Let's take a minute to sit in silence at the shame of how cheap we are — RICE! They are buying your votes with rice???!

Not a job, not a functioning hospital, not light, not roads that don't swallow cars whole like the earth itself is hungry. Not a school where teachers are actually paid, not a future. Not even the audacity of a long-term promise.

Just rice. A bag of rice that will finish in two weeks, sitting next to a government that has been failing you for decades. You will collect that rice, you will take a photo with it like it is an achievement, and then you will vote, and nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.

This is not an accident. This is the plan. And somehow, every four years, it works.

Nigeria has 36 states, 774 local government areas, and approximately one bag of rice per constituency to show for 60-plus years of political leadership. Do the math. It does not add up. It was never supposed to.

There is a reason why the title of this article is in capital letters. This isn't a subtle plea.

This isn't a gentle nudge or a politely worded concern from someone who still has faith in the process. I am yelling. Directly at you. At all of you. Come to your senses.

The Rice Is a Ritual, Not a Gift

Let us be honest about what is actually happening when a politician's aide pulls up in a Hilux truck the week before elections with bags of rice and sachets of groundnut oil. This is not generosity. This is a transaction, and you are the cheaper party in it.

The politician spent millions of naira to get on that ballot. Their campaign posters are on every electric pole in your street; the same poles that haven't had electricity on them in six months. Their jingle is playing from a danfo with a broken suspension on a road the government has not fixed since 2009.

And in the middle of all this theatre, they send someone, not even themselves, a someone — to drop off rice at your gate like you are a charity case, because to them, that is exactly what you are.

Well, they don’t do door step delivery because they don’t even respect you enough; they make you all queue under the hot blazing sun for two cups of rice and some seasoning like you are a charity case.

They are not giving you rice because they care. They are giving you rice because they have calculated the exact minimum it costs to neutralise your anger. And that number came out to one 10kg bag. Per household. Every four years. You are worth ₦8,000 to them. Once every four years. That is your value in the political economy of Nigeria.

The rice is not a gift. It is a receipt. Proof that your hunger was loud enough to be a problem, and quiet enough to be solved with carbohydrates.

While You Were Eating, They Were Eating Too Better

What you need to understand about the people sending you rice is that they do not eat rice from the market. Not Mama Put rice. Not the kind you soaked and parboiled and strained on a kerosene stove because NEPA took light again.

Their rice comes from places you cannot pronounce, prepared by people whose salaries would cover your rent for a year.

While you were sharing the one bag among seven family members, your senator was sitting in a plenary session to approve a budget that allocated millions to "constituency projects" — projects that exist only on paper, in a file, in an office, in Abuja, in a building your tax money built that you will never enter.

While you were grateful, they were strategic. They went back to their hotels, filed their sitting allowances, because apparently showing up to do the job they campaigned for requires extra payment, and called their accountants.

No one in that room was thinking about you. You were a line item that had already been settled. You got rice. They got everything else.

This is not bitterness. This is the budget. It is public record. You can look it up if you have data, which you probably bought yourself, because your government's priority was not internet access; it was your next election.

Your Poverty Is Their Most Important Product

Let's say something that nobody in a political campaign will ever say to your face: a comfortable Nigerian is a dangerous Nigerian.

A Nigerian with a steady job, a functioning school for their children, and electricity for more than four hours a day is a Nigerian who will research before they vote. They will ask questions. They will compare manifestos. They will hold people accountable.

A hungry Nigerian is easier. A Nigerian who has been ground down by twelve years of suffering, by fuel prices that doubled in a year, by a naira that is losing a race against itself, by hospitals that ask you to bring your own gloves before surgery, that Nigerian is tired. That Nigerian will take the rice.

There is a saying — if you are not used to good things, even breadcrumbs will feel like a feast. Which explains everything.

Your poverty is not a problem they are trying to solve. It is a resource they are trying to manage; keep it just desperate enough that rice works, but not so desperate that you burn everything down.

Every time you accept that rice, you are telling them the calibration is correct. You are confirming the formula. You are funding the next four years of the same thing, because why would they change a strategy that keeps working?

RECOMMENDED READ: 5 Signs Nigeria Is Thriving (The Evidence Is There If You Squint)

So What Do You Do With Rice-Shaped Rage?

Now, this is the part where I am supposed to give you a clean solution, a call to action, a ten-point plan for civic revolution. But this is Nigeria, and I respect you too much to sell you a bag of rice disguised as hope.

What I will say is this: you are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to look at a bag of rice and feel the full weight of what it means; that someone sat in a meeting and decided that this is enough for you.

That your vote, your future, your children's education, and your parents' pension can be exchanged for this. Let that land. Let it sit with you like the shame they should feel but don't.

Do not collect the rice. Not because hunger is not real; it is, and that is their fault too. But because every bag you collect is a message that the price is right. And as long as the price is right, nothing changes.

Register to vote, yes. Research the candidates, yes. Drag your neighbours to the polls, yes. But more than all of that; talk. Talk loudly. Talk online, in your compound, at your mama's shop, on the bus. Name what is happening. Call rice what it is: an insult dressed in a cellophane bag.

They are counting on you to be too tired, too hungry, and too hopeless to connect the dots. The least we can do — the absolute minimum — is connect the dots.

The rice finishes. The government stays.

That is the deal they are offering you.

Know what you are signing.