Billionaire Senator and Lazy, Hungry Nigerians, By Lasisi Olagunju

Monday Lines 1

(Published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday 9 November, 2026).

On November 26, 1926, Sanusi Adebisi Giwa (Adebisi Ìdí Ìkán), Ibadan’s legendary philanthropist, was installed as the Ashaju Baale of Ibadan. He leapfrogged about 10 rungs on the chieftaincy ladder because he had money in excess and spent it like rain water. Akinpelu Obisesan, the celebrated Ibadan diarist, noted in his private diary: “Adebisi rose from the rank of political servants to the rank of political masters. Surely, money is the god of the world…”

A century later, money remains the god of the world. In August 2026, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appointed Abdulaziz Yari, the billionaire former governor of Zamfara State and senator representing Zamfara West, as director-general of his Presidential Campaign Council for the January 2027 election. With tonnes of real money in his chest, when this DG directs, even his political masters listen.

Unlike some of his friends, Yari did not begin life by chasing high-sounding academic qualifications. In 2004, the man graduated from Sokoto Polytechnic with a diploma in Secretarial Studies. A year earlier, he had already worked so hard that he became the ANPP’s Zamfara State chairman. He later rose to become the party’s national financial secretary.

In 2007, the trained secretary decided to put his three-year-old polytechnic diploma to good use. He contested for and was elected as a member of the House of Representatives. On May 29, 2011, Yari was sworn in as governor of Zamfara State. He zoomed to the senate after eight years of governorship. In December 2025, Yari became chairman of Geregu Power Plc following a takeover reportedly worth N1.088 trillion, financed by a consortium of banks. Hard work truly pays.

That same Yari two days ago offered Nigerians a free lesson in escaping poverty and hunger; and in how not to complain of want.

At the APC presidential campaign rally in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State on Saturday, Yari spoke directly to struggling Nigerians. Listen to him:

“Just as I said, we have hunger. Let me ask a question here…from where I come from, we have food in the market.

“I don’t know, in Akwa Ibom, is there any person who took his money to the market and found out there’s no rice? You didn’t answer me.

“Is there anybody with money in his pocket who goes to the market to get foodstuffs and says that there’s no foodstuff in the market?

“If there’s no food in the market, that’s what we are calling hunger. But anyone who is not a lazy person, definitely he would have food on his table.”

Zamfara, where Yari was governor for eight years, is home to some of Nigeria’s poorest people. By his logic, must they also be among the laziest?

There is a difference between using wealth to feed the hungry and using it as a pulpit from which to rebuke the starving. In 1926, Adebisi Giwa’s wealth relieved hardship in Ibadan; in 2026, Yari shames all Nigerians who are struggling and enduring hardship.

But no columnist should rebuke our DG. He is blameless. A person fed by others never really knows that famine stalks the land. Yari is like the overfed cricket in an Aláwìíyé poem that uses its own claws to puncture its big belly. Our president’s chief marketer knows there is hunger in the land but says the hungry yawn repeatedly because they are lazy.

Listen to the uncommon wisdom in Yari’s logic – or the uncommon logic in his wisdom. Unlike the hungry crowd in Uyo who had no money in their pockets, the APC man counts his dollars in billions because he is knowledgeable and has been very hardworking.

So, what option have the hungry, the ill and the deprived? With his bride’s arrival drawing near, Lantete, the cricket, put some yam on the fire. His neighbours asked: Why the haste? He answered that what is already imminent admits no further delay. The hungry should enrol in Yari’s class today. Enough of “Ebi ń pa wá” (we are hungry).

But our hunger won’t stop its torment because we are too lazy to learn from the master of dollars. Nigerians’ indolence is so contagiously debilitating that it has become an epidemic. A November 2024 report by the World Food Programme (WFP) said this about the part of Nigeria Yari comes from: “The northern region of Nigeria experiences higher rates of hunger and food insecurity when compared to the southern part of the country…The 2018/19 household survey revealed that the North-West and North-East regions of Nigeria suffer from the most acute levels of food insecurity, and this aligns with data from the recent Cadre Harmonise surveys…” Apparently, an entire region has refused to work hard enough to eat.

Yari, where are you?

The man should come out and establish a school where the hungry can learn the opposite of indolence. Admission should be compulsory for everyone whose hard work has failed to make them billionaires like Yari.

My people say work is the antidote to poverty. They also say a person fed by others does not know that famine is ravaging the land. Yari’s diploma in Secretarial Studies has fetched him and his descendants enough food to last till eternity. The certificated hungry must have studied the wrong subjects.

Yari’s market argument mistakes food on display for food within reach. He is too rich; too easily wealthy to understand why any soul would not have money in their pocket to buy common foodstuff. He wonders why Nigerian markets overflow with rice while Nigerians outside them cry, “we are hungry.” The rich politician expects the hungry to use their eyes to buy what they lack.

Beyond the veneer of satire, the truth is that the labourer who desperately needs food for his family sees food in the market but can’t touch it. His problem is that his full day’s work cannot buy his family a day’s meals. Yari pointing at sacks of rice is showing his poor audience the distance between their wages and their needs.

Nigeria is an impossible country. You want a people to renew your mandate, yet you tell them they are hungry because they are lazy.
The farmer says he needs security to cultivate his field but the politician offers him insults. Here, I beg leaders addressing empty stomachs to carefully weigh their words because hunger grabs insults more firmly than it does sermons.

A key promise of US’ Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was to “end inflation on day one.” Trump returned to office and beef became costlier. Its average price rose from $5.55 per pound in January 2025, when he took over from Joe Biden, to $6.75 in January 2026. In February, a television journalist asked US Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith what Republicans were doing to bring the cost of living under control, citing rising beef prices. The senator’s answer was that Americans had “so many proteins to choose from.” Insults hurt some more than they hurt others. The unfolding results of last week’s midterm elections suggest that, for Senator Hyde-Smith’s Mississippi constituents, affront has consequences. She is panting and sweating and trailing her Democratic challenger, Scott Colom.

Our own Senator Yari’s Uyo words drip with even greater contempt for the poor. I am worried for this democracy; and scared because history records how dangerous even the appearance of such contempt can become. During the French Revolution, an official, Joseph-François Foulon, was accused of saying: “Well! If that rabble has no bread, let them eat hay (grass)! My horses eat it well enough!”

The poor heard him and the gates of hell were flung open. French historian, Eugène Bonnemère, recounts how peasants dragged the lousy man from hiding and hauled him to Paris; they tied hay to his back and nettles around his neck. Despite efforts by Jean-Sylvain Bailly and the Marquis de Lafayette, both leaders of the revolution, to save Foulon, the crowd hanged the man from a streetlamp on 22 July 1789.

In English translation, I give Bonnemère’s details of the mob action and the man’s unfortunate end: “The rope breaks; he falls half-dead onto the pavement. Hanged a second time, the rope breaks again, and only on the third attempt does he expire.” The man’s head was then paraded on a pike, his mouth stuffed with hay.

My friend who understands French said the account is even more sobering in the original French (Histoire des paysans, fourth edition, volume III, 1886).

May that not happen to anyone anywhere in my country.

But, let all Joseph-François Foulons in Nigeria calm down; the fury of the hungry is real. Hunger and anger may not be synonyms in the dictionary but on the streets of Nigeria today, they share the same tongue.