When, for instance, Kristoffer’s parents discovered that their child could play games above his age on the Xbox Games platform, they reported their finding to Microsoft. The company investigated, discovered the flaws in the system that allowed a five-year-old to access those games and went ahead to fix the problem.

Then, Microsoft rewarded Kristoffer with $50, four games and a year subscription to Xbox Live from Microsoft! It went ahead to include “Kristoffer’s name in the list of recognised security researchers and Kristoffer now has his own Wikipedia page.” This, to me, is Obi’s message to the Nigerian society on the menace of Yahoo Boys.

This, again, I think Seye Oladejo, the Lagos State spokesman for the All Progressives Congress (APC), should see rather than his labelling Obi’s statement as “morally reprehensible”, and capable of encouraging “moral indiscipline.”

I read Oladejo’s reaction, and I wondered if he ever shared the piece with his superiors before he made it public. I don’t know how APC finds it convenient to talk about leadership that is rooted in “values, integrity, and moral responsibility”, when from top to bottom, the party flows with characters that are as despicable as the sight of maggots-infested faeces!

I would have been more at home with anyone asking Obi to always show the alternative routes anytime he comments on any public affair than anyone in the APC interrogating another man’s “moral compass”, as Oladejo did in his reaction. I begin to wonder if our politicians don’t look into the mirror to see the gory picture they depict before they go to the moral markets and spew sanctimony!

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Customs Warn Nigerians Against Falling For Fake WhatsApp Auction Scams

Published

3 hours ago

October 28, 2025

Editor

The Nigeria Customs Service has warned members of the public against falling victim to fraudulent WhatsApp messages advertising fake e-auction deals and “quick purchase” opportunities purportedly linked to the service.

In a statement posted on its official X handle on Tuesday, the service said it had become aware of a WhatsApp number,”234 814 732 3739”, impersonating its officers and misleading unsuspecting citizens with false claims of representing the Nigeria Customs Service.

“Please be informed that this number does NOT belong to the National Public Relations Officer of the Nigeria Customs Service.

“The messages and posts circulating from this number are FAKE and fraudulent,” the statement partly read.

It added that the National Public Relations Officer, Assistant Comptroller Abdullahi Maiwada, has only one verified Facebook account, Abdullahi Aliyu Maiwada (with a blue tick), and one official WhatsApp contact, which is not the number used by the scammers.

The service clarified that “there is no ongoing auction via WhatsApp, and no individual officer is authorised to conduct e-auction on behalf of the Service through private messages.”

Urging the public to remain cautious, the statement advised Nigerians to “ignore and block such numbers,” and “not send money or personal information to anyone claiming to represent the NCS through WhatsApp or private messages.”

It further urged citizens to “report such accounts to the appropriate authorities immediately.”

For verified updates, the service encouraged members of the public to follow its official channels: Facebook (Nigeria Customs Service), Instagram (@customsng), X (@CustomsNG), YouTube (@customsng), and its official website — https://customs.gov.ng.

The service concluded, “Please stay alert, verify before you trust, and share this message widely to protect others from falling victim to these scams.”

According to The PUNCH, rampant fraudsters now clone the Nigeria Customs Service website and other official-looking platforms to swindle unsuspecting buyers.

In another report, a 59-year-old woman, Rakiyat Musa, was arraigned before the Igbosere Magistrate’s Court sitting at Tinubu, Lagos Island, for allegedly impersonating a Nigerian Customs officer and obtaining over N34, 116,000, under pretence.

Musa, who appeared before Magistrate B. I. Amos, faced a four-count charge bordering on conspiracy, obtaining by false pretence, stealing, impersonation, and conduct likely to cause a breach of peace.

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Anambra, Lagos, Others Top 2025 Fiscal Performance Rankings, As C’Rivers Dropped from 5th to 30th

Published

4 hours ago

October 28, 2025

Editor

Anambra State has emerged as the best-performing state in Nigeria’s 2025 Fiscal Performance Ranking, according to BudgIT’s State of States Report, released on Tuesday.

Lagos, Kwara, Abia, and Edo followed in the top five, while Cross River suffered a major decline, dropping from fifth in 2024 to 30th in 2025.

Rivers State, a consistent top-five performer in previous years, was excluded from this year’s report due to the state of emergency declared earlier in the year, which prevented the release of audited data.

In a statement shared on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, BudgIT described this year’s edition—titled “A Decade of Subnational Fiscal Analysis: Growth, Decline and Middling Performance”—as a milestone marking 10 years of tracking fiscal sustainability and governance transparency across Nigeria’s 36 states.

BudgIT highlighted the key movements in the 2025 rankings.

“Anambra State rose from second to first position, securing the title of the best-performing state in the federation, while Lagos maintained its second place for the second consecutive year.

“Kwara climbed from fourth to third, Edo entered the top five after consistently ranking within the top ten over the last four editions, and Abia, which had never previously featured in the top 10, now ranks fourth,” the organisation said.

Other notable movements include Akwa Ibom, which surged 17 places from 27th to 10th, and Zamfara, which moved up nine places from 26th to 17th.

At the lower end of the rankings, Imo, Kogi, Jigawa, Benue, and Yobe occupy the bottom positions.

The report retained five key metrics to rank all 35 states: Index A – a state’s ability to meet operating expenses using only Internally Generated Revenue (IGR); Index A1 – year-on-year IGR growth; Index B – capacity to cover all expenses and loan obligations using total revenue without borrowing; Index C – debt sustainability based on foreign debt as % of total debt, total debt as % of revenue, debt service as % of revenue, and personnel cost as % of revenue; and Index D – prioritisation of capital expenditure over recurrent spending.

On revenue performance, BudgIT noted major shifts in IGR.

“While Rivers (121.26%) and Lagos (118.39%) were the only two states with sufficient IGR to cover their operating expenses in 2024, the absence of Rivers from this year’s analysis has reshaped this dynamic.

“Lagos remains a returning champion with 120.87%, while Enugu now leads with an impressive 146.68% IGR-to-operating expense ratio,” the report said.

Only five states—Abia, Anambra, Kwara, Ogun, and Edo—generated enough IGR to cover at least 50% of their operating expenses, compared with six in 2024. Fourteen states now require more than five times their IGR to cover costs, up from six in 2024, underscoring persistent challenges.

In capital expenditure, Abia led with 77.05% of its total expenditure devoted to capital projects, followed by Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, and Taraba, each allocating over 70%.

Overall, 24 states spent at least half of their budgets on capital projects, while Bauchi, Ekiti, Delta, Benue, Oyo, and Ogun devoted more than 60% to personnel and overhead costs.

Total recurrent revenue for all 35 states grew from N6.6 trillion in 2022 to N8.66 trillion in 2023 and N14.4 trillion in 2024—a 66.28% increase, far surpassing the 28.95% rise between 2022 and 2023.

Lagos accounted for 13.42% (N1.93 trillion) of total revenue in 2024. Gross FAAC transfers increased by 110.74%, reaching N11.38 trillion, with states like Oyo (785.79%), Delta (708.36%), and Anambra (640.98%) recording over 600% growth between 2015 and 2024. Despite these gains, 28 states relied on FAAC for at least 55% of total revenue.

Subnational debt also saw a change. Total debt rose modestly from N9.89 trillion in 2023 to N10.57 trillion in 2024, a 6.8% increase. The top five debtor states—Lagos, Kaduna, Edo, Ogun, and Bauchi—accounted for 50.32% of total debt.

Encouragingly, 31 states reduced domestic debt by at least N10 billion, while foreign debt fell by over $200 million.

On long-term trends, BudgIT said, “Over the past decade, the State of States has evolved into Nigeria’s most authoritative subnational fiscal analysis. This 10th edition not only reflects the story of growth and imbalance but also underscores the urgent need for reform.”

“Fiscal sustainability requires that states look inward, improving revenue systems, cutting waste, and prioritising infrastructure and human development investments that deliver long-term value,” said Vahyala Kwaga, Group Head of Research.

The report also highlighted uneven social spending. In education, only 66.9% of the budgeted N2.41 trillion was spent. Nine states—Edo, Delta, Katsina, Rivers, Yobe, Ekiti, Bayelsa, Bauchi, and Osun—exceeded 80% of their budgeted allocations, with Edo, Delta, and Katsina surpassing 100%. Average per capita spending remained low at N6,981, with no state exceeding N20,000 per capita and only eight states above N10,000.

In health, the states budgeted N1.32 trillion but expended N816.64 billion, achieving 61.9% implementation. Seven states—Yobe, Gombe, Ekiti, Lagos, Edo, Delta, and Bauchi—spent over 80% of their health budgets, with Yobe leading at 98.2%. Average per capita spending was N3,483, with only a few states exceeding N5,000, highlighting gaps in service delivery relative to education.