by Boma West
A people who keep repeating a pattern they know has never served them are not simply unfortunate, they are trapped, and nowhere is this trap more visible today than in Akwa Ibom State, where frustrated young people are queuing behind Iniabasi Godswill Akpabio, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of Senate President Godswill Akpabio, who has just received a political appointment widely seen as a runway into the House of Representatives by 2027.
The sight would be unremarkable in a country where political inheritance is as old as independence itself, but it becomes deeply troubling when you consider that these same youths, or their parents before them, once collected cups of rice from the girl’s father during elections when she was barely old enough to understand what politics meant. Now, a new chapter of the same story is opening, and the actors have simply changed costumes while the script remains the same.
A video currently circulating shows Iniabasi on the streets of Akwa Ibom, distributing Tinubu caps and T-shirts as the Director of the so-called City Boy Movement, while men and women old enough to be her parents danced around her singing, “Na my mama be this o, we no get another one.” It is a scene that would be comic if it were not so heartbreaking, because what you are watching is not loyalty, it is surrender. These are people with histories, with identities, with lineages of their own, reduced to serenading a privileged young woman with a song that calls her their mother in exchange for branded fabric that will not pay a single bill, fix a single pothole, or put a single child through school. The transaction is so lopsided that it stops being politics and starts being something closer to humiliation dressed up as celebration.
Iniabasi herself is not being accused of a crime, and it would be unfair to hold a twenty-nine-year-old entirely responsible for the machinery her family name sets in motion. What deserves scrutiny, however, is the system that smooths a path into lawmaking for someone whose closest encounter with hardship is likely a missed flight, while millions of young Nigerians with genuine grit, real stories of survival, and serious ideas about governance cannot find a single door that opens for them regardless of how hard they knock. The legislature was never designed to be a finishing school for the children of the powerful, but that is precisely what it becomes when dynasty quietly replaces merit and name recognition is treated as qualification enough.
Poverty, as someone wisely noted while watching that same video, is dangerous, and the most insidious kind is not the poverty of the pocket but the poverty of the mind, the kind that convinces a grown man or woman that a free cap is worth more than their dignity, that a politician’s daughter is worth more than their own sense of self. When a community has been kept hungry and dependent long enough, it begins to mistake the hand that feeds it for the hand that loves it, and that confusion is precisely what every dynasty in Nigerian politics depends on to survive. The frustration of Akwa Ibom’s youth is real and legitimate, but frustration without direction becomes the very fuel that powers the system it claims to hate. The real question worth sitting with, as the 2027 election season begins to take shape, is whether the people of Akwa Ibom will choose to break that cycle or, once again, simply wait to see what is being shared at the next rally.
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