Binfa™

Sometimes I wonder if Nigerians actually understand the amount of responsibility this country has transferred from the government to ordinary citizens. You pay taxes, yet you generate your own electricity. You pay taxes, yet you drill your own borehole for water. You pay taxes, yet you contribute money to repair your street. You pay taxes, yet you employ private security to protect your family. You pay taxes, yet you pay private hospitals because public healthcare is unreliable. You pay taxes, yet you send your children to private schools because public education has been neglected. You pay taxes, yet you pay for waste disposal, drainage, streetlights and sometimes even transformers. At this point, what exactly is the government providing? Now, look beyond Nigeria. Ghana operates a National Health Insurance Scheme and subsidises public education, including secondary education. Burkina Faso, despite its economic and security challenges, has programmes providing free healthcare for pregnant women and children under five. In the United States, public primary and secondary education is tuition-free. Roads, public libraries, emergency services and several social welfare programmes are funded through taxation. Healthcare and other essential services also receive enormous government subsidies. These countries have their own problems, but nobody seriously argues that America is poor because it subsidises education, healthcare or social welfare. Yet in Nigeria, almost every discussion about government subsidies eventually becomes a lecture about how the country cannot afford to help its citizens. We removed petrol subsidies because they were supposedly unsustainable; -Electricity tariffs have increased. -Public universities charge more then the same government gives you loans and celebrate it as a milestone achievement. -Healthcare remains expensive. -Transportation costs keep rising. Meanwhile, Nigerians are repeatedly told to endure the hardship. My questions to the Federal Government are simple. If citizens must provide their own electricity, water, security, healthcare, education and basic community infrastructure, what exactly is the purpose of collecting taxes from them? Why is subsidising the welfare of ordinary Nigerians constantly presented as an economic burden, while government expenditure on political offices and official privileges continues? Why must the Nigerian citizen make sacrifices before the government demonstrates the same discipline? Why is government support for citizens treated as charity rather than a legitimate responsibility? And why do we celebrate subsidy removal as economic progress without demanding measurable improvements in the services those savings are supposed to finance? Nobody is asking for everything to be free. We are asking what Nigerians are getting in return for the money they surrender to the government. Because there is something fundamentally troubling about a system where citizens finance the government, finance their own survival, and are still told they are not making enough sacrifices. If Nigerians are responsible for providing nearly everything they need to survive, what exactly are we paying the government to do?