Amplifying Obi’s Syllogism: Four Children as a National Mirror

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

Former governor of Anambra State, and erstwhile presidential candidate, Peter Obi’s intervention in the Dangote-Ahmed controversy earlier this week, is not really about Aliko Dangote, nor is it even strictly about Farouk Ahmed. It is about scale, conscience and the uncomfortable arithmetic of inequality in a country where numbers often tell more truth than official statements.

The allegation is now well known: that the former Chief Executive of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority allegedly spent about $5 million educating four children in Switzerland. Dangote, Africa’s richest man and not exactly a stranger to controversy himself, publicly demanded explanations. Predictably, Nigeria’s commentariat split into tribes: those shouting “envy!”, those chanting “witch-hunt!”, and those who, as usual, waited to see which way power would lean before forming an opinion.

 Obi’s contribution cuts through the noise by doing what Nigerian public debate rarely does: following the money. At current exchange rates, $5 million translates to roughly ₦7.5 billion. That single conversion already places the matter beyond gossip. In a country with over 18 million out-of-school children, the highest figure globally, such a number cannot simply pass as a private lifestyle choice without provoking legitimate moral and civic questions.

To be clear, no one is arguing that parents should not invest heavily in their children’s education. Education is one of the few universally accepted justifications for extravagance. Plato said as much centuries ago, and Nigerian parents live it daily, sometimes paying school fees with money meant for rent, food or health. The issue, as Obi correctly frames it, is context and consequence. When such spending is linked to a public official in a severely unequal society, the discussion inevitably moves from personal preference to public responsibility.

Obi’s syllogism is devastating precisely because it is simple. With ₦7.5 billion, you could build 25 school blocks, each with six classrooms, educating about 6,000 children yearly. You could employ 450 teachers, pay them decently, and still have billions left to invest in government bonds, generating enough annual returns to sustain the system indefinitely. In other words, one alleged educational choice abroad could theoretically birth a self-funding education ecosystem at home.

This is where the argument becomes less about Farouk and more about Nigeria’s ruling culture. The tragedy of Nigerian corruption is not only theft; it is imagination failure. Looted funds are rarely converted into enduring social assets. They disappear into foreign schools, luxury apartments, medical tourism, private jets and lifestyles that generate no multiplier effect for the society from which the wealth was extracted. 

There is a cruel irony here. Many of the children educated abroad eventually return to Nigeria, where they must navigate broken institutions staffed by poorly educated, poorly motivated citizens who never stood a chance. They need drivers, clerks, security personnel, technicians and civil servants, yet the same system that sponsors their Swiss education ensures that the ecosystem they return to is dysfunctional. It is like building a bulletproof car and insisting on driving it on roads deliberately left to collapse.

Obi pushes the logic further, and here the discomfort deepens. Nigeria has about 240 million people. If just 0.0001 per cent of them – roughly 2,400 individuals – possess extraordinary resources largely derived from public office, and if each diverted $5 million towards similar self-sustaining educational investments, Nigeria could educate over 14 million children annually and employ more than a million teachers. At that point, the out-of-school crisis would cease to be a headline and become a solved problem.

 This is not idealism; it is arithmetic. What makes it painful is that it exposes how unnecessary much of our national suffering is. Nigeria is not poor. The country is misprioritised. We bleed from choices, not scarcity.

The Farouk controversy thus becomes a metaphor for a wider prebendal system where public office is treated as a personal oil well. In such a system, accountability is selective, justice is obtuse, and investigations often depend on who offended whom, rather than on objective wrongdoing. We are less concerned with whether something is wrong than with who said it and whose ox is gored.

That is why scandals rarely lead to reform. They lead instead to noise, counter-allegations, committees, and eventual silence. Nigerians have become so used to this cycle that outrage itself has developed fatigue. We sigh, crack jokes, forward memes, and move on to the next hardship: fuel prices, electricity tariffs, exchange rates. Corruption, like potholes, has become part of our inevitable narrative.

Yet Obi’s framing disrupts this normalisation. By translating alleged excess into missed opportunity, he forces a moral reckoning. Not a legal one – that is for investigators, if they ever wake up – but a civic one. What do those entrusted with public power owe a society drowning in deprivation? Is legality enough, or does legitimacy require something more?

The Nigerian elite often respond to such questions with defensive nationalism: “Everybody sends their children abroad.” True. But everybody is not a regulator controlling strategic sectors of the economy. Power changes the moral calculus. With privilege comes obligation, whether acknowledged or not.

There is also a sobering warning here. Societies that neglect mass education do not merely produce poor citizens; they produce unstable ones. Crime, insecurity, weak institutions and perpetual underdevelopment are not coincidences. They are the long-term interest payments on educational neglect. As Plato warned, when education fails, the damage spreads to everything else – including those who thought they could insulate themselves with foreign passports and offshore accounts.

The real scandal, then, is not whether one man spent $5 million on four children. It is that a country capable of educating millions chooses, year after year, not to. And until that choice changes, Switzerland, and such havens, will continue to educate Nigeria’s future, while Nigeria educates itself in excuses.