This is not an attack on the babanriga dress code of our Northern brothers. After all, their southern counterparts also wear a variant called agbada. Both are made up of a jumper and ‘sokoto’, which in themselves make up a full dress, plus the babanriga or agbada worn on top! Both are ‘for show’ hence many carry them along, folded, in their cars and only bring them out and wear at the event where they need to impress.
I have used a photo of the Northeast governors taken at their forum to illustrate the story of resolve to create a regional airline for the Northeast. That will be a worthy venture, if prudently managed and revenues channeled towards the general good of the people.
My focus is on the opulence represented and showcased by this expensive dressing by elected ‘servants’ in a time of famine! At this time that Nigerians are groaning from poverty and pain, hunger and disease; a time that many of them cannot pay school fees for their children nor afford transportation through impassable roads of pain and death, does it make sense to dress so flamboyantly and gaudily?
Only a man who doesn’t have an idea of the cost of acquiring each of those well-embroidered and starched outfits made from very expensive fabrics would feel comfortable seeing this level of opulence in full display at this time. Try asking your northern friends!
No one is asking that governors, their excellencies, should come out in tattered clothes because things are hard. But, may I ask what would be wrong if the banbanrigas were not there and they wore businesslike jumper and sokoto to demonstrate the seriousness of their summit and their concern for prudence at this time? Would they look less gubernatorial if they did?
It is the same question I ask of this trend started by the all-conquering PDP of yore who popularised the wearing of gaudy voluminous outfits with party logos and candidate images during election campaigns. Today, that has become a fad that has come to stay. Please note that those clothes are worn for just one event or, at best during one campaign season lasting a month or two. Then they are dumped! I know this from the branded T-shirts I wore in 2024. Wear it and go out now and people would stare at you like a specimen that escaped from a laboratory! The last man I saw wearing a campaign agbada from that era was of unsound mind and kept eating from every refuse dump in sight.
So, my countrymen and women, what drives this showingness in the midst of plenty are manifold. For the political aso-ebi, many, who procure and sell the fabrics or organise the sewing for a collective, make a fortune from it. The campaign time aso-ebi has come to represent our penchant for insincerity in May things we do. There are many who wear that collective subterfuge but carry daggers in the inner pockets to undo their opponent. Some wear it and yet work against their party member. They throw it away as soon as the event it is meant for is done. So what was it all about?
Ditto for the T-shirts they share to anyone in sight to give the impression of a large following where none, or scanty number, exists. We saw the ‘uprising’ and bonfires of T-shirts in Warri last week!
For governors telling their citizens to tighten their belts because resources are scarce to meet their most pressing needs, why are some of them unable to resist the urge to put opulence on show? How will the IDPs of Borno and most states in the Northeast feel seeing their governors dress this way when they have no food, no school, no clothes, no clean water to drink and they cannot go back to their ancestral homes, farm their lands nor rear their cattle? This, to them, may be insensitivity writ large.
I have seen leaders going to pay condolence visits to towns and villages affected by banditry where many have lost their lives. Instead of wearing a simple sombre dress that reflects the solemn occasion, they turn up in huge voluminous three piece outfits whose flamboyance and luxury shout to high heavens. Those materials worn by one man can sew outfits for two men! Talk of body language not matching crocodile tears. How unfeeling can we be?
It is the same attitude that informs our officials arriving in Bentleys and the most expensive SUVs at a loan negotiation parley while those we are begging for the loan arrive in NYC yellow taxis. We thereafter invite them to dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, ordering caviar and vintage champagnes. Our leaders’ commitment to waste reduction is a joke. No wonder the world does not take us seriously. They merely humour us and wink knowingly to themselves.
*4th Oct. 2026*
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