There are moments in Nigerian history when the past does not merely knock on the door. It walks into the sitting room, sits down and starts talking.
I recently went back to the broadcast that announced the military coup which overthrew the government of President Shehu Shagari on 31 December 1983. The speech was delivered by Brigadier Sani Abacha on behalf of the Nigerian Armed Forces and broadcast in the early hours of 1 January 1984.
I read it again against the circumstances of Nigeria in 2025 and 2026.
It is an uncomfortable exercise.
The language could have been written by a contemporary critic of Nigerian government.
“Our economy has been hopelessly mismanaged; we have become a debtor and beggar nation.”
Then came the complaints about food prices, collapsing health services, deteriorating education, unemployment, unpaid salaries, corruption, indiscipline, extravagant government spending and the proliferation of political appointments.
One is tempted to ask: Has Nigeria been running the same country on a thirty-year loop?
But that is precisely where we must be careful.
The similarities are real.
The conclusion must not be.
The ghosts of 1983
The 1983 coup leaders presented themselves as the answer to a country supposedly incapable of governing itself through elected politicians.
Their diagnosis contained truths.
Their prescription was disastrous.
The elected institutions were suspended. Political parties were banned. The National Assembly disappeared. State legislatures disappeared. Constitutional government was suspended. Curfews were imposed. Airports, seaports and borders were closed. Citizens were warned that anyone disturbing public order would be “summarily dealt with.”
The soldiers promised salvation.
Nigeria got military rule.
And military rule did not cure Nigeria.
It merely changed the people sitting behind the desk.
This is the central lesson which Nigeria must never forget.
The problem with military government was not simply that soldiers were soldiers. It was that the Nigerian problem was never fundamentally a problem of whether the people running government wore uniforms or civilian clothes.
It was a problem of institutions, incentives, accountability, political culture, economic management and the absence of consequences for failure.
The uniform changed.
The problem remained.
And here we are again
Fast-forward to 2026.
Nigeria has travelled through nearly four decades of political experimentation since the 1983 coup. We have had military governments, another coup, counter-coups, decrees, structural adjustment, another military transition, a return to democracy in 1999 and now more than a quarter-century of uninterrupted civilian rule.
Yet many of the complaints contained in Abacha’s 1983 speech remain familiar.
Food is expensive.
Electricity remains unreliable and costly.
Security remains a major national concern.
Unemployment and underemployment remain serious problems.
Public hospitals and schools struggle.
Government spending is frequently questioned.
Corruption remains endemic.
And millions of Nigerians feel that economic growth is happening somewhere else.
The World Bank says Nigeria’s economy grew by about 4% in 2025 and that inflation fell from 33.2% in 2024 to 23% in 2025. It also reports stronger foreign reserves and improved fiscal and external positions. Those are genuine improvements.
But there is another side to the balance sheet.
The World Bank estimates that about 63% of Nigerians were living below the national poverty line in 2025, with millions more pushed into poverty despite the improving macroeconomic numbers.
That distinction matters.
A country can have improving macroeconomic indicators while its citizens are experiencing worsening household economics.
The spreadsheet can recover before the family refrigerator does.
That is one of the political dangers facing the Tinubu administration.
Reuters reported this week that Nigerians are still struggling with the effects of the government’s fuel subsidy removal, naira devaluation and electricity reforms. The price of a basic jollof-rice basket has more than doubled since President Bola Tinubu took office, while petrol prices have risen dramatically. At the same time, investors are considerably more optimistic about Nigeria’s economic direction.
That is the contradiction of contemporary Nigeria.
The economy may be stabilising while Nigerians are still hurting.
And when people hurt for long enough, they begin looking for simple explanations and dramatic solutions.
That is when history becomes dangerous.
The temptation of the strongman
There is a recurring Nigerian fantasy that the country does not need better institutions; it needs a strong man.
Someone who will arrive, crack the whip, arrest the corrupt, discipline the politicians, fix the roads, restore electricity, secure the borders and send everybody back to work.
In other words, the Nigerian equivalent of pressing the “factory reset” button.
Unfortunately, countries are not iPhones.
There is no factory reset.
And Nigeria has already tried the strongman solution.
More than once.
It did not work.
The military intervened in 1966 ostensibly to rescue Nigeria from political crisis. It intervened again in 1983 to rescue Nigeria from corruption and economic mismanagement. It intervened repeatedly thereafter in the name of national salvation.
Yet the military itself eventually became part of the problem.
The lesson should therefore be brutally simple:
If bad civilian government is cured by military government, Nigeria should have been Switzerland by now.
It isn’t.
1983 was not 2026
There is another important distinction.
Nigeria in 1983 was a young democracy struggling through its second experiment with civilian government after thirteen years of military rule.
Nigeria in 2026 is a very different constitutional creature.
The present democratic system is imperfect, sometimes painfully so. Elections remain contested. Institutions remain weak. Corruption remains entrenched. Freedom House continues to classify Nigeria as “Partly Free”, citing electoral irregularities, corruption, insecurity and weaknesses in civil liberties and rule of law.
But Nigerians can organise politically.
They can form political parties.
They can criticise government.
They can vote governments out.
They can challenge government action in court.
They can write newspaper articles, publish blogs, protest, organise civil society campaigns and use social media to embarrass governments before breakfast.
These freedoms are not trivial.
They are the machinery through which democratic societies correct themselves.
And, importantly, Nigerians have not abandoned democracy.
Afrobarometer’s latest Nigeria data shows that 64% of Nigerians say democracy is preferable to any other form of government. At the same time, 85% disapprove of the removal of fuel subsidies and 80% believe corruption increased during the preceding year.
That tells us something important.
Nigerians are not necessarily rejecting democracy.
They are rejecting bad democracy.
That is a very different proposition.
Democracy is not the problem
Democracy is slow.
Infuriatingly slow.
It requires persuasion, negotiation, elections, courts, legislatures, opposition parties, journalism, public pressure and citizens who refuse to surrender their political agency.
Military rule is wonderfully efficient at one thing: removing the argument from the argument.
The soldier does not need to persuade Parliament.
He dissolves Parliament.
He does not need to negotiate with political opponents.
He arrests them.
He does not need to win an election.
He cancels elections.
He does not need to explain his budget to an opposition legislature.
There is no opposition legislature.
That is not efficiency.
That is the elimination of accountability.
The 1983 coup speech itself provides the evidence.
The same speech which complained about irresponsible government announced the suspension of the Constitution and the abolition of elected institutions.
In effect, the cure for irresponsible government was to create a government responsible to nobody.
That should make every Nigerian pause.
The soldier and the politician
I have previously argued that soldiers are Nigerians in combat uniforms and politicians are Nigerians in civilian clothes.
The uniform does not confer wisdom.
The agbada does not create corruption.
The khaki does not eliminate it.
The politician and the soldier are both products of the society from which they emerge.
If the political class is corrupt, the answer is not to imagine that corruption mysteriously disappears when a general walks into Aso Rock.
Indeed, military governments have historically had their own spectacular problems with corruption, opacity and abuse of power.
The question therefore should not be:
Who should rule Nigeria?
It should be:
How should Nigeria be governed?
That is a much more difficult question.
And it has a much more useful answer.
We need democratic correction, not democratic abandonment
The answer to a failed government should be political accountability.
Where government fails, citizens should organise.
Where politicians lie, journalists should expose them.
Where public money is stolen, prosecutors should investigate.
Where officials abuse power, courts should intervene.
Where elections are manipulated, citizens should challenge the process and demand institutional reform.
Where political parties fail, voters should replace them.
Where legislators fail, voters should remember.
And where presidents fail, democracy provides the most terrifying weapon known to politicians:
the ballot paper.
The World Bank’s latest assessment makes an important distinction. Nigeria’s macroeconomic reforms are beginning to produce stability, but the gains have not yet translated sufficiently into household welfare. The challenge now is to turn stabilisation into inclusive growth, jobs, better public services and meaningful improvements in living standards.
That is the political task.
Not a coup.
The security question
There is also an irony in today’s Nigeria which deserves attention.
The Armed Forces remain heavily engaged in internal security operations because the country faces insurgency, banditry, kidnapping, communal violence and separatist-linked violence.
The government has recently approved an expansion of the Army from eight to twelve divisions and authorised the recruitment of 28,000 additional personnel. It has also approved substantial increases in military pay.
Nigeria therefore already has soldiers everywhere the state requires them.
And that makes the argument for military government even weaker.
If military deployment itself has not solved the security problem, why would putting the military in charge of the entire government suddenly solve it?
A soldier can fight an insurgency.
He cannot legislate prosperity into existence.
A general can command troops.
He cannot command inflation to fall.
A military government can suspend Parliament.
It cannot suspend poverty.
It can impose a curfew.
It cannot impose prosperity.
1966 and 1983: history repeating itself?
There is a phrase we use too easily in Nigeria:
“History is repeating itself.”
Perhaps not.
History is not repeating itself.
We are repeating our mistakes.
That is different.
1966 was not 1983.
1983 was not 1993.
1993 was not 2026.
The circumstances were different.
The institutions were different.
The economy was different.
The international environment was different.
What has remained remarkably consistent is our inability to build institutions strong enough to outlive individuals.
We keep looking for the perfect Nigerian rather than building systems which can survive imperfect Nigerians.
That is our mistake.
The real warning in Abacha’s speech
Perhaps the most valuable thing about the 1983 coup speech today is not what it says about 1983.
It is what it says about us.
A Nigerian listening to the speech in 1984 could have nodded at almost every complaint.
A Nigerian listening today could do the same.
That should frighten us.
But it should not tempt us into another coup.
It should instead force us to ask why, after more than forty years, some of the same structural problems remain.
Why do we repeatedly change governments without changing the incentives that produce bad government?
Why do political parties remain vehicles for power rather than institutions for developing policy?
Why do elections so often become contests over access to state resources?
Why are institutions weaker than personalities?
Why does public office remain so financially attractive?
Why does accountability arrive so slowly?
Why do Nigerians demand good government but frequently tolerate bad politicians when they belong to our ethnic, religious or political camp?
Those are the questions that matter.
The Nigerian redemption
Nigeria does not need a saviour in khaki.
Nor does it need a saviour in agbada.
It needs citizens who understand that government belongs to them.
It needs institutions that can tell presidents “No.”
It needs legislatures capable of scrutinising executive power.
It needs courts capable of enforcing constitutional limits.
It needs an electoral system in which votes matter.
It needs political parties that represent ideas rather than political godfathers.
It needs journalists who investigate rather than merely repeat.
It needs civil society that does not become quiet when its preferred politician gets into power.
And above all, it needs citizens who understand that democracy is not something politicians give us.
Democracy is something citizens must constantly defend.
The 1983 soldiers told Nigerians that they had come to rescue the country from irresponsible civilian leadership.
History subsequently demonstrated that removing civilian government did not remove Nigeria’s problems.
It merely removed the mechanism through which Nigerians could peacefully change their government.
That is why the answer to Nigeria’s present difficulties must be democratic reform, not military intervention.
The democratic experiment may be frustrating.
It may be painfully slow.
It may occasionally resemble a committee meeting organised by 250 people who all want to be chairman.
But it remains the system that gives Nigerians the right to correct their mistakes without destroying the constitutional house in which everybody lives.
We tried the other route.
It did not end well.
So when we read Abacha’s 1983 speech today, we should not hear a military invitation.
We should hear a warning.
The problems may sound familiar.
The solution must not be.
Nigeria’s redemption will not come from the barrel of a gun.
It will come from building institutions strong enough to make the gun unnecessary.
And that is the unfinished business of the Nigerian Republic.
