The First Lady, Remi Tinubu, has urged young affluent Nigerians like Burna Boy, Davido, and Asake to come together under one foundation to help Nigerians living in poverty. Speaking at the National Community Food Bank Project for the North Central, the First Lady said their “Maybachs and Rolls-Royces are good,” but added that they could also help because “the burden on the government is huge.”
This kind of rhetoric fuels Nigeria’s increasingly worrying culture of public entitlement while brazenly relieving the government of its most basic responsibilities. It is an astonishing thing for a First Lady to say so confidently.
The expectation that private wealth should circulate publicly has already seeped into everyday life in Nigeria, each demand for individuals’ money growing more aggressive than the last. When the government appears indifferent to citizens’ welfare, expectations shift sideways. Wealthy individuals—celebrities, politicians’ children, successful entrepreneurs, returnees—become substitute institutions for daily survival. If the state will not redistribute or create wealth, perhaps those who have visibly benefited from society should.
The logic is flawed, but understandable. In the absence of reliable public institutions, people begin looking for accessible targets. What is far less understandable is the First Lady of an administration widely blamed for one of the worst cost-of-living crises in Nigeria’s recent history suggesting that the government’s welfare responsibilities should be transferred to entertainers with expensive cars.
The timing of this pronouncement makes the statement even more absurd.
This is a political moment in which citizens are demanding accountability from everyone, especially celebrities. Adults and children alike are being abducted from their communities with frightening regularity. The economy is in free fall. An alarming proportion of the national budget goes towards servicing debt. Food prices continue to rise, transport fares have become unbearable, and household incomes can no longer keep pace with inflation. Meanwhile, the President struggles to communicate coherently about policy, security or even the state of the economy.
Against this backdrop, celebrities such as Burna Boy and Davido have come under sustained criticism for failing to speak forcefully against the Tinubu administration and the multitude of crises that have unfolded since it assumed office. Only recently, and in relatively modest ways, has the celebrity class—too fearful, too compromised or simply too unwilling to jeopardise its relationship with this media-obsessed administration—begun to respond to public pressure.
Public figures including Davido, Tiwa Savage, Toke Makinwa, Ruth Kadiri, Iyabo Ojo, Toyin Abraham and Paul Okoye amplified the #BringBackOurStudents campaign. Davido even wore a custom “BRING THEM HOME” jacket bearing the names of the victims during his performance at the FIFA World Cup Countdown Concert in Los Angeles. Small contributions, perhaps, but contributions all the same.
That is precisely why it is so remarkable that one of the most visible figures within the Tinubu administration has now co-opted this growing demand for celebrity accountability and reframed it as a call for celebrities to shoulder the responsibilities of government.
It is also another example of this administration’s unusually intimate relationship with media discourse. The Tinubu government is relentlessly online. It inserts itself into pop culture conversations with a frequency that should concern anyone living in a country facing such profound governance challenges.
Further, is the Office of the First Lady now the administration’s official communications arm? Is Remi Tinubu responsible for announcing government priorities to Nigerians? If the government genuinely wants wealthy entertainers to establish a charitable foundation, why is that proposal coming from the First Lady? Surely there are elected officials and public office holders whose actual responsibilities include communicating government policy.
Ordinarily, new policies are announced by the Minister of Information and National Orientation, alongside the ministers responsible for the relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies. But perhaps this overhaul of traditional governance structures should not surprise anyone.
The Tinubu administration has repeatedly been accused of running the country like a family business. Seyi Tinubu wields enormous influence across Nigeria’s media and entertainment sectors—a reality many believe contributes to the celebrity class’ reluctance to openly criticise the government. President Tinubu himself has frequently been accused of deploying presidential powers to reward loyalists. Now Remi Tinubu addresses the nation as though she were scolding a classroom of unruly students, making sweeping policy pronouncements with little regard for their implications.
Interestingly, the culture of wealth redistribution Remi Tinubu appears to advocate is one that politicians themselves have spent decades cultivating. Public office holders routinely engage in philanthropy in their private capacities, using charitable giving to build political capital instead of simply delivering the public services they were elected to provide.
Nigeria has seen this play out repeatedly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians were accused of hoarding government palliatives only to distribute them later under their own names. The image of bullion vans entering Tinubu’s residence before the 2023 elections has likewise become an enduring symbol of the blurred lines between political power, personal wealth and patronage.
A BudgIT report titled COVID-19 Fund: Fiscal Support, Palliative Analysis & Institutional Response found that palliatives were diverted by politicians across several local government areas in Lagos, including Agege, Mushin, Ikorodu, Surulere and Epe, before being distributed largely to party loyalists.
According to the report, similar practices occurred elsewhere across the country. In Kano’s Minjibir Local Government Area, residents reported that beneficiaries were selected based on party affiliation rather than need. BudgIT found that party leaders were instructed to distribute relief materials only to members of the ruling party who could produce party identification. Similar findings emerged from Ogun, Rivers, Niger and several other states.
And that was just COVID-19 palliatives.
Every election cycle, politicians distribute cash, food and household essentials in carefully staged displays of generosity. These, too, are presented as philanthropic efforts to help Nigerians living in poverty, even though poverty alleviation is supposed to be the outcome of governance, not charity. Remi Tinubu herself recently launched a ₦50,000 empowerment grant for poor Nigerians to start akara and roasted corn businesses.
Now, it appears, the administration’s latest charitable initiative is recruiting celebrities into the same model. This is unconscionable. The burden of governance must return to the people elected to govern. Citizen welfare is not the responsibility of wealthy Nigerians or philanthropists, however generous they may choose to be. Job creation, economic growth and poverty reduction are the responsibilities of the government.
If Burna Boy and Davido decide to distribute their wealth today, what happens when the money runs out? Charity is finite. Functional institutions are for all intents and purposes; permanent. That distinction should be obvious to any government, let alone one boldly asking its celebrity class to compensate for its failures.
