Picture this. It is the early morning of February 25, 2023. Somewhere in Lagos, Kano, Enugu, or Port Harcourt, a Nigerian — let us call her Fatima — wakes up earlier than usual. She has her Permanent Voter Card. She has followed the campaigns, argued online, maybe even volunteered. Something about this election feels different. The streets had come alive with a kind of hope many Nigerians had not felt in a long time. She queues. She waits. She votes.
Three months later, on May 29, 2023, Fatima sits before a television and watches a new president take the oath of office. She leans in for the promised renewal. What she gets instead is a three-word sentence that will rearrange the economics of her entire existence: “Subsidy is gone.”
Ask Fatima today if she will vote in 2027. Listen carefully to what she says — and what she does not say.
There is a concept in psychology, developed by Jennifer Freyd in 2008, called institutional betrayal. It describes a particular kind of harm: the experience of being taken advantage of, wounded, and abandoned by an institution that was theoretically built to care for you. The harm is not merely what the institution did or failed to do. The deeper wound comes from the violation of an implied contract — the slow, sickening recognition that the institution never really saw you as someone worth protecting.
