The end-of-year soothsayer, that perennial fixture of December: prophets, star-gazers and forecasters, fell conspicuously silent as 2025 drew to a close. Many expected the usual parade of triumphant and confident predictions about celebrity politicians and celebrity pastors, markets, geopolitics, and national fortunes. Instead, an unsettling muteness prevails.
The dying days of 2025 twirled around like a dog chasing its tail: restless, disoriented, trapped in escalating loops. Wars raged and rumours of more swirled everywhere. Economic blockades, trade and tariff wars fractured supply chains. Old-school diplomacy died, unburied and unmourned. In its place? A void no one could name.
As 2025 ended, the world felt less like a landscape to forecast and more like a maze in which even the keenest observers have misplaced their map. Uncertainty calcified into something structural, something that resists the traditional frames of prediction altogether.
This silence from the soothsayers merits scrutiny. It signals a world plunged into compound uncertainty, where variables multiply beyond the grasp of old frameworks. The global order, once steered by established rules, predictable alignments, now teeters unstably, defying formal analysis.
Diplomacy’s patient grammar of signed accords lies dormant, supplanted by the forces of transactional pressures, military posturing, economic coercion devoid of coherent narrative or endgame.
Russia’s Ukraine war drags into year four, a relentless haemorrhage. The Middle East convulses with Iranian-Israeli flashpoints; Taiwan Strait tensions simmer. Latin America’s Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, and all of South America reel amid Western hemispheric flux. Europe strains under aging frailties. No continent escapes.
The UN Security Council, meant for crisis management, devolves into great-power theatre. Across Africa, from Sahel to Horn, insurgencies proliferate, armed groups thriving where states atrophy. The era of institutional anchors for confident and certain prophecy has ended.
For Nigeria, this global turbulence arrives at a peculiarly exposed moment. The country’s macroeconomic position has improved in narrow ways; and the naira has stabilised somewhat in foreign exchange markets. Yet these improvements mask deeper vulnerabilities. In 2026, the government faces a debt service bill of approximately 15.5 trillion naira, which may consume nearly half of projected government revenue.
Compare this to the figure of 5.9 trillion naira from 2024 when domestic debt servicing reached, the highest annual figure in nearly three decades. This fiscal trajectory leaves little room for the counter-cyclical policy or public investment that might buffer the economy against external shocks.
More immediately alarming is the security crisis, which has moved beyond the Northeast insurgency to become a national, and even continental phenomenon. In the first six months of 2025, armed groups and insurgents killed 2,266 Nigerians, surpassing the total death toll for all of 2024. Boko Haram and its splinters have overrun more than fifteen military outposts. Bandit groups in the Northwest conduct kidnappings with the confidence of territorial sovereigns.
The military, deployed across two-thirds of the nation’s states, operates in a condition of chronic overstretching, compromised by intelligence failures, technological gaps, and what appears to be pervasive capacity constraints. Over seven million Nigerians require urgent humanitarian assistance; more than two million have been displaced by conflict. These are not marginal pathologies but symptoms of state fragmentation advancing at an alarming pace.
The compound effect of these multiple hot issues (debt servicing consuming revenues, insecurity consuming state capacity, inflation (now moderated but) still constraining household purchasing power, and unemployment persisting at elevated levels) leaves Nigeria structurally vulnerable to unusual kinds of external shocks that 2026 may well deliver. A geopolitical escalation that disrupts global energy markets could collapse commodity prices. A U.S. recession would drain remittances and foreign direct investment. A further widening of the trade war between the United States and China would fracture the global supply chains on which Nigerian industry depends, however tenuously.
The broader question is whether Nigeria’s leadership has internalised the magnitude of this moment. The administration’s reforms which tries to unify of the foreign exchange regime, remove subsidy, and consolidate fiscal were necessary corrections. But they were also blunt instruments that redistributed pain across a population already beset by insecurity and inflation. The structural improvements continue to be tentative.
The nation’s non-oil revenue base has become a vestige of underdeveloped. Agriculture, despite being the largest employer, operates at low productivity. Manufacturing struggles with power shortages and security constraints. The digital economy, for all its promise, has yet to scale into a meaningful revenue generator. The soothsayers’ silence, in this light, is a mercy; it spares Nigeria false comfort and complacency in an uncomfortable world.
2026 demands intellectual honesty and strategic clarity, not clairvoyancy. The year ahead will almost certainly test the nation’s resilience in ways that 2025 did not. Whether that test becomes transformative or destructive will depend on choices made now, in the fog of uncertainty, when confidence in any particular outcome is precisely what should be suspended.
The enigma of 2026 mocks the very notion of predictions and divinations. This is no time for the hazy second-guessing of soothsayers lost in their own fog while Nigeria bleeds thousands of lives to bandit blades. Millions of Nigerians families, crushed under 15.5 trillion-naira debt servitude, cannot afford the luxury of drift.
The clarion call rings sharper now and demands clear-eyed thinking that cuts through delusion. Decisive action must strike with precision forged by purpose more resolute and unyielding than the timid half-measures of 2025.
